For those of you who do not recognize the title of this thread, I recommend that you search for it online and be prepared to pluck out your own eyeballs. Mai Chan's Daily Life is a ero-guro manga by renowned artist Uziga Waita (whose name is a pun phonetically identical to "the maggots have gushed forth").

Most naturally regenerating characters are presented as being extremely fearsome and dangerous. Like Wolverine, they can kick your butt even if you hurt them enough to kill a normal man. But, really, the absurdly powerful regenerating menace is only one possible use for the Regeneration power. The character of Mai Chan possesses the Regeneration power but she is not fearsome at all. She is extremely meek and submissive, in fact. Due to her total lack of assertiveness, she is enslaved by a woman named Kaede, who uses her as a maid and a sex-slave and a mutilation prostitute. Regularly, people who get off on mutilating woman in ways that would be fatal to a normal person pay for the opportunity to cut Mai up, set her on fire, crush her bones, or do whatever gruesome thing that they can imagine and they usually have sex with her while they do it, though in one scene she is rented out to made an informertial about Ginsu-style kitchen knife set.


The dark underbelly of the Regeneration Power is simple. If you don't have absurdly high stats, if you aren't an expert fighter or magician, if you can't kick the ass of every pervert out there, then people can do all sorts fucked-up drek to you over and over and over again and you'll have no hope of death.

Imagine for a moment that you're a cute little Fox Shapeshifter with no magical talent. You aren't an impressive fighter. You're a cunning trickster who relies on stealth for survival. But, one day, your stealth isn't good enough and you find yourself stuffed in the cage at a high-class pet store. You're a Tir Tairngire citizen, you have SIN, you own a home, you vote. But you're also a smuggler, illegally transporting goods between Tairngire, Seattle, and the NAN. You have Resident Status in NAN, a green card, rights. But you got caught on the wrong side of the boarders. You got caught in Seattle, in the UCAS. It wasn't a boarder patrol who caught you either. It wasn't even Lone Star or the Metroplex Guard. You were caught by Animal Control, by the fucking dog catcher. He really was a fucking dog catcher and you were raped multiple times in that cold, dark pound as a variety of sub-sentient animals howled and barked around you. When he was finished, he let some of the male canines out of their cages. They were excited by the smells of sex. He thought it was funny. You screamed and cried. You gave them your SIN, you demanded to see a lawyer and to contact the Tir Tairngire consulate. They would have none of it. In the UCAS, you weren't a citizen, you weren't even a person. You were just a stray. They just shocked you with a cattle prod whenever you would protest.

When the pet shop owner purchased you from the pound, your living conditions improved ever so slightly. You had to look good for the customers, after all. Seattle city policy is that all animals leaving the pound must be spayed or neutered. In your case, it was impossible to accomplish but they went through the motions, messily cutting the gonads from your body without the benefit of anesthesia (they tried, but it wouldn't work on you). Your sex glands grew back, of course, everything grows back, and the humiliation outlasted the pain.

Then, one day, a little boy named Timmy sees you in your cage. "Why do they have a person in a cage, mommy?", he asks. She replies, "It isn't a person, dear, it is a Shapeshifter. It's just a stupid animal that looks like a person." She kicks your cage door and demands that you take your true form. Too tired to resist, you become a fox again. Timmy's mother explains to him all about Shapeshifter's with the clerk filling in some blanks and correcting some of her mistakes. Timmy is especially elated when you learns that you can regenerate, asking if it means that you won't die like his previous pets. You yourself are almost elated that this kind and gentle boy is taking an interest in you. He is far too young to rape you, and far too inexperienced to prevent you from escaping. The boy's mother is concerned that you might be dangerous and that you might molest him, but the clerk reassures her that you are completely tame and docile. She buys you for Timmy, the hefty price tag reflecting her extravagant wealth. As they leave the shop she makes an offhand comment about how useful your regenaration power will be. She is tired of buying Timmy new exotic pets every time he dissects one. You scream and try to get away as security guards forcibly chain you into the back of the burgeoning serial-killer's mother's minivan.


