I thought I would bring this up because I'm Currious and trying to contribute proactively and intellegently to these awesome forums. With that said (and I'll pobably get a lot of shit for this) I'm Pro Surge... Why? Diversity, the more story agles I can work with and the more funky looking villians I can come up with the better.

For instance in my Heyday of playing SR3 when surge hit my team was playing in chicago and we had to go to lincoln park zoo. Guess what we found? SURGE! it was really like going to the zoo. Granted this was a halloween run so it was also humorous.

But other tha that it allows people to do crazy things with their characters like give them tails and not cybernetically. The biggest gripe I will express is that players often look for the advantages of Surge and because their arent any besides cosmetically people tend to knock it.

Finally in my rant, Surge does need to be fleshed out. I like it, I want to hear more of the advantages / disadvantages of being a surgeling for players (BP edges and flaws?). The more options players and GM's have of playing outside the sandbox more power to them. Weak arguement I know but add some fuel on the fire and lets see where this takes us

That's not a yes or no question.

I am pro SURGE, because the way it was presented, it's a small enough population that if you'd rather not deal with it, fine, don't deal with it and there's no reason it has to come up in your campaign. If you do want to deal with it, it's a subculture that has clubs and other gatherings, so you can hang out with all sorts of weirdos. If your campaign style is such that someone wants to play a catgirl, then fine, the rules are there. If not, then don't let anyone play one and they're rare enough that they need not be dealt with.

Basically, I like it because it's easy to take it or leave it, as you prefer.

Guessing that you meant 'No' to signify 'Anti-Surge' and 'Yes' to signify 'Pro-Surge' (As opposed to you polling us on whether or not we actually had an opinion on Surge to begin with) I voted 'No - I am not in favor of Surge being expanded upon, nor the concept in general'.

Ugh. Surge. Yech...

...Truly one of the very few parts of Shadowrun I try to pretend never really happened.

Agreed, what about apathetic?

Since SURGE basically only occured during YotC, and it has been 5 years for most, they are just your average freaks, most of the effects can be duplicated by bio and/or cyber after all.

I only know of one place other than the comet that caused surge effects, and that is a river in India IIRC, which has occasionally caused surge effect with a mana flood down the river. SoA I think. And those were apparently becoming rarer and rarer.

One thing you could do is have a SURGE quality which gave you a certain number of free essence points for bioware taken at chargen (on top of the cost of buying them, for balance purposes)

I voted "yes", because I am pro or anti-surge.

That's a terrible poll. I guessed that 'no' meant anti-surge so I voted for that. SR3 already risked slipping into an anything goes fantasy game. SR4 has pulled it back beautifully, but I see no reason to throw in a load of furry elves and undo their good work.

My 0.02

Are you pro or anti surge, yes/no?

Argh!

What a terrible poll question. (Sorry m'man, but terrible, terrible wording.)

I'm going to assume you meant "Do you like SURGE" Yes/No and vote accordingly.

Scads of reasons why, but, I can sum it up in a word:



Catgirls.


It was an event, an experiment like introducing the Horrors, but, one that wasn't well received and can now be swept under the rug and forgotten.

So, stick me firmly in the Anti-Surge crowd.

I support SURGE but also remember to keep the human element. Too often I think, players look at the stats and changes while forgetting what that can do to a person's psyche.

Imagine going to bed with a terrible back ache and finding the next morning that your spine is realigning itself to start shoving a bony growth out through your lower back. Then have the hair on your body, start thickening and growing in, so suddenly you don't recognize yourself. Lastly, you look into the mirror and don't even see your own eyes looking back at you, instead your pupils have stretched into slits rather than points and gold flecks have become more dominant than even people with hazel eyes can account for.

Do you have surgery to correct the growth? Change your grooming rituals to include full-body Nair? How about wearing contacts to cover your new, inhuman eyes?

Or do you accept the fact that you are now a freak, outcast by society with a whole new Night of Rage just for you...

So yeah, SURGE can create a new level of depth for characters, but players have to examine the changes and question how the runner is going to adjust.

Corrected poll options.

If SURGE is played up as the freaky of the freaks, then yes. If it's just "Hey, lookit! I can be cooler than you!" then no.

If SURGE happens in our game, my ork will become the biggest racist around. Basically, "HEY! I earned my acceptance, and I'm finally one of the in crowd. Now I shall mock you!" Not a great personality trait, but one that seems interesting....

