Meditation: Giving Your Adept Some Flexibility

by Jolly Roger

The following is excerpted and paraphrased from an article originally posted the ShadowRN, the ShadowRun discussion mailing list, by Jolly Roger (taz@media.mit.edu). Many thanks to him (or her..y’never know.)

Here’s an idea. Let a Physical Adept choose the modifications he wants for the next day when he goes to sleep, keeping to his magic attribute, of course. Then, if he gets a sufficient amount of sleep (8 hours or so), he will wake up with the chosen powers. If he is woken prematurely, the powers are the same as when he went to sleep. Makes for a more flexible character. Again, this may unbalance things.

One way to control things would be that you must sleep, or meditate, a number of hours equal to your magic attribute plus one. After the first hour, all of the old skills are ‘erased.’ Then, the most expensive modification starts to develop, taking a number of hours equal to its magic cost. This continues until all of the skills have had time to accumulate. If the physical adept is woken up or his meditation is interrupted for longer than a number of minutes equal to his magic attribute, the process aborts and he is left with whatever modifications had time to fully develop. Any activity requiring a success test automatically aborts the process. The Physical Adept will also know when this process is completely over. So, when he wakes up he can then start to meditate to continue the process.

If the process aborts, the whole thing must be repeated, it can’t be picked up from where it left off. Also, everything must be changed if anything is changed. Even if you prefer to have thermo vision tomorrow instead of low-light, all of the mods need to be changed. This is because the pattern of magic within the body is intricate and must be completely reformed for any change, no matter how minor.

For example, Jobu the Physical Adept picks Increased Reflexes 4, and Killing Hands (Serious) in preparation of a daylight run for the next day. His Magic is 6, so he needs to sleep/meditate for 7 hours. Oh, and he’s a light sleeper. He goes to sleep, and after one hour, the mods from the previous day go away, the magic having to reform for his new mods. The Increased Reflexes cost 4 vs the Serious Hands cost of 2, so they are worked on first. After 2 hours, his roomie comes home and wakes him up. After a bit of cursing and yelling, nothing that really takes any effort on Jobu’s part, he decideds to meditate for the rest of the time. After 2 hours of meditation, Jobu’s magic had developed enough that the Increased Reflexes are in effect. It has now been five hours, two more hours of meditation before the Serious Hands and fully developed. Unfortunately, his wife comes home and finds the roomie (read mistress) naked in bed. She tries to hit Jobu with a frying pan. Even though she misses, Jobu had to dodge, and the process is aborted. He will have to start to whole thing over if he wants to utilize those last 2 magic points.

To further restrict things, you may require that the Physical Adept go through the whole thing every 24 hours, whether or not something has changed, in order to refresh the magic. Or change this to 48 hours or whatever.