Astral Space

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Astral space is a parallel dimension to reality populated by spirits, emotion, and the life force of all thing.

Game Rules Description

Astral space will be mostly preserved from 4th edition.

Astral perception, Astral projection, and presence of astral entities capable of manifestation and materialization will be in 1.0. Astral Project will include mostly unbounded 3D movement, but fast movement will be excluded.

Metaplanes are on the docket for 2.0.

Technical Implementation

First off, there are two important player perspectives on the astral plane for 1.0: astral perception and astral project. Each will be the same visually; however, each has slightly different behavior.

While astrally perceiving, the user is dual-natured. This is the same state as a materialized spirit. The player will be able to collide with both astral and physical objects. They will see "living" objects in colors, higher brightness indicating greater magic. They will see mundane things as dull, fuzzy shadows of themselves. For version 1.0, light in the astral plane only emanates from Earth. It does so only as a volume and objects only catch ambient light.

Astral projection means the player sees the same thing; however, they are no longer subject to collisions with purely physical objects. We will use astral wards (which will be generally indestructible) to keep players in and out of buildings. The player will also be able to fly around while astrally projecting (again, no fast movement as in the book, sorry).

While using astral space, one cannot see AR object.

Current thoughts on representing Astral perception (and projection) heavily involves the treatment of Augmented Reality as well. The current idea is to keep separate lists of the items to be rendered for each group. This will allow us to exclude large blocks of objects easily when they are not active.