I was reading the thread about the super soldier quality, and was wondering, how advanced is cloning in SR4?

I took that other thread to mean that the host body for vat grown replacements and bioware could grow to adulthood. Would they be full fledged people? Is there any info on this?

And if so, could they clone a magically active character or even a ghoul or shapeshifter successfully?

magically active critters/people are a sort of 'mutation' to put it into cloning terms. However, I believe that it's a magical thing, not a genetic thing, so you couldn't clone them without serious side effects.

Cloning was pretty advanced in the practical uses of getting a limb back in SR3, I would say it's that far and further in SR4. You could make a super soldier that way I suppose, but that's your own problem then, lol.

k, wait... which thread about what quality?

[edit] found the thread, NM [/edit]

anyways, as i understand it:

yes, you can bring a clone to adulthood. i say this because the usefulness of an infant sized hand for someone who's lost their adult sized hand would be somewhat reduced...

as far as being full fledged people, i would say that depends on what you mean. everything physically there? yes, i would say so. not much use cloning a replacement if it doesn't have everything you might need replaced.

if, on the other hand, you mean thinking, i would say most of them are probably given the equivalent of severe brain damage, to keep them from being autonomous. they could, however, be made fully functional i would presume. naturally, they would have to acquire their own memories and experiences... it wouldn't be duplicated.

as far as cloning magically active people, ghouls, and shapeshifters:

yes to magically active people, however the clone being magically active is not guaranteed or even necessarily likely. at best, i would guess the same ratio as for normal people... possibly more or less, depending on the environment they are cloned in (which may be a very sterile, cold, unpleasant place.... ie, may have a background count. converself, it may be at a place with strong magic).

a ghoul could be cloned successfully. a ghoul is really just a person with a disease that has mutated them. therefore, the ghoul-ness would remain.

a shapeshifter is hard to say. a clone may result in another shapeshifter... but then again, it may result in a normal version of the animal, or another paranimal. personally, i am somewhat inclined to rule that it would result in a normal animal most of the time, otherwise corps would be much more able to create paranimals to guard their facilities... there would be no such thing as a creature being too rare to have guarding all facilities, because you could just make copies of it.

From what I understand, every beings astral signature is unique. Clones are non-viabale because only one being with that particular astral signature is viable at a time. So you can't clone someone and have it be viable because there is only one 'spirit' assigned to that particular genetic stew, and if it's already in use or already left this plane, then too bad.

Why would clones suffer any more astral signature difficulty than identical twins? Same genetic situation, same body.... clones are just identical twins delayed.

--K

THat's also a question about religion and spiritual beliefs - not SR mechanics. So have fun with it.

...well, okay, it's partly SR mechanics, but the source of an answer is in the above, lol....bah, just keep figuring it out.

Hmm...
if someone lost their body(killed with them in astral space), but HAD a clone of them waiting that they attuned themselves to beforehand...could they re-inhabit the clone?

I'd say there would definately have to be some 'attunement' there...maybe like spending Karma for bonding a focus or something...but for some reason I can picture some rich, powerful folks trying to achieve their 'immortality' this way. (leaving the astral body with a young clone on hand before they die, etc...)

Not saying it's possible...but not saying it's entirely impossible, either. Perhaps thru use of the Possession metamagic as well?

I would say no. The clone is no more you than your identical twin is. Medical clones don't even normally have a fully functional brain (presumably because the force growth process doesn't substitute for the months and years that it takes a nervous tissue to forge conciousness out of the raw mass of tissue that is encoded in our DNA). Heck, an identical twin of a magician isn't always magically active.

So I don't see a stranded magician inserting themselves into a medical clone. Those things are blind and not quite them, and not even actually empty of Essence. I would say that you might be able to get a body sharing plan with another magician if you figured out the Possession metamagic in a very short period of time.

The other magician goes astral, you grab the body for a few hours, they come back, you leave. And so on. You'd have to swap back and forth pretty frequently, so you'd either get a Sleep Regulator installed on the shared body or go stark raving mad. But both options are pretty funny.

-Frank

Twins had the same genetic code in the very beginning (first cells).
Everybody has genetic mutation (even if most stay silent), maybe that's the way a twin can be magical, and his twin brother can be mundane.

About the clone, I would say that brain need time and consciousness to be organised
A adult grown clone won't have the following skills : understand senses input, use any muscles ...
Not very convenient ...

