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Message no. 1
From: gurth@******.nl (Gurth)
Subject: The Heritage Magician
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:09:03 +0200
According to Christopher Hiller, on 27-10-06 15:58 the word on the
street was...

> Hi Gurth.

Are you sure you changed the address when you hit "Reply"? ;)

Anyway, as this is a question that the rest of the list will be able to
help you with, too, I've kept my reply on-list as well.

> I just wanted to ask you a quick question: Pertaining to Magic
> Traditions in Shadowrun. In 4th Ed, we can make our own, so I was
> interested in creating a tradition called "Heritage Magician" and
> wanted to know if that is cool.

As far as I'm concerned, you can do what you want ;)

> What a Heritage Magician is, is they are characters primarily
> of multi-racial ancestry that draw power from a Mentor Spirit that
> is unique and pertainant to their ancestral heritage. This is not
> the Ancestor Magic from 3rd Ed., but draws upon the cultural
> influences of the character's unique ancestry.

This sounds to me like a tradition only Americans would follow ... I
don't know many others who are seemingly obsessed with telling people
where each of their ancestors in the nth degree came from :) It also
seems rather open, as you have also spotted yourself:

> One thing I wonder about is how would one determine the Advantages
> and Disadvantages of each combo? Maybe one culture could be better
> with the Spirits of Man, while another would be better with the
> Spirits of the Sky, or Earth Elemental Spirits?

Exactly. You could do this in several ways -- one would be to give an
exhaustive list of possibilities for all sorts of combinations. I
suppose some kind of big cross-reference table would come in handy here,
but you'll end up with something like the Society Interaction At A
Glance table from Over The Edge, only with more dimensions ...

Another option would be to give a list of advantages and disadvantages
for lots of different individual cultures, and then add the rule that
those advantages must be factored appropriately for all the cultures
represented. For example, someone with two European ancestors and one
African one would multiply all European advantages/disadvantages by 0.75
and add them to the African advantages/disadvantages multiplied by 0.25.
Then just round to the nearest numbers -- which would mean that the
further you are from a given culture, the less chance you'll have of
getting any modifiers at all.

Or you could just wing it whenever someone takes a certain combination
... That's probably the route I'd take if I'd want to do something like
this in my own game. Option 2 is more what I'd do if I were to actually
write the whole thing up.

> I also have no idea about how to go about lookingin to that, aside
> from looking up "cultural mythos" or something to that effect, on
> the Internet.

Sounds like a good enough starting point to me. I wouldn't make it too
specific, though -- English, German, Dutch, French, etc. cultures are
close enough that I'd lump them all together under European or (maybe)
Western European, for example.

--
Gurth@******.nl - Stone Age: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
"Executives can use it without reading manuals, which is sort
of our test of ease-of-use." --Steve Jobs
-> Former NAGEE Editor & ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Site: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

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Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998

Further Reading

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