Pyramid Pick: Magic in the Shadows

Pyramid Pick

Magic in the Shadows

Published by FASA, Inc.

Written by Stephen Kenson

$20.00

With a new edition of Shadowrun comes a reprise of its core books. While Rigger 2 and Virtual Realities 2.0 preceded the latest core rules, the developers waited to introduce this new magic sourcebook. Like the earlier Grimoire and Grimoire 2, it expands heavily on the world of magic presented in the basic rules. So why not call it Grimoire 3? Cynics might imagine it's just to convince people they aren't buying the same book over again. That's sort of true -- but not quite.

After many years of active development, Shadowrun has picked up a lot of extra material in various sourcebooks and adventures. Magic in the Shadows reprises the fundamental ideas of its parents, the two Grimoires, adding extensively from Awakenings, Bug City, various location books, and all new material to create a solid package describing magic in the current world of Shadowrun. It's more rules-heavy than many Shadowrun sourcebooks -- a welcome change, as the over-written background text from Awakenings has been condensed nicely into the first 20 or so pages.

This is really a book for magical gearheads. Large sections describe rules for group spellcasting via ritual magic, enchanting to make magical items, metamagic, new magical traditions and, of course, spell design. These systems are all easily understood by neophytes and experienced players getting into the third edition rules. Veterans should expect no . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: June 18, 1999

Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.