Hi.

I'm new here so please forgive me if I'm asking questions that have already been answered.

Do Ghouls have body heat? The reason why I ask is because I'm sending the PCs up against them in the pitch dark. (They're blind so what do they care). I specifically need to know how well they'd show up in Thermographic vision.

If they keep room temperature it could be very very interesting.

If they are invisible to Thermographic vision (or nearly so) would the PC's only option be using flashlights? Or is there any other tech that can get around the whole lack of light thing?

Chall

Ghouls in Shadowrun are not undead. They're living beings infected with a magical virus. They eat and -- presumably -- perform all other metabolic functions, so odds are they give off body heat.

Indeed, they presumably run pretty hot, as they are in some places listed as eating about 4000 Calories a day and they are still distinguished for being creepily thin for their height.

-Frank

Do you have a page reference for this?

But the average ghoul eats 780 grams in one week or did i get it wrong? So no big deal, consuming 4,000 calories in one week.

Yeah, i got it wrong. They probably eat more than just 780 grams per week. S***.

No. It's 780 grams in a day, once per week.

-Frank

780 grams is 2.08 lbs of meat for those of y'all who are wondering and 78 kilograms means the guy weighs 208 lbs.

Frank, read again what you posted... that's per week.
"1 percent of their body weight in metahuman flesh per week "
That's only 2.08 pounds of meat a week, I'm sure you can do more than that. Plus, have you seen what a cyclist in the Tour de France eats per day?

Some examples of caloric intakes:
http://www.ultracycling.com/nutrition/calories.html

The average daily intake that's recommended is:
"UK Department of Health Estimated Average Requirements (EAR) are a daily calorie intake of 1940 calories per day for women and 2550 for men."
http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/logou...orie_intake.htm

edit: I was too slow, but I was having fun pulling up links and info. hehe.

Actually, the guy weighs 172 pounds.

-Frank

So can we assume Ghoul Average eats ~750 grams metahuman meat per week and the rest of his diet is a "normal" amount of meat?

Reading through the background stuff, it does sound like they require a lot of meat-based foods. I've never heard of a ghoul that can survive mostly on soy (even with it's one weekly human steak). But I also don't think ghouls necessarily manage to get all of those calories. They're basically predators, from what's given, and predators as a general rule have pretty inefficient digestive tracks.

But that's just pure speculation on my part

We had a longer thread here not long ago.

edit: This may help: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...10735&hl=ghouls

Can they eat human collagen gotten from liposuction operations? If they could, that would totally destroy the whole problem of having to eat people.

Ugh, I must have used the wrong pound type on my conversion program. I redid it by hand, 2.2 lb per kg, you're right, it should be 172. Hmmm... I used the troy instead of the other one, that probably made the difference.

Still, that means only 1.71 lb of meat.

So... they COULD eat collagen and not piss people off, except for the chop shop that sells the stuff for lip implants?

Yes, there are lots of ways to get human flesh for eating without killing or corpse camping anyone to get it.

But... why would you want to?

-Frank

Fat cells aren't flesh. So, I don't think they'd be able to just eat the collagen.

Ghouls have to eat that much METAHUMAN flesh or they get sick. They still need to eat other meat. Ghouls are incapable of digesting cooked foods, or most other things, period. They're strictly carnivores (although in our game, my ghoul is allowed to drink Alcohol) which makes it kinda sucky for the food costs. They have to have real meat. Of course, that said, they can always just drag the ganger that attacked them back home.

My ghoul character's pads always had a full walk in meat-locker. Always.

I really hate whipping out dictionary references in internet discussions, but I can't let that one stand:

Thanks for the replies. Got lots of ideas now.

In retrospect its probably cooler for the chracters not to walk around with flashlights.

So... ghouls can live peacefully with humans, as long as there are plenty of liposuction clinics nearby?

Well. On a thought, would you, as flesh eater, only eat the fat of a – mmmh – cow?

