The laws surrounding magic are a mish-mash of references spawning multiple editions at this point, so which ones you end up using are kind of like visiting a salad bar. That said, looking over them I definitely see some issues.


The Basics

The most comprehensive reference I’ve found is the old Lone Star sourcebook, pp. 54-59. There are some “Magic and the Law” sections in SR4 Street Magic, pp. 13-14 and SR5 Street Grimoire, pp. 26-27, but they’re more general than specific. So I’m trying to get an idea on what the laws on magic use and mage registration are in at least the major countries of the Sixth World. The following are my comments on various legal components regarding magic that have popped up across the editions.


Licensing Individual Spells

I’m a programmer, and this would be like trying to license every individual program I create. I can always create more, in fact I could create multiple new programs per day if I’m just ripping up old programs for pieces of new ones. Trying to license all of those would be a fool’s errand of the highest order. Regardless of their intentions, I don’t see this requirement lasting very long, especially as there’s absolutely no way to confirm which spells a magician knows.


Limits on Foci Power

How does this make sense? They can’t exactly run your magic wand over a desktop scanner and then proclaim “Yup, that’s a Force 4 Summoning Focus.” The rating scale exists for players, not NPCs in-universe. If they wanted to invent the “Johnson-Smith” rating scale for magic in-universe then that would be different, but so far I see no evidence of that.


Licensing Fees

The Lone Star magic license costs $25k, which is completely ridiculous. Almost every magician would be flouting the law, and the whole point of registration is that you want to know who these people are and keep track of them. If 95% of newly Awakened magicians can’t afford to register, then then you’ve made 95% of all magic-users criminals by default. There’s no way that would stand, as the powers that be want these people under observation and preferably working away in company labs. Charge $2k instead and make them attend a week-long class with a test at the end. If they fail the test, they have to re-take the course and pay another $2k. That’s one month of expenses at Low Lifestyle, so I think it’s a decent pricing guide.


Unannounced Inspections for Registered Magicians

This makes even less sense than the exorbitant licensing fee. They’re actually going to show up at your home at random times and demand to be let inside to search your house? What if you’re not even home at the time? Imagine running out for coffee and coming home to find that the magic police have busted down your door and trashed your house while you were out. “Well, we were looking for contraband, but it looks like you’re good. Have fun repairing all the damage. Let’s go, boys!” I don’t see how this doesn’t result in regular lawsuits and horrible publicity for them. Not to mention, your own security system would be screaming its head off and calling for aid when your door is smashed in with a battering ram. It would certainly be fun if your armed guards showed up to contest their actions.


Black Guardian Vines Change the World for All of the Awakened

I’m honestly surprised anyone bothers with the expense of making special prisons for Awakened criminals. It’s way cheaper to just toss them onto a batch of Black Guardian Vines (SR4 Street Magic, p. 124) where they’ll be rendered permanently mundane in just a few minutes. I have absolutely no idea why something that should have hit the Sixth World with the force of a nuke to the face got literally two sentences and nothing more since then. You’d think every police department would cultivate a cell full of them at every station and just toss every suspect that was even suspected of being Awakened into it for a while right after booking. Solves the problem permanently. In fact, why haven’t nations/areas that aren’t big on magic around the world cultivating this plant everywhere? If they’ve got the legal authority, they could systematically round up all their Awakened and “cleanse them of their demonic taint” in an organized fashion. Whole communities might make it a Coming of Age ritual to go lay down on a patch of vines for the duration of the ceremony, thus ensuring that their communities were kept free of magic. Though the response of the Awakened community would probably be to declare war on these plants and go out of their way to exterminate them across the globe. Either way, their existence changes the world and the issues surrounding them should regularly make the front pages.


Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Damn. I don't have the Lone Star book. A lot of what you say makes sense ... as in, the rules don't.



There could exist an "Assenser's Tool Kit" of items of varying Force. Then the item in question could be compared: stronger than/weaker than/equal to. This issue has always plagued me, as I would like my PCs to speak in terms that are in character. For example, a current PC would like to buy some items of various Force. How does he phrase it to his talismonger contact?

