I have a ghoul street doc/cybersurgeon who basically survives doing precisely that.

However, there's a big difference between one doctor who already has the equipment and can support the cost to feed himself vs an entire nation. Although I think hyzmarca and Mercer covered this.

- J.

SR4 BBB, pg. 292:

But granted it changed with every edition how much and what kind of meat ghouls need to eat.

SR4 BBB, pg 292: "Ghouls feed on the necrotized flesh of metahumans, along with that of other animals."

I'm guessing they have a strong preference for metahuman flesh, but can subsist on just about anything. (There's probably a pricing structure in place, with dead babies as veal, then people as filet mignon, then primates and so on down to rodents. Instead of nutrisoy, poor ghouls enjoy squashed rat.)

Given that ghouls are infected with a strain of HMHVV, even though they aren't essence drainers, it's possible that the essence of the host does factor in somehow. That would explain why they crave metahuman flesh over that of regular animals. I would probably tie that in somehow, but I like playing up the mystical aspects of the disease.

Edit: Beaten to the punch by Grinder. Well played.

If ghouls do not need metahuman meat, then the point in Dunkelzahn's will that set out a reward for the creation of ersatz food for ghouls makes no sense since the ghouls could just use animal meat.

Feral Cities' shadowtalk, p. 13, mentions metahuman flesh is needed. FC p. 42 mentions 5000 ghouls need 50 to 60 metahumans "just to get by". p. 74 again mentions the ongoing search for a synthetic replacement for metahuman flesh.

Runner's Companion, p. 61, mentions that infected (and therefore ghouls) need to consume 1% of their bodyweight of metahuman flesh per week, with cloned flesh being able to "satisfy some of these dietary requirement".

Dietary Requirement - 5% of body weight per week.

Where does the 5% come from? Couldn't find it in neither the BBB nor RC.

RC mentions 1%. That's consistent with the information in Feral Cities of 5000 Ghouls needing 50 to 60 metahumans per week.

At least 1% is the canon, p61 RC. The RAW states 5%, p78 RC.

Then the ghoul nation would need 10'000 to 50'000 people weekly to feed its citizens (numbered between 200'000 and 500'000 FC p. 74). That's 5M to 25M corpses per year.

Thanks
Wonder how that could slipped through editing, though.

500,000 you mean, correct? 10,000 x 52...

Yep, 500'000.

Please note that, according to FC, Lagos alone may have a population of about 1 Million ghouls.
The demographics give a number of "Other : 5%" and given how rare sapient critters and the like are, i'd guess that most of these "others" are Infected.

Which should not be too surprising, given the high infectiousnes of HMHVV III and the sanitary conditions in Lagos.
In fact, the combination of these two factors should have led to several zombie apocalypse style events decades ago.

If you want to come up with a remotely plausible projection for the situation of ghouls in Western Africa, that's where you should start, not picking at the obvious flaws in the Asamando description.

Well, given that the high-functioning ghouls are probably the only ones getting all their dietary requirements met, Asamando is only really having to feed about 60% of it's population.

When I was running a game in Asamando (shortly after Cyberpirates came out), I went with the idea that the ghouls maintained a buffer zone around them where the low functioning ghouls lived. Keeping them hungry makes sense, because all of Asamando's neighbors are hostile to them and a bunch of ravening ghouls make a pretty good "Do Not Disturb" sign. Since low functioning ghouls aren't allowed to breed and seem to be little more than an embarrassment to the ghouls that run Asamando, they could honestly give a damn if all the reaver-style ghouls are starving to death.

Since this gives the corps in the area the chance to arm both sides of a conflict, this would work out pretty good for them too.

So, given how many bodies 500.000 ghouls would need to barely sustain themselves, we'd be looking at a requirement of some 260.000 bodies per year. The whole of Lagos would be consumed in some 10 years. Since humans reproduce very slowly, it's not really a workable long-term agreement even if Africans don't mind being eaten for a plot device to give the infected characters more k3wl stuff (like a homeland).

