*shrug* Specific trumps general. It explicitly says that ghoul blindness is non-neuro.

Haha, I didn't realize passing security was your goal. I don't think you'll succeed, then, because of your smell, hideous face, infected aura…

SR4A says that the eyes develop a white film of cataracts, so I'm going with the eyes.

Clean Metabolism = no more smell.
Dermal Sheath or Silky Skin + Fiberoptic Hair = no more hideous face.
Infected aura = gotta Initiate to mask that, but how common are Awakened checkpoint guards?

We've been discussing ways to hide ghoulishness for a while. You just now realized it was a goal?

Not as common as guard spirits who report back to awakened sec guards.

They do mention getting cosmetic surgery and cybereyes in RC iirc. Heck, my assassin isn't infected and she constantly wears full body chemically sealed stuff with gloves and wigs.

Yeah, Biosculpting, Severe Modification. :/ Anyway, there are lots of options.

Just play that -5bp to be a second gen Ghoul your not infectious then. You have have to put up with the eatting humman fleash from brith issue.

Speaking of ghouls, this is reminding me I need to write more on that story of mine >.>




Only if you have a severely limited imagination.

One way to cover up the smell is through a Cybergland to pump out something nice smelling. You could also load it with something to screw up anyone with enhanced pheromone reception bioware. I also find the Gastric Neurostimulator to be a cheap and effective method of dealing with the inability to eat cooked food. It's also good for attacks that cause nausea.

The ghoul ork I made, Gork (yes, it's a painfully unoriginal name. It's ironic enough to be hipster) has a street doctor that he is in debt to that provides full body clones to eat. I began thinking that since it is cheaper to keep a full body alive than a specific organ, people with good medical insurance will likely have a full body on tap. When they make use of them, for a heart or a spine or something, they don't keep the rest around. Disposing of the remaining body is very expensive (currently any human remains must be fully incinerated, which is very expensive), so an unscrupulous doctor could charge customers for the incineration and feed the body to a ghoul instead. Here is a BBC news article dealing with someone who buried bodies instead of cremating them and pocketed the difference: [link], [link]

For the link-shy:


And for the purposes of writing, we have the Due To The Dead trope [link], proving that anyone doing this to people who were considered alive are the worst people, ever. So the question remains; Is this Street Doctor horrifically immoral, or is it merely fraud when done with a clone?I'm glad I used the drop-bear icon on this thread now.

Thats .. honestly not an easy question to answer. Everyone is going to have a different opinion on it. -Everyone-, the thing to figure out, is how your characters and your NPC feel about it themselves. Morality is a sea of greys, for a lot of things, not black and white.
I encourage you to check out the link in my sig for one take on how you can handle ghoulism away from the mold.

Okay, you're right, the psychopath and the psychopath frankenstein are also viable possibilitieres. Given how limited these characters are - touch vector and all (even injection would be rather limiting), not to mention the food and prejudice baggage - they always are ghoul first and anything else second. Unless you play a special all-ghoul campaign, of course, then everything's possible because the ghoul factor fades into the background.

even those are reasonably rare, as they cost 1 service for every 12 hours of work, making them terribly expensive.

How about paracritters? Anything relatively cheap and non-sapient you could train to sniff out nasty auras?

Watchers. And if you have two mages on the payroll, it's certainly cheaper than risk being caught with your magical pants down. Of course, leeches, biofibers, critters, glow moss ect. also help.

So, Watchers can act as an "astral alarm" (SR4A p.189) "Astral Alarm: Watchers can be instructed to watch or patrol an area of astral space, and to alert a specified person if they spot an intruder." -- you're assuming dual-natured critters count as astral for the purpose of triggering this astral patrol? That could make sense. Then the Watcher spirit wakes up the wagemage who projects to the appropriate checkpoint and he looks at the aura with a moderate assensing check, and that could detect the infected with some kind of accuracy.

I gotta standardize my security patrol / checkpoint tech some day.

And takes an elemental with him, since he is not stupid. Those cameleon thingies or any critter with magicsense could do to trigger the alarm - position them close to the entrance, put some glowmoss or leeches thwere so that it'S detected if someone manabolts the critters, and have a cam with an agent in it running an animal analyse proggie monitor the critters. If the animals react oddly, the wage mage comes.

Alternatively, a watcher positioned at an entrance could be instructed to yell bloody murder if an awakened moves past a specific checkpoint, without being given some astrally active token, but that'S an easier to break system IMO.

The thing that you have to take into consideration, though, are the large number of false positives you're going to see with any non-sentient detection system.