I and GM often break down and just use the game's rating system.



The Magic drain does take a minute per point. That's 20 combat turns to fireball the sucker. It might hurt a bit if the PC is entwined, but better a 'deep tan' than no Magic! Hmmm ....

... Slaughter (Black Guardian Vine), anyone?

Err, was there not actually an in UNIVERSE System at work that lets people who know what they do (probably some kind of meta magic?) determine those things?
Also, technically it does not matter what level something is . . if you use magic in a crime, it is allways treated as premediated and as if it was a lethal weapon i think?

If there is such an in-universe system, then a lot of things would make a lot more sense but I can't find it. And without it, all those references on "a license for up to Force 3 spells/foci" make absolutely no sense whatsoever. As pbangarth pointed out, how do you tell a talismonger that you'd like to purchase a Force 5 focus if you can't express/quantify the Force of magic in-universe?


Yes, SR4 Street Magic mentions that, but that's more general than I was looking for. The Lone Star book is far more specific in the legal requirements for mages, but reading over it the rules just seem totally crazy and unworkable to me.

That's what started my post. I went looking for more specific rules and the ones I found didn't make a whole lot of sense upon closer examination.


Which is kind of why I'm thinking that I might need to retcon in some sort of in-universe scale for quantifying magic Force levels.


I would assume that the proper procedure is to carefully tie down the individual vines so that you'd have a (writhing and struggling) "mat" of vines to toss the person onto. Otherwise it might be difficult to extract them without hurting your rather expensive plant. Leave them in a cell with the thing carpeting the floor for 15 minutes and no more magic for them. You'd probably handcuff the suspect so as to stop them from hurting it as well.

It may or may not be expressed in the same terms, but the existence of a comparable measurement to Force must be inferred, much like Rating and the like.

Legal protections are stronger today than in the Sixth World, and permits exist that allow the ATF to perform unannounced inspections, so it’s not clear to me why those inspections would be problematic in the Sixth World. They don’t suffer from busting your door down, that’s your problem. This and the licensing fee both serve to encourage the Awakened to seek corporate employment as soon as possible, which is a desirable outcome for the corps.

For keeping people still while rendering them Mundane, that’s what tranq patches are for.

~J

Then it ought be spelled out in the sourcebooks.


I'd want to see some documentation on that. If the cops bust down your door and trash your house, and then don't find anything, I'm pretty darn sure some lawyers would love to take your case to sue them for damages.


I just don't see this working out. This is a real "chicken or the egg" problem. How could you apply for employment without a super-expensive license and how could you afford the super-expensive license without the employment? Knocking that down to $2k seems more realistic.


That does seem easier.

I mean, it would be nice if it were, but I don’t think it’s necessary. We know certain Force foci incur legal burdens, so they must be legally definable and identifiable. That’s enough.


(Not a lawyer, not legal advice.)

If you pay them up front/as they go, sure, but don’t plan on contingency: an article with anecdotes, and various other information can be found about the internet. In the US it seems reasonably established that barring local laws to the contrary the question is whether the door-busting was “unreasonable”, with liability mostly being found in cases where a warrant was for a different address than it was served to (even declining an offer of a key in favor of a battering ram doesn’t seem to qualify as “unreasonable”). Even then there are horror stories about the compensation process (requiring a bidding process then taking the lowest bid resulting in substandard work). I continue to believe the current legal situation to be an upper bound on how friendly to claims Shadowrun is likely to be.

Might dig around for the details of how existing RL unannounced inspections are handled. (Edit: I miss the days when I could just send up the Raygun-signal and get some answers on things like this.)


Most of the time you couldn’t afford it, so you’d be applying for work where the workplace would take that burden off your shoulders. You’re correct that only a rare talent would be worth shelling out 25k¥ on untested new Awakened employees, even as hungry for Awakened as the corps are implied to be, but there’s a loophole—extraterritoriality. If you can be assigned extraterritorial corp housing contiguous to extraterritorial place of employment, suddenly they aren’t paying more than a fraction of the license cost to make the problem go away, and the “downside” of chaining you to corp territory is mostly a downside for you, not for them.

