Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Senko on <01-27-17/0118:15>
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First off this isn't a rules question I fully understand that these kind of spells aren't part of the game and why. What I'm curious about is whether that limitation is known about in the shadowrun world itself. That is have their been experiments with mages trying to time travel or the like and meeting a horrible, grisly end or just having nothing happen no matter how much power and resources they threw at it. Or is it just a quiet out of game ruling these things don't work with no one in the game world ever actually attempting/questioning it?
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I'm quite sure that there are people who are working on that, just as there are 'scientists' today who do the same. In my opinion teleportation would be the only one where the big corps are also investigating resources on. Time travel and raise dead are probably more for the fringe sciences.
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So more a metagame restriction than something that is reflected in the game world lore somwhere.
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Teleportation is currently the "Holy Grail" the Corps. seek, because whoever get's it first is gonna gets a incredible powerful advantage over his competitiors. So far they only suceeded in Interplanar Travel.
Raising Dead is mentioned as a fluff power in Court of Shadows:
pukwudgies appear to have a limitless facility for controlling the dead. Any of the dead. Stories abound of pukwudgies calling up fallen soldiers and turning them on their masters, or
of pukwudgies strutting ahead of an entire army of corpses.
so it should exists.
Time Travel just causes Headaches, but eh this is the 6th World, so propably some magic fuck up with that result happened somewhere, but generally any non accidental use of time travel should always be avoided aka "Why didn't they just use the Time Turner to kill Voldemort"
So yeah, these are really more "this should be kept out of player hands at all costs unless you want them to fuck everything up" restrictions.(and lets face it, we totally would ;D)
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That isn't raising the dead, Xexanoth. That's controlling bodies. There's a big difference. No-one has ever brought the dead back to life; the closest thing is keeping the soul in a 'dead' body. You know, cyberzombies. Blood magic, possible inhabitation by evil spirits (that also happened in some lore about an insane mage who went Dark after his wife died trying to bring her back), etc. All in all, bad times for everyone.
You think Megacorporations aren't looking for ways to raise the dead? Teleportation might be a money-maker, but how many people would pay to come back? Look at leonization, and imagine they made it even better. That it could undo a horrific accident and put your loved ones back in your arms. There's no shortage of those who'd kill for such an ability (ironic, yes).
Same goes for time travel. Instant youth without mind-altering nanites!
One can assume all of those projects are being worked on, or at least a means to gain the equivalent if folks accept the main goal is untenable (such as Perianwyr's extreme speed spell). Then there's the out-of-game text explicitly stating all of these things are impossible in Shadowrun, no exceptions. Just because we know that, doesn't mean others in-setting do. Even if there is someone around to tell them it is impossible, it is completely within the realm of reason for Shadowrun that they don't believe it; people lie all the time, and that drek-head just wants to keep those secrets for their own use.
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Time Travel, Teleportation, and Resurrection magic are known, in world, to not be possible at this time.
Out of game, we know that some of those things are possible, when mana levels are higher, since some of that stuff was in Earthdawn IIRC, though it was all INCREDIBLY high level stuff.
The megacorps are, naturally, quite interested in finding a way to make it work, but as such the closest you get to 'raising the dead' would be Shedim, and no one wants that. Actual teleportation isn't possible at this time, but faux teleportation is possible if you have a spirit that can open an Astral Gateway in one place and then open it again to dump you out somewhere else. Whole lot of problems with that.
As for time travel, well, even most idiots don't like messing with that shit. Being able to see or predict the future is much more useful (and has fewer cataclysmic drawbacks) than screwing with time. That's playing with core parts of the universe we live in, like gravity. Magic can be used to influence the fabric of the universe, but the closer you get to core concepts (like laws of physics and time), the more energy it takes for any appreciable effect, and the more likely it is to fail outright.
Getting people 'caught out of time' is possible, though that usually takes the form of finding some way for the victim to simply not experience the time between A and B, such as if they were turned to stone, or caught in an Alchera, or something like that. Going back in time is out of the question, and I don't think they managed it even in Earthdawn times.
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My recollection (and this was years ago long long before I was a freelancer) is that back in 1-2e, these were benchmark rules of game design. The original Threats' chapter on the black lodge includes a ton of shadowtalk about the impossibility of teleportation according to magical theory. No death distinguished Shadowrun from games like Dungeons & Dragons that had various ways of circumventing death, lowering the stakes of combat.
