It is my understanding that each Tradition has a set of five spirit types. The PC then is assigned a Tradition.

-SR4, page 169.

Your concept is flavor text. The types of spirits that you can summon is that you pick five - currently the list is only six long, but there's specifically going to be aditional spirit types later.

-SR4, page 176.

The associations of each spirit is that if you want Earth Spirits to teach you illusion spells instead of water spirits, you can just go ahead and do that (since it really doesn't matter). The means by which you resist Drain is that your drain resistance is your Willpower plus one other mental trait. This means that Orks (who are the master race in SR4) get to resist Drain with Willpower and Intuition.

-Frank

Yes. There are only three ways to reconcile the existence of the Universal Brotherhood and Loa Zombies into SR4:

[*] Remove all references in the fluff to those events and pretend that entire method of doing magic never existed.

[*] Introduce possession magic as something that anyone can do, like when Watcher Spirits were introduced in the 1st edition Manual of Practical Thaumaturgy.

[*] Create a new tradition option, where people have to give up something good (spirit manifestation) to get something else good (spirit possession).

The first option is flat unacceptable to anyone who's played since 1989 (like myself), the second is a powerup of magicians that I can't see any reason for, and the third has the potential to be balanced and interesting while retaining access to the backstory that's been going for 16 years. What's the problem with opion 3?

No. This introduces a new mechanic for several traditions. The Universal Brotherhood, the Houngans, the Bearsarkers, these are all different traditions. They'll summon different spirits and use different drain stats. I see the Inui using Logic to resist Drain while the Houngans probably use Charisma to resist drain. The Indian Avataristas are probably going to use Intuition. Bearsarkers probably use Charisma again, but I don't think anyone is going to mistake them for Houngans.

-Frank

I guess i'm missing the angle here, but is there not a way to define a spirit power/spirit type as nasty? Call it fluff, but fluff has real power within the mechanics when direct GM intervention and approval is called for.

Hell there is meat in the spirit types and their powers. If dealing with such spirits exerts influence on the ones using them then any tradition that uses them will also pick up the other end of the stick. Insect spirits are an excellent example of this, as by their vary nature they and their source (the Queen) seek to , and eventually do control the summoner. Toss into the Tradition that they always have a Queen as a Mentor Spirit and you are set.

1.: Consistency with older editions.
2.: Game Balance.

The consistency idea is obvious. Historically, the people who could possess themselves and others with their spirits have never been able to summon spirits that could materialize on their own.

The game balance idea is a little more subtle, but a lot more convincing. Certainly some things in SR4 are not like things in SR3, and for the most part I'm OK with that. However, when you make your character, you are supposed to be able to select any five spirits for your character to be able to summon. That's really cool. And as soon as there become more than six spirits to choose from, it'll be even cooler (since right now it's basically "choose one spirit you can't summon"). And it's game balanced, since none of the spirits are actually all that different from each other. Their combat dice are pretty similar, their skill list is pretty similar, and so on and so forth. In fact, if a character could only summon a single spirit type (say Water Spirits), people wouldn't really notice because in most circumstances one spirit is as good as another.

But that's not true of a spirit that possesses vs. a spirit that materializes. These spirits function very differently in combat, out of combat, and in between. A character who summons 5 spirits that materializes has a very large power discrepancy with a character who can summon four spirits that materialize and one spirit that possesses.

So the choice, from a game balance perspective, is either:

(*): Make an entirely new list of spirits that possess instead of materialize, and then force people who can summon any possessing spirits to choose entirely off that list.

or

(*): Make some new spirits that anyone can take, and then give traditions the option of trading the materialization power for the possession power on all their spirits during the "choose associations" phase of tradition design.

Both of these are equivalent from a game balance standpoint, but the first is a lot more work (since it requires the creation of a crap tonne more spirits), and is a larger impact on the game (because players are no longer free to choose any spirits they want).

It's not that you can't make an entirely new list of spirits that all have possession and then insert additional rules to keep the game balanced - you can. That would work. It's that by making the materialization/possession trade a tradition choice you are doing less work to make a better game.