No matter how you look at it, Asamondo as written just makes no sense at all. And that's not even taking the crazy-ass million ghouls in Lagos into account.

ummm... no.

human beings in modern first world countries reproduce slowly.

metahumans (some of whom will include orks) living in extreme poverty situations in a third world country is a little bit different. even your dead children are worth *something* if they don't make it to adulthood, and i would fully expect to see birth rates way out of control in an area where gangs of armed thugs go around raping anyone they feel like... and it's a pretty safe bet they don't stop to make sure that some form of birth control is being used.

also, lagos is not the only place where people are born... some move into lagos, and most likely some of the flesh traders don't operate out of lagos at all. the entire continent is pretty much like a less-populated lagos... the gangs call themselves military forces, the gang leaders call themselves kings, and it is otherwise pretty much the same.

Given how infective HMHVV III is, it is a relatively harmles assumption that only 5% of the population in a place like Lagos are infected.
The mistake made in FC is not to extrapolate further from this point, not to consider the absolutely terrifying consequences of the almost inevitable mass outbreak of Krieger's syndrome in SR Africa.

Of course, these consequences would not fit the spayed-and-neutered version of HMHVV that is portrayed in SR4.
While this politically correct portrayal is, in my opinion, quite fitting for several industrial nations, any place that can rightfully be called feral would most likely not produce ghouls that wait in line for their voluntarily donated long pig rations.

I could see a region devastated by roving warbands of sasabonsam and the occasional other infected, with some areas so depopulated that they have to start to fight each other to survive.

Battle-hardened ghoul veterans who have endured decades of hunting and being hunted until they emerge as local rulers over their own piece of swampy wasteland, filling up their ranks by deliberately spreading the infection among the population.

Warlords instrumentalizing the fear of the Infected, either by employing them as mercenaries, gaining access to their opponent's natural ressources in exchange for feeding rights on the victims, or by portraying themselves as ghoul-hunting strong men whose iron-fist ruling is the only alternative to being devoured.
Or sometimes both at the same time, if they can get away with it.

That would just invite some generous droppings of FAT III all over the place. Faced with ghoul acopalypse in Africa, no one in Europe would object to the most drastic measures taken to wipe them out.

I don't see how massive deployment of a bioweapon is a likely response to a fatal, but locally contained and faraway problem.
Or why anybody who is in the position to do something about a mass outbreak should all of a sudden start to give a damn about that region.

Sure, people would start to argue that something should be done, some people would claim that researches for a vaccine or an HMHVV treatment should receive more funding, from time to time there'd be a little media outrage.
That would be about all.

Yes, i know, they bombed Chicago with FAB III, but that was in the middle of the UCAS.
Ares certainly wouldn't have done the same in Brazzaville.

A thought I just had: Ghoul adepts with the Sacrifice, Cannibalize and Power Bleed metamagics must be terrifying.

This is so wrong on so many levels. Ok. So everytime you fly out a drone you need the supplies and infrastructure to do that. Even if it is from a vehicle that vehicle in and of itself needs a base. 100,000+ life forms being killed (note FABIII would also affect any other dual natured critter) would cause a background count (Big IMHO, as this is more up to how you want to run your world). ALso Asmondo's non ghoul shamans and the other locals, would probably not support the Azzies. Attack and raid, probably. Support, no, not unless bribes were paid. Which of course leads to ask the question why go through the trouble and expense to control an area when someone already has. Part of the reason the corps aren't government's is that government services aren't profitable.

PS:The U.S. won in Iraq against 3 of the opposing factions. Saddams army is no more (that was the easy part), Al Queda admitted defeat and fled to Pakistan/Afghanistan and probably parts of Africa as well. Granted the victory may or may not be worth it for the expense the U.S. as a definitive victory (producing a stable working Iraq) is in the hands of the Iraq's population rather than the U.S. military.

Uhm, the figures are based on body mass, and thus, a child/infant does not count the same as an adult for consumption (this is where ghouls are unlike vampires; that kind of thinking would work for them). Given a good 10 years for reaching physical maturity in orcs, we'd still have dire troubles even sustaining lagos' current populace.


The entire continent is pretty much unpopulated.



You said it yourself; HMHVV III has undergone yet another retcon. It's nowhere near as virulent as it was under SR3 times.