My character has a long prehensile SURGE tail, and frequents a SURGE club in Seattle called Dr. Moreau's Island.
Personally, I think SURGE is really cool flavor-wise and gives more homage to mythical beasts, which is certainly part of Shadowrun. Olmec culture was full of those freaky half-jaguar images, greek culture had cyclopses, and so on.

For all you Anti-Surge players, I have to ask, what are your opinion of variant metatypes? Those "I'm a troll only different" metatypes from the old player's companion? Personally I hated those things. They were limited in scope, somewhat abusive, and made me think "well, if orcs from the middle east have different stats why don't humans?" But surge I loved, because It was simply mix and match freaky traits to make new mythical people. Kinda like open source metatypes. So I retconned the regional variants from the previous book to be "Spike" surgelings: people who expressed surgeling traits well before YOTC.

I have a full set of house rules for surge in 4th edition. If anyone is interested let me know and I'll post them. (maybe I did already, but I don't see them in the complete list of conversions so I'm not sure.) The basic Idea was that surgling was an advantage you purchased that gave you access to "surge traits", other advantages and flaws you could only buy if you were a surgeling.

Yes, because it gives Humanis more targets to go after.

I'm ambivalent as to SURGE. I think it can be cool, and it can suck spectacularly. It all depends on how the group in question is handling it.

On the optional metatypes though, I pretend that they just don't exist. They're waaaaaay to "cram some (more) D&D into SR to get D&D players to try SR".

Not that I don't want people trying SR, but that's not the way I'd do it.

First of all thanks for fixing the post. Im at work and when I was typing it my boss was comming down the way to get in my face about TPS reports (yeah its office space). so my fist poll is a failure in some senses, something to learn from.

Surge is a great way for shadowrun to distance itself from D&D. Yeah you can get cybered up to look cool but people look at cybered individuals just as weird as they to surge. Its all tabo which is why shadowrun is better than D&D in some aspects, there is a consequence to things that are sensationalized or diferant, things to fear and lots of subjects to explore.

No SURGE, no metavariants, and no sasquatches.

See? As further proof that humans are hypocritical, emotional, and subjective creatures,

I love sasquatches.

For anyone that has Sasquatches in their games, I highly recommend that you find the Sasquatch song by Tenacious D and give it a few hundred listens. It is awesome, as the sasquatch in it is a drummer as well.

Could you clarify what you'd like to see a bit, lorechaser? I'm getting that you'd like to see something like

SURGE - (cost)5bp (would be a "quality" in SR4 right?)
Gives you the ability to apply three positive SURGE traits from <list>. You must also choose one negative SURGE trait from <list>

or something like that.

Am I reading that right? I'm wondering because it's not enough to be a system really, at least as far as what I think when I see "system". I'd think it would just be a quality, in which case you'd just have to have lists of positive and negative traits to choose from.

Sorta like this?

Pos Qual - Long Tail - 10BP (15BP)
+1 dice to Athletic tests due to better balance. Character can move it at will. (wagging, bending, flicking) 15BP version is prehensile and can support the character's weight. 1/2 Character's normal physical stats when using it as a third 'hand'

Neg Qual - Third Eye - +10Bp
Character has a third eye in the center of its forehead. Does nothing to improve eyesight, but can close one his normal eyes and still see normally. Opens and closes at will.

Neg Qual - Wierd hair - +5 (+10)
Character has abnormal hair growth over parts of its body, determined by the GM. (+10 version is full body fur/hair growth)

Pos Qual - Claws - 5BP (10BP)
Character's finger nails have hardened and sharpened into claws. Unarmed damage can be physical at (Str/2)+1. 10BP version are retractable claws, like a cat's claws.

Yup - I was looking for Pimp's conversions.

I just don't want to see only positive surge, basically.

Those wernt a part of his conversion, I just thought those up off the top of my head.
I would suggest making a SURGE limit, whatever it might be, outside of the normal quality limit. So you can have your +/-35BP limit in qualities and your +/-35BP limit in SURGE effects.

Sure you might wind up with a two headed freak of a shadowrunner, but the player will have to deal with the problems of playing that type of character. It all depends on how the GM handles the world.

pro-surge.

One of my characters gain an interesting range of options...like dual-natured for a street sammie...

I can't vote in this one - I'm neutral on the topic of SURGE.

Sounds like a man law to me... "MAN LAW?"

Forgive me if this was covered in the thread and I missed it, but what IS SURGE?

I find it referenced briefly in SR4, but it's never explained.

