I was conidering putting together a shaman with only manaball. I got me thinking.

How many people can a lone nutjob with an AOE spell kill? A lot, before he passes out from drain.

How many magiclly active probablly go around the bend? A number a lot higher than the national average, when you factor in the power they have, and access to the weirdness of the astral.

I would be willing to bet that since the awakening dozens of incidents have occured in which mages have cut loose on crowds. Imagine what the media would do with them. Society's response would likely be extreem.

Well, even if you accept that more mages than mundanes go crazy and kill random people (which I guess makes sense), a fraction of a fraction leaves not a lot of people. Considering the amount of violence that exists in SR, and from which the people are happily shielded by corp-controlled propoganda on every channel, I guess mages goisn berserk are only one of several items on a person's list of Bad Things.

Bug City: thousands die
Arc shutdown: thousands die
War everywhere: thousands die all the time
Terrorism acts (such as the destruction of the Aztech building in the AMC): thousands die
VITAS: thousands die
Riots: hundred die

So a mage going nuts and shooting off AOE manaballs... well, police would of course show up pretty fast. And he can't very well be casting Deadly manaballs too much, he'll pass out pretty quick. I don't deny the damage, but if it happened once it would already be alot. Combat spells are heavilly restricted. It's kinda the same as an Army cybered commando going nuts and killing everyone in sight.

But yeah, people are already wary of mages. The UCAS section in SoNA details how mages are not well perceived in the UCAS.

Wasn't the destruction of the Sears Tower pinned on mages and metahumans?

~J

One well-publicised case would lead to a lot of knee-jerk reaction from the public and some political scrambling to make it look like people are doing things.

Take the awful and tragic example of the Dunblane massacre over here. Bloke walks into a school and shoots a bunch of kids. Everybody goes nuts, government outlaws possession of handguns at home. All fine and hoopy, except that iirc the guy didn't get his guns from his home, he got them from the shooting club - where the government just said everyone has to keep their handguns.

(Disclaimer - I'm not a shooter and couldn't give a rat's arse about where the government says you have to keep your guns except for my one concern about "one-stop shopping").

Mages are already viewed badly in the UCAS. All it takes is one nutzoid mage with a manabolt and an old-fashioned pair of binocs sitting on a rooftop in Downtown and things are going to go Tango Uniform for everyone else pretty damn quick, logically or not.

Don't forget, by selectively targeting a given metaspecies (with "Slay Human" or "Slay Ork" or whatnot spell variants) your would-be mass-murderer can not only target only his most loathed waste of oxygen, but he can keep on casting much, much, longer before the Drain catches up to him!

Suddenly I have an evil plot burgeoning in my head... involving a devious scheme by anti-magic, antu-metahuman types,involving a psycho meta mage with a Slay Human spell, and prime time coverage on CNN...

I guess one thought might be is how many newly awakend people find out they have the ability this way - I mean if your first manifestation of your power was ripping off a manaball at somepeople that maybe you were only thinking bad thoughts about, you can see why the amount of awakend people in the world is so small - you cast your first spell and get lynched for it. Secondly it would seem that the corps have people on the lookout for those who manifest magical ability, so those out there who are randomly killing off others probably get snapped up by a corp and turned into a wage mage before they can cook off these spells - which to the benefit of your average sixth world citizen probably makes the probability of encountering a rogue homicidal spell-slinger somewhat less. Lastly the police have their mages too which probably keep a lookout for such things.

Isn't there some kind of universal magic testing done at a relatively early age? I'm sure I remember reading that somewhere.

EDIT: I think it might have been nation-specific - one of the Tir's, maybe. Anyone?

And thus, the street phrase "Geek the mage first"... before he goes off on a wild killing spree. It's the only way to be sure, right?

I remember one of the magical-potential tests is called an "Xavier Exam" or something similar. I dug that. All the kids who come up positive go off to a school for gifted youngsters in upstate New York, and...

Shades of the "just-for-fun" run I did once involving a bunch of various types of adepts conditioned and trained into being X-Men. Iirc, I had an unscrupulous government black ops department do it; an experiment in could it be done that got away from them.

By "dug that" I thought it was a nice, fairly subtle, Easter Egg or nod to the X-Men.

And Laverty didn't so much run an X-Men school as "train his own paramilitary force," starting before the whole idea of Paladins made it the cool thing to do. That I can get behind.

Or weak writing.

Critias... Why am I not surprised?

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