Drone Homunculi, A mighty robot; love by good, feared by Options

[hyzmarca]

Hypothetical situation. A Rigger/Mage is initiating and decides to take the familiar ordeal. Seeing as he has a megical rigger theme, he decides to turn a custom superdrone into a homunculi. He spends many months and well over a million nuyen cobbling together a masterpiece that he calls Dave and Goliath. Dave is a small rotodrone designed for survaliance. Goliath is an impressivly large anthroform with heavy artillery comming out the yazzoo and other unspecified orifices. Goliath has no brain. Intstead, Dave docks with the anthroform and serves as its control system.

The hypothetical magical rigger than has the pair enchanted as a single homunculi, paying out the hoop to do so and sucessfuly initiates.

Laying asside for a moment the prohibitive cost of this, what other problems would arise from this technomagical abomination?
Would the ally be able to fire Goliath's guns or see using Dave's sensors? Would it be able to cast spells through the sensors? Would it be able to take Dave out for a spin when necessary and leave the attention grabing armored giant behind as the drone was designed to do or would seperating the two brak the enchantment? What would happen if the rigger jumped into the homunculis or an rival rigger tried to take control of it?

[Cain]

First of all, I don't think a homoniculi can split into two like that. You *could* have two Allies, though; the only restriction is that you can only have one Familiar.

[CircuitBoyBlue]

I think I remember another thread extremely similar to this being the first thread I posted to on these forums. As I remember, my take on it was that putting an ally spirit in a drone homunculus is cool, and so should be doable, because cool ideas work like that. And if I were GM, I'd work the rigger vs. spirit issue out differently every time so nobody would ever know exactly how the thing was working, because when you screw with stuff that weird, you're basically forfeiting any semblance of understanding in return for all those nifty cool points.

[BitBasher]

I have to disagree, becasue that's not wierd at all. It's no more wierd than any other body to put your hominblahblah in. There's pretty established ways these things behave or so I thought.

[Lantzer]

This topic comes around periodically.

My opinion on this is that it is a waste of time to use drones as spirit bodies. Why? lets look through the logic.

1) The first thing is that the technological complexity of a drone makes it a pain to enchant. Nobody argues with this point.

2) More arguable is whether the spirit would be able to use the abilities of the drone - i.e. the electronics, sensors, communications, motors, etc. My take on this is _no_. The spirit could do gross physical motions, but electronics are outside of it's sphere. The spirit could use a iron table with a gun welded to it just as well as it could use a drone - perhaps easier.

Why? Let's approach it from the other direction: If a spirit inhabits a cyberdeck, can it deck? Most people would say no. But if a spirit can use drone sensors or comunications, it should be able to deck. I therefore think that it's a bad idea to let a spirit use onboard electronics as if it was part of it's body.

From the spirit's alien point of view, any matter is just grey, inert, boring stuff. A humonculus focus is a lump of inert grey boring stuff that has been enchanted as a prison, although it grants limited mobility in the physical plane. But the spirit inside is still a spirit. It still uses spirit senses, still keeps it's own stats, etc. From a spirit's point of view, a computer and a rock are the same thing, differentiated primarily by the emotional contexts people have imprinted on them.

Back to the iron table with a gun: You have here an easily enchanted hunk of material, it is still mobile, and the _manually operated_ gun shouldn't be a problem. You might want to give the spirit an appropriate skill.

A stone or bronze statue would work well too. How about a wax replica of Jimmy Carter?

[Jrayjoker]

Hey, like they said in the first post, it will cost a lot of money and Karma and time, but why not. It is their time and money and Karma. This is a fantasy game in a modern world after all.

On a slightly different note, if a metahuman can spend essence to integrate cyberware (cybereyes are considered vision and can therefore be tricked by invisibility spells, etc.), why can't the Karma for bonding a spirit to a chunk of tech do the same thing?

I am sure this has been beaten to death in previous posts, so forgive me if I am being redundant.

This post has been edited by Jrayjoker: Jan 4 2005, 02:12 PM

[toturi]

[Tarantula]

Heres a question. Could the mage of a team homunculi the riggers friendly anthromorph drone. Could the rigger then jump out of the drone, in order to let the homunculi do something like, fight off an enemy spirit, and then resume control of the drone afterwards? Might be the start of riggers not having to worry about magic users wrecking all their toys quite so much.

[Jrayjoker]

Another way to look at it is this:

If I have a cyber leg and I choose to disconnect it for the night, when I put it back on in the morning it will fire right back up and be a part of me again.

I spent the essence to integrate the cyber leg, and the spirit was bonded to the machines with Karma. End of story.

[Shaudes29]

HOUSE RULES! HOUSE RULES!