So how can we easily make it happen?
-What are the ramification
-Who is immune?
-Will Ghouls eat each others since they are all metahumans?
-Will it become Cannibal Earth?

The first part is easy - lets view the recipe for a starter kit.
-10 Ghouls
-10 Crop Duster Drone
-10 to 100 Litres of DMSO (not sure about 80KG Ghoul VS Amount of DMSO)
-1 Large blender
-1 Escape Plan
-Lots of guns

Mix Ghouls and DMSO and mix in blender until liquified.
Pour mixture in cropdusters
Let cropdusters go through a major population center in rush hour around lunchtime where a lot of people are in the street - summertime is preferred.
Get to your secret lair, summer retreat or convenient island that most likely will be plagued by the zombie horde as well. Be well armed.

This should be possible for a starter character with a slight case of insanity and hopefully you can conceal your plan from your GM...Or even better - he wants to see how it turns out...

MOAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Hmm, are there other means that are easily replicable and cheap to make it happen? What about a city's water reservoir?

Making a Hermetic Mad Scientist character with a specialization in Biology / Parabiology and Pathogens? Chemistry and Medicine looks like good skills and a Laboratory Workshop should suffice.

EDIT:
For a starting character i would suggest the following:
1 workshop or facility (slaughterhouse) and a drone workshop.
A few of those nursery drones upgraded with tazers for the slaughterhouse and as help capruring ghouls alive, an additional dartgun with tranquilizers might be useful

A facility might be expensive but i dont see how an old slaughtehouse in a run down part of town is a problem.

Organlegger or slave trader contact might be useful too.

I actually had a Nosferatu I played once (I've played two now) who had Carrier (Ghoul) and was planning on using splash grenades on public transportation areas. All the sudden water splashes over people, no one really cares, and then a couple days later the outbreaks begin.

Game ended before I could start though.

1) It'd be worse than Bug City, IMHO. Cops with licenses to kill on the suspicion of infection, probably martial law would be instituted in many places.

2) Infected and Metasapients would be immune. That's about it.

3) I'd think so. They are Sufficiently Metahuman, according to the sidebar.

4) I think it'd become Scorched Earth.

The question is how well the virus survives outside a living host or if it just needs normal nourishment because in that case you could easily culture it in a laboratory - and who knows, make it airborne.

I was just thinking about this topic today when I read this article:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/10/11/the...-radio-podcast/

and thought about how there's a cash bounty on Ghouls in some jurisdictions...

I can see how Ghouls do this to keep a functioning society.

Any feral becomes either food or bounty depending on what the society needs and the same goes for violent criminals receiving the death sentence.

I've recently GMed a module where Seattle had a zombie apocalypse: Ares had been experimenting with mana-producing biospheres, entered a resonance, and had a Horror sip through the mana spike. Then everything went downhill from there.
I feel that a zombie infestation works better in SR when it's magical in nature: that partly removes the need for explanations, and it fits with the fluff (more or less).
As for ramifications, well, Seattle got nuked :3

Porbably doable, but in my opinion vey much of a dick move aimed a completely ruining an ongoing game and absically piss off veryone else around the table. It screams 'who cares about everyone elese's fun as long as i get MINE'.

IF the other playersand the GM are informed an OK with it, whatver floats your boat even if it 's not my notion of fun. thouhg ifthe problem gets worldwide, expect cybered characters to have someserious maintenance issues coming up.

That's pretty much my reaction, too. I mean, what's the point of it? "Hey GM, I'm wrecking your campaign setting! ROFLLOL!" ?
Seriously, if I was GM I'd probably ask the player to simply scrap that plan because I've no interest in GMing zombie apocalypse stuff. And if I was a player and the plan went through, I'd probably leave the group, because if I wanted a zombie survival game, I'd have joined a AFMBE campaign, not a Shadowrun campaign.


You'd better hope you can conceal it from the other PCs, too. If any of my characters noticed a fellow runner trying something like that, they'd shoot him in the back of the head at the next best opportunity, if only because the zombie apocalypse would utterly ruin their "business environment".

Of course, derailing a game is pointless. My train of thought was more about possible doomsday scenarious and how SIMPLE such an act is due to the tech available and how freaking dangerous the virus is.

One deranged induvidual could do this - like an intelligent Ghoul with a reason to hate the world.

ONE.

The odds of such schemes happening should be rather high and on intelligence agencies top priority list as WMD's go.

Let's make it worse:

An astrally projecting magician's body is considered a prepared vessel. What if dual-natured beings were just as easy to possess? A Master Shedim gets it into its head that he can use Ghouls, even Feral ones, as hosts for his Slaves/Drones. He opens an Astral Gate and the slaves gush through and with their Master's help they inhabit a feral ghoul den.

To spread, all they have to do is infect people.

I mean, what's worse than a ghoul outbreak? A "ghouls inhabited by Shedim" outbreak.

That's because AH wrote some staggeringly awful rules which CGL, with their typical expert editing, published because nobody there anymore understands the game rules. Just because the CGL publishes really crazy stuff doesn't mean you need to allow it in your game.

AH did offer an errated version of the rules later.

Yeah, but then, all you would need to do, would be to mix the ghoulash with dmso to make it touch vector again.

Ah, minor details. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

What is dumpshock for if not discussing minor details to death?

Been there, done that, and it was a very unpleasant situation, in Hong Kong, for a time. Epic, though. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

DMSO really shouldn't work on the virus.

In the real world, at least, it only works on compounds.




-k

The 'compound' in this case is liquified Ghoul so their blood (the compound) is mixed with DMSO to deliver it into the recipients bloodstream along with any pathogens they carry.

Exactly. I took that into account as I see it as being injection/bite/scratch delivered regardless what the rules say.

However, I don't think it would work IRL. DMSO is so amazing in reallife because it dissolves both polar and nonpolar compounds, AND is easily absorbed by the skin. But only those compounds dissolved in it get carried through the skin barrier with it. Viruses are not compounds. They are orders of magnitude larger than DMSO molecules. They won't dissolve. They may be kept in suspension, but that doesn't make the DMSO carry them through the skin.

Poisons tend to be compounds, and will work with DMSO. Biological agents, not so much.

Take a page from Warehouse 13 and have an infected food truck, or a fleet of them. Have to hit a metro city hard and fast with cheap soy meals that taste just like real meat, because it is infected meat. Maybe make some candy too and get those people who love worms and scorpions in their suckers.

Thank you for a very informant post. I had no knowledge of that.

In that case I go back to the original rule of it being "touch based". THat way the DMSO and fluids will simply allow it to get through clothing easier.

How was that eventually resolved? Lots of shooting, I take it?

An inordinate amount of shooting, with a Final showdown between the PC's including two NPC Jaguar Warriors we had managerd to bring along for the fun, vs. the Master SHedim and several of his Warrior Elite. A lot of downtown was shot up. Lots of Dead. We lost 60% of the Player Characters. Was Awesome.

As interesting as that is, unfortunately the rules of the game take precedence. Interestingly again, however, DMSO states very clearly that only "compounds" can be dissolved in it, and Toxins and Drugs are not compounds as defined on page 80 of Arsenal. By the rules only the items as compounds from page 80 through 83 are capable of being dissolved into and given through the vehicle of DMSO.

Freeze Foam is a legitimate use, but drugs are not (without house-rules).