I learned from the Bear's Pit forum that apparently there's a term in German for when you get shot in the head and your brains fly out. The term is (drumroll) Krönlein Schuß.

Source: http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbth...&page=0&fpart=2

I just realized that this introduces new and exciting possibilities for my gaming pleasure. When I write RPG rule systems I can have a result for shots to the head called "Krönlein Schuß". When rolling a billion successes in SR3 I can scream out "Krönlein Schuß".

There's only one problem...how do I pronounce "Krönlein Schuß"? I need to know how to pronounce it if I'm going to use it. Does anyone here know German?

This is like for a while I wasn't exactly sure how to pronounce "Hecker & Koch" since it's a German company. So one day I approached an attractive, blond, slim female German med student who was studying medicine in the US in New Orleans. I asked her how to pronounce H&K and she told me it should be (if I were to represent what she said phonetically) "Heckla undt Cokghe". So to this day when talking about everyone's favorite manufacturer of high-end firearms I'm careful to pronounce it German style.

Of course I'm afraid that if I enter a gun store and ask to see their "Heckla undt Cokghe" merchandise the proprieter will scream something about how I'm too fruity and then use my body to demonstrate "Krönlein Schuß."

It's been a long time and I'm a little rusty at it, but I think it would come out like...pardon my fancy-schmancy phoenetical spelling, but "crown-line shoe-suh."

. . if you guys knew how wrong that sounds to us germans O.o
the problems with you people in that matter is that you don't have any . . heck it seems you don't even have a word for the kind of letter ÖÄÜ with dots over them O.o . . we call them Umlaut . . and i think the closest there is in english is mutated vowel or something like that . . my english is not all that good i am afraid <.< . .
for example the english word of death . . it is pronounced sing the german letter ä which is more like a in your language . . at least speaking it x.x . .
and if you want to write the word krönlein without actually using the ö the propper way to spell those words is to add the letter e behind the letter with the dots on them instead of using the letters with the dots on them . . if that makes any sense at all @.@
krönlein would be propperly spelled kroenlein
Äpfel(german for apples) would be spelled Aepfel
Güterwaggong(german for freight car in american and for goods wagon in brit english) would be spelled Gueterwaggong
as far as i can tell right now there is just no way to propperly pronounce the letter ö in english at all o.O . .

wait . . anybody seen Hellboy the movie?
the immortal nazi ninja cyberzombie assassin with the cutting himself fetish and the foll visor helmet in the german version of the movie was called Krönen . . so there you would have your way of pronouncing the letter ö if you were to watch said movie i'd think . .

edit: this the fella i am talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ruprecht_Kroenen
and amn, some day i WILL build him as a (N)PC for Shadowrun <.< . .

watch hellboy, listen to how the name of Karl Ruprecht Kroenen is pronounced, especially the Kroen part of kroenen. . then simple just add line behind that and you're pretty much on target for krönlein . . and schuss is the german word for shot, so just use that instead of schuss *g* kroenline-shot should be pretty much right.

I did some Googleing...
First of all, Krönlein Schuß is written as one word, either as Krönleinschuß or Krönlein-Schuß.
It appears to me that "Krönlein" refers to the person (perhaps a pathologist or policeman or so) who originally named this type of wound.

Awesome, guys! Thanks for all the help. Just you all wait 20 years. When some twist of fate makes me the most influential and awesome RPG designer on the planet the good Mr. Kronlein can, as a result of enormous tables you roll on, become the most famous cop and/or pathologist in the world.

Damn!
Logged on one month too late!
Sorry for the thread necromancy, i just couldn't resist.

Anyway, i have to correct Stahlseele, there actually is an English vowel coming quite close to Ö.
It's the one in words such as work, lurk or clerk.
Not 100% the same, i think, but close enough.

So, asuming that the ö stands for this vowel, the correct pronunciation would be something like crönlineshooss (the latter vowel sounding like the one in cook or took, but shorter).
Also, keep in mind that German has a rather harsh, clipped sound.
Don't dredge out the last sylables, cut them off imediately.

