I always assume that, to a ghouls palate, Metahuman flesh tastes better than any other flesh - it just kind of makes sense, if you think about it. So, what I find kind of funny is that a sentient, "normal" personalities ghoul eats BEST when s/he is hard on his/her luck and has to scavenge, vs., say, having to pay top prices for real meat from real animals.

Just an interesting tidbit that I love RPing with my own ghoul character.

I'm quite surprised that ghouls don't have the power to spread Krieger RAW. That's....kinda wrong.

Ya, that's why i tossed in the Interview with the Vampire quote about "surviving". In some ways i'm a bit surprised that they didn't do vampires like that but instead required that the victim have Sapience.

It isn't given as a Power, however they are still created by infection with the Krieger HMHVV (something that SR1 didn't have, i believe, in no small part because in canon it was simply unknown what caused ghouls to be ghouls). The Infection power is only for Essense Drain critters as it has special properties regarding 0 Essense.

Incidentally this is another area where Frank has been spreading his usual brand of disinformation. In becoming a vampire the original vampire victim might for a moment (perhaps a second) be "dead", but are brought to near death by the Infection power. But it is still described as being the "victim", not the "victim's body". So the person they were is still there even though they then under go a "physical, mental, and spiritual transformation."

Of course the power does not explicitly require the Infection power to immediately be used, so there is some flexibility there on the GM's part as the vampire/wendigo could by SR4 BBB RAW Infect a victim from 10 years back. But such is the nature of the tone of SR4. As someone mentioned here, SR4 reads like it was written by gamers and not lawyers. (whovever said that please let know, i have been meaning to add the quote to my sig and haven found it yet)

As for ghouls Fanpro has left out of the BBB the specifics on the subject of becoming a ghoul including how virulent Krieger is, infection vectors, and such.

It was canon storyline before SR3. Those of us who have had Ghoul plotlines going for 15 years deeply applaud the "change".

-Frank

It allows them to infect anyone they drain to zero essence with HMHVV. If they drain them to zero, they fucking die. End of discussion, it not only says in the basic rules that there is no exception to this, it also states bluntly in the Essence Drain power that any character that is defined as being suitable for infection in the Infection Power is dead. As soon as the vampire takes your last essence point, you're dead. Period.

Now, what's the Vampire itself?

Is it "the victim"? Is it "The character"? NO! It's a critter. It's even a "newly created critter". It's as much you as an Insect Spirit is. Maybe less. The Infection power doesn't even specify that the newly created critter has all of the memories of the victim - that part is left for the game master to decide.

I know you're kinky for vampires and want them to playable or some shit. I don't care. The shadowrun vampire is and always has been a dangerous monster in viral form.

-Frank

This of course ties in well with the past canon of a cabal of vampires specializing in creating cyberzombies. Who better to unlock the secrets of cheating and perverting the death caused by 0 Essense than someone that does it naturally?

As for this, shall i recreate the list of bullshit misinformation you have spewn before, reputed not just by myself but others as well? The "open and shut" cases where you then still continue to spew your nonsense? A list we can then go over with an electron microscope.

I guess so i can just link back here later when you, no doubt, again start spewing your fucktard misinformation....

It is the "victim" transformed into a critter. "The victim" brought back from the dead (or the 0 Essense cusp as it were). As per the text.

Yeah, I got the IwtV quote. Dunno if that should scare me or not.

Ahh, alright, thanks for clarifying the bit on ghouls spreading Krieger, blakkie. I haven't read the Critter Powahz, and I'm lazy, so I probably wasn't going to check them until sometime far into the future. I do wish they'd tossed Krieger HMHVV into the BBB, but I can understand why they didn't bother - hopefully Running Wild or some other upcoming book will cover Ghouls in more depth, including the virulence of Krieger (though really, in SR3, very few Runners would EVER actually contract Krieger.)

It seems to me that vampires DIE, but then they're simply REVIVED. You know, kind of like how my real life friend Chris DIED after a car accident, but the paramedics REVIVED him. It happens.

Oh, I've totally done that. But Vampires are "created". Note that the book doesn't specify how long it takes to die from essence loss, so the most likely order of events is this:

You get drained of all your essence.
You lie there in a state of near death for up to 24 hours while you undergo transformations.
You die.
A vampire is created from your corpse.

It's pretty unambiguous that you die, and that the vampire is a "newly created critter". It doesn't use ambiguous language like "the transformed character" - it uses the other language. Of course, depending upon how you feel about identity, the newly created vampire might be the same person anyway. But only if you also accept the identity of some other creatures that the Shadowrun authors seem strongly inclinated to tell you do not share identity (such as good merge termites).

-Frank

Huh? Iirc everyx critter with Essence Drain was able to only create critters of his kind. Vampires created vampires, wendigos created wendigos etcpp.

Nope, they create whatever the race they infect becomes. Vampires/Banshee's (the only two with the ability to spread the diease{easily}) create Vampires in humans, Dzoo-noo-qua in trolls, Goblins in Dwarves, Windigo in orcs, and Banshees in elves. It all depends on what the victim was.



And in the case of Blakkie Vs Frank, blakkie is right. =)

Well, I was using vampire in the generic "has the vampiric virus" meaning. However, according to 4th edition it is the metavariant of the victim that determines the outcome of infection.

