This came up in my game 2 sessions ago:

Team was searching the barrens for a secret research facility. The Summoner and the Face got a clue that this one hobo had his friend grabbed a week ago so they go and check out the building he squats. They get there and turns out that the guy is hiding because some ghouls moved in.

Long story short, the Summoner takes some physical damage as a result of the encounter that had a possibility of infection. The Krieger Strain is supposed to be contagious, but because Ghouls don't have Essence Drain and Infection they can't actually infect you with HMHVV.

I tried looking in the Diseases section of Augmentation but didn't find it in there. Thought it might be similar to the Magical Diseases in there. Basically I'm wondering if there are stats somewhere that I've missed or if someone out there has stated it out? Thanks.

To say "ghouls are different" is a bit of an understatement. Their particular method of infection (not yet addressed in SR4) has not traditionally required Essence Drain to pass along.

I could swear I saw it somewhere, but can't remember. Maybe Shadowrun Companion? I don't have that book any more, so I can't look.

Yes. SR3's companion had the rules.

AFAIR it took extensive and long term contact.

Someone living with the ghouls might become one.

No reported cases where it was transmitted due to an attack.

I thought that non-contagious stuff only applied to magic pixie dust PC Ghouls.

It is highly contagious. Even the tiniest scratch can cause infection. Anyone who was injured in melee with a ghoul had to roll Body against a TN equal to the ghoul's Essence. Failure meant infection. Partial success also meant infection, but no symptoms. It could be treated in the first month and all PC carriers, even asymptomatic carriers, were contagious.

Did ghouls suddenly become more infectious or were they supposed to be that infectious all along and nobody knew it? Looking at those stats, it seems like ghoul hordes would be a lot more prevalent. Those look like Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead style mechanics, rather than "We Don't Think Ghouls are Contagious" rules.

I remember the module in SR2 where someone had figured out how to turn people into ghouls was a pretty big change to the canon. It seems like if every 3rd person who got scratched turned into a ghoul, the CDC would've been a little more ahead of the curve on that one. Not to mention, Asamando would pretty much rule Africa.

I'm not sure if they were as infections pre-SR3, but to answer your "it seems like they would be more prevalent", they're just as prevalent or absent as any other plot device. Devil rats are everywhere, but when is the last time you hit the PCs with them on their way to the Stuffer Shack, D&D kobold style?

Also, remember that Asamando isn't out to rule Africa, at least that I can recall. They're a nation/state vying for recognition and legal status. It's the silly "ghouls are people too" thing that they're going for (which I prefer to ignore; I like ghouls as baddies).

The Saudi Arabian royal family only has 7000 members, so there you go: no more than 7000 ghouls are needed to control one of the wealthiest nations in the world. A banana republic in Africa would probably need far less.

The United States imports more than three billion pounds of beef per year and grows between twenty seven and twenty eight billion pounds at home every year.
A ghoul needs only 90 pounds of metahuman flesh per year. Even if there were ten million ghouls is Asamando, their dead metahuman flesh importation wouldn't be extreme.

The global crude death rate is 8.78. That is over 57 million dead people every year with a mean of 171 pounds per person. 171*57. That's 9.747 billion pounds of ghoul chow produced worldwide without any intervention.

And that doesn't even include medical waste. Get a SOTA cyberarm installed, something has to be done with your meat arm and there if no sense in wasting it. Appendectomies are common. So are tonsillectomies. Liposuction clinics produce pounds upon pounds of delicious fat every day. Cbereyes are extremely common.

It just irks me if the mechanics and the fluff are wildly out of sync; that is to say if ghoul infection is relatively uncommon but mechanically, anyone scratched by a ghoul stands a pretty good chance of either turning into a ghoul themselves or becoming a carrier of the virus then its a little weird. If ghouls infecting people are fairly rare in the game world, it should be difficult mechanically. The game (like a movie, book or tv show) should obey its own internal logic, or verisimilitude suffers.

If you want a plot device to scare the hell out of the players, as the GM you can always make a up a new, super-rare, super-infectious strain of the ghoul virus, although you probably should tack on some sort of reason as to why those ghouls aren't taking over the world-- like maybe they go mad dog crazy and tend to be put down very quickly. That makes for a good 28 Days Later style zombie infection.

Personally, I like the idea of Asamando (not enough to look up if I'm spelling it correctly, but still). When I was running my SR Africa game, the pc's ended up there. I treated it sort of like an HMHVV Israel, and a lot of ghouls, vamps, wendigo and so on showed up there as a place to escape persecution. I like the idea of ghouls as people to. (Which doesn't preclude using them as monsters. If you look back through history, almost all our monsters were people.)