After all, in Chinese Buddhist magical traditions, a jealous animal can steal the body of a human and usurp the wheel of life. That sounds a whole lot like using evil Possession Binding to put a Beast Spirit into an unwilling helpless host. There's no reason why we should have to write up an entirely new spirit to represent the bear and tiger spirits that can enter human bodies in Norse and Sichuan magic when we already have Beast Spirits and we can have specific traditions summon them into people instead of having them materialize.

-Frank

That is where this is all falling down. That is to define the spirits that are usable by those in a given Tradition. As a player by the rules you CANNOT do this without explicit GM approval.

All that is required is "fluff" in the spirit text and you'll only have those spirits used in their intended roll as interpreted by the GM. That's pretty much a solid mechanic as long as the "fluff" is written clearly to show the intent. So it is safe to put the possession and self-materialization in the spirit, and further logical IC since in [SR3] canon the spirit is the one that comes with the power.

P.S. Also note that if you didn't assign the power to the spirit type then a Free Spirit of that type would not have the power.

Actually....no. Free spirits will 99.999% likely have Possession as an available power in Street Magic. So no new rule that isn't going to exist anyway.

Some of the spirits' other powers become moot, like Engulf, when using Possession so you can't swap Manifestation and Possession out willy-nilly. I'd rather have new spirits with Possession built with rational thematic power selections. Yes, it requires someone to define new spirits.

Possession in any form creates potential problems, just as Charm/Dominate spells would. Acknowledging the potential does not exascerbate it. Matter of fact, identifying areas that can be problematic up front goes a long way towards mitigating them in play as it gets harder to slip something by a GM.

Finally, I see the possibility of a Tradition with both Possessing and Manifesting spirits. I see no reason at all why Voudun would not have manifesting spirits now that the magic level is high. Heck, a Satanic tradition could have both Manifesting demons and Possession. Your mechanism would not allow for that.

No they don't. Let's check Engulf from SR4:

So a character possessed by an Earth Spirit and hammer someone into the ground, a character possessed by a Fire Spirit can light people on fire and hold them aloft on tendrils of flame. There aren't any spirit powers in SR4 (except Materialization and Astral Form) that the basic spirits have that can't just be used as normal by a character possessed by the spirit that has them.

The spirit powers are:

Accident - a character possessed by such a spirit can cause accidents.
Animal Control - the character can command relevant animals (Bears for Berserkers, Snakes for Houngans, Wasps for Invae, etc.)
Astral Form - as part of the Materialization swap out, this is going to be replaced by "dual natured".
Binding - a character can grab people super hard.
Concealment - the character can conceal stuff.
Elemental Attack - the character can shoot energy bolts at people.
Energy Aura - the character can set herself on fire.
Engulf The character can draw people into the controlled terrain type.
Enhanced Senses - the character's senses improve (may be useless if she already has this enhanced sense)
Fear - The character causes fear.
Guard - the character can protect stuff.
Innate Spell - This optional power doesn't do anything on first inspection, because it simply gives you access to a spell you can already cast. However, if you overcast the summoning into yourself you then get a better casting platform and you can also give spells to spirits that you bind into other bodies.
Materialization - this is going to be replaced with "possession".
Movement - the character can make things move faster. Wheee!
Natural Weapon - the character gets big claws or a stinger or whatever. Doesn't completely destroy your ability to use stealth because this is an optional power.
Noxious Breath - the character can halitosize all over people.
Psychokinesis - even more useful for the character, since she doesn't already fly.
Sapience - I certainly hope that the character can use this power, although for some players I am unsure.
Search - The character can find stuff. There's no LOS restriction anymore, so this works even if you are stuck in a single body.
Venom - the character's natural attacks become poisonous. This is already only available if you decide to start growing a stinger or snake fangs (for Invae and Damballah followers). So no problem.
weather control - the character can change the weather.

So that's the list. And no, there aren't any powers on it that screw things up. You must be thinking about the SR3 power list (which I wouldn't even try to do something like this for).

-Frank

Frank is using his real name here, which amuses me.

Yes, Yes he is. He is like my GM most a lot of the time.

