Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Senko on <07-22-17/0321:17>
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First off this isn't a "how many mages do x" topic it's just me stating something that's probably fairly obvious. Specifically I just saw some statistics for population in my country and it hit me even today just how much of our population is actually crammed into just a few major cities. For instance I live in Australia and we have around 21 million people in the country, nsw according to these figures has around 7.5 million people and Sydney has over 6 million people living there.
Even just using the generic 1% of the population is magically active (and not allowing for those too young, too old, too weak, not interested, etc) that means we'd have around 210,000 magically active people of which almost half (75,000) live in just one state and a quarter (60,000) live in just one city. The rest of NSW a decent chunk of our country has only 15 000 spread throughout all if it and the rest of a continent has barely over 3 times the amount living in one city. A significant amount of which would lice in Melbourne which with a population of 4.5 million would have another 45,000 mages there meaning Melbourne and Sydney just two cities would account for almost half my countries entire magical population between them.
With Shadowrun far greater population compression that would get even worse with the bulk of a countries/corps mages probably all being found in one single city. I never really though about this before and just wanted to mention it.
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It would depend on your country. In Australia for instance I would assume that a lot of those 1% mages are actually aboriginals who live in the mana storms out there. So in that particular case the numbers might be slightly different. But yes, according to numbers I saw in 2014 slightly more than half of the people live in urban areas and that number is only rising, so that would hold true for mages as well I assume. Of course, in shadowrun you also have nature shamans who won't touch a city with a standard issue ten foot pole. For instance there were a lot magically active living on Mount Shasta with Hestaby. There, if I recall correctly, where more than 1% magically active, so those would skew the numbers.
So I guess the answer is: how many do you want to live in a city in your game.
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Oh sure that's going to shift things as would the fact a lot of the active mages would be where the jobs are like I said I'm just looking here at base level only. On a purely numbers basis it just sort of hit me today how much of the magic community would be in a few areas capital cities, nature reserves, temples, what have you. For the average small town they could quite conceivably have no magic users at all when your looking at the numbers from the top level like this.
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I guess a lot also depends on where the corps would send their mages. A large number would be in cities of course, but you could also find a large group of mages in a research station in the middle of nowhere (even if the town nearby, if any, doesn't know it), as some research is best done away from cities.
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I believe the traditional breakdown is this:
1% of the population is magically active. 10% of those are aware and capable of controlling it; the others just 'have a knack' or have gone bonkers. 10% of those are of sufficient capability to be of use - a 'base' magic rating of 3 or better, essentially.
That means out of your 6,000,000 people in Sydney, 60,000 are magically active; 6,000 are aware and can control it; and 600 are magically active individuals of all types working in and around the city. Seems a lot, yes, but when you get down to it ...
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I think part of the OS's point may have been regarding how much the magically active might cluster in capitals and other major cities? That a city of six million in a territory of twelve million may have more than half of the magically active.
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I would not personally consider that to be likely, in no small part to the fact that a good third to a half of the magically active are those who follow more naturistic paths, and among those who revere nature were the magical arts first and most highly recognized. You might make a fantastic salary of 400k as a wage mage, but you're still generally being directed by a spreadsheet and a mundane, whereas in a tribal society you might well hold a position of nobility, honor, and influence as a judge, a communer to the spirit world, medicine-man, however you want to put it.
I don't deny that 'more people = more mages', or even that mages will tend to cluster; dealing with mundanes all the time can be a major headache, and it's nice to be understood by a fellow-astral-sensitive, you know? But I wouldn't personally call it more than a percentage point or three in either direction.
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I think part of the OS's point may have been regarding how much the magically active might cluster in capitals and other major cities? That a city of six million in a territory of twelve million may have more than half of the magically active.
