[Strill]

I'm trying to get a picture of what the daily routine of a wagemage is. I'm guessing it's something like, summon a handful of Watchers, then spend 6 hours recharging a ward or binding a new spirit. If someone trips a ward, they astral project to the place to scope it out and maybe sic a spirit on the intruders.

What else would they do?

[MijRai]

Well, that's very limited.  Wagemage isn't just some security nerf-herder.  Keep in mind, there are more fully-trained doctors (PhD-certified medical personnel) than magic users per million; that doesn't even get into the quality of those magic users (only a fraction of them are wagemage level).  Even fewer of those are going to be dedicated to law enforcement/security/military.  Their rarity does mean there will be a bit of overlap, though...  Let's see...

Magical research (new spells and such don't make themselves, and exploring the metaplanes is very lucrative).

Talismongering (where else do reagents come from?). 

Magical services (Healing, among other things).

Alchemy (people love them some magical compounds and preparations). 

Artificing (foci are really good money-makers, and make your job easier). 

Practicing/Initiating (makes you more valuable and better at your job).

So yeah, just because they're a wagemage, don't expect them to be professional security personnel.  The majority will have bound a spirit or two and said 'guard this area' to provide some support; low maintenance wards as well, perhaps.  Otherwise, a lot of them have more important duties than sitting around, waiting for bad things to happen.

[Senko]

Yep in my opinion security wage mage while the main focus of the books is actually the most limited area as it pretty much boils down to protect against other wage mages trying to steal our secrets. Outside that though there's a huge range of options available to company's looking to employ wage mages particularly if they're on contract i.e. paid X amount per year not X amount per spell.

Teaching: Someone has to educate the new crop in the company spells/magical procedures.
Health & Beauty: A luxury bonus for the rich and wealthy in exclusies spas spells like "Healty glow" make you look good for that important dinner or "Dream" helps someone escape bad nightmares for a good nights rest.
Law Enforcement: As an aid to scientific forensics you have spells like "death replay" for the weird cases and "analyze truth" for a witnesses statement.
Examination: Equipment A keeps having an intermittent failure and we can't pin it down as no one's on site when it happens "Analyze device" but a technically trained mage what don't I know about this machine? Oh there's ants in that component.
Disaster Relief: "Detect Life" will tell you there's survivors under that rubble over there even if they're unconcious or "Light" gives you a lightsource with no danger of igniting flameable gasses.
Medical Field: Lots and lots of spells here starting with "Diagonose" for those VIP clients who are too busy to give up the timel for a normal examination for potential problems.
Diplomacy: For those important conferences "Translate" will let the two people involed discuss the details directly even if they don't share a common language.
Entertainment: Spells like "Trid Phantasm" suddenly let popular performers put on an open air performance with all the props that usually require a full CGI set and a film studio to produce.
Decontamination: Long term and requires a lot of mages or a sealed off area but you can turn a contaminated area of land/air/water into a clean one with the "clean element" spells.
Multipurpose: Spells like "Fashion" and "Makeover" can see usage in a lot of different fields and roles.

All of that's just off the top of my head.

There's going to be a lot more if you just look around and think about how you could use a wage mage to make certain tasks easier/safer. I'm currently doing repairs on a location that caught fire and it gets horribly hot in there when you have 35+ degree's celsius day's in an unairconditioned, brick building with little space, lots of electrical equipment heating it up and half a dozen people inside. We're running 2 portable AC's normally and they're not always able to keep up especially since we occasionally have to turn one or the other off so we can actually hear the instructions from the engineer in a different part of the building when we're tracing/running wires. One on staff wage mage with alter temperature assigned to the jump until something more important comes along removes all problems with noise and keeps the workspace nice and cool all day long regardless of the outside temperature. A wagemage with the summon great form spirit ritual summons some random spirit to create a massive storm over a bushfire or even just between said bushfire and the homes of people. In the health service for the ICU or a major vital location for a corporation that HAS to keep running main powers out, batteries have been running for 5 hours and is about to cut out, a generator can't be gotten in till tommorow . . . corporate wage mage shows up and casts recharge on the batteries bang you have another 6 hours runtime while they head off to the next ICU hospiital to recharge their batteries. 2/3 mages cycling through keep the ICU and emergency rooms running till the generator is delivered to provide an ongoing power supply till power is restored.