That said, I’ll have to review the literature on magical licensing.

~J

You are assuming that the victim of police brutality has a SIN, a sufficiently savvy lawyyer and the time, resources and inclination to contradict and go up against Lone Star? I see a lot of ways that might not be the case in the Sixth World.

If they've taken the course, paid the license fee, and registered, then they're certainly a SINner. Some other factors to consider are social media and civil rights organizations. You could get on social media and tell your tale of woe about the horrible cops that trashed your house for no reason. Join up with others in the same boat, make a Matrix site all about it, and invite others to send in their horror stories as well. That would also give you the resources for a class action lawsuit. Which would almost certainly attract the notice of civil rights groups who could chip in with money and expertise as well.

It would eventually hit the national media, and you're the poor underdogs oppressed by the evil cops. This is officially bad for business and so it would behoove the powers that be to avoid it. And it wouldn't be hard for them to skip all that. Assign a drone to watch your house and then serve a 24 hours in advance notice of an inspection. If you come frantically running out of your house with a box of contraband and drive away with it, they've got you on film. If not, they stroll in the next day and have a look around.

It hadn't dawned on me you were talking about a full-fledged and highly accomplished (because they have the money to pay the licencing fee) magician. I thought you referred to some random muggler. But if a magician is licenced, why would the Star beat down their door? They already know the person behind the door is a magician. I are confuzzled.

Don't get me wrong here, I am totally on your side re. inconsistent, missing, implied and/or contradictory rules throughout the SR editions. I pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster every day that he'll inspire someone to produce a coherent, playable, and fun version of SR3, but the lazy bastich keeps ignoring me.

Because, like some real-world firearms licenses (for the US, the ones that let you own automatic/burst/selective-fire weapons from before the cutoff), the license for Awakened apparently includes the requirement to submit to unannounced inspections. I haven’t dug up the source, but battering rams are law enforcement’s skeleton key if they should show up when no one’s home.

My argument, though, is less that they would bash down the door than that they would almost certainly suffer no consequences from doing so, to the point of not even paying to replace the door, because in the real world US (which is more friendly to personal rights than SR) courts have repeatedly found that police departments are not liable for damage caused by their actions unless they did something truly boneheaded, like trash 121 Elm using a warrant for 211 Elm. Trashing 121 Elm on suspicion of possession of a MacGuffin which is never found, nor anything else actionable, does not meet that threshold.

Edit: actually, now that I read Lone Star’s section on the Department of Paranormal Investigation (starting p54), I think the OP’s issues get substantially resolved—regulations on magic seem to be driven by the DPI (Diamondback’s comment on p56) and are aimed less at creating a solid, sane legal framework than at increasing the power of the DPI. If mages have difficulty complying with the law and only the DPI has jurisdiction over their likely violations, the DPI has grounds to pressure mages they want to pressure, and can bigfoot investigations that touch on unlicensed mages or the like. My theory about forcing mages into work for multinationals is also confirmed in the same section.

In short, it works the way it does because the goals aren’t what you think they are.

~J

4E's Parageology mentions the "Metzger-Typhus scale" and 5E's Street Grimoire mentions "Typhus-Metzger scale" although the context for both is mana/ley lines.

I am positive I remember a piece of fluff that includes mention of a scale that would be the in-universe equivalent of Force, but there are so, so many books and so, so many fluff pieces...

It's entirely possible that it was Metzger-Typhus (or Typhus-Metzger) too, so until I find that piece again that is the name that I am using for all things related to Force and background count.

Lone Star also refers to “2,000 nuyen per power level” in the in-character Shadowtalk-adjacent part of the text. It doesn’t get much more explicit.

~J

It may have been in some older 3rd edition or maybe even 2nd edition book.
I can not find mine any more since i have moved.