And you know what else is fun about regeneration? Meat. You could feed a small country with one Whale shapeshifter (like in the recent Torchwood episode) and a group of tribal ghouls with a Shaman of a certain persuasian could easily survive on a single metahuman using Immortal Flower.

Do you sit in a dark room feasting on Marquee de Sade and dreaming up this stuff? Good lord! Do the characters in your campaign have an absurdly high suicide rate?

I guess it's a small mercy that normal people can only be raped to death once. Oh thank god.

The feeding a small tribe thing is something we always talked about doing in D&D. After all, you hack off a limb and get your cleric to drop a Heal or somethig on it. You're money. Buy yourself a high quality cow and go to town.

Of course you didn't touch on something even creepier. Auto canabalism. Everyone likes their own brand right?

Or he/she does consulting for Laurell Hamilton for her Anita Blake books, or for the Sword of Truth series since there is a rape scene in every one of those books.

In Cyberpirates, the African pirate tells how he captured a leopard shapeshifter, and skinned it a dozen times, selling the pelts, until the shapeshifter escaped.

I should point out that a) guro manga is not really compatible with Shadowrun canon and b) people can't have the regeneration critter power. The only things that have it are far far far too dangerous to be used as meat. If you ever meet one, you need to kill it, burn it, and scatter the ashes, or you're dead.

You can make a pact with a Greatform Free Plant Spirit. Or you can be possessed by a Greatform Plant spirit. And any game which revolves around cybernetic modification is inherently easy to incorporate Guro elements. In other words "Baby fuck, baby fuck, it's alright." And if you caught that reference I apologize.

The development of clonal tissue and BTL can really take Guro to a whole new level. Why chop someone to pieces until they die when you can chop off their arm every day and swap in a clonal replacement? Or put them in a BTL generated world where they feel themselves getting mutilated again and again while you masturbate over their ASIST inhibited body twitching in pain? Science in 2072 is so advanced that you can don't need to resort to mighty magic to get your limb chopping fetish going.

Although if you want to use powerful magic to assist you in feeling the bloody viscera of a dying prostitute with your bare hands, I suggest using Illusions. First of all, you can get a multisensory illusion to truly feel like an innocent young woman who you are drilling extra orifices to while she is chained spread eagled to a wall (phantasm will work). Alternately, you use illusions on real people to make them look and feel like their spines are being ripped out and then after they pass out from agony you can drop the spells and do it again.

If you have the money to burn, you really can indulge in some pretty dangerous sexual predilections at no risk to yourself or anyone you care about. And that's before we get into purchasing women from Moldova and then rolling them around in broken glass until they die like people do today.

-Frank

Great, now the FBI is gonna be monitoring this board

I guess there actually is some room for insane and violent fetishes in Shadowrun, since there are both monsters and monstrous people with incredible power. That kind of thing would be useful to a game when either a) the Shadowrunners are hired to stop it or b) they work for that kind of person, and have to be morally conflicted about it.

And what about simsense? I'm sure there are black market snuff BTLs. Not many people are going to spring for any magical means of doing it in real life or via illusion when they could just dreamdeck it.

I wonder if you'd have to cart the Megladon Meatmachine around to keep the background count from warpping and finally killing her... Things like this always seem to go wrong though, like Tir and their Fire Spirit Powerplant. Attract the wrong sort of attention. Rule of Three kind of thing, perhaps?

I'd say they already do as often as people talk about BOMBS, EXPLOSIONS and the best way to maim people in the game. There must be several threads that talks about TERRORISM and at least one that mentions situations similar in 2070 as 9/11...

There, all that is needed now is some obscure name of a terrorist group to attract the feds...

We should make a new threads of creative terrorist group names.

Frank, baby fuck means never having to say you're sorry. It is the one thing on the internet that you never have to apologize for, even if you attempt to win a debate by posting it with photographs of your opponent's children superimposed over the baby's face.

Immortal Flower lets anyone have regeneration, so long as you limit the damage to 19 boxes per dose. This isn't ideal for torture prostitution or industrial farming, but it works great for ghoul feed.

Using the PC Shapeshifter rules from SR3, you can create some incredibly vulnerable Shapeshifters who might find themselves in the same predicament as our poor WereFox, captured by Seattle Animal Control and sent to the pound.