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Thats's what I was curious about Kincaid if there were actual ingame reflections of the metalore i.e. current magical theory has proven that time travel via magic is impossible (which is not to say current magical theory is right ;D) or mage X tried raising his wife and got an army of Shedim instead. That is events and theory that are actually in the game lore or history of Shadowrun rather than a GM's section "These things are not possible because they will give you headaches if you ever even think of allowing them." note. Hmmm
Exercept from a presentation by Issac Abrams to the board.
"Magical theory has conclusively proven that teleportation via magic is theoretically possible but the energy requirements are so great no mage currently living can manage even a short distance. Therefore we are researching a variant of the Shushin from a popular anime series where the user travels faster than the eye can see from a starting point to their destination. Our early experiments have been extremely promising with several young mages succesfully using the spell in development. We just had a slight hitch where in even if they were able to clearly see a destination their bodies proved unable to sustain the speeds involved. However we are confident the testing facility will be back in operation within 3-8 weeks and once we have recruited some new testers we will resume development."
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I'm frankly fine with keeping any of those out of the hands of players in Shadowrun.
Raise Dead is the least offensive because you normally need direct access to the body in most instances where it applies in other games.
Of course, this still detracts from the threat of a highly lethal game.
Teleportation wrecks heist games completely. There's no need for planning of how to get from A to B, when you can just immediately arrive at B and then leave as you came.
And any measures to mitigate teleportation only devolve heavily into convolution, instadeath GM gotchas and just completely degrade the usefulness of characters who can't bamf (drivers/pilots spring to mind).
Time Travel is easily the most powerful ability of all, because without some sort of hard counter to mucking with timelines too much (like Wrinkle in WoD's Mage) it means you can just force the story to go wherever you want, or utterly derail everything to the point where it's an incomprehensible mess. (time travel stories are tough to run by default if you don't keep them simple)
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Setting Wise, there have been several people claiming to have come back from the dead, or have the ability to return people to life....
But in EVERY case, what has come back is not what has died....
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One of my brother-in-law's characters was a rather nutty raven shaman who figured out time travel. (Don't ask me how, I want in my fiance's life yet when that happened). He's now an NPC antagonist/plot hook/expediter. The guy is chaos incarnate, and the only way you MIGHT gt him to play nice with you is to offer copious amounts of beef jerky. The real stuff. Good luck with that.
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So far they only suceeded in Interplanar Travel.
If you can create manatech that succeeds in making interplanar travel viable, and can return you to the physical plane in a location other than where you started, would you not say teleportation is now a thing in Shadowrun? While it gets some uncertainty added at the tail end of the entry, this is precisely what is described in one of the 5e books.
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Which is what I'm looking for. Personally I'd like to be able to teleport and time travel (raising the dead has a lot of worrying implications) however I quite understand keeping them out of a game. I just wanted to know if there had been cannon reasons the shadowrun world knew what we know as players.
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Raise Dead is the least offensive because you normally need direct access to the body in most instances where it applies in other games.
Of course, this still detracts from the threat of a highly lethal game.
Well with the possibility of burning Edge and buying Edge on the spot for 5 Karma if you're at 0, the lethality of a game is only as high as the players allow it to be.
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So far they only suceeded in Interplanar Travel.
If you can create manatech that succeeds in making interplanar travel viable, and can return you to the physical plane in a location other than where you started, would you not say teleportation is now a thing in Shadowrun? While it gets some uncertainty added at the tail end of the entry, this is precisely what is described in one of the 5e books.
Well it's a form of Teleportation, but Spirits have always been able to do that, so it's not exactly "new".Heck, it's on of the reasons why Pixies tend to have pianos dropped on them.
The Problem with interplanar travel is that it's not precise, you can target a certain plane, but you cant really say were exactly the portal will come out. Not to mention that many planes are quite dangerous.
Unless i remembered something wrong, i don't quite remember where the rules for the interplanar travel where and looking through all books would take to much time.
