Once again the 'newbie' returns to the concept of Earthdawn and Shadowrun cross-over... How have people who have attempted this, e.g. Sephiroth (sp.?), managed it, i.e. the difference between thread/pattern artefacts and the more, erm, standardised artefacts of the SR world?

I'm interested in both mechanics and concepts here...

As always, many thanks for taking the time to reply...

Kage

I always saw it as a matter of "upgrading" the focus.

For instance: if you have a thread artifact with a maximum thread rank of 7, then that item, for all effects that target it, treat it as a Force 7 focus. However, you begin be bonding it as a Force 1 focus, and can only use whatever abilities it gives you (most are easy enough to convert) at that rank; when you wish to upgrade the link, you re-bond the focus at the next higher force, paying karma and getting those additional abilities at that thread rank.

For all intents and purposes, I usually consider the cost to bond a thread to be 1/500 of the cost to bond it in Legend Points, rounding fractions up (so if it costs 10,000 legend poitns to bond, it costs 20 karma points ot bond)

Once you decide how you are going to convert circles to grades and spell matricies to SR magic, the artifacts should be easy. Ancient History pretty covered it. As for covering spell matricies... Something akin to a more powerful version of Filtering might be okay, with the mage still taking drain (not enough ambient magic yet to fully power spells) but not having to worry about background count, etc, for a spell locked in a matrix.

Before SOTA63 introduced Filtering I created Spell Matrices and Grimoires in Shadowrun as a focus for a series of runs - the players had been hired by Fed Boeing to retrieve a Grimoire that had originally been given to the Young Elven Technologists by Ehran teh Scribe.

Aztechnology were also introduced and the players came up against a nasty Blood Spirit (which because I didn't have my books with me at the time had the Engulf power and erupted from a corporate diner who suddenly started convulsing and then burst open in a spray of blood).

I had rules, bonding costs and everything sorted out for them.

I was wondering how to run pattern magic or use the Passions in Shadowrun if I ever wanted to have some Tir elves that were taught magic by the IEs rather than learning it the modern way. Having never played Earthdawn before, this becomes difficult.

The Abstruse One

With the Passions, you'd treat them as Idols to which shamans pay homage, imo. Pattern magic would be a bit more difficult to port over, I think.

Non spellcasting ED characters are all adepts. One thing that we discussed one time was trying to figure out the magic point cost of various ED adept powers. Its tough proposition given the differences between the systems, but I'm sure someone smarter than me could figure it out. I shudder to think of a SR adept with a modern composite bow & the Archer adept powers.

As far as the spellcasting magicians, essentially all SR mages are casting "raw" i.e. they are taking physical drain. Physical drain is almost unheard of in ED given the fact that almost a ED magician will use matrix out of fear of horror taint. Most of the ED books are out there on places like eBay or www.stiggybaby.com for cheap. If you really want to screw a SR magician up, get them horror marked.

Drain in ED was a mix between Raw MAgic and Forced Spellcasting (where you take strain rather than weave the threads, spell knack)

Personnaly, I view drain to be only caused by forced spellcasting. As I see it, the drain coming from raw magic is due to the pollution of the astral, which in SR exist too (Background count 6+)

Spell matrices should'nt be to hard to translate. The important thing to remeber is that while it might seem unbalancing to let a magician cast spells without taking drain..etc., it actually takes quite a lot longer to cast a spell from a matrix. Now there is a problem with the discrepancy between the length of SR and ED combat rounds, but when you look a mundane actions the same problem exists, so i would just use the SR combat rounds. Now many spells in ED has threads that needs to be woven into the spell before it can be cast, and there is also a test that needs to be taken when weaving the threads, first of all i would make the threadweaving action a complex exclusive action, second i would reduce the difficulty for the threadweaving test by ca. half, you should still be able to attempt to weave more threads than one in one action, to calculate the TN for a test to weave multiple threads simply multiply the TN by the number of threads as in ED or add them together if you prefer that, third i would either give the characters in question a threadweaving skill, and then make the max. number of threads they could weave in one round dependent on their skill rating or you could rule that they just had to use sorcery for the test, third casting the spell should be a complex action, maybe exclusive, maybe not in any case it is problaly pretty redundant if you make threadweaving exclusive, anyway you should think about what to do regarding sustaining spells, in ED many spells are selfsustaining for a period, these mages wouldn't really be much of a thread if they didn't have selfsustaining spell or at least a good portion of sustain foci then. Also you need to compare SR spells and ED spells to find out how many threads you think a SR spell should be assigned ( for spells that damage maybe something like 1 thread for serious dam., 2 threads for deadly dam., 1 thread for a physical spell and 1 thread for elemental effects, which would make a fireball spell set for deadly dam. a 4 thread spell ). There are many more things to consider such as force and stuff, these ideas are just off the top of my head.

As I see it, matrices don't let someone cast a spell with no drain, it just purifies the astral energies, so you won't have problems casting in a high background count. By casting a spell by raw magic (the only way SR magicians know), you would still take many rounds in ED, and would suffer only minor drain caused by the pollution of the astral.
If you take a look at forced spellcasting, you would see someone using a matrix takes more drain... To translate it to SR is really easy, I would say it takes 3 successes (instead of 2) for the drain to go one level down.

An ED magician does not take drain if he casts a matrix spell normally, i.e. takes at least two rounds to cast the spell, 1 round to weave threads, 1 round to cast the spell.

As far as the discrepancy between the round systems, that is something you can't translate litteraly from one system to the other, in comparison swinging a sword in ED takes considerably longer than swinging a sword in SR, which is why i would translate all ED actions into SR combat rounds and intiative passes.

Also you do suffer drain from using raw magic, and not just because of astral tainting, you just suffer alot more when using raw magic in astrally tainted environments. But yes using raw magic also takes longer, so in essence SR magic would be more akin to raw magic cast with the forced weaving knack.