The real dystopian thing is that, under UCAS law, sending a Shapeshifter to the pound is the correct course of action. They aren't recognized as being anything other than animals. A Shapeshifter may be able to become a citizen of either Tir, Amazonia, or any of the NANs, but in the UCAS they are just pets or strays and are extraordinarily vulnerable to exploitation.

Of course, even the most powerful of Shapeshifters can be captured. There is always someone more powerful. And there more powerful the captive the worse the feeling of impotence when he is unable to escape his fate. The same is true of vampires. A sufficiently powerful group could simply capture a powerful vampire, hook it up to simsense, and make BTLs from its feeling of total impotence as its attempts to escape all fail. Vampires are frightening but people who torture vampires for fun and profit are far far scarier.




The Marquis's material, though shocking for his time, is incredibly tame for the internet.


The suffering alone would create a background count, though I'm unsure how long it would take. It would probably require many years.



Don't forget the assasination of President Dunkie. Assassinate and President are NSA keywords.

guro manga is completely workable within SR, assuming that the group is comfortable with it--there are creatures who can facilitate it, and there are people who would engage in it. and as for being too dangerous, hyz gave a perfect example: a fox (or similar small, relatively harmless creature) shapeshifter with low physical stats and no magical ability besides her natural ones (ie, no sorcery/conjuring/etc).

She's been using Mask for years. Every morning, rubbing it on like makeup, hiding the bruises, faking a smile. It seems to drain her more, take a little more effort to draw the lines along her cheeks, brighten the eyes, the eyes which seem to grow more dull and lifeless. The corners of the smile seem to droop, even as she fixes them in place. The red of her lips is grey without the mask now. She pretends its just old age creeping in. Old age at thirty. Old age at five years of marriage. She puts the mask on, and he looks at her, saying: you look good with that little nod of his.

K10 is awesome. Don't ever leave DS for a prolonged period again, EVER.

Well generally true I have to disagree. There are a number of entries battling for SWAP avi in terms of "Thing I wish I had never read". Masturbating while mutilating someone is pretty bad, not being able to have an orgasm unless your defenestrating someone from a great height is not much better.

Plus I'm a bit of a relativist. Sure the internet is bad but it's because it stands on the shoulders of...

uhm...
god.

other... writers.

I don't think I have ever encountered anything that I could classify as 'something I wish I had never read'.

That's because you don't spend enough time at Fundies say the darndest things or 4Chan.

-Frank

So very funny, and yet so sad.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There is heaps of stupid shit in print, and it sometimes seems that I have read libraries full of the crap. I still can't say that I truly regret every second spent reading it though. I mean, the entertainment value alone ...

Did you ever read Artemis's Lover by Oscar or any of Shintaro Kago's manga? I mean, I can point you towards some stuff that I put down because I couldn't stand to read it. I'm still trying unsuccessfully to purge Drafting of a Water Goddess from my mind.

No ... and I probably won't ... at least not now.

Sort of a clinical spin on the ghoul chow would be a regenerating blood donor. Though you have to wonder what happens to all the blood once it's inside another person; does the regeneration power still work, but only to maintain the living cells it has, possibly curing hemophilia and other blood degenerating diseases, or does it die like normal blood outside the essence scope of the originator; does it remain dual-natured without transferring the power to the patient? What about the meat and skin, is the sustenance it provides withdrawn, or material unravel as the astral tries to balance the give and take?

Just me personally. I would probably say that pulling it away from their pattern would cause it to no longer retain special properties. So blood would go to being normal blood of whatever type. A chunk of meat or skin would just be normal meat or skin. So since it is no longer part of their pattern then it no longer gains the benefit that their pattern bestows upon them (regeneration).

Obviously, otherwise you could cut a vampire in half and end up with two vampires. Though very cool, this is undesireable for reasons that should be obvious.

This thread and the preceding vampire quote reminds me of a Vampire LARP I played in waaaayyy back in the day when it still spooked parents that kids did that sort of thing. I just remember this exchange:

"Ha! You've just had a drink of my addictive blood, how does it taste?"
"Goood... yes, very good."
"Now you have to do my bidding, or I'll withhold it!"
"Do I now? *points at nearby thralls* Grab him, and throw him in my darkest dungeon. Chain him to a slab and cut his legs off. Keep cutting them off until he stops growing them back. Yes... now your blood will be mine forever, whenever I want it."
*out of character* I hope you've learned your lesson about the addictive blood quality...