That was pretty much my whole point yes on a purely population based look at things a huge proportion of the magically active are going to be in just a few areas and that there'd be relatively few spread out over the rest of a country. To use Australia again population wise we have 210,000 mages (or if you want to get picky about an actual breakdown 2,100 give or take) of which 60,000 (600) are in Sydney alone with another 40,000 (400) are in Melbourne that's a huge number relatively speaking of the magically active population. You still have another 10,000 (100) in the rest of NSW (nature path flowers if you want to actually start breaking things down). However breaking into X mages are in rural towns, f mages are in secret facility, y mages are in caves in the woods is further than I wanted to go here. I was just looking at the basic 1% of a population have some form of magic (regardless of type, age, training, interest, ect) and how much of a countries magical population would therefore be in just a few cities. Sure there'll always be exceptions and Gm preferences as well as the fact if a gm says there's a mage somewhere there's a mage there but again that's further than I was really looking to go here I just wanted to share my personal surprise at how much humans even in the real world are crowding in just a few cities and what that could mean for a resultant concentration of mages.
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Yeah, but you can say the same thing about anyone. Purely population-based look at things, a huge proportion of ...
... doctors ...
... nurses ...
... computer programmers ...
... road crewmembers ...
... fast food workers ...
... are going to be found where-ever the majority of the people are found. Very few types of people are NOT going to have their centers-of-job-population be at, well, the centers of population - farmers and forest rangers are the two that pop into my head at the moment. But this is why population centers are population centers, you know?
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Sure I knew it intellectually but it didn't hit me emotionally how heavy that was actually becoming till I saw the actual break down if you see what I mean? 5 cities alone in Australia account for almost half our population with the 6th most populous having just over 600 thousand and the 20th just under 81 thousand. Maybe it's just me but I didn't realise it was that big a difference between population division.
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Welcome to the modern world :D
Advances in technology, energy, and labour have allowed the 'unwashed masses' to flock to cities like crazy. And it's a trend that will continue for a long while.
And it's not just your country either... Canada's major population is found in 3 cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver house 60% of Canada!). The US is in the same boat (Californa, New York State Florida account of 55% of their population!).
Thanks to modern technology, and fossel fuels, 1 person can do the work of 1000, and grow/harvest enough food for 10,000!
(Fun fact: Alberta and Saskatchewan are the farmlands of Canada. Those 2 provinces alone produce enough wheat to meet the world's supply! - and until 1990 we dumped most of what was harvested into the ocean! Now we PAY farmers to NOT grow wheat! And as to why we don't use it feed the starving masses? Well, let's just say that the poverty groups and countries don't want us to, and leave it at that....)
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... clearly you must shift to corn and rye, and make whiskey, bourbon, and other aged alcohols. Not for sale ... yet ... ;)
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Or move to canada, become a farmer and get paid not to work. "Yeah I have 6 fields producing - 250 tons of wheat per year".
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... clearly you must shift to corn and rye, and make whiskey, bourbon, and other aged alcohols. Not for sale ... yet ... ;)
Make bourbon in Canada?! 1. You can't. 2. >:(
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What? Never heard of Canadian Club, Gibson's, or Crown Royal?
All Canadian Rye Whiskeys.
Then we have... oh.... 15 breweries within 6 hours of my front door. Some big, Some small...
(Apparently Canada is the beer capital of the world, as Canadian consume more beer per person then anywhere else!)
<Looks at waist line.> Yep, I can believe that.
Now, where did I put that can of beer.... it's time for corn flakes!
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Oh, I love me some Canadian whisky. I tend to like whiskey in general, but Canadian whisky is not bourbon.
Wasn't there a movie about how much Canadian beer sucked? ;D
I'm mostly just being a smart ass.
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(Apparently Canada is the beer capital of the world, as Canadian consume more beer per person then anywhere else!)
<Looks at waist line.> Yep, I can believe that.
Now, where did I put that can of beer.... it's time for corn flakes!
Not remotely close: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita
Not sure about your farming claims, didn't check those ones, both sound weird, but stranger things have happened...
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On the 10 percent of 10 percent of 10 percent argument, would this still hold true for the late 2070s? I would think that magical testing would become rather ubiquitous, so at least magically active SINners would know that they're magically active, and this would likely result in resources being diverted their way to develop those talents.
Thoughts?