Just a note, its using SR3 mechanics... ghouls get a base -1 essence, can't get bioware, and take double essence loss from cyberware. Any bioware/cyberware they had upon infection is rendered inoperative by the transformation.

This means, at the base, the test is body tn (5) with only 1 hit needed to avoid becoming infection. One success gives the character some permanent effect from the disease (GM discretion, partial blindness, skin discolorations, etc), 2 the character will be sick for 10 days and feel weak and dizzy. 3 success the character fights it off with no ill effects.

Only with 0 successes is someone actually infected. The chances of the average (Body 3) person making 0 successes is low.

It is pretty hard to get infected by it.

It's more like an Israel for Ghouls. Actual essence draining monsters are incredibly unwelcome. Consider:

• Any sort of vampire kills people without creating bodies. Ghouls don't like that, since normally all they have to do is wait and humans will drop dead on their own and turn into food.
• Specifically Wendigo give ghouls a bad name, since they eat people who are totally alive.
• More importantly, the favorite food of Wendigo is (I'm not kidding) Metahumans who have eaten the flesh of Metahumans. Which is to say that they hunt, kill, and eat Ghouls by preference.
• And as if it weren't enough that Wendigo are in fact the Ghoul's most capable (and only) specific natural predator, every other kind of "Vampire" can create Wendigo accidentally just by murdering an Ork.

And so I find the prospect of Asamando being at anything other than permanent jihad against every kind of infected except the Ghoul as being patently absurd. The nation caters to creatures who don't really have any natural enemies except Wendigo, who in turn are powerful regenerating mind controlling bastards who amass small armies for no purpose other than to torture people to death, round up Ghouls and eat them while they are still alive in a painful and degrading fashion in order to maximize the emotional impact on the victim and those around them.

If you want an Israel for vampires, try Romania. If even 5% of the world's vampire population decides to wear an opera cape and declare themself a Count, then the Council of Counts has a death lock on controlling that country no matter what the original Vampire statistics were.

-Frank

I'm missing something here. If you get essence drained and killed by a vampire, there is no body? Or the body isn't usable by ghouls? Or is it something else?

I'm going to point out that vampires and wendigos do not have to kill. They only need a single point of essence per month, of which the average person has 5.

I'd also like to point out that having your eaten by a Wendigo while you are still alive is, in fact, an extremely fun experience. It is so fun, in fact, that most people who have had their flesh eaten by a Wendigo want to try it again. Really if a Wendigo just drains one point of Essence from a victim at a time and lets them walk away, then word of mouth advertising will soon allow him to make a decent living by charging people money to eat them.

Was there an actual infection mechanic decided in this thread? It might be good to know.

@ Stahlseele: True, but they will pay double essence for the fixes, and had already lost a point of essence to start with. (I guess this means that any street sam with < 1.0 essence before infection will automatically die after expression.)

@ hyzmarca: By the fluff, Wendigos might not have to kill, but they like to kill, and probably will whenever given a chance. As far as being fun, I thought the fluff was that essence transfer only required powerful emotions (lust, ecstacy, fear, horror, etc.). They say that vamps can cause addition to their bite, but I don't remember hearing that it applied to all metavarients, or that it even had to apply to vamps unless they willed it so.

Technically it is possibl for there to somewhere be a responsible wendigo. Heck, you could have a Wendigo cybertechnician who ate body parts he was removing anyway and installed devices in the holes. With his tremendous magical powers, there's no reason for anyone to know he was a wendigo (or even an ork).

But that would be extremely atypical wendigo behavior. Let's recap the description:

And now I want to play a wendigo cybertechnician..... Thank you, Frank.

Chris

I thought wendigos were covered in fur-- I guess the cybertechnician could pass for ork if he got a weekly full-body wax, but being persecuted might be less painful.

As for HMHVV persecution in Asamando, I disagree with Frank's take on it. While wendigo who hunt and kill ghouls might find the well running dry there (much the same as anyone who kills ghouls would), they all have a variation on the same disease, they all are persecuted to varying degrees in most other places in the world, and thematically, they're all hit with the same stick.

Even if they disallowed wendigo (and given that wendigos were based on cannibal spirits who corrupted people to eat human flesh, and ghouls were corrupted beforehand, wendigo might not like HMHVV-infected flesh), they're are still formorians, dzoo-noo-qua, vampires, banshees, nosferatu, and goblins, as well as my personal favorite, the bandersnatch, and whomever else got added to the list since I stopped paying close attention. Of that list, the bandersnatchi would probably be the least likely to get a tourist visa, but I like invisible vampiric sasquatches, so I'd probably figure out a way to include them.