Would then, metahuman fat suffice for ghoul?

It might sustain him, yes. But the taste... come on. The ghoul doesn't just want to slurp the blubber from a tube or plastic bag, stemming from some obscure liposuction clinic.
He want's to bite and taste the real deal. The tender, juicy and "well hung" meat. The muscle. The tissue.
Yum!

If their target has a shotgun that is.
Normaly they will naturally tend to eat the dead. Up until that point in time, when there is no more carrion to be found.
As the predators that they partly are (they are part scavenger too), they will inevitably prey on the weak first.
The homeless, the children, the sick. Everything weaker than them, which is intruding on their hunting grounds, or just living nearby.
And they are hunting in packs, probably even setting up traps.
They will avoid anything not worth the trouble. Unless, of course, they hunger for flesh, because no easy prey has been caught for some time. Then they will attack the armed, and the stronger specimens of their prey.

Of course that is only for the more animalistic ghouls. As previous sourcebooks, and the 3rd ed. rules have stated some of them remain nearly their old self. And AFAIK, and i haven't read Loose Alliances yet, there is at least one ghoul (or ghoul-influenced) organisation out there, buying the dead from those who don't need them anymore, or don't want them.

But then again. If ones spouse died in a gang shooting, just because he or she was at the wrong place at the wrong time - would one rather see him or her properly – even if it is poorly – buried or cremated, than live in the knowledge that those at the morgue sold the body to them and that it has been eaten?

Their need for metahuman flesh will inevitably bring metahuman haters against them.

Even if they only need bodyfat from the clinics to be satisfied. They are still consuming it. They are the embodiment of every cannibalistic myth ever to be heard of.
They will still be hunted. Because people will fear, that those things will get a taste for the human, and change their diet, from body fat, to something more "substantial".

Unless Big D's Will regarding a substitute for metahuman flesh for the ghouls isn't fullfilled, no normal and unstrained co-existence will be possible.

well, they can always eat clones.

heck, those guys are already getting various pieces of them chopped off for other people to use (specifically, the original from whom the clone was made).

presumably, if no one has any problems with the clones being used as spare parts, it would be relatively not a problem for a ghoul to eat one.

Dude... feed them Humanis members! No one feels bad about killing Humanis members!

Other Humanis members might

bah... humanis member's opinions don't count for anything anyways. they're clearly intended to be treated like garbage anyways, IMO

Bah, just feed them elves. It'll solve lots of problems.

So ghouls are the lesser evil

I tend to believe, that they both will be hated by their living neighbors. And thus both will be hunted, just because they are different.

That's the way humans have reacted every time.

Actually, the rise of the shedim is a problem for ghouls:

Most bodies will be incinerated before being buried...

So a ghoul keeps a clone in a feeding tank, right next to his inexpensive rating 6 medkit. Kinda like having a fruit tree in your kitchen.

You can't just buy a cloning tank at Costco and plug it in. Raising clones requires serious medical background and takes special nutrient baths and... things.

(I don't clone, but given how much it costs, one would presume it's more than a $500 cloning tank and a power source.)

Sure, but since food supply is likely the #1 complication of a ghoul's life, it'd be worth it to buy/beg/borrow/steal the tech to make it happen.

You wouldn't even need to raise the clone. Just arrange a 'run against DocWagon and steal some pre-grown snacks off the rack. If you had an expensive DW contract before you got ghoulized, you could even enjoy the moral complications of eating your own clone.

You could just grow cancerous muscle cells. They just keep on growing, never age and stop dividing, and pretty much all you have to do is keep mixing in crushed nutrient tablets. And if you ran a company that did this, would you be eligible for the part of Dunkelzahn's will that pays you for a metahuman flesh supplement, or does it have to be wholly artificial and more easily mass-produced?

