I have some questions that hopefully someone here can point me to some
answers on:

A) What exactly are the bounties on Ghouls and other para-critter menaces? Are we talking spare change or some decent nuyen?

B) In 4e, there apparently are no rules on Disease Resistance Tests or the specifics of HMHVV infection possibilities (something which runners never seem to contract, no matter how many ghouls bite them or bleed all over them with all of their bodily fluids carrying the highly infectious Krieger Strain of HMHVV). Any older references on this that actually have specific game mechanic entries?

Don't know about canon, but:

Bounties would vary from place to place depending on the Ghoul population and their threat to the outside world. If there's maybe one nest that really only snags street rats, there's not going to be much of a bounty. I would say start at 750 nuyen a head and work from there.

Disease resistance in 3rd, if I remember correctly, was a Body test. For Ghouls, I would say a Body test with a threshold of how much damage was dealt by the Ghoul to the player. If they fail, they're infected.

Isn't it illegal to pay a bounty for killing ghouls in the UCAS? IIRC, Dunkelzahn got that law passed.

Dread Polack

Actually the SR3 companion even told you about playing as a ghoul after the change. You might have to translate things a little, but I thought it was pretty good.

Ghoul bounties vary widely. In Seattle it was about 100 nuten for a male and 150 for a female. In Germany it was EC 10,000, and in England it was 25,000 either pounds of Nuyen, can't remember which. Fat chance collecting it though since pretty mcuh everything that could be a weapon was banned or regulated and mages had to give material samples and have implant bombs to make sure you behaved.

I always thought Seattle's bounty was low, but that was probably a game mechanic. It was set low so all new players wouldn't go out and get rich quick killing ghouls.

My 2 are that ghouls are a walking plague that need to be hunted to extinction.

My 2 are tossed into Frank Trollman's hat. Da capo!

Why was the bounty higher on female ghouls?


[edit]How did they determine the gender - drag the entire day's haul back to Mr. Johnson?

Gouls are not hunted in the UCAS and CAS. In the NAN they are just killed if they are found near towns or cities. In Quebec they is still a bounty on their heads. You will have to look it up in the Shadows of North America to see how much it is.

Just because there aren't government sanctioned ghoul bounties, doesn't mean us shadowrunners don't get hired to put some lead on ghoul communities.

I seriously doubt it was Tir Nan Og, them bein' so magic lovin' and all. Fraggin' daisy eaters.

If you were a sick and twisted individual, you could easily exploit ghoul bounties by just getting a bunch of squatters infected, shoving them into a cage until they transformed, then killing them to collect the bounty. All you'd need to do is capture one ghoul, and you could make all the ghouls you wanted.

Hired to clear out a building full of squatters? Why not get paid twice! Heck, for the squatters that didn't survive, you could probably find some ghoul-sympathizers to sell the meat to!

You know, when it comes to ghouls, somehow I suspect that sexual reproduction is probably far and away in the minority compared to infective reproduction.

Plus, walking around with hacked-off body parts is a really good way to get infected yourself...

Seems like the problem with classic werewolves to me. You get bitten by a werewolf, you turn into one. Reason why the world isn't everflowing with werewolves? You gotta survive a werewolf attack first.

Ghoul reproduction really isn't that weird if you think about it for a while. Let's consider the problems that ghouls have getting laid:

• They Smell Really Bad.
  Well, they smell really bad to non-ghouls. To other Ghouls they smell virile and attractive. So that's not really a problem.
• They look like crap.
  Well, they look all funky on the physical plane - they are also blind on the physical plane and get around entirely by astral perception. And astrally, they look much more alive and powerful than the pale shadows that mundane humans look like.
• They are all clawed and shit.
  Not a problem if your potental mate also has claws. In fact, when you get up in the morning with a strength of 6, you probably don't even want to have sex with normal humans - they're like little girls to you.

Really, once you get over the minor details like "humans are genetically determined to enter a fight-or-flight response upon seeing or smelling a Ghoul" - they're actually pretty hot. A person who becomes a Ghoul is more than twice as strong and gains less than 10% body mass. So they are extremely athletic and healthy - prime breeding stock except for the whole thing where their mere presence invkes an instinctual revulsion response in normal metahumans.

And other Ghouls don't have that response, so from their perspective every Ghoul woman is built like Keira Knightley and is immune to preeclampsia. Seriously, how could you not hit that?