[Strill]

So I'm getting the impression that they'd largely be on-call for high-ranking corp executives, in-between long stretches of relatively repetitive magic use.

[Senko]

Maybe, maybe not. Most of them would serve the higher ranks simply because trained magic users are very, very rare and  they're going to be in high demand with a relatively small supply you can't increase with better training programs. So any mage with sense is going to make a fortune serving the very wealthy or spend a lot of time helping the lower rungs of society out of a social concience. Still there'd be some in PR slots helping the general populace, ones on call for the very wealthy sitting around doing nothing because when you need them you don't want them tired out from something else, others who do the two of them combined (healthy glow over and over for the wealthy spa goers), some serving the general public in order to steal market share from other groups, those in research or government jobs, university teachers, mages doing pure research from the thrill.

It'd come down to a combination of factors are they a contractor being paid per spell in which case they'd be doing lots of different things for different groups and making money hand over fist, are they Johny CEO's private mage who spends most working day's in their office watching movies and the like except when they're calledin to help the CEO (any time day or night) in which case they better be ready to do their job, are they a corporate mage who's going to have job after job keeping them busy if only because your not going to want that resource going to waste, are they in a specific field and spend all day casting the same spells on different customers/products, are they a researcher or security mage? What their lifestyle is going to be like is going to depend on where they fall in there.

[Reaver]

You are going to find awakened in every job there is. Why? Because they are just people. People who have a unique ability granted, but that doesn't mean it shapes and takes over their life.

You could find awakened working in kitchens if cooking is their passion. Or cutting hair... or sitting at the boardroom table. Or researching a cure of diseases. Or constantly drunk at a bar.

Mages are people, and people squander their talents all the time.

And that is not even considering individual moral rationales. IE: if a person is a total pacifist, they are never, ever join a security detail - they might have to hurt someone!
●●●●

Never forget, a person is a person, is a person. You can't ever judge them or hole-peg them just cause of the color of their skin, or what talents you think they have, or what creed or ethos they keep.

[Senko]

True I was just assuming they were looking for actively working awakened rather than just active as it were.

[brasso]

Hmm, if I remember correctly, awakened make up about 1% of the population. I know they're not all mages, or even full mages, but that's actually still reasonably common (thumb in the air, about 5 times more mages than lawyers). There would enough for any corporate location in a city to have at least a few dozen on the payroll.

I tend to agree with previous posters about the varied roles of mages, the security mage is the person who runners bump into most often, so is *perceived* as being the main role.

I would also think that there would be alot of mages involved in government work, such as espionage and magical bodyguarding. An aspect of magic often ignored by the writers of the setting is that mages can read minds. Every single politician would need one, also every exec above a certain level. Lawyers? Mobsters? Police departments? Secrets would only stay as such while the target had a mage bodyguard. Probe thoughts may be range touch, but control thoughts and control actions are not, "Email me everything on the xyz project", etc. I imagine this would keep alot of mages employed. This in addition to those listed by previous posters.

I would imagine alot would go into magical policing and enforcement as well (licencing, etc)

[MijRai]

Well, keep in mind there are fewer magic users than (medical) doctors.  The math done previously puts full mages at about 250 out of 1,000,000, 1,600 aspected mages, 650 adepts/mystic adepts (none of the numbers given ever say exactly how rare mystic adepts are; I generally put them at the '50' in 650, if that), etc.  Then there's about 7,000 people with magic who either don't know they have any, are too weak to do anything, or are insane/broken because of it.  If you count the latter, they do outnumber lawyers.  If you only count the functional, there are more lawyers. 

As far as magical bodyguards go...  There's not that many of them, so getting on without is probably common.  On the plus side, that also means there aren't that many of them who make you need a magical bodyguard unless you run in the circles where the bodyguard is provided. 

