[ArkangelWinter]

Largely, the Toxic and Dissonant are able to change paths anymore even if they wanted to. Their choice has been taken away by how beholden to their Path they've become. A Jesuit Battle Mage can lose his faith and go another route; a Toxic who loses faith will still be Toxic.

[Mara]

Largely, the Toxic and Dissonant are able to change paths anymore even if they wanted to. Their choice has been taken away by how beholden to their Path they've become. A Jesuit Battle Mage can lose his faith and go another route; a Toxic who loses faith will still be Toxic.

However, said Jesuit Battlemage can still be as full of conviction and madness as the Toxics...(just look at them historically..
sure they might be different today..but I could so see some SR Jesuits going back to the Old Ways...)

[TheWanderingJewels]

a fight between the Toxics and the Bugs might make for amusing byplay in the story as the players set them on each other

[DarkLloyd]

Largely, the Toxic and Dissonant are able to change paths anymore even if they wanted to. Their choice has been taken away by how beholden to their Path they've become. A Jesuit Battle Mage can lose his faith and go another route; a Toxic who loses faith will still be Toxic.

I don't know about that; we know that once you become a Bug you can't come back, that once you become beholden to Horrors you can't come back and once you become a cyberzombie or cyborg that's a full on lifetime commitment.
But being Toxic seems to be a lifestyle choice. Well if not a choice then a by-product of going a bit insane. Insanity is cured/managed all the time. Some people can even be talked back from "the edge" as it were to rejoin the sane side of humanity.

In fact you give an allusion to an example in your description there, "the Toxic and Dissonant". Now I'm pretty sure we've never seen a Toxic shaman brought back to the light, but I know we have a Dissonance practitioner that has come back over. Puck.

I'm not saying it would be easy, or that I would even want to do it, (I prefer to shoot toxics first and never ask questions) but it Should be possible to "rehabilitate" a Toxic. For casters I would assume that they would have to go thru an initiation ordeal and take a geasa that prohibited them from useing the toxic magic. Then rebuild their magic score from the ground up.
For Dissonance users I assume it would be the same type of deal (mechanically), Or they would have to become Hackers.

[Mirikon]

Twisted and toxic magicians are that way because they've taken a few too many steps down the road that leads to madness. Unfortunately, even in Shadowrun there are only limited ways to deal with crazy.

[CanRay]

I got an enemy you'd all love. 

[redwolf]

well i'll bite who?

[Xzylvador]

Bubba?

@OP: I, for one, really don't like bugs as an enemy, nor horrors or shedim or the likes. I much prefer the intrigues in the corporate, government and criminal world.
All those "big threats" are so black & white and despite all of their danger still a "far away" story to most people's every day lives. But the games played by the CEO's, politicians and capo's, ah fun. So many layers, lies and shades of grey but never black or white that 'runners never know which way is up or down, but can still pick a side, make a name, a carreer, new allies and new enemies for themselves and then split town to lay low while things cool down.

[DaveDaveDaave]

Bugs, bugs for sure! I have a list of quotes/rationalisations for an Insect Shaman I`m going to spring on the party. Nothing hurts more than finding out the guy who`s pulled your hoop from the fire and is ypu wingamn drinking buddy ... is one of them.

"Get with the program. They stopped recruiting social inadequates a decade ago. They recruit people who can get them results."

"Please don`t imagine for an instant that anything would happen if the Hive took for example, Belize or Lagos other than the Corps opening trade embassies and prisons selling people to them. Don`t imagine otherwise, it happened before."

[ArkangelWinter]

I did forget Puck. But just how twisted had he become before he turned around?

Edit: And anyone who says insanity is curable hasnt met a genuine been-committed-four-times psychiatric patient, which is the kind of crazy I think of when I see fluff about Toxics. That level of crazy isn't even managed, just suffered through.

[Mirikon]

Puck was never really a Dissonant. He was an idealist that got suckered in to a cult leader's vision.

[JustADude]

But individually, in terms of raw power, a Toxic magician or a Dissonant Technomancer is no more powerful than a regular magician or technomancer of their initiate/submersion grade. What makes them frightening is their madness and conviction.

I wonder if it is even possible to have someone with as much conviction who is NOT a Toxic/Dissonant? Who believes in their
cause so much that they will do whatever it takes, but is not trying to destroy the world/ecosystem/all life? What is the
difference between "mad" and "differently rational"? What makes one a Toxic Magician as opposed to a Jesuit Battle Mage
with a Convert or Die mentality?

Access to Nuclear spirits and other things that do Radiation-element damage.

[Black]

Hey Wak, what about the return of VITAS... IV I guess.  Vitas, an old threat, but one that our shadow runners have never faced...

Throw a toxic or bug connection and I think we're good to go.

[CanRay]

well i'll bite who?

Bubba?

Worse.

[Mirikon]

well i'll bite who?

Bubba?

Worse.

A union between Alamos 20K and the Universal Brotherhood?