-Frank

How's that song go? "ooo that smell... can't you smell that smell...."

"Yeah baby! Shake that aura!"

The Krieger strain of HMHVV is the one that causes people to e transformed into ghouls. The reason it is the most feared is it doesn't require being carried off and having your essence drain away like with the primary strain that creates vampires. Usually this is fatal anyway, doesn't matter if you become a vampire or not he drained your essence to 0. Your dead with out some serious medical treatment. "Lost Essence can never be regained (short of the Essence Drain critter power)."

Most people who become infected with the ghoul strain and actually become ghouls are the poor and sinless individuals. Both could be required.
Someone who is poor but still had a SIN card might be entitled to treatment for HMHVV by law.

Someone who is not poor but still SINless say a shadowrunner is of course not poor and by that they have money and could either bribe someone or use a fake SIN card and get treatment.

The most likely event of a runner becoming a ghoul would be if they went for treatment they'd be recognized and arrested. So they sit and hope they haven’t contracted the disease.

Its also possible that someone who is infected but not yet transformed could pass on the disease. As "Krieger infection can be passed on through contact with any bodily fluids from one already infected."

In response to CrakkerJack the Jarka-Criscione strain turns humans into loup-garou described as basically a werewolf.


I recall from the sega shadowwrun game ghoul hunting ranging from 25 to 250 a head. Depending on your skills. With a maximum of 20 kills.

I didn't realize they had to wait for it to rot. I had assumed that they could only drain essence from living(or recently so) creatures.

Thanks for the correction:-)

Well, now I know(and knowing is half the battle.) I thought they did have essence drain. Obviously, today is my day to be wrong.

It's one of the many facts that makes "Krieger Strain HMHVV" a bad description for the disease that causes Ghoul transformation. There are others:

1. Viruses are not named after specific humans, and have not been since the 1980s. Thus, no virus is ever going to be named "Krieger Strain". That's bad sci-fi right there.
2. People turn into ghouls without infection. People get the infection without turning into ghouls. The virus causes ghoulishness in the same way that HPV causes Cervical Cancer: having the disease makes you way more likely to have the condition, but the virus only correlates with the condition. There's no 1:1 correspondance like there is for Vampirism.
3. Ghouls are not vampires, and do not share any of the signature abilities or magical limitations of the Vampiric virus.
4. Ghoul transformation takes months, not days.
5. Ghouls don't eat Essence or the living.
6. Ghouls need normal caloric intake, Vampires do not.
7. Ghouls are alive during the entire transformation, Vampires die and then a vampire is created afterwards.

Seriously, there is absolutely no reason to classify the virus that spreads Ghoul Transformation as Krieger Strain HMHVV. Calling it that just causes confusion amongst people in the world and players of the game.

--

In character, that would be the reason to attempt to classify Ghoul transformational viruses as strains of HMHVV - not because there is any scientific reason to classify it in that manner, but as a propaganda tool against Ghouls.

-Frank

How do you know that the taxonomy hasen't been changed between now and the outbreak of HMMHV?

All the magically mutating virus are named after HMHVV as vampries came first then the others followed. Its called HMHVV with some other name of the various strains for ease of use on the players. 99% don't want dozens of names for the virus's that cause these mutations we just want ONE.

elf (Homo sapiens nobilis),
dwarf (Homo sapiens pumilionis),
ork (Homo sapiens robustus), and
troll (Homo sapiens ingentis)

You maintain they are all Homo sapiens because they can interbreed with out difficulty.
You also forget that shadowrun is fiction not real life. In real life different species can't interbreed and produce viable off-spring(off-spring that can reproduce)
A Troll looks further removed from a human then Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal) do from use homo sapiens.

A ghoul is even further gone.
Then of course quote me an official game manual any edition (Novels are crap) that has a ghoul interbreeding with another metahuman?

So to cling to the idea they must be the same species based of the fact they can interbreed. (A fact of life almost no sci-fi or fantasy setting has followed. is stupid, quit acting like that dork in the movie theater who says the lasers should be invisible and there aren't explosions or sound in space.

Why don't you complain how when an Elf and a Troll have a kid the child is somehow either one or the other and not a mix of both. Doesn't that fly in the face of science just as much as everything else you've been complaining about?

Actually, Metahumans either breeding true or producing a genetic throwback (plain humans) does make some sense from a scientific perspective. You can illustrate it (albeit greatly oversimplified) with a Punnet Square.