No need to look into the Lone Star book and involve law enforcement. The price at which foci can be bought is based on Force, which requires sellers and buyers to have some objective measurement to agree on how powerful a given focus is. And it's not just some haggling over price-performance between AMD and Intel for your next laptop: the price difference between two foci levels is several thousand nuyen. So, if it was impossible to assess Force, then the rule should state that you pay an arbitrary amount of money for a random rating.

Which could be a nice change to make magic a bit more mysterious, but I would expect players to get quickly pissed off.

Otherwise, the assenssing rules make it quite difficult to know a focus rating (threshold was 4 with TN 5 in SR2) so actually the only way to not get scammed when buying a focus should be to visit again and again every shops until you find a suiteable focus and your assenssing roll is successful.

Ok, here’s my first pass at untangling multiple editions of law enforcement policy regarding magic in the Sixth World.


The Early Years:

The first patchwork of laws to regulate the Awakened was clumsy, ham-fisted, and partly nonsensical. Things like unannounced home inspections, trying to regulate spells and foci by the Metzger-Typhus scale, licensing fees that cost more than most cars, and even trying to license individual spells per magician. Naturally, all it really did was make a giant mess.

The unannounced home inspections led to what eventually became giant class-action lawsuits for tens of millions in nuyen for property damage and some wrongful death cases. Trying to regulate magic by the Metzger-Typhus scale was essentially impossible to comply with as relatively few magicians could tell the difference between a spell that was Rating 3 or Rating 3.07436 on that scale (if they could get that close). Even trying to learn what spells a magician knew was a non-starter, and was frequently compared to trying to license each application that all the Matrix programmers in the world created every day. And many Awakened made less per year than the exorbitant licensing fee charged by Lone Star (for just a basic license, at that).

After many years, this giant mess eventually snowballed its way into public awareness due to the sheer number of lawsuits and horror stories, which Awakened civil rights groups had actively solicited and publicly posted in an attempt to shame the powers that be into some badly-needed reforms. In the end, that arguably worked.


Current Era (2075-ish):

While laws vary between the UCAS, CAS, and CalFree, most of them have been streamlined into a basic licensing system which is something like getting your Driver’s License or CCL Permit as it involves classes, written tests, and practical tests to obtain. Their costs have been reigned down to about 2,000¥ and the courses are typically a week to complete. Foci are licensed rather like firearms and while there are no explicit Metzger-Typhus scale limits, all foci will be assessed to determine their Force Rating according to that scale, which also gives the legal authority an idea how powerful the creator of the focus was and how powerful the magician who bonded it is as well. In addition, the registering officials shave a little sliver off of each focus and save them in a magical preservation vault to serve as magical links to both the focus and indirectly the bonding magician as well.

Lone Star
They did not take the magic law reforms gracefully, and largely regarded it as their right to push around the Awakened whenever and however they chose. Their response was a massive escalation of the whole situation, in such a way that its effects would be felt around the world. At the time, Black Guardian Vines were barely known as an obscure variant of Awakened Ivy that were only found in the deepest corners of the Amazonian Jungle. But their Division of Paranormal Investigation’s Research Department prides itself on being well-informed and saw their potential in law enforcement.

At considerable expense and trouble, they carefully imported several specimens for testing purposes and the results were all that they could have hoped for. Within 5 to 10 minutes of forcible exposure, any Awakened criminal could be rendered permanently mundane, greatly simplifying their treatment by the legal system. The vines had to be carefully restrained into a “mat” of sorts and they typically had to slap a tranquilizer patch on the prisoners first, but they did the job. One of their first acts was to immediately depower the entire populations of all the private mage prisons under their jurisdiction, resulting in massive cost savings going forward in dealing with the now perfectly normal criminals. All Awakened criminals that have even been arrested (not necessarily on valid charges) are likewise subjected to this fate unless some corporation offers to take them off their hands instead (for a suitable discrete payment, of course).

