I might agree with that limited availability as well. I think this is just a talent that is "currently" limited to this one group due in part to skepticism about that tradition's validity.

I take that to mean that a character can have only one "active" charm at a time so no chain smoking them unless they're actually enchanting them which is a different story!

(Bold emphasis mine)

Plus, this seems to say that you re-roll the whole test not just the failures (as you do with Karma Pool) and since it takes a Simple Action to do so I see it as being very limited to saving people from a botch.

As for the Witch only creation limitation, I don't really mind. I could see extending it to include other shamanic paths (i.e. bags of Aztlan worry dolls) but I think hermetics would still think it too touchy-feely to totally buy it. Then again, the unified magical theory types would probably love the idea. And, I wonder who the first person will be to extend this form of enchanting and try to get that item from Dunkie's Will which provides oricalcum for a magical item usable by mundanes

If taken at face value, then it does imply the entire test is re-rolled. The first time I read this, my mind read it as the same as spending a point of Karma to re-roll failures.

As for whether I have an issue with only witches being able to create them, nah. Like some of the others here, I think its a nice bit of flavor. To be honest, I like that the gamedevs are making things a bit different amongst the magicians. Shadowrun has never been about copying reality (or in this case, magical traditions) "verbatim" after all. The Shadowrun universe is a splinter universe where our real history only has a marginal bearing on its outcome. It is not the final say in it though and I'm happy its not. If that were the case, magic in Shadowrun would be severely gimped over.

I suppose if a hard answer is *necessary*, one could always say that either the other magical groups who had traditionally been able to create charms simply haven't been awakened to the rememberance of how to do so yet. Or perhaps, there is another "awakening" in store for them.

You completely re-roll open tests, IIRC.

The Charms in SOTA are designed around the concept of RL "luck charms" or simply "charms". These are a feature of traditional witchcraft and pagan traditions (including, it is believed, druidism and pre-Christian Goddess worship) but despite what a lot of the fiction would have you believe they don't actually feature in Hermeticism (classical, alchemical, neo-classical or the magickal), Qabbalism (Orthodox or the hermetic variety) or North American shamanic traditions (which use fetishes and spirit items and generally lack the "fate weaving" concept).

Note that although many neo-pagans now boast "charms" these are actually ritual focusing tools, or what in SR would be called spell locks for "workings", rather than what charms were originally all about (ie. luck charms). Some New Agers and Wiccans do claim to use charms in the original sense but they're not really based on any age-old formulas or fabrication techniques (which is the idea behind the way traditional witches do it).

In SR they were introduced the way they were because though "luck charms" exist in many neo-pagan traditions that fit luck/probability/fate manipulation into their cosmology, we judged it "cool" that it turned out that the tradition that has knowledge of the technique involved is the one that stuck closest to its roots (ie. witchcraft) and the one most people underestimate because it is apparently weaker.

Charms or Luck Charms, as currently presented, may also be appropriate to some African shamanism (Central African shamanism as practiced by witch doctors rather than South African animist shamanism), many Eastern mystical traditions (especially Daoist Wujen as well as Hindu and Tibetan mysticism) and certain hybrids like Santeria and Candomble common in Brazil, Latin America and the Carribean, to which "weaving" or "influencing" fate is integral to the cosmology.

BTW - I have been looking into a "grounding focus" or "sympathetic focus" like the one Funk mentions for a while, but keeping it balanced is more complicated than it seems. I've so far considered requiring ritual sorcery for the casting because I think simple spellcasting may be subject to abuse (basically by eliminating the LOS requisite for "friendly spells"). So far the most balanced (and harder to abuse) I've come up with is a variant, which until I come up with a better name I'm calling "twined foci" - under which two foci are bonded to each other and they provide the link for Spellcasting (the magician casts into one focus and the effect sympathetically manifests through the twin). While I am interested in discussing this further I won't do so on the open forum simply because I hope to actually use it somewhere down the line. Funk, or anyone else interested in exchanging ideas and developing this particular concept further, please contact me by PM.

That was pretty much my thought with the added bonus of providing spell defense to person who bonded the twin (provided both were in physical contact with the separate foci).

So if I read that correctly, you still redo the test, not just re-roll the failures, right?

Is there a process to bond a zero karma cost object to one's character? What exactly is binding the object to the character if not karma? Maybe I'm just not understanding what you're saying here...