.... T ..... h
----------------
E | E/T | E/h
---------+-----
h | T/h | h/h

E= Elf traits
T= Troll traits
h = Human baseline

Despite how different they appear, metas aren't separate, but related humanoid species (as asses, horses and, zebras are related species of genus Equus), but distinct phenotypes (subspecies) of the h. sapiens genotype. One's Elvishness, Orkishness, etc. is, essentially, the result of a specific combination of alleles - much like blue eyes or the ability to fold your tongue - under the influence of ambient mana. The taxonomy used for the different metaypes (h. sapiens <whatever>) would tend to back this up. For whatever reason, in the SR universe, the E/T combo (for example) simply doesn't produce a viable fetus.

Frank, my theory on why the virus names are as they are has always been:
All "strains" of HMHVV are the same virus. By any scientific examination they are exactly the same. The exact same base pairs.
The virus that turns you into a vampire and the virus that turns you into a ghoul are the exact same; your electron microscope and gene sequencer can not tell the difference.
The differences are in the 4th dimentional "astral shadows" that we heard about in some of the old-edition talks about meta-genes.
Obviously, current laws of classification can not appropriately apply to this situation, so they made some new rules.

Someone needs to change shooting target under Frank's name into Ghoul Rights Advocate

Hansen disease is accept name for leprosy. They renamed the disease after him.

Franky why the hell do you care?
The shadowrun world has declared that the virus that cause further transformation in metahumans is HMHVV.
The game has long sense declared that one can be infected by a ghoul and be transformed into one.

Science Fiction is alright in the game but pusdo-science isn't? Why can't they call the virus that.
Why can't the name it after a scientist? Give me something other then. Thats not how they do it in real life crap. Because thats all it is crap. You can make the same argument for why ANYTHING in the game needs to be changed.

Its a game, and for people who don't give dam how they name virus in real life. Giving all the mutation virus the same name is good for everyone except of course for you.

You say that the disease replicates in dead tissue THIS IS FALSE. There is no death involved, vampires aren't undead remember. And Essence 0 is not instant death, but coma and death over the course of several days. (possibly months if hooked up to medical equipment)

HMHVV is not named after how the virus replicates. But what it does. ALL HMHVV strains have one thing in common. They can cause massive physical changes to the subject, supernatural abilities emerge. And in almost all cases, (ghouls being only exception I'm aware of). Essence drain.

The last quality is a diminished mental capacity and a reverting to a more animalistic state in some cases. (not a vampires and ghouls become monsters but some do)

Now the virus that can create ghouls has ALL the basic qualities of those other virus save one. Essence drain.

Is it so unreasonable to classify a magical virus that may magically replicate after the effects instead.

Yes, but there's a point where "Realism" gives way to "this won't be any fucking fun".

For example, any corp with a little cash to blow could easily just hike their security budget up a little bit past "insurance purposes" to actually "Impossible to get in and out without having been seen and traced by the security", but nobody does that because it would be a boring fucking game.

And nobody (except Frank) wants Vampirism Viridae 1-5, we want Kreiger Strain HMMHV.

If Frank's rant on viral taxonomy causes you to change the way you run your SR game, you deserve your HMHVV. In the face. Right now.

Seriously, in no way is he saying 'do it my way now'. Sure, it's enlightening that he told us this. Now if we want it, swank. If we don't it's all 'cool Frank, thanks for the heads-up'.

Now then, back to the original subject. I'd definitely advocate ghoul hunting on the same level that I advocate my players to take up, say, organ legging. I won't stop them, but then again it's them who deal with the consequences of their activities. There's always going to be a need for killing in SR, so someone will pay for dead ghouls. Adjust the price roughly using, oh, 500 nuyen baseline per head for male. Plus 250 female, if you want to do the whole 'deer hunter' feel and inject the feel for the players that maybe what they're doing is deprived.

Would there be actual, organized 'control hunts' for ghouls? Possibly, but this would be a regional issue - you'd see support for hunts to come more from private and corporate interests as opposed to governmental and strictly on a localized scale with strict parameters. A ghoul hunt would always be a means to an end; be it to clear em out of an area to be developed, gain political cred amongst the normals, or what have you.

And the part B of the OP has been answered with rules already. Cool.

By the way, thanks for the naming heads-up, Frank.