The Banshee, Fomorian, Goblin, Dzoo-Noo-Qua, and Nosferatu get no love in the BBB.

-Frank

Ah yeah, that's more what i wanted to say, thank you

That's why i was confused.

And that's really a shame.

The Bean-Sidhe is a spirit, the Banshee is an Elf with HMHVV. Needlessly confusing, I know. But it isn't as bad as the Fomorian.

The Wendigo has mental domination powers and is widely regarded as one of the nastiest things on the market today. The Dzoo-Noo-Qua is something of a pushover compared to the Wendigo, Banshee, or Vampire - but so is the Goblin. Apparently, HMHVV just doesn't work well on our thermographic seeing cousins.

:shrug:

-Frank

It's a virus - it doesn't need to play fair or by the book

Look at that, didn't even take you a 1 1/2 hours. LOL. Damn you're thick.

A magic virus.

A GM might. He might even just mentally cut out the sentence "Only one attribute may be boosted at any time." Or he might boost Magic and then cast Increase Strength. Though sustaining that for total Strength above 6 ends up with either the -2 die penalty or putting wiz, non-canon focus into play. A possible option around that is Quickening, though normally NPCs aren't assigned karma that isn't out of line.

Presto, potentially greater Str than a fully augmented Troll (Force 18 = only 7 boxes Physical drain)** as long as they prepare ahead and roll incredibly well on an Edge augmented Spellcasting check. Then all the vampire has to worry about is walking around as an shimmering astral beacon/ward bulldozer because he'd need a stupid number of Grades to hide that spell aura.

P.S. To get the full benefit of +6 to Magic they would then have to immediately turn around and drain somebody again to bring their essense back up. A vampire doing this regularly is going to leave quite the trail of corpses.

** EDIT: Of course this involves saying pooh-pooh to them having a normal metahuman attribute cap. But their cap isn't given. *shrug*

Maybe they'll turn the tables and make the [rarer] Nosferatu the all around badass vampire variant? Death to the idea that smart means physically weak! Nosferatu did also have the Enhanced Physical Attributes too, but it was for limited use (while the Vampire was unlimited i guess, since it was given the power with no stipulations).

Nosferatu also had that coolio temporary drain power. I wonder if they'll keep that and how that will interact with the boosting (since the gain from temp drain use to be gone in less than a minute).

That would give more stratification in the vampire line. All around i think the change would be mostly neutral (once the Nosferatu stats come out), and a good thing from the POV of the vampire as PCs set. The PC-as-a-Vampire could be something in the midling PC power range. But still keep the top end NPC threat separate.

Not that it ever really appealed to me to play a vampire. Partially because vampires are usually way offscale to be a PC unless the system was built around it (Whitewolf) or you are starting out the character in a high-end game (and i rarely play that). But also i personally probably have tended to keep them at arm's length mentally because they are the one horror thing that really got to me as a kid.

When i was 13 or so i saw only portions of Salem's Lot on TV. My mom tried to warn my Dad not to let me watch. It really bothered me for maybe a year. I lived on a farm with a very large yard filled with lots of tree rows and narrow passage ways to go through at night to get around. Even now vampires still represent in my dreams something that is draining me of my focus or energy.

That's interesting. At least half my friends have told me that when I was in their dreams, it was as a Vampire. Now... if only I can get into Blakkie's dreams and scare him witless...

I too, miss the super-strong vampires of previous editions. Though I *am* even more terrified of the super magic vampires in this edition; it's a totally different flavor.

Dreams are basically conversations with yourself, and therefore quite personalized. Don't let that Chinese fellow Jung fool you, symbols aren't always as universal as you might think and even a largely universal general symbol can represent many widely different things in different instances and such. For example, in the case of your friends the common ones for vampires run from along the lines of drain, to nobility, to sex appeal, to death.

For example in my dreams one of my brothers shows up if i'm doing something foolishly dangerous, because, well that's the kind of thing i associate with him. Another example is a particularly difficult computer program bug i found in a dream, after spending about 3 long days at work trying to find it, came entirely in the metaphor of a mechanical breakdown on a harvester combine. I located and fixed the problem code within about 20 minutes of sitting down at the computer after the dream. It was so startlingly accurate that i only took that long because i hadn't realized to what level of detail the dream went to. Why a combine? Likely because over the years i have in totally serious jest said "If you can fix a combine, you can fix anything."

Whatever the reason for the vampire there is likely a strong concensus among your friends about a very prominent aspect about you (EDIT: or even something somehow linked to you, LARP much? ). It might have even been something someone said/says that others have heard that built the association. My online impression of you leads me to doubt it's about dragging people down.

Completely off-topic but, Carl Gustav Jung was Swiss, not Chinese.

Sorry, sort of an inside joke. Didn't really belong here, i just get a little chuckle every time i think of him that way.

EDIT: Incidentally part of the humour for me is that Carl Jung enjoyed and studied Chinese intellectual culture at a time when Europeons largely either looked down upon it [from a distance] or just flat out ignored it. But then some things are unique in striking me as funny.

That's cool. He did have somewhat odd interests for his time.