black market organs and "used" cyber is a large profitable market so... how much to give the players when they sell bodies to them? extra for awakened flesh? and how much for 'ware?

'ware's pretty easy: standard street price for fencing cyberware. Generally, our group uses the flat rate of 150 nuyen a body. Sure, it's worth more, but they're helping you hide a body you killed.

Organs usually sell by weight. Its 5 to 10 Nuyen per kilo depending on quality, I believe. For used cyber I'd suggest 10% market value according to grade except for used deltaware which is treated as betaware by canon.

shit... did i ever overpay them for those bodies:o no extra pay for magical bodies?

Mage's organs aren't any different to anybody else's... well, unless they mange to kill themselves with overcasting, anyway. Even then, though, the main difference would be the burning and wounding...

I dunno. If a dragon's body parts are super-duper valuable, I imagine a mage's body parts might at least fetch * 100 * (Magic Rating + Initiate Grade)

Except that dragon organs count as virgin telesma for enhanting purposes. I don't think human bits do. Well... if you use bits harvested from your own child, theyu might, but otherwise...

if nothing else they're simply in better condition. and they can be used for other mages in replacement can't they?

No more so than anyone else's organs.

One of our team eventually went in to organlegging before becoming a mindless ghoul we put down without recognizing him, which really teaches him not to undercut Tamanous.

Dragon body parts (usually nail clippings) are valuable because dragons are the most magical material beings in the world. Even their toenails are brimming with power that could make enchanting potent artifacts much easier. Its like orihalcum in toenail form.

Metahuman magicians, on the other hand, aren't so powerful that their toenails grant enchanting bonuses. You need much more of one for that. It is a pretty much given that any enchanter who is interesting in a metahuman magician's corpse is creating something that SHOULD NOT BE. Furthermore, such an enchanter would probably want to collect his own telesma, especially if he possesses the Sacrificing metamagic and/or geas.

The reason I say that I say that organs will go for 5 to 10 Nuyen per kilo is that cloned replacements are cheap and plentiful. They mitigate the need for antirejection drugs and can potentially last a lifetime. If you have enough money to pay for the operating you have enough to pay for the cloned organ. In addition, Awakened characters would be at a higher risk of magic loss with any generic organ, the fact that the organ comes from an awakened doner would not mitigate that. So the likelyhood of organlegged organs going to a medical facility that can charge thousands of nuyen for them is somewhere between slim and none. The likelyhood of them going to the Ghoul Nation is rather high.


Of course, there is the Hougun market to consider. Its always nice to have a strong and fresh body for one's zombies. I'd think those would go on a body-per body basis and would be a percentage the cost of enchanting materials depending on the quality of the body.

Salvaging cyber/bio gear would be iffy, depending on the circumstances of the departed's death. I think it could help decrease the 'looting' effect. Even book rates for salvaged gear is a little generous in my opinion, maybe if you managed to I dunno, strangle or suffocate the cyberdude to death, and the gear is more or less pristine, then sure, but if its 'death through lead poisoning' or spell-tacnuking, I'd say even less. Mostly due to damage and the like.

Thankfully, most SR mages use stunbolt for the reduced drain. This also keeps the bits fresh for the organlegger. Everyone wins.

What a bunch of cheapskates! Also without any basis in the rules, just pull a number out of the air or your butt.

I go by numbers in the book. Cyberware and bioware is listed. Cultured bioware becomes regular bioware unless implanted back into the donor, and then won't it be obvious who stole it and sold it back to him? Likewise, better grades of cyber get downgraded if the original was tailored to an individual.

Prices for Body parts are listed in SR3 page 128.

In all cases, use the fencing rules and deduct, or refuse to buy, if damaged.

Man and machine lists the values for O type vat grown organs. And the penalties and costs for second hand bio and cyber wear. SR3 lists what percentage of street price you’re going to get. It is from these values that the value of a corps should be assessed.

The problem with the organs is they must be harvested buy somebody with suitable skill quite quickly after death. And packed in appropriate containers. Cyber wear on the other hand will still be good when the body has been lying in the ditch for a weak002E

Edward

Then again, if your players are corpse-legging, chances are they're dissatisfied with the rewards of their current work.

Or they really like harvesting every single they can out of your game world. Try asking them what their problem is, and ajusting.


Generally, hawking the bodies is a sign of a problem/

most of the characters are broke, and after food fight needed a little cash. all of them are newbies and one of them remembered that you can sell bodies and cyber. another had a contact with some organ leggers. so they threw 2 of the bodies into the trunk, called their contact and had a meet. i just pulled a random number out of the air for the amount, and it was apparently _way_ too much.

