So I have a player who is getting both the Blast and Ice Elemental Aura spell, and who is wondering if both spells can be stacked and where both effects can kick in. Can this be done without any problem?

Outside of the Sustained penalties, I don't see anything technically wrong with this...although things could get ridiculous if you continue to stack more and more aura spells. Anything else I could be missing?

(see pgs. 164-165 for Elemental effects in Street Magic)
(pg. 173 for the spell, also in Street Magic)

Nothing wrong with it by RAW. You could house rule that two elemental auras cannot occupy the same "space", but honestly, I think the sustaining penalties should keep it from being broken. I would say something about possibly house ruling that two incompatible elements cannot coexist - but the napalm spell combines the fire and water elements. If you can do that, then I don't see why nearly any other combination wouldn't work.

While the book does not specifically state you can not for the spell, we tend to follow the same guidelines for this as for the Adept's elemental strike (pg 176) which states only one elemental effect may be applied per strike. I look at it as charging up the aura with an elemental 'armor' effect and it can be one or the other just like you could not wear two armor jackets and expect to get twice the defense.


So while they can argue they 'just' want to stack two spells to full effect, from a game balance standpoint opening that door will invariably lead to someone trying to really munchkin it up and claim why yes they do have 7 elemental aura effects in play and call it their Personal Prismatic Aura.

If they really, really want to have both effects and you are feeling nice, make them learn an ancient and thought lost Paraelemental Aura Spell for each combo- Combining the elemental effects but the Damage /Force is split between the two forces. Its a bit more number crunching and will have some very creative effects, but still keeps the overall damage on par with other spells.

Thinking about it, I'm with Glyph. Sustaining penalties and costs of Manipulation Sustaining foci should help keep things in check, along with the added Drain if you custom make stacked Elemental Aura spells.

Same here. I can see why you might argue that you can only have one active at a time, but considering there's nothing against it in the rules and you could just as easily have a single spell that combines both effects, well, it just doesn't seem like a problem. Basically it's a choice between a custom spell with two elements for +2 drain, or two separate spells resulting in an extra -2 sustaining penalty.

Having multiple single-element auras is more versatile, but it takes longer to put up and impairs your other abilities more since you're sustaining two spells instead of one. On the other hand, custom multi-element spells have higher drain and might be harder to come by, depending on your GM. Overall I'd say they come out more or less even.

I actually had a character back in the day with a custom "Bomb Aura" spell, Fire + Blast. Dude was an old Chinese ork who owned a fireworks shop and ran the shadows as a dual-blade wielding adept and demolitions expert to pay off some debts he owed to the triads. Good times.

Anyway, the real edge case would be whether you allow a character to stack two of the same aura spell on themselves.

It is one of those things which are not ruled, in theory would be totally overpowered but due to the fact, that melee combat(in this case, in other cases there might be another mechanic) sucks hard become the no-issue kind of thing.


The point is each aura adds to your melee damage value. So if you keep them aktive at all times there are several options to calculate your damage:
1:) You do base damage+aura buff1+aura buff2 and you apply both elemental damages
2:) You do base damage+aura buff1+aura buff2 and you apply only the second elemental damage
3:) You do base damage+aura buff1 and base damage + aura buff 2 each with it's elemental type. (Those two count as different damage sources)
4:) You do base damage+max[aura buff1; aura buff2] and apply both elemental effects.
5:) You do base damage+max[aura buff1; aura buff2] and apply the elemental effect of the spell with more hits or higher force.
6:) The second spells simply fails or cancels the first one
I guess that would be all possible outcomes.

While we have no issue with Stacking Elemental Aura's (Napalm is a Spell afterall, and you have drawbacks whether you go with custom multi-element spell or sustained multiple elemental spells), we would not allow multiple stacking of the same elemental effect.

I'm with Irion here.
A decent manipulation mage can easily stack +8 damage (per original rules, nothing else considered) onto one character by casting two separate spells with 4 net hits each, that's kind of powerful. That's what makes it different than the Napalm spells.
Then again, melee combat often is weak and flashy neon advertising will be nothing compared to the character in question. Probably will be shot.

Well, going strictly by what's in the books I'd say it's #1, but I agree the wording is a little ambiguous here. It seems to imply that an aura spell changes all the damage from a melee attack into elemental damage as well--which could mean it overrides the damage type of any previous auras. In theory you could use this spell while wielding a stun baton and end up changing the electricity damage to whatever element your aura was.

