Shadowrun: Making The World's Nastiest Spirit

[Leliel]

Anyway, I got the 4E book recently, with the other corebooks on the way.

Something that I've learned is that Toxic and Blood spirits are otherwise normal spirits that have been corrupted through black magic.

Given my fondness for template stacking, I wonder:

Is it possible to apply both Toxic and Blood spirit templates to an Insect Spirit?

Quite obviously, said (likely utterly insane) spirit is likely to be a Prime Runner-because honestly, if "Toxic Insect Spirit of Blood" doesn't induce pants-wetting terror, call your psycholgist-and begs the question of "who the heck has the resources to do this, and how can I avoid them?", but I digress.

[Swordguy]

Being a toxic spirit isn't a "template" as a normal D&D player would understand them. Toxic spirits and Insect spirits use the same rules as other spirits (attributes are equal to their Force plus a static modifier, for example),. but they are a wholly different creature, with their own individual entry in the books.

An approximation would be to compare them to elves. There's lots of different subtypes of elves (wood, grey, high, dark, and so forth),and they're all elves...but you don't create them as a template laid over a basic statblock. Likewise, so it is with spirits - lots of types (fire, urban, man, insect, toxic), but they're all distinct and separate.

With that said, Blood Magic IS a template as as D&D player understand it...it's a set of qualities, both mechanical and RP-based, that is overlaid on top of another spirit type.

Now, just to confuse you, you could totally create a toxic insect blood spirit. And it would both fit the game AND scare the pants off of players. All you have to do is build an insect spirit as you normally would (a la Street Magic), and then load a bunch of toxic spirit powers on top of it. Be aware the toxic spirit powers are extremely free-form and heavily dependent on Rule Zero. But then, to do this in the first place, you're invoking Rule Zero regardless, so you may as well go whole hog. Once you've generated the Toxic Insect Spirit, drop the Blood template on it and you're good to go.

On a personal note, something like this will be a MAJOR baddie - so I'd make it a free spirit that's doing Very Bad Things somewhere, and the runners get hired to deal with it. A spirit like this is capable of wiping out even a very experienced team of magic-heavy runners, so be warned. If they haven't optimized at least somewhat for magical combat (plenty of foci, fetishes, spell locks, initiate grades, and weapon foci), they're probably not slick enough to deal with this level of threat yet. Don't let that stop you, mind; just so you're aware...