Well, the initial story is fairly nice, but it works on two premises that are not correct.

First, it assumes that a dog catcher can recognize a human form shapeshifter, which is highly unlikely as there are freaks with cosemtic ware tails, fangs and stuff running all over the place and no one with even an ounce of magical talent would work as a dog catcher.
Second, while native non-recognized critters are no legal entities in the UCAS, foreign non-recognized critters that are a legal entity within their home jurisdiction and thus posess a SIN are in fact a legal entity in the UCAS, as they are foreign citizens. (Not that most people in the underworld care about legal terms anyway.)

Unless it's a specialised paranormal animal control expert.

Speaking of that - wasn't there a story in the LoneStar sourcebook about a team's mage transforming the team samurai into a wolf over a dispute, and while the runners are still laughing, LS pulls up, sedates the "animal", and releases it in the wild?

On another note, there was a novel, I think in the Anita Blake series, where they mention that shapeshifters are used to circumvent the anti-bestiality laws.



In addition to this I'd think that the dozens of metahuman right organisations would have something to say about a shapechanger (especially in human form) being sold in a pet shop. Though I can imagine a world where shapechangers would be considered animals, not sentients, and where metahumans (who had troubles reaching legal equality as well) could persecute them just to show they too are human, I'd think they'd be more likely to resent such persecution.

If I remember right (and I might just be wrong). shapeshifters are in fact animals with the ability to pose as human and not humans posing as animals. Their behaviour is more on the animal side of things.

Those are rather found in Quebec than in the UCAS - the UCAS awards for para-critters actually suck.

Not that the average slummers behavior is that much better...

I think you're getting shapeshifters and trolls mixed up...

I don't mean someone working freelance for cash - I mean an expert employed by the municipality to deal with paracritters so citizen can feel safe. I could see Seattle having a mage or three on the payroll to deal with awakened critters.

Hm... that would make a nice alternate runner campaign too:

"We're not SWAT, ma'am, we're Paranomal Animal Control Specialist! Now, where is this hellhound you said was eating your pet dog?"

"Guys, suit up - there's been an incident at the docks, looks like an incubus attacked a local union representative, and the mayor, his brother in law, wants us to sort it out. Muller, the press is there, so don't wear your bloody trophy pelt necklace - I don't want PETA picketing us again."

"Kelly, banish that fragging spirit. Muller, keep the lead flying. Vittorio, Manuel - with me, we're going in and take that Wendigo down!"

Yes. Which would not stop some activist groups from treating them as fellow metahumans. Some states accept them as citizens, as was mentioned.

You are talking about a city that out-sourced the police... and so ist pest-control.

A little late in the post but...

I truly regret reading those fundies posts. I want to believe that half those posts are people trying to be ironic.

I also still believe in Santa Claus.

I retract my previous statement about ginzo porn, reading what ignorant people write is actually much much worse.

Yes. Still, someone has to deal with such critters, especially the magically active ones. The bounty on criminals is not that high either, but there's still SWAT and mages in LoneStar. So, I maintain that having specialised animal control mages are viable, be they employed by Lone Star or by another corp, and hired by Seattle.

Hyz...you make me happy that my fox shaman Shapeshifter is a 3rd initiated conjurer with many Fire and Man spirits bound to his service. Even though he did a stint in Hollywood. *shivers* And in stint, I mean chained up in a perfectly dark room for years...tests being done on me about my shape-shifter abilities, wiether cyber-ware will work in me or not, FORCING cyberware to work in me wiether my regeneration likes it or not, learning where my essence comes from... *whines* Ok, he may have been in a very similar situation...maybe that's why he's trying to bring down the UCAS with a level 18 ally spirit. >.> That is, once he get's his spirit formula back. And then, the mundas will pay...oh yes...they will pay...

Not if ACSWATTA (Animal Control Special Weapons and Tactics Team Alpha) can stop him!