You know this fellow IRL? Is he always like this? I mean i'm on the optimistic side of things, and 4 posts in i cut bait. It isn't just his name. He, he reminds me a lot of a poster personna named Bugaboo from some time back at ENWorld.

What puzzles and threw up warning flags was how he got from GM having approval on any custom Traditon to:

Somehow he doesn't occur to him, or register with him that putting the by GM approval, not recommended flag Traditions such as Insect and Voodoo is basically the same thing as putting a GM approval, not reccommended flag on the spirit type.

Followed up by:

After i mentioned a glaring one, that if the power isn't with the spirit you have to involve using his new summoned spirit rules under the caster centeric Tradition to build/run a free spirit who has no associated summoner (unless he is newly freed).

This as a product of discarding inplace infrastructure in SR4 to create a new design that works counter to it.

Ocham rolling over in his grave indeed.

Dude... I'm right here. Please don't talk about me in the third person on my own thread, it's exceptionally rude.

However, pretending for the moment that your objection (not actually articulated by you until now) was phrased in a coherent and polite fashion to me, I can now address it:

There is no reason in SR4 for Insect Totems or Voodoo to have "GM approval, not recommended" flags on them. Magic Threats still need those (and should probably have the "you can't play one, stop asking" tags instead), but the traditions of magic can be integrated just fine without the Threat potential for use by PCs. The SR3 Voodoo and Insect Spirit rules were extremely specific - a spirit of Azaca or Obatalla and a spirit of Ant Worker or Warrior behaved entirely different from a game mechanical fashion. Much like how Water Elementals, River Spirits, and Ocean Spirits all had their own crazy rules. But in SR4, spirits have been simplified. Each character can summon exactly five, and so as long as the spirits stay general, that's plenty to cover just about any tradition you'd care to think of.

But while we have nothing against people playing Berserkers or Jade Wheel society Members, or Houngans, it's still unbalanced for people to have possession magic and manifesting spirits at the same time (since other traditions have to choose between one or the other, I don't think I have to draw you a diagram to show how it would be overpowered to be able to choose both). So if the spirits who possess people are off separate lists, there are going to be a bunch of spirits that are going to be part of traditions that should be freely available to PC use - but combinations of spirit types that should be banned outright.

Let's say that we make the barest minimum number of possessor spirits available for summoning - that would be five. Now we have five spirits that are perfectly OK for PCs to use and don't bother us a bit. But we have to ban every combination that has at least one spirit form the basic book and one spirit from the new list (because having both is rightly banned). That's 30 unique pairs that are not allowed. That's four hundred and fifty five total packages that are not allowed. In the simplest possible case. In a more reasonable setup, where we add an additional 4 potentially summonable standard materializers and about 7 possessors, we are left with banning five thousand, nine hundred and fifteen combinations (or perhaps specifically allowing the remaining two hundred and seventy three, but honestly I don't want to go there either).

So now that I know what your objection is, I hope you don't get offended when I say that I don't consider it a problem. Yes, you could do things by specifically banning the problem spirit groups, but that's a much taller order than just setting it up so that there aren't any problem groups in the first place.

The power is with the spirit. The tradition replaces "astral form" and "materialization" with "dual natured" and "possession" - so your problem here isn't one.

Remember, a Berserker gets possessed by Sky Father (Air Spirits), Earth Mother (Earth Spirits), Narwhal (I'm guessing Water Spirits), Great Warrior (needs a new "Warrior Spirit", which will also serve for Obatala and Wasp Warriors), and Bear or Wolf (which are collectively Beast Spirits). That's five (assuming that we make Bear and Wolf into the same thing). So to do Bererkers up right we need to either:

Rewrite all the spirits that do basically the same thing that a possessor tradition needs to do (which is all of them when you include just Houngans, Berserkers, Invae, and Disciples of the Holy Spirit). Then write all the extra spirits that these traditions need (Worker Spirits, Warrior Spirits, Fertility Spirits, and Ancestor Spirits). Then rewrite all of those spirits that various traditions of materializing summoning magicians need (all of them actually). Then, and this is the most important part, make fraggin sure somehow that nothing from column A ends up in column B even though the only real difference is the availability of the "possession" or "materialization" power in case after case, which basically means that Players can't be trusted to select their own spirits any more.