There's a word for "BOOM HEADSHOT!"? My life is now complete.

Actually, i wasn't aware we had a word for this before finding this thread.
I only knew Blattschuß (a shot with which a hunter takes down prey with a single strike) and finaler Rettungsschuß (final rescue shot), the latter being legalese for a SWAT sniper shooting down someone who is threatening a hostage's live.

Does that happen a lot in Germany?

It happens a lot in English!

Yeah, we happen to have some very professional hunters here, since you have to undergo extensive training to get a hunter's license and...oh, wait, you meant the final rescue shot.
No, not anymore.
In fact, it never happened a lot, but was heatedly discussed in public during the late 70s and early 80s, when we -like most of western Europe- had our share of international terrorism, you know, that whole Red Army Fraction thing going on here back then.
The most prominent case was the Landshut abduction in the fall of 1976, probably the most turbulent year in German history after WWII, when members of police specops force GSG 9 shot a bunch of RAF-allied Arabian terrorists in a hijacked German airplane on Mogadishu airport, but it all started 2 years earlier during the Olympics in Munich, when authorities completely screwed up dealing with a PLO cell kidnapping several athletes from Israel.

As far as I'm concerned, thread necromancy is *always* appropriate when we're talking about blasted-open heads.

While we're at it, clerk rhymes with lark rather than lurk in most of the English speaking community.

I appreciate efforts to bring more German into SR. For inspirational German spouting terrorists versus the Zaibatsu in the 80's, see Die Hard.

Or the Nihilists of Big Lebowski.

Yeah, all sourcebooks on Germany completely lacked Kraftwerk-influenced militant nihilist groups bouncing around in black jumpsuits.
Hope that Pegasus will change that in upcomming products, when they finally get to be official distributor over here...sometime after Unwired comes out or so...

Wasn't Der Nachtmachen a bunch of Kraftwerk-influenced militant nihilists bouncing around in black jumpsuits?

I was never able to quite figure out what that guys where about, probably because all i ever heard of them was the brief entry for one of their members as a connection in Sprawl Sites.
They where supposed to be neo-anarchist, but what that really meant to them never quite came through in that book.
That Laubenstein decided to hang big iron crosses around their necks, making them look like a bunch of somehow suspicious militaria collectors or sid vicious-type-stupid nazi punks, didn't make it any better.

I'm quite fond of policlubs in my game, especially those of the wackier kind (like collectivists, transhumanists, magocrats and anarcho-primitivists), but i never used Der Nachtmachen, probably because their name doesn't make any sense at all, i'm not sure.
I mean, i don't mind if someone who's not a native speaker doesn't get the grammar, it's hideously complicated, and who cares if a term is unidiomatic, my English is terribly unidiomatic, too, but nightmaking?
What's that supposed to mean?

Probably that's the reason why they wheren't even mentioned in 1st ed. Germany Sourcebook, in spite of the fact that the book assumed the existence of a -by contemporary standards- gigantic anarchist scene in the AGS.

If Lebowski would have already been made at that time, i could have made something out of them, though.

Since that wasn't possible, i'll design my own group, make them ninja-wannabes and call them...hm...yeah, i admit, that's the tricky part.
They need a simple yet pretentious name, like something coming out of Düsseldorf...something that's stuck halfway between early 80s wave and fluxus art.
Damn, i'll definitely make them Düsseldorf-based, that's so fitting.
Or Hamburg?

Kaltfront (cold front), that sounds good.

Yeah, they'll be Hamburg-based, try to set up shop in Düsseldorf, aren't hip enough for the policlub crowd there and try to "broaden their operations" (read = get stuck in my Cologne campaign).
Excellent.
Time to stat out those jumpsuits.

To a certain degree it doesn't need to; the neo-anarchists have been sufficiently thoroughly portrayed as anarcho-capitalists that you only really need to comment more on the matter for deviations from that norm.

~J