Considering the overcrowded sprawls of the 6th world, it can't be too difficult for organ-leggers to get fresh dead bodies. A city like Kalkutta with today 20 millions inhabitants "produces" some corpses every day. Taking in account increasing numbers of SINless people and a more dangerous life (due to poverty and violence) Tamanous probably pay only for bringing corpses directly to them and not much for body itself.

But they're great when you need to get rid of a body. Or ten.

I generally don't have a problem with organ-leggers in my game because they like white phosporus.

But I'd go with 150 per body, and 10% for cyberware.

The biggest problem with organ harvesting is the proper removal and storage of the organs. Probably not possible in the middle of your run. Organs must be harvested immediately after death. You threw the bodies in the trunk then drove over here? Those bodies are ghoul chow now chummer. The 150 per body is probably quite reasonable for ghoul chow. My mage developed a spell to transform dead flesh to water to allow rapid harvesting of used cyberware. Yes the bioware is dissolved to but given you must begin removal immediatley after death how do you know what bioware the sammie has? Cyberware shows up as black areas in someone's aura but bioware doesn't at least in our game. If you want to sell organs for transplant the best way would be keep the donor alive until your street doc is ready to harvest. Ever seen the movie Coma? Someone else here pointed out that if your runners are driven to selling the enemy bodies for ghoul food they aren't getting paid enough. This is a big problem in SR3. Loot can be worth way more than the run itself pays. Cyberdecks and magical foci are worth big money as well as being highly portable. Keep that in mind when you consider how much a run should pay. If the nature of the run will prohibit looting the run should pay a lot more than say a smash and grab run. Let's say Corp A wants wants some data from Corp B's secret research facility in the Barrens stolen. If smashing the facility and looting the security decker's deck, the security mages' foci, etc. is allowed our group will take the run for next to nothing if Corp A has good intel on the facilities security. If the goal is to break in, copy the data and get out without Corp B knowing their data was stolen the price will be quite high. I'd say 75%-90% of the money we have made has been from loot.

You're assuming the individual in question is dead at the time of sale.

~J

99% of the time they are .... oops, we shot up some corp sec, or you have to drop some gangers/other runners, now it is time to have them harvested.

most of the time people are not willing to slap a trauma patch on an enemy they are planning to have recycled.

Nonlethal weapons + a flatbed drone to carry them = plenty of freshmeat.

Unless you are running a human harvesting operation that just ain't gonna happen.
And there are many better and easier ways to get coin. It is possible, but is one of the
silliest ideas I have heard in a while.

You can make a run out of it if you really think this would happen, corp wants you to investigate disappearances (to discredit their competition). Seems a bio-corp is harvesting raw materials. Have to find out what is happening, link the perps to a parent co, then leak it to the media.... then get paid. have a few corp is framing corp is framing another corp loops in there for fun.

Actually, you can support a high lifestyle by killing just 1 person per day and selling the body as ghoul feed. It is so simple that I'm surprisied everyone isn't doing it. (Of course, that would lead to a market glut that would drive down the price which is probably why Tanamous goes to such lengther to keep its monopoly.)

1) Anti-Ghoul fascists catching wind might catch up with you.

2) Who you killing? Because that might catch up with you: ("I attack the homeless bum." "That's a Lone Star operative. They're trying to catch who's killing all the bums in the area. His squad attack you.")

3) A hungry ghoul might just be luring you into an ambush to turn you into a ghoul.

I can think of one kajillion reasons that it doesn't work out in the long term.

One really good reason is that ... 'killing one person per day is an unsustainable hobby'!

Not at all, between the United States and Canada today the average birth rate is 12.505 per 1000 while the average death rate is 7.99 per 1000

The total combined population of the US and Canada is 333,751,109. Applying the average rates gets us 4,173,557.6 live births per year and only 2,666,671.36 deaths per year. An extra 365.25 deaths per year across North America won't make a dent in the population.

With all the extra brders and jurisdictions in North America after the Awakening it is far easier to take such an operation on the road than it ever was before.


If you are lucky, Texas may even honor you for your humanitarian efforts in the field of population control.

SR3, p128.

~J

I meant unsustainable in the sense that "eventually you'll irritate someone too much". A lot of those deaths you mentioned are noted and documented, so the risk you're actually running is showing on a blip documenting unexplained deaths.

Changing your M.O. for each killing gets difficult. There is no way that you could kill everyday and not get caught ... you just raise your profile (in a bad way) and sooner or later you will slip up and get nailed.