IIRC, dangerous and magical critters are a part of LS responsibilities.

And they could have a mage as "dog catcher".

You'd be hard-pressed to find him in Redmond right now...and if you do, kudo's to you. Now try getting through the level 9 ward and multiple rigged drones. And that's just outside my apartment. And by apartment, I mean hanger. And by hanger, I mean my lodge. All of that, just to capture and contain a cuddly, docile little fox? *meeps and licks his paw* Please...just leave me alone and I'll leave you alone...till Judgement Day.

Just the premise was that it wasn't LS.

Well, it could have been outsourced from Lone Star, technically .

And in that case, we're calling in the SACC (Strategic Animal Control Command), and nuke it from orbit! No on in the Redmond Barrens will notice!

Seriously, what's your (anyone's) take on shapeshifters in the UCAS? Can they legally be bought?

A lot of that might actually be farmed out to ParaShield.

As was said before, shapeshifters are NOT legal citizen's. They're not even people. For all the UCAS cares, they're wild animals. And people buy animals all the time as pets, play things, companions, target practice...you name it. I see no reason they can't be. I just don't have to approve of it. Hence the domination and eventual collapse of the UCAS government. Any day now...

Over LS dead body - that's a MCT subsidary.


For all the UCAS cares, this speciment is a Tir Citizen.

Rotbart, you really know how to ruin a man's soul-crushing. I did consider both of your points before putting my fingers to the keyboard but dismissed them because they did not jive with the point of the story, which is to crush souls.

The Animal Control agent saw the Fox in yo's true form and chased it. When the Fox transformed into a human, the Animal Control Agent though that the Shapeshifter looked pretty enough to rape, case closed. And a low-stat shifter like that isn't really dangerous enough to warrant a call to paracritter SWAT; they might want their share of the raping, after all. And while the UCAS government might treat a Tir citizen as a person even if it were an animal, what the UCAS government doesn't know won't hurt it. There is no sense in filing all the extra paperwork involved when you can just shock the critter into submission.

Didn't crush my soul, I'm not a shifter.

I imagine, since shifters don't shift with clothes on, if someone were after the shifter, he would stay in animal form. Running around naked in Seattle would probably make it MORE likely you get caught. So the critter gets caught in critter-form, and only shifts to human form while in the catcher's truck, since he needs to shift to plea for his freedom. Well, the catcher already has the shifter, figures there's a big reward in for his catching it, PLUS gets a chance to get his kicks in.

I also am pretty sure the UCAS is under no obligation to respect the 'rights' of creatures other countries call citizens. India may say all cows are citizens and deserve human rights. That doesn't mean a cow touring in NYC won't get made into hamburger. "Respecting" the Tir's ridiculous claim would be giving credence to that same claim, which ultimately adds political pressure to recognize animals like shifters. Unless the UCAS is really scrimping for points with the Tir (and I don't know that they ever have been), I think most government officials would prefer simply not to know. It's not their problem, and if they knew about it, hypothetically someone could make it their problem. So not only won't they help the shifter, they will refuse to acknowledge there is even a problem there in the first place.

I don't know that it matters; just because your recognized as a citizen in one place doesn't mean you have any legal rights anywhere else.

The UCAS considers shapeshifters animals and has standing bounties on them; I don't think citizenship in any country will protect you from that.

I mean, how are they gonna know your a Tir citizen if everytime you try to talk they belt you across the mouth and tell you to shut your filthy animal mouth?

Actually, that pretty much means exactly that because there are treaties about that matter.


That's Quebec, not the UCAS.


That sentence is equally valid if you replace 'animal' with 'human' or 'metahuman' - so it's not a shifter issue.

Shadowrun 3e Companion, page 35, right hand side, paragraph two, line 7-9.

"In nearly all cases, governments do not hesitate to destroy criminal shapeshifters as they would a rabid dog." And remember, being in the UCAS is in and of itself criminal if you are a shapeshifter.

And honestly, their is absolutely no reason that being a citizen of the Tir would make you have any rights at all in the UCAS. That is not what it means at ALL. I may be an American citizen, but if I go to China, they can and will lock me up in a "re-education center" for the rest of my life for the slightest infraction, because they're China and that's their laws.