Poison Oak mentor spirit (Shadowrun 5th edition)

The Show Us Your Crits adult stream is building up to Neurally Ambiguous: Gepetto Must Die, the Shadowrun 5e campaign I'll be running in which we follow the lives, dreams, and struggles of a house full of bunraku prostitutes.  And engage in some mind control fetish fun, as well!  In the flow of my excitement, I have reached back into my pile of half-completed ideas, found this, and polished it off to present to y'all.  I hope you enjoy it!

As always, thank you to my patrons Jaina Bee, Ferny, Casey, Dave, Todd, and Darius.  They and my other patrons saw this post a week early ~ if you would like to support my writing and my streaming (and join them in seeing all of my blog posts before anyone else), you can do so on my Patreon ~ even $1/month helps a tremendous amount! 

Poison Oak

The original namesake of what is now called Los Angeles, Yaang lives on the edge of the forest, crouching and invisible.  Most famous for the oil on her leaves to which metahumans are uniquely allergic, she nonetheless holds many powers.  Upon annexing LA in 2061, the Pueblo Corporate Council experienced a fad for the old techniques of using her juice or soot to color baskets and tattoos; a close relative of hers is used for lacquer in Japan.  Poison Oak feeds deer with her leaves and squirrels with her berries, and has always helped the Chumash cure many ills.

Advantages
All:  +1 for Artisan and First Aid tests.  A magical lodge counts as +1 Force for the purpose of crafting qi foci in the form of tattoos.
Magician:  +1 die for Counterspelling Tests and anchored rituals, +1 die for summoning plant spirits.
Adept:  3 free levels of Stillness.

Disadvantages
Poison Oak guards, but she does so without violence, preferring instead to make things so unpleasant for intruders that they leave of their own volition.  Accordingly, her followers must succeed at a Charisma + Intuition (3) test in order to take any directly violent action, each time.  They have no problem using non-violent means like many health or manipulation spells to soften up targets for their more . . . direct teammates to then be violent at, however.

Similar Archetypes:  Forest, Guardian Angel, Fence, Smudge. 

Notes on Character Synergies and Use
The Nahua ("Aztec"), druid, Hindu, Muslim, Romani, Shinto, Wiccan, and Wuxing traditions all summon plant spirits to help with health spells, while the Oceti Sakowin ("Sioux") ask them to help with detection spells and Zoroastrians with manipulation spells.  With their predilection for not being seen and for stunning, rather than killing, their enemies, druids might be especially drawn to following Poison Oak.  Nahua and Shinto use Charisma to resist Drain, which is a less than optimal combination with Poison Oak's skill bonuses (though it does help them with the mentor spirit's disadvantage).  That hardly seems to be severe enough to outweigh the fact that, culturally, they are the most appropriate traditions in which to approach Poison Oak.  (OK, so Nahua isn't really, but there's no Chumash tradition or anything of the sort >.< )  An Oceti Sakowin follower of Poison Oak is likely to focus on espionage work, while a Zoroastrian might find bodyguard work most comfortable; Poison Oak followers of other traditions likely gravitate towards being healers.

The green magic tradition recently discovered by the Tzuri Group under the waves off of India's coast has, quite expectedly, proven to be very fertile ground for Poison Oak mages, summoning plant spirits for help with every kind of spell except manipulation.  They do use Charisma to resist Drain, though.  The Tzuri group also recently revealed that they had knowledge of a tradition they call necro magic, which summons the plant-like rot spirits for help with health spells.  Perhaps ironically, since it uses Logic to resist Drain, Poison Oak necro mages truly excel as healers.  DocWagon has made it known that . . . convincing . . . such a mage to accept employment from them would be worth a grip of nuyen.

Though most of the Ways could easily be appropriate for an adept following Poison Oak, the Artisan's and Invisible Ways are probably the most common among such adepts, though there are a perhaps shocking number of Poison Oak adepts on the Speaker's Way.