Lighting Spells

Quote :

Lightning Bolt (Indirect, Elemental)
Type: P • Range: LOS • Damage: P • Duration: I • DV: (F ÷ 2) + 3
Ball Lightning (Indirect, Elemental, Area)
Type: P • Range: LOS (A) • Damage: P • Duration: I • DV: (F ÷ 2) + 5
These spells create and direct vicious strikes of electricity that cause
Electricity damage (p. 163). Lightning Bolt is a single target spell. Ball
Lightning is an area spell.

Quote :

Electrical damage is treated as Stun damage and resisted with half Impact armor (rounded
up)—metallic armor, however, offers no protection. The nonconductive armor upgrade
(p. 327) adds its full rating to the armor value. Other factors may modify the target’s damage
resistance test at the gamemaster’s choosing, such as lack of grounding (a character flying by
levitation spell) or extra conductivity (a character immersed in water)

So here is the thing. Lightning spells do P damage. but Electrical damage is treated as stun. Is this an oversight? or on purpouse just because they wanted lightning spells to do mad physical damage?

I suggest making the lightning spell do stun and reducing the drain to (f/2)+1 (+3 for lightning ball) to adjust for doing stun over physical. or just making an alternate set of lightning spells.

The odd thing is that in my Street Magic book on pg 163 where it shows the drain modifiers it says "Combat Spells: ... Elemental Effect (must be Physical Spell with Physical damage)"

Then on pg 165 in the sidebar it talks about the new elemental effect of Sound and it says sound damage is stun damage. So that seems to contradict the above.

Unfortunately there are not examples of elemental effect spells that do stun damage in Street Magic or even in the Digital Grimoire to look to for clarification.


I think we just have to make up a house rule to cover it. I would suggest allowing both the +2 drain for an elemental effect spell and the -1 drain for a sell that does stun from the Drain Modifiers table in Street Magic (pg 163), that should result in Lightning Bolt having (F/2)+2 drain and ball lightening having (F/2)+4 drain.

I like the idea of dropping the drain and having them do stun damage. It's hard for me to imagine fire doing stun, but the precedent is set of electric with every electric weapon in the game doing stun. Also, sonic doing stun is kind of the only way that makes sense for sonic damage to work, so elemental magic doing stun should be in play, too. That said, I'm not opposed to having two different kinds of electrical spells, one that does stun and one that does physical (lke stunbolt/ball vs. powerbolt/ball).