So there I was, someplace I wasn't supposed to be again. My filters were clogging from all the fust I was kicking up in the cramped little passageway, and the mage I was escorting winced every time my gear scraped away part of the drawings on the crumbling sandstone walls. Navigating in this hellhole wasn't too bad; our hacker had finally managed to earn his keep, stealing fifteen minutes on a satellite, and low-and-behold if it didn't look like one of the main chambers was intact.

The one thing I didn't like was the rats. They were fraggin' everywhere. Big suckers too, and a couple devil rats the size of small dogs - you could pick out their bald pink hides amid the morass. Eventually, the tunnel broadened out a bit, and the rat traffic picked up - it was like wading through a small furry stream, except they were going the same direction we were. I had a real bad fealing about that.

All in all, I wasn't real surprised when we finally came to the main chamber, a little vaulted room maybe ten feet in diameter, with the rats crawling around everywhere. On the dias in the center of the room was the largest rat I'd ever seen, it had to weigh as much a troll. Muscles bunched and relaxed under it's shiny pink skin, and two tiny horns caught the light my chemstick was giving off. It fixed me with a malevolent glare as it devoured one of the smaller, normal rats whole.

Just then, the mage gives a shout. I end the staring contest with King Rat long enough to glance at him. The mage looks like he's halfway between needing to pee and having an orgasm, and can't make up his mind. Mana-nerd points at something on the far wall. I follow the line of his finger to a small shield of shiny orichalcum that just screams magic. Looks like I might see pay day after all.

Right on cue, the giant rat rises up on it's hind legs and starts to change. I've seen this before - and believe me, it's hard to take your eyes off of bone snapping into new shapes and muscles rippling into new formations. Lucky for me, I can field-strip a piece blindfolded; my hands move through the motions bringing my sawed-off to bear even as the rest of me watches a muzzle become a mouth and epicanthic folds form around the same red eyes. It's hands made a gesture that might have been an arcane spellcasting stance or might have been a secret martial arts kata.

I think it squeaked something in Cantonese at me before I hit it with the temper shell, but I'll never know for sure. Had my Mandarin linguasoft plugged in.

In many games, the older magic is, the more powerful it is. Ancient equals awesome. All the best magical stuff happened thousands of years ago, was lost in some horrible catastrophe and was lost to men forever...until your brave adventurers dig up the precious remnants and artifacts.

What the Hell? That's for rubes. In Shadowrun, age doesn't always equate to power and advancement. The first magic items ever crafted are more likely to be pointy sticks and flint-knapped spearheads with a minor enchantment on them. Sure, advanced magical civilizations existed in the past, but that doesn't mean they've got a lock on magical theory and advancement. Corporate research labs are as likely places to find the next unique enchantment as the ancient tomb in the mountain. Research grimoires have spells the ancients never would have dreamed of.

So why the focus on the past? For one thing, even with the advancement of 60 years of practical research and hundreds of years of theoretical occult lore and paranormal research, some of the civilizations in the past studied magic for millenia. The Sixth World may be doing some great things with magic, but there's no reason not to learn from previous ages to give ourselves a leg up. "If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." and all that.

Plus, of course, the mana level isn't quite high enough for some of the neat-o keen things that could be accomplished in the past. Transferring the knowledge of the ancients to the R&D database is going to be an ongoing process; but even after the great dragons and immortal elves and free spirits and every other Hidden Master has
mined every bit of magical wealth and lore from the ancient sites, R&D will still be chugging along making new discoveries, adapting and synthesizing new techniques.

The point (you knew I had a point, didn't you?) is that while many people get hung-up on the metaplot, they focus on the arcanarchaelogical digs and the kewl stuff the immortal elf prince has tucked away in her boudoir, but less focus is paid to the magical research taking place in government, corporate and private labs. Hell, anybody can be a theoretical thaumaturgist - working up a new type of focus, a refined technique, a revised theory, an esoteric spell or just a new textbook catalouging current trends is suitable material for a Shadowrun as various players go to work to acquire or stop the research (and/or the researcher). Corporate intrigue and industrial espionage take on new connotations with Magical R&D, with guardian monsters straight out of myth and computer systems behind magical barriers.

Magic is fun. Don't limit yourself to what's normally done. Do the strange things.

i love you man!

Actually, in my game I have a mix of both old and new. The old is a magical artifact from . . . well, a long, long time ago (pre-human, pre-dragon, but no one knows how FAR pre-), and is pretty much the most powerful thing ever, though again no one's really sure what it actually does.

The new is a crazy mage who gained a lot of power really fast and came up with an entirely new way of working magic (not a new tradition, a new magic altogether). He had all the IE's, GD's and Uber-spirits running scared because they'd never seen anything like him before and couldn't figure out how he could do what he did.

we spend a lot of time running on new stuff and nicking corp magical research squads. I mean extracting willing employees and scamming/corrupting data files.

But the older stuff. It's not just that the mojo slingers millenia ago were "better," Heck the shiawase flasme thrower would probasbly send they screaming. but this stuff has been sitting around for a LOOOOONG time, unused, recharging, building up charges, gaining mana/karma/mojo what ever you want to call it.

Sure the sword just made in an Atlanta forge will be better steel than the sowrd of George wasshington in the Smithsonian, but Washington's sword? What it 'saw' and who held it?

I do have to wonder about what the results of dropping your typical shadowrunning team into Earthdawn would be...

Especially if one of them is a poor sod who SURGEd to get Chronic Osteospus...

I'm looking forward to the day when the IE's and dragons start realizing that us newbies do the anchient stuff better then them too. One of the favorite plots I had was that a Mega got hold of some DNA from one of the IEs and realized that genetically they were a elf-dragon hybrid race (as were drakes). A few years later the IE's and dragons woke up to find thousands of genetically modified elf-dragon and human-dragon hybrids under corp control. Boy were the dragons pissed.

Pel.