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This question gets a little to far down the meta-concept . For my game There is no doubt that the corps would have looked at trying all three of these things, and simply determined that it is not possible at this time. Clearly if they could bring people back from the Dead they would, and same being true for the other two. The limit was established to distinguish SR from D&D, and that's really that. I'm sure the dev's could reverse that choice if they wanted to, but i would be surprised if they did.
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Eh, I would personally assume every AAA has a team working on at least one of these things, regardless of if it is actually possible. If they were to somehow make it work, they'd basically become even more of a juggernaut in the world. Side-discoveries would probably cover the costs, and it gives the opportunity for them to mess up and have Bad Things(c) happen.
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Raise Dead is the least offensive because you normally need direct access to the body in most instances where it applies in other games.
Of course, this still detracts from the threat of a highly lethal game.
Well with the possibility of burning Edge and buying Edge on the spot for 5 Karma if you're at 0, the lethality of a game is only as high as the players allow it to be.
Well, so long as you ignore the "training time" for improving any Attribute, sure.
At my table, that doesn't fly and I don't brook HoG-heavy nonsense. Not without damn good reason.
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The explanations for things that *are* possible in the lore are already so vague and handwavey that they might as well be the author telling you that it just works. I really wouldn't expect much more than that for lore restrictions.
Besides, it's good practice for them to keep things open in case they want to put out material that seems to violate a rule that was previously established.
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Well with the possibility of burning Edge and buying Edge on the spot for 5 Karma if you're at 0, the lethality of a game is only as high as the players allow it to be.
Well, so long as you ignore the "training time" for improving any Attribute, sure.
At my table, that doesn't fly and I don't brook HoG-heavy nonsense. Not without damn good reason.
Edge is a unique quality. Because it reflects the character’s luck, it requires no special amount of time to raise.
Edge can be raised anytime the character has the Karma to do so.
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I admit I also like bad thingstm.
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Edge is a unique quality. Because it reflects the character’s luck, it requires no special amount of time to raise.
Edge can be raised anytime the character has the Karma to do so.
Ah. I didn't have the rule book to hand when I replied.
My response is the same: I ignore that rule because "Pay 5 Karma: Auto-HoG" is beyond stupid, and encourages players to be more careless.
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In ED there was a high level wizard spell that allowed you to return the soul of a deceased person to their body. Provided you had repaired the damage to the body, the person would come back to life.
Also in ED there was several ways to physically enter astral space, given the travel times in astral space that could be near teleportation.
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I've used a version of TP in games of mine before. You could only TP to where you could see, and the distance was based on force. This didn't break anything or out-class other PCs in usefulness.
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In ED there was a high level wizard spell that allowed you to return the soul of a deceased person to their body. Provided you had repaired the damage to the body, the person would come back to life.
Also in ED there was several ways to physically enter astral space, given the travel times in astral space that could be near teleportation.
While I only have a passing knowledge of ED, a couple things to keep in mind:
Depending on the edition, ED and SR are written by 2 completely different companies, with different visions of the collective history they are supposed to share.
And The mana cycle during the ED period is WAY higher then it currently is in the 6th world.
ED was (originally) FASA's answer to D&D, as such, it more closely aligns to that fantasy trope then it does to SR...
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I know they're effectively seperate these days (although I still wonder why if immortal elves were too powerful why did the dragons go to Drakes who seem to have a higher base power level) but did they used to have the same mechanics? That is did earthdawn have drain, similar stat's and d6 rolling or did it use a different one like d20's.
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The original drakes were bound to their creators, and only lived a couple hundred years. While they made for good spies and 'liasons', they weren't like Immortal Elves, where the only way you could tell they were different was by having them kick your ass in a mage duel. They were also infertile, however, which posed its own set of problems. The drakes we see today are the second version, created by Doll Maker, Mountainshadow, and friends. They were less powerful than 'true' drakes, but could breed, giving the possibility of a replenishing supply of servants.
As for why drakes? Because the dragons still required servants that didn't die as quickly as some of the Young Races, and the Elves were NOT going to sign up.
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Yes there's drain in ED, though it's called strain and it happens for example when you cast spells using the raw casting technique, and before the scourge it was the common way of casting spells. In essence it's the shadowrun way of casting spells, though due to the rising pollution of astral space leading up to the scourge spell matrices were invented as a safe way of casting spells. Shadowrun style conjuring is there as well in the ED magic book.