And since you're basically letting other people know that you're a serial killer (the ghoul customers), the threat of getting caught is increase on both ends.

I don't think that the ghouls are going to tell. I would not tell the cow police that the guy who is selling hamburgers to me is involved in a conspiricy to murder cows, after all.

Perhaps farming is a better idea. Just kidnap a few thousand women, hold them hostage, and force them to have children against their will.

According to some experts, an international conspiricy of Satanists uses this method to obtain infant sacrafices without alerting authorities. If there is no record of birth then it doesn't matter if there is no record of death. Now, there is absolutly no eveidence to support this theory but that only proves that it is true. If there wasn't a massive coverup then there would be some fallacious evidence that could be construed to support the position.

Ghouls won't spill the information, of course. But I'm sure that they can be pursuaded to snitch!

Of ocurse, you could incorporate and name your company with a cool redundant recursive acronym such as AAHFC corporation, which stands for AAHFC Alternative Human Flesh Corporation corporation.

Then, with such a cool redundant recursive acrynym for a name you could get bought out by an extraterritorial megacorp and then all of your human farming will be perfectly legal.

What colour is the sky in your sixth world h?

Every GM that I know would have you dead or locked up for good inseid of 2 weeks.
As for suddenly being snatched up by a megacorp, at that point you just get dusted and they stick a doppleganger in your place, then have the dopple sell them the company for 50 . Every mega corp has a doppleganger that they use for simple bump and take over operations.

^^Or, they could just use plastic surgery, or maybe ASIST brainwashing.^^

As for organlegging, well, I run it that the cost depends greatly on freshness, as well as market. While selling to ghouls will get you some change, to get a real blackmarket organ out there, you gotta take into several market factors: Metatype, condition of body, condition of organ, and if there's even a need.

The condition of the body and organ are linked in a few ways. While you can't sell a heart if the chest is shot to all hell, you also will find yourself getting screwed over if the heart's 2 cheeseburgers from a heart attack, if the body suffers from some sort of degenerative disease, or even if the person you're harvesting from is a strong user of drugs. Then, market comes into play. If you're constantly harvesting bodies, then you'll be flooding the market, and making yourself a target for the police, criminal organizations, and independant organleggers. Not fun to become the product you're selling. Linked to the market factors is metatype. What metatype is in need of these organs? A human heart won't last long in a troll's body, while good luck putting that troll heart in the dwarf. Remember, organlegging requires customers, with no demand, then there's no need to harvest the organs. Also, the people you're selling to may only buy occasionally, so as to avoid detection, as well as the fact that you're not the only game in town.

So, in summary: Can make a good occasional hobby, but leave most of it to the pros.

A: in shadowrun what exactly is wrong with becominga professional body harvester

b: Records? Cops posing as homeless bums? WTF game are you guys playing, in shadowrun 99% of homeless are sinless, thus not only are records not kept, the cops are banned from helping them. You can get fired for investigating sinless deaths

a) There are a number of problems: first, it's against the game's themes. The game's built around the idea of karma, remember, and there is very little karma to be gained out of being someone whose idea of working is "bring out yer dead," and even less to be gained for the runners who kill innocent people just for their organs.

Likewise, the entropic theme of Shadowrun is that nothing works forever. Dunkelzahn died, even megacorps rise and fall. Eventually, something happens to you.

Third, reputation, no matter how well you try to cover it up, will get around. Shadowrunners are a group for whom information is lifestream. And eventually, it's going to get out that you are a sonnuvaslitch who is killing innocent people. And then someone will kill you, and *they* will get karma for doing so, because you are evil.

Fourth, there's the question of how much you're making out of it. In a game where a body runs you 4 - 5k, it's possible that this is a feasible course of action. On the other hand, nabbing homeless people means that you're not getting the best quality in organs, so the price of them may drop. In my games, as I said, the price runs 150 , but that's because the characters don't have the infrastructure to do it themselves, so they sell to a chop shop, who rooks them because what else are the characters gonna do, and the chop shop's doing them a favor hiding evidence of murder. The price you're getting from the bodies has to cover the cost of an actually medically trained individual (because Shadowrunners are not M.D.s, no matter how much Biotech they have) and finding a doc willing to carve up bodies might be expensive. Likewise, a secure facility with the resources to do this is going to have high overhead.