It has been suggested that the need for ghouls to eat metahuman flesh is in part because of the metaphysical association with the metahuman aura. In other words, they need to eat something that was once living. Whether or not a clone would suffice is...iffy, to say the least.

If it was that easy, someone would have claimed the bonus by now.

It is not so simple that science alone can solve it.

I dunno, AH. If it's not living anymore it doesn't have an aura (per current understanding of the term).

I have to agree with Azralon. They need real biologically human tissue. They don't need to (and can't) consume Essence, and they do dig up flesh from graveyards - whose aura of course is long gone. And there are references to ghouls sitting out behind cloning facilities hoping for scraps.

Now, you can make a good solid case that cancer tissue isn't human flesh, but a divergent species that ghouls can't eat. But force-grown human flesh is still human flesh. If you can implant it into a magician and have them not lose Essence out of the deal, you can feed it to a ghoul and keep them going for another week.

---

There are a lot of screwy things with the "Ghouls are a disease now" plotline. The most glaringly obvious of course, is that there's no way that anyone would classify Krieger's disease as a strain of HMHVV. It infects the same species (humans and metahumans only), maybe it has a very similar particle morphology. Great, that easily puts it into the same order and family.

But HMHVV is a species name. The ICTV establishes that no virus shall ever be named after a person. There can't be a "Krieger's Strain" of HMHVV or any other virus. That's not an allowed name any more than having a virus have a Greek letter or superscript appear in its name. But even disregarding that, since a Virus species is defined by being a isloatable and self replicating lineage that occupies an ecological niche, HMHVV and "Krieger's Strain" wouldn't be classified as strains of one another.

It doesn't matter if KS is different in only one base pair from other HMHVV. It's still a different species by definition. It has a different vector, causes a noticably different set of symptoms, and can't cross infect (you can't be a Ghoul and a Vampire at the same time).

It's like whoever wrote that plotline had no understanding of virology at all, and it pisses me off to no end. Maybe Ghouls get caused by a magical infection. Maybe that magical virus is similar in many ways to the magical virus that causes vampirism. Sure, whatever. But that virus literally can't be called "Krieger's Strain", nor can it be defined as a strain of HMHVV. That's not how human science classifies things.

Arrgh.

-Frank

Were I to expend my personal brainpower and defend the SR writer(s), I might offer something along the lines of:

"Biologically, a ghoul and a vampire are infected with the exact same retrovirus. However, these two contagions possess significantly different metaphysical qualities for reasons modern science has yet to fully understand. The Sixth World is notorious for exceptions such as this, as with the case of armadillos Awakening into two radically different creatures.

"Because they express radically different symptomologies in their victims, the viral variants were originally diagnosed as completely different diseases; hence the cultural misnomer that labels one as the 'Krieger strain' to differentiate it from 'vampirism.'

"In fact, the whole 'family' of HMHVV variants are replete with multiple misnomers as the scientific community attempts to catch up to the newly-Awakened Mother Nature. For instance, it is only homo sapiens sapiens that actually turns into a 'vampire.' All other metahuman subspecies (elf, dwarf, and so on) technically do not turn into vampires; the exact same virus expresses within them in radically different ways (turning them into banshees, goblins, and so on).

"For example, stating that an ork is infected with the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus is an unfortunate inaccuracy in terminology. It would be more correct to label the affliction as Homo Sapiens Robustus Wendigo Syndrome (HSRWD) brought on by the Aural Deficiency Virus (ADV), but the medical community is currently in such turmoil that reviewing official taxonomies and nomenclature -- normally a daunting task even in less interesting times -- has not yet been a major priority."

Looking at the original sentence, that refers to the ghoul's metaphysical aura, not the metaphysical aura of the meat. Human flesh is just human flesh, but if the ghoul doesn't eat some of it, it becomes magically sick.

Which brings up a pretty good question: if you told a ghoul that the pork it was eating was actually human in a convincing enough fashion, would it still become ill?

-Frank

They should eat apes and chimpanzees....