Or...

Write all the new spirits you need for the new traditions you are introducing. Put in a rule that allows an individual tradition to swap Possession for Materialization on all the spirits it summons.

Which one of these is less work? I'm guessing that the one where you write up four new spirits and a rule that's perhaps as long as three sentences is perhaps a tiny bit simpler and easier to convey than the one in which you write up fourteen new spirit types and then write up a rule that out of the 15,504 possible combinations of spirits, only 504 of them should be considered acceptable under any circumstances.

Which one works better game mechanically? Well, actually they are exactly the same at this point. Just that one involves several extra layers for mistakes to be made and the other does not.

---

Now back to your Free Spirit complaint... one of us is obviously not taking their crazy pills. I honestly don't see how spirits that show up spontaneously on their own not being summoned and bound into physical bodies is at all a problem. Or if it was, you could just say that sometimes spirits manifest spontaneously into bodies as if they were summoned by possession magicians instead of the regular kind.

-Frank

I'm not ignoring it, but I am saying it's bad. Materializing spirits have a great deal of utility inherent in their ability to do that. Possessing spirits have a great deal of utility locked up in that ability as well. When you possess yourself you can drastically increase your own survivability in some cases (you get weapon immunity for goodness sake), apply your skills to the stat line of a spirit, or just use spirit powers over and over again until the possession time runs out - but a materializing spirit can be sent on a remote service suicide run against people on the other side of a wall or fly up in the air to go deal with a problem.

Years of experience and two editions worth of Houngan play have shown us that possession summoners are potentially balanced against summoners of external manifesting spirits. But they haven't shown us that the ability to summon both externally manifesting spirits and possessing spirits is balanced against the ability to do either one alone. In fact, that's impossible. Assuming that the ability to possess yourself or to summon an externally manifesting spirit is worth anything, which I think is a pretty safe assumption, then the ability to do both is by definition better than the ability to do one or the other. A + B > A v B. That's not subject to debate as long as both A and B are positive, and in this case they are.

Absolutely. But once you've balanced the Hermetic (who can summon five different kinds of spirit that start in astral form and have the materialization power) against the Houngan (who can summon five different types of spirit that all possess his own body), then you're up a creek trying to balance that against the Omniconjurer (who can summon 2 different spirits that start in astral form and can materialize and 3 different spirits that he can possess himself with). The Omniconjurer can do the primary schtick of both the Hermetic and the Houngan, and that's never ever going to be balanced. Sure, the Hermetic can conjure up a Fire Spirt, but the Omniconjurer can put energy aura on an air spirit as one of the optional powers if he for some reason wants to do that. And while the Houngan can possess herself with Legba and get movement at will for 12 hours(or whatever), the Omniconjurer can take movement as an optional power on a spirit of Obatala and get the same game mechanically important effect.

As to redundancy, I find the idea of having a separate write-up for "Spirits of Agwe" that have the ability to possess people to be totally redundant with "Spirits of Water". It's just plain easier to toggle that one power set than it is to make an entirely new writeup that is only really different in that one power.

You're welcome to think that. I certainly won't barge into your house and execute you for thought crimes or anything, but I completely disagree. The word "Berserker" comes from the word "Bear". Berserkers were supposed to literally take the spirits of animals into themselves giving them great strength, near invulnerability to weapons, and animalistic madness. If that doesn't get to be "spirit possession", then I honestly don't know what does.

-Frank

Oh man, that brings back memories. I miss Bugaboo sometimes. *sigh* But this guy writes like he studied at the foot of the master himself.

Mozilla. That's an open-source Netscape, so I would think that it would work fine. Oh well.

