Harvester

While he may not have going for the actual organs, he took just about everything else taht wasn't nailed down.

What's Tamanous?

Tamanous is a cabal that harvests organs from the living; someone'll get mugged one night, then they'll wake up missing half of their liver, or a kidney. They rarely kill people; murders get investigated. Something that's in between murder and a crippling mugging, though, doesn't. Rumor says that their facilities are guarded by ghouls and the whole thing's run by a wendigo.

IMO that's a silly idea. I think that serial organ theft would get investigated a lot faster than run of the mill murders. Murders happen every day in big cities but serial organ theft is creepy and unusual and would catch peoples' attention.

I'd say then that it depends on how apathetic the GM decides to make the Star. If the GM decides that the Star is the ultimate expression of apathy and they continue to behave algorithmically for years then that would fly.

But if the Star is in any way intelligent the people there are going to differentiate between Assault With A Deadly Weapon charges that are random and the ones that are systematic and involve organ removal. Furthermore, it's not just malicious wounding, end of the story. There's almost certainly an element of premeditation which would make charges more serious. The fact that you removed an organ from someone would probably open you up for some kind of torture charge. Something as exotic and bizarre as street organ harvesting would not be confused with random assaults if you decide that Lone Star has the slightest bit of intelligence.

The other thing is that Tanamous is an organization. Random street murders and assaults are, however, random.

This means that while Lone Star *cannot* possibly hope to stop all of the random attacks that happen on the street by virture of the fact that the attacks are *random*, there's a lot more for them to go on when they go up against an organization. There's more evidence, there's premeditation, there's methodologies, and inherently there's a certain degree of predictability. All of these things mean that an organization is a much more vulnerable target to the Star than something as ephemeral as all the random violence that goes down in a city. So, if I were the Lone Star commissioner, I might even considering focusing on organizations and spending resources efficently that way instead of pumping all my resources into the inefficient task of trying to prevent random violence from happening on the street.

The more I think about it the dumber Tanamous sounds.

The Lonies only care if the stolen organ belongs to a valued member of society. So some poor sot on the street will most likely be treated and released while his case will be lost forever in the evidence locker. I think the Tamanous also pays for delivery of dead bodies (cover of Loose Alliances).

People dissapear in the city all the time. If they were rich enough and pretty enough or mabye were somehow important, they may be missed. Random Joesixpack goes missing and the Star will likely put forth no more than the token effort to find them. Tamanous employs ghouls for that reason. Snatch the meat off the street, carve em up take what you need, the ghouls munch the rest. Mo Muss no Fuss. No witnesses. No bodies. No solid evidence. Also nothing to stop an underpaid Lonestar cop from trying to get a little something extra on the side. No matter how dirty it may seem.

I think Tanamous as an org is plausible, but that the benevolence of letting people live is hard to believe. When death is so cheap, why spend so much to try and keep them living? Besides, you get more parts out if you kill them or they're already dead, not just a part here or there.

So here we are having a civil discussion about a secret organization that kidnaps people, steals their organs, feeds their scraps to their ghoul guards, and the only point worthy of contention is why they wouldn't kill everyone.
I love Dumpshock.

Seriously, it does seem odd that they let people go. It seems someone would either be SINless, and they could just off them without questions, or it's an upstanding citizen and they shouldn't be attracting attention to themselves by nabbing them. What's our source that they don't usually kill people?

Okay, well, I guess I can go with the idea that most people just disappear, and some people occasionally escape either by being released (perhaps to spread spooky rumors) or the occasional freak-accident escape. It was the idea that, by policy, they only harvest an organ or two and then let you go to blab your story to anyone who'll listen and drum up public awareness when they could just make you disappear and keep ALL your organs that seemed implausible

I can check the Underworld SB, but I don't think Tamanous normally lets people go. They discuss the harvesting factory in that book, and none of those people were slotted for release, not to mention that Tamanous shows off their Amerindian roots by using every bit their prey: the leftovers are ghoul chow.

I prefer to run them as mentioned in Loose Alliances, hack hospital records to find who to keep an eye on then pick them up when you need them. More effecient.

And somehow, that sounds even better. Think I'll have to modify a mafia leg breaker I'm been toying with. Thanks.

I don't think kidnapping with intent to rape is anywhere near kidnapping with intent to steal organs. It certainly isn't the closest we have nowadays. Kidnapping with intent to murder or torture is a lot closer.