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I haven't followed this whole thread but I was flipping through Forbidden Arcana last night when I came across this line on p. 103:
As of January 1, 2079, Seattle has 1,414 registered full mages, but 8,849 aspected. There clearly are SINless mages who would bulk up those numbers.
The Seattle Box Set gives Seattle's population as 3,103,250 if you add up all the neighborhoods. (Curiously, this is down 0.3% from Seattle 2072's figures.) It's unclear whether these figures include the SINless or not, but given the relatively large populations for Redmond and Puyallup I'm going to guess that they do.
Forbidden Arcana did not give population figures for adepts or mystic adepts, or if it did I haven't found the reference yet.
1,414 full mages + 8,849 aspected mages = 10,263 mages of some sort. The SINless would add a percentage to that but I don't know how much.
10,263 / 3,103,250 = 0.33% of the Seattle population is a registered mage.
Presumably the adepts and the unregistered/SINless mages increase the number of Awakened significantly.
I will say that this is not compatible with The Wyrm Ouroboros' "traditional" understanding, which would suggest that only 0.01% of the population is magically active and knows what to do with it. I will say that I haven't heard Wyrm's quote before, and to my knowledge it is not canon.
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Forbidden Arcana contradicts itself. According to the table on page 105, there are ten full magicians for every 10,000 people (i.e., one for every thousand, or 0.1%) and forty aspected magicians (i.e., four in a thousand, or 0.4%). That means there should be about 3,000 full magicians in Seattle, and 12,000 aspected magicians. More, since magicians are also supposed to concentrate disproportionately in cities.
In order to get the numbers you quoted from page 103, Icarus would have to be using some subset of Seattle districts, not counting the entire sprawl. Maybe he figures the "real" Seattle doesn't include the barrens, or Fort Lewis, or Tacoma ...
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I'll note that Icarus' comment was for registered magicians. It's entirely possible that the differences between p. 103 and the table on p. 105 are due to registration, or the SINless gap that Icarus mentions.
The inconsistency that bothers me more is that adepts are mentioned as a subset of "aspected magicians" on p. 105, which is never the language that's been applied to them before.
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I will say that this is not compatible with The Wyrm Ouroboros' "traditional" understanding, which would suggest that only 0.01% of the population is magically active and knows what to do with it. I will say that I haven't heard Wyrm's quote before, and to my knowledge it is not canon.
Well, here's one part:
How many magicians are there?
Magicians are fairly rare. Statistics show that about one person in a hundred has enough talent to make active use of magic. Of those individuals, only about one in ten are fully capable magicians, while others are adepts or untrained individuals. Approximately 3-4 million fully capable magicians exist today,and studies show their number rising each year[/i].
Here's the original critical one, though:
Second, magicians are the smallest minority of the population. One percent of the people in the world can use magic at all. Perhaps 90 percent of those are minor magicians, or never get the proper training, or go crazy trying to deal with what they are. There are maybe three to four million fully capable, trained, competent magicians in the Sixth World, though some studies suggest that the percentage is rising with each new generation.
Shadowrun typically uses the world population at publication for convenience's sake; this was when the world population was approximately five and a quarter billion (1990). Using the 4 million number, this would put the 'fully capable, trained, competent magicians' at 0.000757771% - 7.5 in every 10,000, or one in every 1,320 individuals. I grant that that's not the 10% of 10% of 1% that I spoke of previously, but 15 out of every 20,000 is ... thin. Compare to the 2015 percentage of physicians (of all specialties) in the US: of a population of 321,773,631, there were 860,939 physicians - 0.00268%, or 26.75 in every 10,000, or 1 for every 374 people. (General practice physicians are notably more rare - 0.00034588%, or 3.45 for every 10,000 - 1 per 2891 citizens, or about half as common as magicians.)
Something I read recently while skimming for this (therefore I don't recall where it was, but I THINK it was for SR5) indicated that for every full mage, there were 3 mages with 'restricted' magic - sorcerers, or conjurers, or adepts of some sort or another. I may have to hunt around to find that ...