[Sendaz]

Being in such short supply and high demand does put them in an interesting position as a valuable asset of the company as you can see in the following which comes from another thread.

<snip>
<snip>
"How can you let Johnson sleep on the job Higgins?"
"I didn't know if he sleeping, meditating, practicing his feign death skills or astrally projecting and conducting a security sweep sir and you recall the last time I woke him up that tentacle thing got lose in the offices."
<snip>

And of course all the stress relief, good pay and job conditions as its a skill you can't train unless they are part of the 1% to possess it naturally, specialized training and research trips. Mmmmmmm probably wouldn't be like that in Shadowruns grim and gritty reality but here? "You want to cut my pay to barely even with inflation, remove no forced redundancy and retention of pay because they're unconstitutional while politicians still get indexed pensions regardless of getting other jobs after 2 terms? Ok fine here's my resignation I've got 15 job offers that have better terms and conditions so I'll not debate it with you but good luck getting anyone to hire on to replace me. Yesss Mmmmmmm is most appropriate.

  It does sort of put them at odds with the usual dystopian outlook as you can only browbeat a mage so far in the office because replacing them is not so easy.

[psycho835]

Don't forget that a typical wagemage is brought up and trained on corporate dime. Meaning, if he tries to quit, the corp can just slap all the bills on him. But, if he saved enough nuyen to pay of Don Corpsuit...

[Strill]

Being in such short supply and high demand does put them in an interesting position as a valuable asset of the company as you can see in the following which comes from another thread.

<snip>
<snip>
"How can you let Johnson sleep on the job Higgins?"
"I didn't know if he sleeping, meditating, practicing his feign death skills or astrally projecting and conducting a security sweep sir and you recall the last time I woke him up that tentacle thing got lose in the offices."
<snip>

And of course all the stress relief, good pay and job conditions as its a skill you can't train unless they are part of the 1% to possess it naturally, specialized training and research trips. Mmmmmmm probably wouldn't be like that in Shadowruns grim and gritty reality but here? "You want to cut my pay to barely even with inflation, remove no forced redundancy and retention of pay because they're unconstitutional while politicians still get indexed pensions regardless of getting other jobs after 2 terms? Ok fine here's my resignation I've got 15 job offers that have better terms and conditions so I'll not debate it with you but good luck getting anyone to hire on to replace me. Yesss Mmmmmmm is most appropriate.

  It does sort of put them at odds with the usual dystopian outlook as you can only browbeat a mage so far in the office because replacing them is not so easy.

So it sounds like for a wagemage to become a shadowrunner they'd have to either be in the middle of a seriously major scandal that prevents them from working in public, or be philosophically opposed to working for a corp (which ironically they'd still end up doing, even as a shadowrunner).

[MijRai]

Or maybe they just don't fit (a number of shamans or odd traditions could fit there), or they get a better offer from some other group (private or government instead of corporate sector).  There's plenty of reasons out there.

[Marcus]

Yeah it comes down to their specialty, just like engineers or doctors, Mages are skilled talented employees. They have extra gifts, sure, but that doesn't mean all wagemages are going to be patroling around the astral looking for brawls, only your security group will be up for that.

Routine mage stuff: create and maintain wards, Medical related (heal spells, detox, sterilize etc), Summoning (Binding) assigning spirits to do stuff, Spirits have a huge number of powers and uses, talismonger/enchanting/alchemy, creating new spells, recruiting, meetings, ascencing services (you have to figure companies would jump on using ascencing, with it you can learn all kinds of stuff, healthy not healthy, truth detection).

If were to make wagemage book the biggest section that would be off interest would have to be group magic, while mostly ignored in the Normal level play imagen what you could do with it in a magic team, wanna move dirt? No need to get millions worth on construction gear, call up a high force great form earth ele, and let it grade the site. There are so many large scale uses for group magic that I'm sure could blow away the way normal things get done.

[Senko]

I admit it'd make interesting reading even if it's probably not viable as a product "Rituals, Wagemages and life in the corporate world".