I was afraid of that. Shucks. On to important matters:

Yes. Sort of. When a Bug Shaman took a normal human and forcibly implanted a spirit into him or her, that person eventually made a Willpower test, and the number of successes determined what came out the other end: True Form (which was an astral spirit with manifestation), Flesh Form (a permanently dual natured creature), Flesh-Form with the ability to nearly be copyright infringement on W40K Genestealer Cults, and finally "Stealth Form" (which was human looking and had masking for no reason). The spirits you actually summoned were Worker, Soldier, and Queen (which did not exist in the whole True-Form/Flesh Form thing).

So to a very real degree, that's five spirit types right there: Flesh Form Workers, True Form Workers, Flesh Form Soldiers, True Form Soldiers, and Queens. However, while sacrificing a human is sort of a high price to pay for a maerializing bound spirit, in many ways it isn't, and the combination of physical possessed humans with astral materializers was very very powerful (more powerful than anyone in SR4 is supposed to be). Certainly, with the body counts that some SR groups rack up, the need to sacrifice a human every time you made a bound spirit would amount to little more than flavor text in a lot of instances.

I would rather just make up a spirit type for Workers, Soldiers, and Queens, and then give them two of the basic ones (I suggest Air Spirits and Beast Spirits myself, but your mileage may vary). This would be something of a departure for Insect Spirits, but put them firmly on the power level of Houngans - and if the SR4 goal of fighting rulesbloa is to be achieved, that's the direction we have to go. I think that uniting Hermetic and Shamanic Conjuring is a bigger step, and SR4 has already done that. Comparatively, folding the Invae into Voodoo is very minor indeed.

One option I've seriously considered is adding an Edg... Positive Quality that would allow dual summoning. Perhaps a 10 or 15 pointer. That's kind of cheap, but a conjurer is already seriously pushing the 35 point Positive Qualities limit just by being a Magician in the first place.

----

The Great Loa:

Agwe - Now a Spirit of Water
Azaca - Now a Spirit of Man
Damballah - This is a hard one. Partly this could be done as a Spirit of Beasts, but really the signature ability is Divination and Magical Guard, along with Animal Control. This should therefore be whatever the Queen Spirit gets called by Insect shaman. So I guess it's an ancestor Spirit
Erzulie - Now also a Spirit of Man
Ghede - Now an Ancestor Spirit.
Legba - Also an Ancestor Spirit.
Obatala - Still an Ancestor Spirit.
Ogoun - This is a tough one. Both Ogoun and Shango should be Fire Spirits you'd think, but Fire Spirits actually don't have Fire Immunity in SR4 (typo?), and in any case don't get Concealment. So Ogoun and Shango work out as Air Spirits bizzarely enough.
Shango - Air Spirit, but see above.

So all 9 of the great loa (and the Work Loa Zombies) can be fit into five categories:

Water
Air (?)
Man
Ancestor
Worker

Ancestor Spirits have the following powers:

Accident, (Astral Form), Confusion, Divination, Guard, Magical Guard, (Materialization), and Search.

And the following Optional Powers:
Animal Control, Concealment, Influence, Mind Link.

----

To get the old Invaesion under way, Magical Threats should probably have the following additional powers available to their spirits:

Aura Masking.

Conjuring (the spirit gets a skill in Conjuring, which can be real small and still have this be a bad bad thing for everyone around).

-Frank

Because Spirits of Man don't get access to Divination, Magical Guard, Mind Link or Animal Control. That's four powers that are key to several Loa and Queen Spirits. The way the optional powers system works in SR4, we can then get all the key powers of Queens, Ghede, Legba, Obatala and Damballah without making up five different new spirits.

But none of the spirits had divination or magical guard in the last three editions of the base book either, so I'm OK with that.

That's a possibility. But I'm currently operating under the assumption that conjurors don't get any more powerful than they already are, and that additional traditions should be balanced against magicians as they stand now. Which means that it's OK for them to summon different spirits with different powers, but not to just add powers to spirits as they currently stand.

Absolutely. I'm looking mostly at them having a larger and more optionalized skill list than other spirits. A spirit that has Artisan would be extremely useful, even if it never got energy aura.

-Frank

The Report feature does not function. Perhaps disabled to avoid frivilous [ab]use? Or that could just be a coincidental benefit.

