Anything the character is carrying or wearing will either fall to the ground or might possibly even be destroyed by the shapeshift if the character doesn’t bother to remove his clothing first. One of the limits of the shapechange spell given above is that it doesn’t affect clothing or equipment. If Unarmed Combat skill is required, then the shapeshifted character can also default to Quickness or Reaction, which will likely be fairly high in the beast form. This could even be a different skill for each species or even each type of animal! This is generally too restrictive, but it is a good way to limit the combat abilities of a shapechanger, if desired. Keep in mind that all tests (including attack tests) made in animal form may still suffer a target number penalty from sustaining the shapechange spell.Īlternately, the gamemaster might require a specialization of Unarmed Combat for animal forms. This seems to reflect the fantasy-genre fiction where shapeshifting magicians who are quite combat inept become fearsome fighters in animal form. This makes a shapechanged combatant formidable, because the animal Reaction is increased by the Intelligence of the subject of the spell, but this seems to well represent the terrible power of a creature like a bear or tiger controlled by a human intellect. Normal animals use their Reaction as their attack score and I would suggest that characters in animal form would do the same. Would the human-oriented skill of unarmed combat even apply to fighting in the form of an eagle or a tiger? The ability or attribute used by a character in animal form to make attacks is also not given by the spell description. This is probably better covered by the mask spell, but it might be allowed by some gamemasters. Perhaps he feels that the larger forms are not too great of a concern because of their limited utility (you can’t become an elephant in an enclosed space nor would you want to become a whale on land) and only very tiny forms are restricted.Īnother question to consider is whether or not the shapechange spell allows a character to assume (meta)human forms as well as animals.
Naturally, the gamemaster can vary these limitations as needed for the campaign. Of course, with the attribute bonus generated from the spellcasting test, it could be one tough rat! Likewise, the magician is not allowed to reduce Body to lower than 1, and so cannot assume the form of anything much smaller than a rat. This would allow most magicians to assume animal forms with mass a few times greater than human, such as a horse, but nothing as massive as an elephant or whale.
#Spell ad infinitum plus
A simple rule is to limit the change based on the Body of the desired animal form (which is also a rough guideline as to its mass), say no more than plus or minus three to the magician’s original Body score. Obviously some sort of limit on the forms that magician can assume is probably needed to keep things under control. What about microscopic life-forms like amoebas or Merlin’s trick (again from Sword in the Stone) of turning into an invisible germ? There is also the possibility of turning into a very tiny form, like an insect. An elephant must have Strength and Body well into double digits, not to mention what the abilities of, say, a blue whale must be (easily Strength 40 or more). However, there are still many “normal” animal forms that can be quite powerful. To quote Madame Mim from Disney’s Sword in the Stone, “no purple crocodiles or pink dragons allowed.” There is no mention in the spell of any limit of size or other abilities for the critter form beyond the fact that it must be a “normal” critter (that is to say, a non-Awakened “real world” animal). Critter form is just a limited version of shapeshift that only allows the magician to assume a single animal form. There are two primary spells for shapeshifting: shapeshift and critter form. However, there is a virtually limitless range of possible spell in the Shadowrun magic system and many effects are overlooked by magician players.
In most Shadowrun campaigns, magician characters will have a fairly “standard” assortment of spells, including some of the old stand-bys like manabolt, heal and armor.
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