SUdden Recessive Gene Expression
It happened back in 2061, so its a SR3 thing. It came out with 'Year of the Comet' book.

There are a few people who have some charts to port it over to SR4, and considering it only being 9 years from SURGE, its reasonable to have a character with SURGE effects.

SURGE caused some people to mutate.
Some would get a pre-hensile tail, fur, extra eye, astral perception, etc...
All kinds of mutations.
Caused quite the ruckus when it happened.
SURGE mutations stopped after the comet went by,
but who knows, high potency magic may cause to happen again.

Supposedly SURGE came about because of the rising Mana levels, possibly spiked by the comet. I'd be interested to know is this kind of mutation happened in a similar manner in the 4th World.

It could be that with events such as the Great Ghost Dance and the Comet causing spikes and steep rises in the levels of mana, rather than the gradual growth which was experienced previously, we are seeing mutations and cross-polination of static types.

From my fractured memory of Harlequin's Back, Harley tells us that one of the big problems which the powers that be are trying to deal with, and in fact the reasoning behind the entire astral quest is because metahumanity has taken steps like the GGD to force issues. This has had the unwelcome side-effect of bridging levels of existence which were connected back in the 4th World.

These spikes and mutations would call on recessive traits such as the blood wood ritual (osteocuspis), goblinization, or the re-assertion of fantastic creatures which existed in the 4th age, without the gradual, controlled expression that had been exhibited before.

Thoughts?

So contact or close proximity to a mana well, either natural or man made, could have a chance to SURGE someone, depending on if they have the recessed genes or not.
Also, considering the ammount of magical research going on in corperations, you would think that mana levels near them might rise higher than other places. Hell, some corps might try and cause SURGE on purpose to study the transition and record the required stimuli to cause it.
Sounds like an interesting reason to have a changling character in SR4. They werent affected by the comet due to whatever reason, but they were affected by forced SURGE caused by a corp experimenting on them.

I voted pro. But I only use it as a means for adding in some Earthdawn references. All surge effects in my game are in some way hinting towards some element of the 4th world, and they are almost non-existent in 2070, as people turned only once in the year of the comet. I had an elf fixer get blood elf spikes during that time. I also planned to have a sorcerer dwarf player suddenly get visits from dwarven ancestor spirits as a sort of surge effect (that would get him kicked out of his magical group, as it had a sort of pact against summoning), and connect that with the occurance of shedim in some way. Never came to pass though. The freak show subculture thing didn't interest me much, as it already existed with surgery. The interesting part was having magic act up and allow for some glimpse of what's to come.

So is magic showing us that there are going to be more metatypes in the future like lizardmen? The world already has a phobia of everything. I think surge would be great if it was like the native american population in the united states. you know they exist but dont necessarily see them all the time. In my life time I have meet 4 (i think 4) total and knew of 1 family.

Thats how i see surge. I think the idea of inducing surge could fit into a threats book. But while the corps induce surge from mana lines and wells i hope it would have some nasty mutated affect to screw the crop who commited the crime (mabye lycanthroy or some sort of altered beast syndrome?).

What else could you do with it? One las thought just occured: if a surgeling hit a mana dead zone (like space) would they turn back to normal human form?

Is that directly from ED, and if so (or if not), what SR canon exists to support it?

I always got the feeling that the meta's children just started to be only human, that is what caused the fading, rather than them suddenly starting to mutate into human.

Since I don't have the sourcebooks handy any more - did you only SURGE within your type?

IE Would a human ever become a minotaur, or did only trolls become minotaurs?

Lore--Humans could goblinize into Orcs and Trolls, and any metahuman could transition into an appropriate subtype as i recall. So only Trolls could become Minotaurs due to SURGE

LOL i didnt mean litterally I ment numbers wise. Forget all the crazy shit the natives have done I just want to see little enclaves and maybe their own nation (everyone else has one).

Just wait till they bring back the lizardmen.

*koff*t'skrang*koff*

I dont know if there are enough changlings in the world to form a nation... It did affect only a very small portion of the population, hence why you can ignore it if you want.
This also is why the people who did SURGE are outcasts, because there arnt that many like them. There might be enough to make a few clubs in Seattle, but Seattle is a big city.

American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2004 (a) 1.0% - That was the 2004 census estimate of native americans in the USA

Surgelings can have their own nation if they affected 1% of the population worldwide if they banded together.

That would really piss off the people who are anti surge. Just a point it doesnt matter if it happens or not