Well, true, but no one gets access to Divination or Mind Link yet, because those powers don't exist yet in SR4. When those powers are added to the game, I could definitely see Spirits of Man getting access to them.

On Magical Guard, all bound spirits in SR4 can add dice to Counterspelling, which is what Spell Defense has become in SR4. The only catch is that the spirit can only add Counterspelling dice that apply to spells in its category (each of the five spirit categories a magician can summon in SR4 being linked to one of the five spell categories).

The lack of Animal Control on Spirits of Man might be a problem, but I'm not sure yet. I think in terms of Voudoun, that's why I'd like to see Spirits of Beasts added, to allow them to have those effects elsewhere. As for Queens, I'm really leery of classifying Insect Queens as Spirits of Man. Mainly because insect shamans don't conjure multiple Queen spirits, they can only have one. Queens are more like Mentor Spirits, in a way, but they are very physically real Mentor Spirits.

I see what you're saying, but I wouldn't be surprised if the spirit power lists were expanded when new powers are added. At the very least in the Optional Powers category (since that doesn't really make any single spirit more powerful, it just broadens the possibilities). I think that's more likely than adding new spirit categories which are very similar to existing ones.

Yeah, I can definitely see them as some sort of general-purpose laborer spirit. Possibly one that doesn't possess Materialization, but must invest itself into some shell. Voudoun often uses corpses (zombies), Insect Shamans use metahuman hosts, Qabbalists use constructed golems, etc.

Buh wha? That's bull.

Inappropriate scaling. As long as you still have two lists, the problem does not increase, no matter how much you imply it does.

"A single tradition may not summon both spirits capable of materialization and spirits capable of possession."

Either I am badly misunderstanding the argument here, or you win the straw man of the month award already.

It isn't. Try actually submitting a report. Or trying to view the moderator list.

~J

Elementals have always been able to do that, and yet the Magical Guard power has existed just fine in previous editions. The Magical Guard power allows:

1. The use of a Skill in addition to just Force.
2. The counterspelling of a spell from any school of magic instead of just one.

That's a big deal, and more than enough to justify a power.

Technically, Queens are the character in the old rules, and the shaman is just the flunky. The Queen has her own Conjuring Skill and the Shaman loses all his power if the Queen dies. But we'd scale that aspect back if the Insect Spirits became PCs (which they could if they drank a little less crazy juice in terms of unique game mechanics).

As to what to call the spirit that is Damballah, Obatala, or a Queen - honestly I don't care. Game mechanically it could be called "Spirit #7" or whatever. It's just a list of powers that overlaps somewhat with the other spirits and has a few unique schticks (access to Magical Guard, Mind Link, and Divination). I chose to call it "Ancestor Spirit" because it had the special powers that Ancestor Spirits had in SR3 (which Spirits of Man do not), and because "Ancestor" is a term that can be bent to include a Hive Queen (because she's the all-mother) or Ghede (because he's totally dead already). If it's important to you that "Ancestor" spirits be Spirits of Man now, then the new spirit type will need a new name. It still needs to be there though, because the powers are not (and should not be) available on any of the Spirits in the basi book.

Spirits of Man are already extremely powerful with the fact that they have the ability to cast any spell the summoner knows with a Magic Attribute and spellcasting skill equal to their force. I seriously don't think they need to gain access to all the cool things that a Hive Queen can do on top of that.

-Frank

It's a big deal, yeah, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that power will exist in SR4. Something like it might appear, but with the way Spell Defense and Spirits have been reworked, it may just vanish.

I definitely wouldn't reach as far as to say that FanPro will ever make Insect Shaman a playable possibility. They really aren't meant to be. But I do think there will be an attempt to work them into the existing mechanics. That may mean that Insect Shaman, instead of a Mentor Spirit, have something else, which is definitely more concrete. The Queen. Or it may take the form of something like a spirit pact, which might be open to other spellcasters (but Insect Shaman form a pact with a unique type of spirit, the Insect Queen spirits).

Yeah, I really don't see Spirits of Man and Insect Queens having anything in common at all. Conceptually or on a power comparison basis.