Since it specifically says that your net hits add to the base damage, rather than applying alongside it, aura stacking could lead to some pretty high damage values. What concerns me is the line about sustaining penalties. I'm relatively new to GM-ing, but the way I always understood it was that sustaining penalties only applied to magic tests: Casting another spell, summoning a spirit, that sort of thing. Looking at the actual rule it just says "all other tests", with the specific exception of concentration tests made to keep sustaining a spell.

So although you could stack a number of auras for an impressive amount of damage, you'd be increasingly unlikely to actually hit anything, and would end up relying on your enemies being dumb enough to punch the guy surrounded by magical fire instead of stepping back and shooting him in the face.



I'm curious as to what your definition of "decent" is in this case. The minimum dicepool for being able to buy 4 hits would be 16, and would require a starting character to have Magic 5 + Spellcasting 5 + Specialization (Manipulation) 2 + Mentor Spirit 2 + Spellcasting Focus 2 + Attunement Cost 2. That's a total of 75 BP, almost a quarter of a standard character's BP budget. You'd also need a force 4 sustaining focus to keep your dicepool at 16 when casting the second spell, costing another 40,000¥/8 BP + an attunement cost of 4--bringing the total up to 87 BP.

It's certainly doable, but I wouldn't insult a build that optimized by calling it "decent."

If you wanted to get really crazy, you could raise your spellcasting skill to six (+4 BP), pick up the restricted gear quality three times (+15 BP), and upgrade to a force 5 spellcasting focus (+12 BP), a force 5 sustaining focus (+3 BP), and a force 4 power focus (+24 BP), giving you a total of 24 dice for casting manipulation spells, which is the minimum to buy 6 hits.

So for a grand total of 145 BP (160 if you count the magician quality), you could stack a force 6 aura, three force 5's (one in the foci), and two force 4, 3, 2, and 1 auras each. Pick up a Defiance EX Shocker (wielded in melee mode), a monowhip, or maybe an axe, claymore, nodachi, or vibrosword if you have a strength of 8 or more, and you're looking at a DV of 49 with ap 1/2. (Possibly worse if the weapon's AP modifier still applies or you have a strength of 10 or more.)

Of course, with a drain code of (Force / 2) + 3 you'd be dead or unconscious long before you finished casting the final aura, and even if you were still standing you'd be sucking a -11 penalty to everything you do. Might be more plausable with spirits thrown into the mix, either to sustain the spells, suck drain for you, or possess you to boost your stats. (Spirit of Man, give it your aura spells as it's optional powers.)

Still, it's easier to break the game in other ways, so I don't see this as much of a problem.

That, and the prep time required for this buff, is pretty much the only reason it isn't broken. For someone stacking two spells, it is not that bad. It is when someone makes a build specifically to exploit this tactic (like your last example) that you might need to reconsider house ruling it.

Indeed, though it would be funny to see a player try to justify turning themselves into a "bunker buster" by sitting on the roof of a complex and stacking aura spells until the contact damage caused them to melt through the ceiling. Not technically how aura spells are supposed to work but I'd be tempted to allow it just for the lol factor.

Of course, now that I've started thinking about this idea, I can't leave it alone until I've broken the dreck out of it. Okay, super crazy time:

Swap the sustaining focus for a force 5 Summoning Focus. That's an extra 5 BP and puts your foci costs up to the full 250,000¥ allowed at character creation. (This can be mitigated by taking the In Debt negative quality or the Born Rich positive quality from Runner's Companion) Drop spellcasting down to 1 (just enough to get us a single aura spell), bump Summoning up to 5 and take Binding at 5 as well (+24 BP overall). Go with Voodoo tradition for possession spirits, and start with a bound Guardian Spirit, Spirit of Man, and Task Spirit (+1 BP/service each). Finally, drop the spellcasting specialization and mentor spirit quality because you're no longer casting spells yourself (-7 BP cost), or swap them to something that helps your summoning/binding instead.

Bound Spirits purchased at chargen start out at a force equal to your magic, I'm gonna' go out on a limb and say starting with a bound power focus means you'd use the augmented attribute for that, so you've now got a trio of force 9 spirits bound to you. You'll need a charisma of at least 3 for this. (+20 BP)

Give the spirit of man your aura spell as one of it's 3 optional powers, order the task spirit to sustain spells for it, and have the Guardian Spirit possess you. This adds 9 to all your physical attributes and replaces your mental and special attributes with the spirit's. At this point, it's questionable whether your foci still function for the merged being that forms from a spirit possession. If not, then you can drop the spellcasting foci and save yourself 25 BP, counting attunement costs and the restricted gear quality.

