HMHVV and You, Apparently Ghouls aren't contagious |
HMHVV and You, Apparently Ghouls aren't contagious |
Oct 17 2007, 10:34 PM
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#1
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Shooting Target Group: Members Posts: 1,512 Joined: 26-February 02 Member No.: 392 |
This came up in my game 2 sessions ago:
Team was searching the barrens for a secret research facility. The Summoner and the Face got a clue that this one hobo had his friend grabbed a week ago so they go and check out the building he squats. They get there and turns out that the guy is hiding because some ghouls moved in. Long story short, the Summoner takes some physical damage as a result of the encounter that had a possibility of infection. The Krieger Strain is supposed to be contagious, but because Ghouls don't have Essence Drain and Infection they can't actually infect you with HMHVV. I tried looking in the Diseases section of Augmentation but didn't find it in there. Thought it might be similar to the Magical Diseases in there. Basically I'm wondering if there are stats somewhere that I've missed or if someone out there has stated it out? Thanks. |
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Oct 17 2007, 10:42 PM
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#2
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Great Dragon Group: Members Posts: 6,748 Joined: 5-July 02 Member No.: 2,935 |
To say "ghouls are different" is a bit of an understatement. Their particular method of infection (not yet addressed in SR4) has not traditionally required Essence Drain to pass along.
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Oct 17 2007, 10:54 PM
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#3
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 609 Joined: 13-August 07 Member No.: 12,615 |
I could swear I saw it somewhere, but can't remember. Maybe Shadowrun Companion? I don't have that book any more, so I can't look.
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Oct 17 2007, 11:27 PM
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#4
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Deus Absconditus Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,742 Joined: 1-September 03 From: Downtown Seattle, UCAS Member No.: 5,566 |
Yes. SR3's companion had the rules.
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Oct 18 2007, 01:00 AM
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#5
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,210 Joined: 5-September 05 From: Texas Member No.: 7,685 |
AFAIR it took extensive and long term contact.
Someone living with the ghouls might become one. No reported cases where it was transmitted due to an attack. |
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Oct 18 2007, 01:43 AM
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#6
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 323 Joined: 17-November 06 From: 1984 Member No.: 9,891 |
I thought that non-contagious stuff only applied to magic pixie dust PC Ghouls.
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Oct 18 2007, 02:11 AM
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#7
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Midnight Toker Group: Members Posts: 7,686 Joined: 4-July 04 From: Zombie Drop Bear Santa's Workshop Member No.: 6,456 |
It is highly contagious. Even the tiniest scratch can cause infection. Anyone who was injured in melee with a ghoul had to roll Body against a TN equal to the ghoul's Essence. Failure meant infection. Partial success also meant infection, but no symptoms. It could be treated in the first month and all PC carriers, even asymptomatic carriers, were contagious.
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Oct 18 2007, 04:57 AM
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#8
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,326 Joined: 15-April 02 Member No.: 2,600 |
Did ghouls suddenly become more infectious or were they supposed to be that infectious all along and nobody knew it? Looking at those stats, it seems like ghoul hordes would be a lot more prevalent. Those look like Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead style mechanics, rather than "We Don't Think Ghouls are Contagious" rules.
I remember the module in SR2 where someone had figured out how to turn people into ghouls was a pretty big change to the canon. It seems like if every 3rd person who got scratched turned into a ghoul, the CDC would've been a little more ahead of the curve on that one. Not to mention, Asamando would pretty much rule Africa. |
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Oct 18 2007, 02:19 PM
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#9
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ghostrider Group: Retired Admins Posts: 4,196 Joined: 16-May 04 Member No.: 6,333 |
I'm not sure if they were as infections pre-SR3, but to answer your "it seems like they would be more prevalent", they're just as prevalent or absent as any other plot device. Devil rats are everywhere, but when is the last time you hit the PCs with them on their way to the Stuffer Shack, D&D kobold style?
Also, remember that Asamando isn't out to rule Africa, at least that I can recall. They're a nation/state vying for recognition and legal status. It's the silly "ghouls are people too" thing that they're going for (which I prefer to ignore; I like ghouls as baddies). |
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Oct 18 2007, 04:06 PM
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#10
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Target Group: Members Posts: 8 Joined: 1-April 06 Member No.: 8,423 |
As long as we are on the subject of ghouls, is it even implied anywhere just how that Ghoul nation survives? that wou7ld require a pretty steady , not to mention large, supply of dead bodies. I would imagine that kind of import business wouldn't endear them to the neighbors. How many ghouls does it take to run a country? |
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Oct 18 2007, 04:31 PM
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#11
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,246 Joined: 8-June 07 Member No.: 11,869 |
The Saudi Arabian royal family only has 7000 members, so there you go: no more than 7000 ghouls are needed to control one of the wealthiest nations in the world. A banana republic in Africa would probably need far less.