As far as I undertand it in SR you can clone bits but not the whole.

I guess it's down to being able to handle a few of the appropriate growth triggers but not all at the same time.

I would however allow cloning for very high tech groups (universal omnitech for example), but with only a limited success rate.

Force growth clones + skillwires + knowsofts + personafix = obident robot. It would probably be less capable than a drone with a rating 5 robot pilot, but it would be just as doable as cyberzombies.

Now, a fully functional forced growth clone would be impossible due to the lack of experience. In the above example, the 'softs replace experience to a degree. Downloading a GITM into a clone body sould be doable with sufficient memory implantation technology. With current SR tech, one could potentially jury rig one by implanting the clone with a cranial computer with personafix emulation software and having the GITM run on the comp as a p-fix. Directly mapping a persona onto the brain is almost certainly beyond SR tech but SR medicine does have a much greater understanding of brain function and functional nano machines. This combination means that it is possible and one may find such experments in the secret labs of mad scientists.

The (freshly mentioned) "Dragon Heart" novels included a process of impressing a persona onto a living brain with the intention of overwriting the previous personality with someone else's. Sort of like a permanent biological personafix without the implants.

It was, naturally, an experimental process and it didn't get to fully run its course because the subject got away before the cybermancers showed up to transfer the personality donor's soul into the subject's body. The end result was a fusion of the two psyches in the subject, blending personality traits and memories from each mind into one fairly confused guy.

I expect it's a variant of the memory-alteration tech that showed up in a later SR3 expansion book, only with a muchmuch larger amount of data transfer than just "forget you ever saw me, you were having lunch alone instead."

And before anyone asks, if I recall correctly the mastermind behind the mindjacking couldn't clone himself a new body out of his original tissue because he had a horrible degenerative genetic disorder, which would just be passed on to the clone. That's why he needed a new body.

His disorder? All of the major connective tissues of his body had degraded to the point where he was nothing more than a vat of internal organs floating around like a chunky stew. Yep, he lived his life through a datajack. Hooray for the "Infirm" negative quality!

Mmmkay,

First, cloning a ghoul would not result in a ghoul unless HMHVV is a retrovirus. I don't know if the canon states weather this is so or not.

Second, any magically active character's clone would have the potential to be magically active because magical ability (like meta-human, shapeshifter or surge phenotypes) are coded by magically induced meta-genes. To truely be a "clone" the new being would have to be an exact genetic duplicate of the original and so would posses any requisit meta-genes. Otherwise cloning a new arm for a troll might result in a human limb, which wouldn't really work. The idea that one identical twin can be magical and the other not has little basis in the actual science of genetics. It makes no sense, but its one of those "Oooo Its Maaaagic!!" type things found so often in the fluff.

Personally I would rule that a clone has no Essence and no astral signature (except maybe as a link to is donor like blood left at a crime scene). If you think about the justification for why cyber and bioware cause essence loss (technology pollutes/distorts the aura, blah blah blah) growing up in a vat probably doesn't lend itself to the development of a healthy astral being. I would maybe give a clone like 0.25 essence- just enough to be alive- the rest effectively lost to the invasive high-tech procedures involved in its creation. So any mage clone would effectively have lost any magical ability they would have had just like the mage himself had loaded up on cyber and bioware.

Oh and beyond that, i agree that they would be horribly mentally retarded, again due to the whole vat thing and accelerated growth as discussed above...

Interesting...

I know its funny isn't it?

It requires a bit of virtual similitude, but if you're going to use RL science to explain how something works in your game world you should at least *try* to be consistant, right?

i'm hoping they'll add that in street magic.

it's kinda a major thing to just drop... it's been a rather major plot element in some established SR work already...

Not only was it a HUGE plot hook, but it also helped to implement that sweet, sweet, paranoia into players.

The fact that links of that kind was so much implemented into previous edition makes me belive that tracking with such link will be reserved for forsenic investigator, or maybe only available as a metamagic feat.

But yes, I pretty hope they'll be back in SM, in one way or the other.

But then again, it can be easily introduced into the rules without changing anything:
Just allow to drop the seeker for a piece of hair for ritual magic
-and-
Reduce the dificulty test for the search power, and whatnot, instead of image, substitute it for that same piece of hair.

Those two simple change can introduce back that important part of Shadowrun.