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Sorry could you explain that again it looks to me like they're saying the same thing. 1in 100 =1% and of those number 1 in 10 are fully capable magicians = 90% don't amount to anything.
As for why it hasn't gone up magic is still fairly new and in some areas/groups opposed so being identified as a mage can get you killed like it can homo and transsexuals today. In fact I'm about 90% sure there's still areas that haven't removed the stoned to death penalty for witchcraft from the lawbooks. May have to look into that. . . Plus of course even if the testing is ubiquitous in some areas it isn't in others and even in the ones it is it isn't 100% reliable in finding someone has magical potential. I recall one piece of fluff talking about AR games released to kids with testing programs designed to indicate of they have the potential to have a potential for magic but no guarantee it'll find all mages or not generate false positives.
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@Senko, I understand that sentiment, but I'm not sure that I agree. The quoted material is from 1e, which means it reflects a 2050 truth about the Sixth World. For it to still be accurate, that would mean that testing, evaluation, and cultivation of magical assets hasn't improved in 29 years of rather marked advancement in other areas of magical evolution and growth - Mystic Adepts, for example.
Even of the 90% who don't amount to anything, I'm wondering if someone with a better lore understanding than myself can explain if this means that they don't amount to anything having to do with being a magical threat -- e.g. they would neither be a shadowrunner spell slinger nor corp mage -- or if that means that they wouldn't directly capitalize off of their magical skills at all. For example, even a lowly MAG 1 Aspected Summoner would be able to assense a group of high school seniors, and you only need 1 Hit to determine if an individual is magically active. Ditto HR at pretty much any corp worthy of having an HR department.
On the prejudice angle, remember that 1. that cuts both ways -- awakened individuals are prized and respected in the NAN, for example; and 2. playing off of the dystopian elements of SR, I would think that monitoring, categorizing, and labeling those scary finger-wigglers would be as much of a priority for anti-magic areas of the globe as others. Governments have always been much more adept as monitoring potential enemies of the state than they are Joe Wageslave.
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It may have gotten better but even in the current era I'm pretty sure its not perfect. I've mainly been involved with 5th ed stuff and I do recall that bit of text about AR games from there and to train a mage you first have to find a mage.
I'm not that big an expert on the lore but I'm pretty sure part of why those 90% don't amount to anything is that its written from a corpish perspective and they would only be interested in mages, shinto magicians and other traditions that work well in a 9-5 or otherwise structured job. There's plenty of religous ones who wouldn't even want to touch those because they aren't an Iman, Christian priest, etc. It does them no good if the super powerful and experienced mage when asked to assense the kids say's "Sorry the sun is in the house of vega and my spirit guardian has instructed me to meditate upon the sand of yiega for the next 9 months in order to open the inner eye and perceive the truths shrouded in the mists of Catahenia."
Prejudice might be good at identifying them in some places but in others its just happy to hit anyone they deem "off" regardless of whether its true or not.
Still its always up to you to decide how common you want them in your game and even how big an effect supply and demand has on their working conditions.
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Think this was posted already but my phone isn't easy to read this site on and I'm posting rather than editing so people will notice it. forbidden Arcana says magic population is. . . .
1) 1% of the population.
2) Half of those are unaware of that talent or its too minor to make a difference.
3) Six out of Seven with magic strong enough to count are aspected or adepts.
4) Full mages are one in a thousand or roughly 1 thousand mages per million people.
5) That one thousand per million is skeweed towards cities rather than rural areas because that's where the jobs are.
6) They get six figure salaries plus perks and eccentricities are ignored especially if they take their job seriously.
7 Coyote and time clocks don't mix.
8) Aspected mages earn about 60k a year.
EDIT
An actual breakdown table showed up later.
For each 10,000 people there are...
1) 10 full mages usually hermetic, shamanic or physical.
2) 40 aspected magicians.
4) 100 sparks (technically magical)
5) 9,850 non-magical people.
For those 40 aspected magicians...
1) 8 conjurers.
2) 8 sorcerers.
3) 8 physical adepts.