Most legal systems are still reeling from this new tactic, as such an approach was not addressed at all in the most recent reforms. Lone Star’s response was to note that their depowered prisoners are completely unharmed physically (as verified by medical examination), and that their new “Paranormal Containment Protocol” was entirely both ethical and legal. So far, they’re continuing to get away with it.

However, this has completely burned any bridges they had with the Awakened community as a whole. They now firmly regard Lone Star as Public Enemy Number 1 and are openly hostile towards them. This has severely hampered the DPI’s ability to hire new magicians and there are persistent rumors in the shadow community that magicians are being captured on trumped-up charges and offered deals to either join up or be immediately depowered.

Knight Errant
They regard themselves more as soldiers than police, and view the Awakened as individuals possessing potent concealed weapons. Accordingly, they insist on mandatory licensing as soon as they identify them and stress the penalties (getting shot dead) if they become a public nuisance with their abilities. As Lone Star’s top competitors, they strive to differentiate themselves from them and have deliberately avoided using Black Guardian Vines save as an absolute last resort for powerful Awakened prisoners who would otherwise be very difficult to contain. Note that this situation is mostly rare due to their “shoot first and ask questions later” policy towards Awakened criminals, so that’s of dubious benefit to the Awakened community as a whole. Nevertheless, their “only as an absolute last resort” policy on Black Guardian Vines has won them some grudging support from the Awakened, if only because they want to spite Lone Star by lobbying for their main competitor instead.

NAN
At least in North America, these are arguably the best places to be a magician, as magic there is treated as an everyday part of life and regulated like any other profession. This has caused a steadily-increasing “mage drain” as more and more Awakened try to immigrate to the NAN (typically the PCC) from the rest of North America. It could be said that the UCAS and CAS are getting exactly what they said they wanted (less magic around), but it’s happening in a way that makes them weaker and their neighboring states stronger. It’s a complicated issue and the UCAS and CAS find themselves arguing either side of it on any given day, but in the end it’s undeniable that the NAN (and again, mostly the PCC) are growing magically stronger every year at their expense. The NAN are, of course, delighted at their neighbors’ short-sighted laws and gleefully take in nearly any Awakened that apply, as long as they don’t have a history of being violent criminals. Black Guardian Vines are illegal all across the NAN (Availability 25F), where they’re regarded as a sacrilege to their spiritual beliefs. Very quietly, various NAN governments run “underground railroad” networks to smuggle promising Awakened onto tribal lands out of the UCAS, CAS, CalFree, and Aztlan.

Elsewhere
Fundamentalist religious communities, in particular, have eagerly embraced the use of Black Guardian Vines to “cleanse the demonic taint of magic” in their midst. New Coming-of-Age rituals have been devised where every young person is required to lay upon a mat of writhing vines to drain away their magical potential. Likewise, anyone in those communities found to be exhibiting sorcerous talents are liable to be kidnapped in the night by a local vigilante squad and forcibly depowered. The slowly-healing divide between the Awakened and organized religion has now shattered into a vast gulf that will likely never be mended. The Awakened have largely become far more militant on the subject of religion, and will routinely ostracize members that belong to any sects that do not loudly condemn this practice.

Newly-formed Awakened terrorist groups have started hunting down and destroying Black Guardian Vines wherever they can find them, and they have strong (if not always open) support from the rest of their Awakened brethren.

The Short Version
Lone Star: Dirty cops who want all of the Awakened either drafted, depowered, or dead.
Knight Errant: Soldiers who regard the Awakened as having concealed weapons and license them accordingly. Cross them and they immediately treat you as a terrorist to be gunned down.
NAN: Laughing at their idiot neighbors and happily gobbling up nearly every Awakened that makes it to their borders. Have quietly established smuggling networks to facilitate this.
Religious Nutjobs: Have launched their own little anti-magic crusade and now aggressively keep their communities free of all magic. This is frequently a problem when paracritters invade and there are no magicians to ward against them, but they’ve increasingly turned to technology to try to combat them as best they can.