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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: "Jason Carter, Nightstalker" <CARTER@***.EDU>
Subject: Everything to know about Quickening and Masking
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1993 12:49:35 -0700
Look out! I'm back and ready to astound you with my knowledge of Shadowrun
Magic (or at least to spout of at the mouth for awhile).

The base question was quite simple, "what happens to their quickened spells if
they are masked?"

The answer is just as simple. "NOTHING!" Nothing at all. A quickend spell is
a self-contained astral creature. All it does is sit connected to the creature
or object that it was casted upon and perform its real world function.

This means that and initiate cannot mask or hide a quickened spell, because the
spell once cast is no longer connected to him. Also as Stainless Steel Rat has
skillfully stated, you cannot hide an active spell.

SSR was in slight error when he said a magician can only mask his personal aura
because in Grim II (which he may not have) it allows magicians to also hide the
aura of magical items they own. After all it would look pretty stupid if you
looked at someone in astral space and saw a mundane with a power focus. However
magicians can hide these items because they are linked to his own aura.

Once more for the record, Quickened Spells are not Foci. Every rule that
applies to something because it is a Focus do not apply to quickened spells.
Prime examples are Masking and Grounding.

Someone said that a quickened spell ona mundane would look supicious. Well, its
about as supicious as a spell lock on a mundane. In fact it's less supicious
than a spell lock on a mundane since a spell lock can be traced to the casting
magician and a magician can only have so many foci at one time.

Now the subject of quickening and masking brings up a good oversight in the
rules. You don't see a spell lock when its being masked, buy what about the
spell its locking? It would be kinda impossible to hide the large spell energy
latix that is a detection spell.

See Ya in Shadows,
Jason J Carter
The Nightstalker

Further Reading

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Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.