Fifth, someone bigger might just come along. Deus might need your organization to perofrm some of his experiments, and you'll be much more useful to him without free will. The triads or the Hong Kong syndicates might decide you're making a lot of money they'd like to take advantage of. Or maybe the government tracks down your organization after an illegal transplant leads to a patient death. Anything can go wrong. Entropy. It's a rule of Cyberpunk, from Neuromancer onward.

b) First, you're right, Lone Star does not often investigate the deahts of sinless people. And if you're capable of keeping it discreet, it's likely that no one is ever going to find out. But imagine how much discretion that's going to take. Making sure that none of the organs you're putting into people fail and lead back to you, that none of the people you kill are connected to another shadowrunning team, or have a cop boyfriend or something. Entropy will hit you eventually, because all it takes is one bad situation to completely destroy everything you've worked for, and we're talking about a heavy investment of money, legwork and your soul because you're caring up dead people.

"Lone Star" as an interference can come in a variety of ways. A cop pulls you over on a routine issue, notices the blood smell coming from your trunk, and either you're going in his car in cuffs or he's going in your trunk, too.

Also, there's the issue of protectors. Every habitable sector in Seattle has some group who are responsible for dealing with aggression, whether it be the Brother Eye cybernetic monitoring system with its army of drones or a gang of wizbangers operating down the street. These people are going to notice people disappearing from their district if they're living there, and rumors of that unholy body chop shop operating across the city are going to get out eventually.

It's not that organlegging isn't something to turn to once in a while, it's that entropy always states that a long-term thing in Shadowrun is doomed to run out of luck eventually. Shadowrunners should never rely on one thing for very long.

but they always rely onMr Johnson to rbring them work

oh and on your points

INNOCENT people? Nononono, the corpsec guards that tried to oppose you on a run, stunbolt them to coma and put them in the truck. Ten to tamanous they go.

Remember kiddies there is a canon organlegger biz that buys from runners

2: some G<s use the amoral campaign rules. Also in the books Karma is linked to success, not goodness.

3: most runners rely on one thing for their entire careers: Hackers, rely on matrix tricks. Sams on their fighting skill, mages on their spells. The crimes might vary but the skillset does not.

4: Reputation gets around. Woopdy. The rep is that we complete jobs and forces opposing us disappear. SHould make jobs easier as guards will flee

1) I think that if you're capable of killing every corpsec in the compound. and given enough time to haul their bodies to the meatwagon you brought in while completing your objective, and are capable of getting home without being caught, your GM is probably going easy on you. Given that carrying a body (roughly 100 - 120 kilograms) in armor should be enforcing moderate stun on even strength 6 humans, that's a lot of damage to be under, not to mention all the gear YOU are carrying...

(but "Ah!" you say, "we have the shaman summon up some spirits to do it while we complete the mission." In which case your totem's probably a pretty sick frag that he's agreeing with your behaviour.)

2) If you're using the amoral campaign rules, that's true, you'd be earning karma and at least there, you're recognizing that this campaign is even more of a romp through the sick side of shadowrunning than even Shadowrun should be at. But on your second point: Let's look at some of the karma rewards from mission books. DNA/DOA:your karma is directly related to how many people you've helped. Imago: You actually lose karma for demanding a reward in a quest that, at bare minimum, will probably cause essence loss in your decker. Double Exposure is based entirely on surviving and trying to fight the Invae. Sourcebooks reward heroic, good actions, which organleggers are not.

3) And Runners usually die. The entire idea of Shadowrun is that "you are a deniable asset, and the jobs you do should kill you." A character who's been doing one thing their entire life may be choosing the manner of their death, but they should be dying. The ones who don't are probably gods among men, and get away with what they do because they don't just do the same thing over and over. In Shadowrun 4, great swaths of text are written about how patterns and getting used to things are antithetical to staying safe in the shadows. Most shadowrunners change their spots frequently. Even Captain Chaos died because he did what he usually did.

4) But on the other hand, this is something your enemies know, too, that if they're going up against you, they'll have to kill you, because you won't let them live. It means that instead of the mafia thug squad with bats beating you down and shaking you down for info, they'll just try and have a sniper take you out, or a car bomb, or hire a spirit to frag you up. Instead of Corpsec for a company you've been up against before deciding to take you prisoner, they may decide that the losses they'll face aren't worth it, and kill you dead. Sometimes, you'll come across someone willing to kill you just because killing organleggers means you get to loot a wiz medical facility with all the trimmings.

I agree that the campaign's a possibility. I mean, the amoral rules exist for a reason. I just think that a campaign built around "we do one thing" will eventually end badly for the PCs.

Eagle and Wolf would have a problem with it, and I didn't see them on your list.

Toss Eagle onto the "depending on shaman" pile. Wolf? Bullshit.

~J