4) 4 apprentice's.
5) 4 enchanters.
6) 4 explorers (astral projection talent).
For those 100 sparks...
1) 20 are aware (can astrally perceive)
So there's the 5th Ed take. Interestingly it supports your view magic is getting more common as theres about 10 times as many full mages as there were previously with australia having about 24 thousand full mages. Still get great working conditions though.
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That's really interesting. Thanks for posting.
I wonder is Sparks would show up as magically active -- are they MAG 1 or >MAG 1?
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Tough question I'd say less than 1 as even a magic 1 player character can with time, training (and karma) become a magic 10+ powerful mage. Then again at zero you loose all magical ability. So I'd say sparks are either a special case between zero and one or what a magic zero being is as opposed to magic N/A. That is a mundane has no magic stat whereas a spark or burnt out mage has magic zero. They're awakened but don't even have enough power to kindle into something more.
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No, a burn-out is no longer Awakened. A major event (on the scale of the Halley's Comet worldwide mana surge) would be required to 'reAwaken' their magic, as happened to the ex-mage rigger in 'The Burning Times'. A mage standing in a fovae might have Magic 0, but it is a temporary condition, imposed upon him; he is still a mage. A burnout has destroyed the last vestiges of his magic, and no matter how much karma he spends on trying to bind power foci, he won't be able to do a damn thing. It's the difference between an empty bucket (the mage drained of his power) and a bucket with holes all through it, including in the bottom (the burnout).
Sparks are those who are Awakened, but whose innate Talent is so narrow that they can do only one thing. 'The Aware' is one such 'spark', using Priority D, gaining a Magic rating of 3, and being able to use one rating 4 Magical skill, most typically Assensing since it dovetails with . others would be those unpublished ones who can only cast one individual (or one category) of spell, who can only defend against spells, who can conjure only one type of spirit (or, possibly, only one particular spirit, with restrictions on its return after being destroyed/banished equivalent to that of a free spirit's return), who can only banish spirits, who can only enchant one type of focus, or other similar 'one-shot wonder' sorts. A magic 1 spark will never (without GM's permission at expanding their ability range in steps, and in exchange for whole bucketloads of karma) be able to do more than that single thing - but that doesn't say they can't get extremely good at what they do.
Take the Aware spark as an example. This assensing wonder is already professional-grade at their own little narrow corner of Talent, and with a few add-ons from elsewhere (2 special attribute points and 2 skill points) and a proper build otherwise could very quickly fit into the slot of 'Knight Errant astral detective'. Add on a few years and more karma, and soon you have a Grade 4 Initiate with a Magic 10 and the ability to not only Mask, but pierce Masking, use Sensing to feel astral energies without even needing to shift their perceptions, and use Psychometry to gain information off objects. And nothing says they cannot bind weapon foci; if they went with some sort of melee combat skill, well - they might not be adepts or mages, but that experienced KE 'spook' with that old horn-handled knife on his belt could go one-on-one in a knife fight with some of the nastier gangers in the sprawl - and come out on top.
For those looking, the stuff quoted by Senko is Forbidden Arcana, p.102. The demographic sidebar giving the numbers layout is p.105.
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I see not what I'd call a "Spark" but that's just quibbling over terms, thanks for the info.
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The term is coming straight from Forbidden Arcana, p. 49: "While most “sparks” have so little magic that they’re not worth consideration, one type, the aware, are."
If you're Awakened at all you have a Magic Rating, of 1 or more. Discipline and education (i.e. spending Karma in the right areas) can improve that until you become exceptional at it, the king of your little area, the"training (and karma) become a magic 10+ powerful mage" - but you're not a mage, you're still a 'spark' because you can only do that one little area instead of a significant section of magic.
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Like I said quibbling over terms and just my own personal images that crop up in relation to spark (as in sparks from a fire, electrical sparks) and not something even I'd want to argue over as it's just the name not the rules that don't quite work for me. Shadowrun calls them sparks their sparks it's not like there's not for real world things that share the same issue. If you see what I mean.