(If the foci do work for the possessed being, the spirit possessing your body is effectively a force 13 now, which is just silly. Have the spirit of man possess you first and cast it's aura spells on you, then have it swap out with the guardian spirit.)

Assuming the foci don't work, have the spirit of man uses it's spellcasting skill to cast the aura spell on you, rolling 18 dice (31 if the foci work) and buying 4 hits. (7 with foci) Your Task spirit sustains the first spell, allowing you to get another 4-hit (7-hit) aura stacked on for only a -2 sustaining penalty--which doesn't matter because the spirit of man isn't going to be doing anything but casting/sustaining aura spells on you. Drain is going to be 5 vs a dicepool of 18 (26 with foci), allowing the spirit to buy 4 (6) hits and soak all but one point of drain from each spell. In theory, you could have the spirit cast one more aura spell at force 4 before it starts taking wound penalties. With 13 boxes of health and sufficient services spread out between the spirit of man and Task spirit, you could stack a maximum of three 4 hit auras and as many lower force auras as you've got services for. Technically I'm not seeing anything that says a spirit can't perform spell sustaining for more than one spell at a time, so you're only limited by how many services you can feed to your spirits.

With a force 9 guardian spirit possessing you, your minimum strength is going to be 10, so grab an axe (STR / 2 + 4 = 9 DV) and you're delivering 21+ DV elemental hits with AP 1/2 and a dicepool of 18+.

Of course, you're going to want to save at least one service from each spirit so you can rebind them again afterward or this will be a one-shot trick. Probably best to swap the Spellcasting Focus for a Binding Focus, which saves you 5 BP and puts a little wiggle room back in your nuyen budget. I'd also advise saving your edge for the rebinding tests--you don't want to lose control of a force 9 spirit that you've been using hard.

Total cost: Magician Quality (15) + Magic 5 (40) + Charisma 3 (20) + Spellcasting 1 (4) + Conjuring 5 (20) + Binding 5 (20) + Restricted Gear x 3 (15) + Power Focus 4 (24) + Binding Focus 5 (15) + Summoning Focus 5 (20) + Bound Spirits (3 x services) = 193 BP + 3 / service.

Remember that power foci don't increase the Magic Attribute like they did in SR3; they only give bonus dice.

@Rad
The problem with stuff like that is always, that magic is not an one time choice. Which means, you do not have to build your character just to get two aura spells, you pick up the second on the way.
And you do not need to target yourself with the spell, you can target somebody else.
And you do not need to get the 4 hits first try, you can just recast the spell. We would be talking force 4 here, thats not going to kill you.


Well, going out on limp here. But my guess is that a spirit of man is able to sustain the "spells" he casts with no extra costs, because they are basically powers which a task spirit could not sustain because the are not spells. To make matters worse, powers do not have a sustaining penalty.

But you do not even need possession to pull this off. Just augment your level 9 spirit with some auras and let it one hit kill people.

In 4a they don't, but in regular 4th edition they do. I think some people tend to forget that the anniversary book isn't an errata, but a separate edition.



Not sure I follow that first one. Obviously you have more options with that build than just stacking auras on yourself, but since that seemed to be the specific scenario we were talking about, that was the example I used. Of course you could buff someone else, which would make the issue about sustaining penalties fairly moot if you wanted to just aura up the street samurai and stay at home.

As for not needing to get 4 hits on the first try, that's true, but the drain on aura spells is pretty high so repeated attempts could kill you. A force 4 aura spell has a drain value of 5, you'd need a pool of 20 to reliably soak all that. Actually, you'd need even more since a GM shouldn't technically allow you to buy hits on a soak roll.



That's a good point, actually. I wasn't entirely sure if having the task spirit sustain spells cast by your other spirit was legal or not, but since you can loan services I figured loaning them to another bound spirit would be fine. You could definitely argue that spells cast by a Spirit of Man are actually power uses, rather than normal spellcasting, and so they might use the rules for sustained powers rather than sustained spells. In that case the spirit can sustain up to Magic uses with no penalty, so you can drop the task spirit and still get up to nine stacking auras at once. The better question is whether the spirit still has to worry about drain. If not, things could get a little ridiculous--nine stacking multi-element aura spells anyone?

There's 12 element types in the game, additional elements increase the drain value by 2 each, so a custom aura spell with all 12 would have a drain code of (force / 2) + 25. Of course, if your spirit doesn't have to worry about drain...