For me, what I liked best about Asamando when I was running my SR Africa game was the odd concept of ghoul statesmen. You take what is usually one step removed from a wandering monster in a lot of games, and you give them a corner of the world they are trying to make their homeland. Thematically, from that persepective, it made sense for them to accept vampires and the other HMHVV-infected people (even the loup-garou, even if they considered them charity cases) because there was more that united them than divided them, and they were hated by a lot of the same people. Ghouls still remained the vast majority of the people, but it was a place where any HMHVV could come and be free from the persecution that was associated with their disease.

Asamando (still not checking the spelling), oddly, was not the worst place profiled in Cyberpirates, a book which-- the caribbean chapter aside-- I thought really set the bar for dystopian settings in the Shadowrun world. The ghouls could pursue a jihad against vampires or whoever else they wanted, but since there were probably relatively few there when they took over and fewer still turning up to get killed, it wouldn't make much difference. Or, they could open their diseased hearts to any and all who shared their affliction, so that they too could live in a place free of the prejudice and persecution. Asamando (in my game) was a place where ghouls didn't have to be monsters, they could just be people.

Your mileage may vary.

Wendigo look like huge orks covered in white shag.

However they are all capable of using magic and many of them can wrap themselves in Illusions to bypass the looks of horror from crowds. All of them have mind control powers and can force individual people to find it totally normal and reasonable that there is a huge hairy man ripping some little girl in half and offering them gobbets of the tastier organs.

Ghoulism is not a minor variation on other kinds of vampirism. It is structurally fundamentally completely different. Ghouls change from human to Ghoul without going through an intermediate stage of dying. Saying that a Ghoul is like a Wendigo is like saying that an Adept is like an Insect Spirit because they both have magically increased strength.

Ghouls are scavengers. They eat the bodies of the dead. It's gross, but it's not specifically harmful. Vampires are the risen corpses of the dead who prowl the night as predators hunting the humans that they used to be. One of the first steps to Ghoul acceptance is the dispelling of the illusion that HMHVV is "all the same" and that vampires and ghouls are alike in any way at all.

They aren't. Ghouls don't consume Essence. Ghouls never died in order to become the way they are. Ghouls are capable of having children. These children in turn can be Ghouls whether or not they carry the virus. Ghouls don't eat the living.

There is a virus which some Ghouls have which, if it infects you may or may not cause you to turn into a ghoul. There are ghouls who don't have this virus and non-ghouls who have the virus. Every single Vampire has a specific virus. If that virus is removed, the vampire is dead. A vampire can only pass this virus to a non vampire by killing that person, and then if it takes a new vampire is created out of the corpse.

Vampires of all types are the worst thing for Ghouls. They give ghouls a bad name internationally, they confuse the very real issues of ghoul rights, and periodically they create the ghoul's only natural enemy. If I was a ghoul and the head of state allowed vampires into Lagos under any auspices, I would meat cleaver that head of state and demand a recount.

-Frank

Does anybody have the SR3 Companion rules for infecting PCs with ghoul strain HMHVV? I don't have it with me now, but I remember thinking at the time that the chances of significant mental stat loss was pretty harsh. Aren't both the benifits and the drawbacks somewhat variable depending on how the PC rolls?

Of course, take all qualifiers (such as "widely", "lot of", etc.) with a grain of salt in any internet conversation.

Experts say that 99% of all statistics are made up.

In the last campaign I was in, we had a player character get infected on his first mission. As the GM, I was going to have mercy on him and fudge some dice rolls until we saw that it actually made him really badass. He rolled pretty well on the chart, and so he took just a little hit to mental stats (I think it was just a -1 CHA?). In the meantime, being a ghoul shaman that had been geared toward close combat made him really awesome. He was all set to start swinging around his weapon focus axe, and get the necessary spells to hide his ghoulness. Unfortunately, the player just wasn't able to make it after that. We just used his character as an NPC from then on, sort of an awesome security device ("you don't want to break in THERE, bro. Those dudes have a ghoul shaman with a combat axe living in the basement..."). Added slightly to the upkeep when the runners had to provide fresh corpses every now and then (we were under the impression it took WAY more than 90 lbs. a year to keep a ghoul fed). Since then, the player that ran the shaman has really really been wanting to recreate the character, but hasn't had the chance since you really can't make a character that badass at generation. I'm in a 4th ed. group with the guy now, and he's playing a shaman, but I'm not sure it would turn out the same...

Well, I will say that its possible that politics and cannibalism are redundant.