A mage walking through a checkpoint with an active Focus isn't necessarily breaking any rules. Same deal for a dude with a dual-natured paracritter pet. You might want to keep an eye on him, but then, you might want to keep an eye on a troll in a trench coat, too.

Depends. There are not THAT many awakened things roaming about.


Depends on the installation. If therer'S a ward, neither the active focus nor the critter pet will go though easily. If it's a secure site, odds are they're not allowed there, either. You really cannot generalise there; of course an open-access placelike a mall or something is very different from a Zero Zone.

If you are trying to make a ghoul whose nature is a dark secret, they have plenty of options to hide their nature, many of which have already been touched upon:

Infertile Infected (which gives you BP) means you don't have to worry about turning other people into ghouls.

A severe biosculpting modification will make the ghoul look like a normal metahuman.

The clean metabolism bioware will get rid of those annoying odors.

Cybereyes give you normal (or more likely, improved) vision again.

Note that for a mundane ghoul, getting any 'ware will cause them to lose their starting point of Magic, which means they will lose their dual nature (which is more of a hindrance than a boon to a mundane character). So no more worrying about wards, or about an astral mage hovering 20 feet above you peppering you with manabolts. Assensing can still detect your infected status, but it is a higher Threshold than simply noticing that someone is dual-natured.

Finally, deltaware digestive expansion will let the ghoul eat more normal food without suffering nausea, although you would need a Type O system to begin play with this. I'm not quite sure how I would handle Ogre Stomach. It duplicates digestive expansion, but does it duplicate deltaware digestive expansion?

Gastric Neruostimulator. Makes a character immune to nausea and the disorientation caused by nausea. The ghoul can then eat cooked veggies, and not suffer the secondary effects of being hit with a shock weapon.

If he has a contact/relative/team mate called Mork you win.

Though they should really be identical twins and even they should have issues knowing who's who.

Using Severe Biosculpting, anyone can be twins.

I just went with Ghoul ORK. I guess Magician ORK could be his brother. Sadly, I didn't intend the pop-culture reference; that would have been more creative.

Paracritters, if duel natured are a better bet, as once trained they mostly just cost you food, which is far cheaper then the conveyor belt of binding materials you'd need for spirit guarded checkpoints.

500¥ for the materials to bind a force 1 spirit, which a good mage with a binding focus should be able to get 6 or so services.

We had a player once roll up a ghoul who was a Jahovah's Witness Amway salesman. We got the bounty on him before the first run.

But how would you have responded if he only ate those people that came door-to-door?

He was one of those people going door to door!

telemarketers that are ghouls...

talk about bad day if you trace the call down and hit the joint...

I'd hardly call the Orc/k "god(s)" from Warhammer pop culture.

More info.
http://warhammeronline.wikia.com/wiki/Gork_and_Mork
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Gork_and_Mork

I wouldn't call them culture.

and has 2 dice to 'observe' with, meaning just about anything could sneak past it, especially a duel natured creature who could see it.

Well, it depends on what Obvious means, if it's actively watching, etc. There's a whole pile of Astral perception mods, we were discussing it in a thread last month.

Yes I know. By RAW its possible to stealth down a perfectly straight corridor lined with pressure sensors, motion detectors, camera's of every available spectrum of light, wide band radar sensors, and filled with all sorts of spirits looking for astral signatures, auras or anything else which shouldn't be there.
Common sense on the other hand says such things are likely impossible.
I'm more of a common sense sort of person.

'Common sense' says that a dual-natured person can't just walk past a spirit whose job is to notice if people are dual-natured, either. It's not like it has to detect deltaware, just an Infected, dual-natured aura. *shrug*

Ya but if you can see it, its often possible to work out its field of view, and avoid it. Also moving in with a large crowd of people at one can obscure your aura, as well as any access to masking, or mental manipulation spells so it ignores you.

Certainly there are things you can do, but it's hardly a non-issue.

didn't say non-issue, just said 'possible'

Ha, you said 'just about anything could sneak past it'. I apologize for getting the wrong impression.

by RAW if you have more then 6 dice in your stealth pool you're virtually guaranteed to be able to. Hence the latter comment about preferring common sense to RAW much of the time.

Again, unless you take into account the situational modifiers. Not to mention the Stealth-on-Astral rules.

+2 for always looking, and the stealth on astral rules are nothing special.

Yes, they are. I.e., it barely functions, especially if we're talking about a checkpoint (and I thought we were?). My point is that it all depends: a busy jungle path is very different from an empty facility.