If I've got enough photo's to make a pretty solid picture in my head, can a watcher track them?

If I have material from an awakened being, if it's still a viable ritual link, it will retain enough of an aura to be used in astral tracking, right?

I thought I knew this stuff, but after re-reading the rules, it appears that they aren't very specific.

I've always required a large amount of information; i.e. a photograph, or a tissue sample, along with a general idea of where the subject is. The reason for this is both in-game and out-of-game.

In game, watcher spirits are pretty stupid. They're not capable of carrying out complex commands, and have a tendency to take commands literally. Moreover, it may be difficult for spirits to convey the location of the subject to their summoner (i.e. "He's 5 miles that-a-way" while pointing vaguely north).

Out-of-game, it really sucks for the GM if players can just send their watcher spirits after anyone they're mildly curious about; make them find out as much as they can via conventional means before you give them the exact location.

No one else has any input?

If the mage knows their astral signature, that should work, as well. The problem with watchers isn't so much them finding the target as making sure that them finding the target has a useful result.

Yea, but I can just follow the watcher around for a couple of hours, til it finds my target

I would (and have) say that a couple of decent photographs would be sufficient to convey a mental image to the watcher for tracking.

Furthermore, watchers do not have services... they have durations. So its really not that hard to make watcher tracking useful. Send it on its mission, kill time for a couple of hours, then, when it returns, astrally project and follow it back to the target. Since the watcher already found the target once, you can follow the watcher at fast astral speeds to get there before the target can relocate.

And while yes, watchers are rather stupid, the book specifically mentions that they are still quite good at the limited number of things they can do, and rather singlemindedly clever at doing them... unless something unexpected happens and they get confused.

If the summoner has assensed the target, then he can send a watcher to them. So make sure you either have ritual links or have assensed everyone you could potentially send a watcher after. That's how I've ruled, mostly influenced by how Bernard claims to have sent in watcher after Dirk in 2XS.

Don