Conjuring

Summoning spirits is something of a joke in our game. Not the act itself, mind you; our mage summons lots of spirits. In fact, that's part of the joke. He's very quick on the draw when it comes to summoning, even before he knows what's going on. The team needs to find someone? Summon a spirit and ask it to locate the person. Where to look? Um, the whole city and surrounding Salish-Sidhe territory. The spirit does, but it's time to success is dependent on the search area, so the party routinely finds their target before the spirit does, who often then appears on scene, right in front of the person, and says "He's right there!"

Still, conjuring is a go to move for our mage, so it's an aspect of magic I can't ignore. So, here's my go at it attempting to make it feel like Shadowrun's metaphysics while using the backbone I've created for dice in general and sorcery in particular.

Conjuring has several subsets of skills, meaning the conjuring knack covers summoning, binding, and banishing, each of which can be a concentration of Conjuring.

Summoning

A summoning test is handled much like casting a spell.

1. Select the force of the spirit
2. Make a Conjuring (Data Rat) test
   
3. Split your hits into yin and yang dice
   
4. Apply yang dice to the success threshold
   
5. Apply yin dice to resist drain
   

The threshold for a summoning test is the spirit’s force step minus your initiate grade step. This is the number of hits required to successfully summon the spirit, with a minimum of 1. Success gives you one service, and each hit over the threshold gains an additional service. 

Summoning a spirit causes drain equal to the spirit’s force step. 

As with sorcery, you may safely summon a spirit up to your Magic in force and only suffer stun drain, and can go as high as double your Magic if you are willing to risk physical drain. 

Binding
Binding uses the same procedure as summoning with one change: use the spirit’s force rank instead of its force step when determining the success threshold. The mage still uses his initiate grade step.






Banishing

Banishing works much like summoning, but in reverse. You derive your threshold the same way, but your hits subtract from the services the spirit owes. If it is brought to 0 services, it departs on its next action.

Bound spirits are harder to dismiss. When attempting to banish bound spirits, fold the summoner’s Magic rating into the spirit’s force before determining its step rating. Because this is a complimentary adjustment, it adds a minimum of +1.