I know the two games are no longer officially connected, but fasa clearly intended them to be connected back when they made them both, so it's as close as your gonna get to "evidence" that some of the things thought impossible or at least beyond the reach of current magical theory and capabilities is actually possible. It may very well be a question of mana levels or simply because astral space still isn't understood completely.
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Interesting thank you.
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It's called Astral Walking, and only two people on Earth in SR know how to do it. Good luck getting either of them to teach you.
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Some spirits can do nearly the same thing....
But again, good luck in forcing them to do so...
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It's called Astral Walking, and only two people on Earth in SR know how to do it. Good luck getting either of them to teach you.
Really only 2? I'd have thought most of the immortal elves and dragons would know if.
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It's called Astral Walking, and only two people on Earth in SR know how to do it. Good luck getting either of them to teach you.
Really only 2? I'd have thought most of the immortal elves and dragons would know if.
While the dragons and Immortal Elves can astral project, astral walking was a high level ability of a certain class or set of classes, IIRC. And there wasn't much in the way of multiclassing in Earthdawn.
As for the two who can do it, I believe Harlequin is one of the ones who can do it, and I forget who the other is.
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I see interesting if irrelevant to the current game, thanks.
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Well with the possibility of burning Edge and buying Edge on the spot for 5 Karma if you're at 0, the lethality of a game is only as high as the players allow it to be.
Burning edge still has to be done in a survivable situation. Otherwise you're just bumped back up to "alive, but unstabilised" for a calculable period of time before facing the choice of dying or burning ege, again.
Well it's a form of Teleportation, but Spirits have always been able to do that, so it's not exactly "new".Heck, it's on of the reasons why Pixies tend to have pianos dropped on them.
The Problem with interplanar travel is that it's not precise, you can target a certain plane, but you cant really say were exactly the portal will come out. Not to mention that many planes are quite dangerous.
Unless i remembered something wrong, i don't quite remember where the rules for the interplanar travel where and looking through all books would take to much time.
PC grade Pixies do not have that ability. It's an unfortunate case of CGL overusing names, and AFAIK has since been clarified for everyone who thought they did ...
While it may not be new to spirits, the manatech required to achieve it *is* new, and when you have physical stargate-esque portals to walk through, you can be certain within a fine tolerance of where you're going to exit.
The danger of other planes lasts precisely as long as it takes to travel from the planar opening of portal A into the planar opening of portal B, when A & B are as adjacent as human ability allows. IOW, almost non-existent.
This does not have 5e rules; only IC description.
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It's called Astral Walking, and only two people on Earth in SR know how to do it. Good luck getting either of them to teach you.
Really only 2? I'd have thought most of the immortal elves and dragons would know if.
While the dragons and Immortal Elves can astral project, astral walking was a high level ability of a certain class or set of classes, IIRC. And there wasn't much in the way of multiclassing in Earthdawn.
As for the two who can do it, I believe Harlequin is one of the ones who can do it, and I forget who the other is.
The ability I think you're talking about is called Astral shift not Astral walking, it's a high level lightbearer ability. As for the two IE's that are thought to have been lightbearers that's Harlequin and Ehran if I remember correctly, though that does not mean they are the only ones knowing that ability.
There were other ways of physically entering Astral space in ED as well. The high level nethermancer spell spirit portal let you enter astral space as well and you could summon a spirit and have it use the astral portal ability, and yes it did let you enter astral space physically not only projecting as it is in SR, they go as far as to specifically say that it is one of the most common reasons for summoning spirits in the ED magic book.
As for near teleportation phenomena there is the high level illusion spell other place that let's you connect two doorways no more than maximum a mile apart, you can then travel instantly between the two due to a warping of astral space. Likewise the high level nethermancer spell gateway allowed the caster to open a gateway to a previously cast bone circle with a max range of 5000 miles.
On top of all this there were rare stable natural rifts that let you enter and exit to either the netherworlds or to astral space.
So clearly in ED it was not exactly uncommon to use one or more of these ways to enter Astral space and to perform some sort of teleportation like movement.
It would be pretty safe to assume to all of the IE's and GD's know at least one of these ways.
Oh and having multiple disciplines were actually fairly common and is covered in the crb.