True, I threw in possession tradition just to add an extra layer of cheese. Technically you could throw the aura on any spirit that has the Natural Weapon power and get an extra force worth of damage that way, but if you use a possession spirit and an axe you get a minimum of 9 base damage at force 9, and up to 19 base damage if the host is a drake with maxed out strength.

You're right therethat#s a little above "decent" . I kinda forgot my current mage is optimized in his own crazy ways. 4 net hits was just what I just recently had him cast to aid the team's orc in a fist fight with two gangers with way too much machismo.

I also recognize that my GM might slap me over the head if I ever use that Water Spirit + Shapechange spell + Sound Aura spell combination I've envisioned... That's a lot of "ouch" in a fairly small, bear-shaped bundle, also ignoring any armor.

No, they don't. Unless you have a specific passage to quote.

Hmm, I guess you could be right about that. The second line says it "feeds a magician’s Magic directly, making her efforts more powerful in all forms of magical ability", but the third line specifies that it adds to tests. If you take the second line as being flavor text then it does work like you describe, only adding dice to tests and not actually boosting your magic. On the other hand, if you read both lines as being rules text with the third line simply going into more detail then you're back to power foci augmenting the user's magic attribute.

It's a bit ambiguous. By the same logic you could argue that the fourth line "A single power focus can increase a magician’s ability to cast spells, call on and control spirits, and bypass astral barriers" limits what tests a power focus can be used for to just those four actions, even though that would contradict the previous line that says "all tests in which the magician’s Magic is included". The last line is pretty clear in specifying that power foci don't help with "Counterspelling a hostile spell as it is cast", but that doesn't rule out using it to remove sustained spells. Overall I'd say you could interpret it either way.

Interestingly enough, I just checked my 4a rulebook and it has the exact same entry for power foci. Not sure where I heard that they changed it, but clearly that was incorrect.



So, are you shapechanging the spirit into a bear? Or shapechanging yourself into a bear and then having the spirit posses you? Either way sounds like a nice combination, especially with shapechange's whole "every hit adds to your stats" thing.

Keep in mind though that elemental effects only halve armo--oh wait you said sound aura.

It, however, does not say that it raises the force at which you can cast spells.

That would be the relevant line. The following lines go on to say that it adds to tests, but it never specifically contradicts the above line other than specifying that it can't be used to counterspell a spell as it is cast and doesn't work as a weapon foci.

So yeah, it does say that. The question is whether we interpret that line as flavor text or as part of the rules on how power foci work.

The Added Dice feeds a magician’s Magic directly, making her efforts more powerful in all forms of magical ability. Which is very true. What they do not do is add their Rating to the Magic Attribute, which is something completely different... No Contradiction is needed at all. *shrug*

The Rule tells you what it does (augments magical abilities), and then tells you exactly how it does it (by adding dice to your magical tests).

Yeah, I have never found that rule ambiguous at all. But it doesn't really nix your build - you just need to bind those Force: 9 (or higher) spirits after char-gen.

Thanks for all the answers guys.

I think for now I'll rule that you CAN stack multiple Elemental Aura spells, but that the caster can't use all of elemental effects at the same time. But that when they hit someone or they get hit, they get to choose which Elemental Aura will kick in. So if you have Ice and Sand up, and you want to smack someone with your katana, you can choose whether you want to freeze their ass or erode their skin away from sand, but just not both.

Everything else might be a case-by-case basis.

Oh yes, sound aura.
The plan was to shapechange the spirit, as the character in question doesn't have access to possession spirits.
Adding a layer of armor onto that bear might also do well

@Modular Man
I do not think you can shapechange spirits. Shapechange is a physical spell. Spirits are creatures made out of magic.

Except that when they are Materialized, then they are physical creatures.

Precisely the argument a friend from that gaming group presented me with when I told him the idea.
I'm warping magic that somehow transforms your entire body beyond physical possibility into another biologic being and a being whose body and physical mass is somehow created all through magic (and thus not quite biological).
Essentially, that is so much of a grey area in my opinion, it could at least go either way. It's magic, after all, and complicated magic at this point.

It is RAW in the "not explicitly forbidden" sense, but I think most GMs would nix it, as it is a cheap way to boost a summoned spirit's physical stats, and spirits are already potentially game-unbalancing at high Force.

Ahhhh... but if you put a control on the HIGH FORCE aspects of that situation, then you don't really have issues anymore.

Eh, it's Shadowrun. "Potentially unbalanced" is a leaky boat with too many holes to consider patching. You just bail as best you can and prepare for your game to inevitably move under water.