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Oct 18 2007, 04:45 PM
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#12
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Midnight Toker Group: Members Posts: 7,686 Joined: 4-July 04 From: Zombie Drop Bear Santa's Workshop Member No.: 6,456 |
The United States imports more than three billion pounds of beef per year and grows between twenty seven and twenty eight billion pounds at home every year.
A ghoul needs only 90 pounds of metahuman flesh per year. Even if there were ten million ghouls is Asamando, their dead metahuman flesh importation wouldn't be extreme. |
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Oct 18 2007, 06:53 PM
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#13
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,246 Joined: 8-June 07 Member No.: 11,869 |
Except to the human on the chopping block. :D |
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Oct 18 2007, 07:16 PM
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#14
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Midnight Toker Group: Members Posts: 7,686 Joined: 4-July 04 From: Zombie Drop Bear Santa's Workshop Member No.: 6,456 |
The global crude death rate is 8.78. That is over 57 million dead people every year with a mean of 171 pounds per person. 171*57. That's 9.747 billion pounds of ghoul chow produced worldwide without any intervention.
And that doesn't even include medical waste. Get a SOTA cyberarm installed, something has to be done with your meat arm and there if no sense in wasting it. Appendectomies are common. So are tonsillectomies. Liposuction clinics produce pounds upon pounds of delicious fat every day. Cbereyes are extremely common. |
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Oct 18 2007, 08:30 PM
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#15
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Prime Runner Group: Banned Posts: 3,732 Joined: 1-September 05 From: Prague, Czech Republic Member No.: 7,665 |
What chopping block? A human gives up 40 kilos of real edible human meat when it dies and its body is recovered. Asamando is in fucking Nigeria where the Life Expectency today is 47 years. That means that every human in the population produces approximately 850 grams of edible human meat per year without doing anything special to them at all except pouncing on all the corpses and hauling them away before the shedim do and turn them into a public health hazard. Every Ghoul needs approximately 40 kilos of human meat every year. Which means that having 1/47th of the population be Ghouls means that the flesh eating demands of the ghoul population don't have any effect at all on the population of the nation. And that's assuming that:
And hell, the moment your Ghoul population exceeds the natural carrying capacity of the population, you've got three options:
So all in all, there's no reason why a ghoul nation need be any more dystopic than any other nation. It's my primary problem with the "Ghouls Is Virus!" plotline they introduced. Ghoulism just isn't that bad. And we already had a more horrifying version of the same thing in the setting with Loup Garou. -Frank |
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Oct 18 2007, 08:53 PM
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#16
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,326 Joined: 15-April 02 Member No.: 2,600 |
It just irks me if the mechanics and the fluff are wildly out of sync; that is to say if ghoul infection is relatively uncommon but mechanically, anyone scratched by a ghoul stands a pretty good chance of either turning into a ghoul themselves or becoming a carrier of the virus then its a little weird. If ghouls infecting people are fairly rare in the game world, it should be difficult mechanically. The game (like a movie, book or tv show) should obey its own internal logic, or verisimilitude suffers.
If you want a plot device to scare the hell out of the players, as the GM you can always make a up a new, super-rare, super-infectious strain of the ghoul virus, although you probably should tack on some sort of reason as to why those ghouls aren't taking over the world-- like maybe they go mad dog crazy and tend to be put down very quickly. That makes for a good 28 Days Later style zombie infection. Personally, I like the idea of Asamando (not enough to look up if I'm spelling it correctly, but still). When I was running my SR Africa game, the pc's ended up there. I treated it sort of like an HMHVV Israel, and a lot of ghouls, vamps, wendigo and so on showed up there as a place to escape persecution. I like the idea of ghouls as people to. (Which doesn't preclude using them as monsters. If you look back through history, almost all our monsters were people.) |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:04 PM
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#17
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Dragon Group: Members Posts: 4,664 Joined: 21-September 04 From: Arvada, CO Member No.: 6,686 |
Just a note, its using SR3 mechanics... ghouls get a base -1 essence, can't get bioware, and take double essence loss from cyberware. Any bioware/cyberware they had upon infection is rendered inoperative by the transformation.
This means, at the base, the test is body tn (5) with only 1 hit needed to avoid becoming infection. One success gives the character some permanent effect from the disease (GM discretion, partial blindness, skin discolorations, etc), 2 the character will be sick for 10 days and feel weak and dizzy. 3 success the character fights it off with no ill effects. Only with 0 successes is someone actually infected. The chances of the average (Body 3) person making 0 successes is low. It is pretty hard to get infected by it. |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:05 PM
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#18
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Prime Runner Group: Banned Posts: 3,732 Joined: 1-September 05 From: Prague, Czech Republic Member No.: 7,665 |
It's more like an Israel for Ghouls. Actual essence draining monsters are incredibly unwelcome. Consider:
And so I find the prospect of Asamando being at anything other than permanent jihad against every kind of infected except the Ghoul as being patently absurd. The nation caters to creatures who don't really have any natural enemies except Wendigo, who in turn are powerful regenerating mind controlling bastards who amass small armies for no purpose other than to torture people to death, round up Ghouls and eat them while they are still alive in a painful and degrading fashion in order to maximize the emotional impact on the victim and those around them. If you want an Israel for vampires, try Romania. If even 5% of the world's vampire population decides to wear an opera cape and declare themself a Count, then the Council of Counts has a death lock on controlling that country no matter what the original Vampire statistics were. -Frank |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:15 PM
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#19
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Great Dragon Group: Members Posts: 5,537 Joined: 27-August 06 From: Albuquerque NM Member No.: 9,234 |
I'm missing something here. If you get essence drained and killed by a vampire, there is no body? Or the body isn't usable by ghouls? Or is it something else?
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Oct 18 2007, 09:17 PM
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#20
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The ShadowComedian Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 14,538 Joined: 3-October 07 From: Hamburg, AGS Member No.: 13,525 |
things like MAGICALLY CHARGED NUKES which send out high amounts of EMP which basically means every electronics gear gets fried by it in a world where OPTICAL computing was invented half a decade ago at least?
where's it say that? if you get INFECTED during game-play, you lose everything that was bioware, as it is incorporated into your new body . . you lose most cyber aside from strictly structural things like bone lacing, dermal tech and the such . . every ghoul caracter with cyber/bio is considered to have taken those things AFTER he became infected . . so yes, you can have bioware and cyberware that you would usually lose on becoming infected, if you start as a ghoul because you are considered ghoul before implantation and then you get the problems of less essence and doubled essence cost for cyber . .
of course there is a body . . if the ghoul is fast enough to get it before he comes back as a vampire . . |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:19 PM
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#21
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,408 Joined: 31-January 04 From: Reston VA, USA Member No.: 6,046 |
If I remember correctly, they also often took penalties to their mental stats, went blind, and took penalties to social interaction because they stank. They become permanently dual natured, which can be both a bonus and a penalty, depending on the situation, but is more often a penalty unless they're also magically active. I remember everybody bitching back when I was playing SR3 because the rules for ghoul PCs were extremely gimped. I don't think we'll have to worry about them taking over Seattle any time soon. And I think that there was also an anti-viral that you could take between infection and expression (if you knew you needed it) that completely eliminated the chance of infection. Idle question: If a ghoul caught a corpse inhabited by a master shedim with regeneration, could he use it as an inexhaustable food supply? |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:21 PM
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#22
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,180 Joined: 22-January 07 From: Rochester, NY Member No.: 10,737 |
It's "something else" like, say, the body getting back up and growing fangs. EDIT: Dammit, this is what happens when I open up a bunch of tabs and threads at once. This post has been edited by bibliophile20: Oct 18 2007, 09:22 PM |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:25 PM
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#23
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The ShadowComedian Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 14,538 Joined: 3-October 07 From: Hamburg, AGS Member No.: 13,525 |
cyber-eyes and bio-ware to change body smell
technically yes . . but remember that a body which is being inhabited(sp?) by some sort of ghosts gets one hell of a toughness boost . . try to get a bite out of that when it's got something like forcex2 hardened armor *g* and don't forget that the shedim probably won't like it too much to be used as a chew-toy and probably can feel what is done to the body . . |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:25 PM
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#24
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Midnight Toker Group: Members Posts: 7,686 Joined: 4-July 04 From: Zombie Drop Bear Santa's Workshop Member No.: 6,456 |
I'm going to point out that vampires and wendigos do not have to kill. They only need a single point of essence per month, of which the average person has 5.
I'd also like to point out that having your eaten by a Wendigo while you are still alive is, in fact, an extremely fun experience. It is so fun, in fact, that most people who have had their flesh eaten by a Wendigo want to try it again. Really if a Wendigo just drains one point of Essence from a victim at a time and lets them walk away, then word of mouth advertising will soon allow him to make a decent living by charging people money to eat them. |
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Oct 18 2007, 09:31 PM
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#25
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 241 Joined: 14-December 06 Member No.: 10,360 |
Was there an actual infection mechanic decided in this thread? It might be good to know.
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