Historically, SR nations/corps would be more inclined to answer with a massive use of nukes and kinetic projectiles, accompanied by various bioweapons.


How is Africa far away from Europe when a zombie holocaust is the matter? Also, those zombies need to feed on soemthing, and that won't be other zombies. That's not Rwanda, or the Congo of today.


Yeah, the Rapine Storm is quite a force.

Think about it, if your doc wagon clone had its hearts used (damn snipers!!) it is no onger viable and needs to be regrown. What do you do with the other parts?

Yes, it's not world-threatening contagious anymore.
It's still contagious enough to cause massive problems in an area without any sanitation to speak of, with almost nonexistant medical care outside of the token magical healer (at least they have the only halfway viable remedy during initial stages of infection at hand) and without institutions to take efficient care of the outbreak of a previously unknown paranormal virus.

As far as the other points are concerned, why are you assuming that this outbreak would lead to all the ghouls sitting in one area, waiting to be FABIIIed into oblivion (BTW, an option that only exists since the late 2050's, the scenario i'm discussing could take place a lot earlier) so that the problem can "easily" be solved?
I see that this possibility may present in the case of Asamando, but why in this scenario?
Such a large number of ghouls would be better advised to spread out, as -unlike canon SR- i do not assume that it would be possible for them to set up the infrastructure needed to supply an entire nation with at least 56% of the overall population's body weight in edible human meat per year.

Besides, all these ghouls aren't just going to pop up in one place either.
What we are talking about are large numbers of infections all over Sub-Saharan Africa.
Of course, the densely populated coastal sprawls would be affected disproportionately, but the problem still remains :
How do you apply FABIII (something that is not available until the mid-2050's, BTW) to an entire continent?

Read up on how many people have to be tortured to death (they eat them limb by limb to avoid shedim problems) to sustain the ghoulies. Massacring them won't matter much compared to that, only it will have the background count gradually degrade (unlike being kept up by continued existence of the ghoul nation).


Which Asamondo non-ghouls?


Aztech operates more like a socialist regime anyway. With the war in Yucatan and in Amazonia, the occupation of part of Texas and a standoff with Pueblo over L.A., it doesn't appear that maximised shareholder value is Atztech's primary concerns (not that the cosmic horrors guiding it would care much about money anyway).

Likewise, cost of military deployment wouldn't be so much an issue, all the more if Aztech could get UN backing (and with an ongoing genocide that claims about a quarter to half a million people a year by cannibal zombies, that shouldn't be too hard really).


Uhm, that's two ... who would be the third? The sunni insurgents? Granted, they're pacified for the most part, but I wouldn't call that a victory. It's more of a truce.


I'd expect roving bands of various size, much like CthulhuTech's Rapine Storm or Firefly's Reavers. However, they're likely to concentrate near population centers before overrunning them. They're effectively feral, except for the one-in-6 cases with more or less intact brains. In that case, fortification and sustaining lines would propably be the best one could do (and exterminating all carriers in one's own back yard), until someone develops FAB3.


Clone meast doesn't work for SR4 ghoulies anymore, courtesy if the RC retcon.

The few, the proud, the uneaten. Some of the locals are non-ghouls. Namely the original inhabitants since the ghouls moved in. Are there many? No. I'd suspect the queen ghould protects them, as would the local shamans (Being dual natured does have its disadvantages).



Note, Azantlan is technically not Aztechnology. So for that to be the case is no suprise. Of course since Aztechnology runs the voting system.....

So what interest would Aztechnology have in going after Asmondo? Resources? No, as it is cheaper to go some where else with much less fuss. Political points? No, as the UN would probably condemn it (genocide is genocide).



The third is the Iraqis themselves. The problem we face in that part of the world is that the countries are usually arbitrary borders drawn up by some scheming european colonialist back in the early 1900's or earlier. The Europeans didn't (or did to manipulate things) take into account other loyalties of those affected by these borders.

Complete victory here would be that the Iraqis think of themselves as Iraqis first, not sunni, shia, kurdish or whatever local tribal/affiliation they have. I think one of the unfortunate things is that most political parties in Iraq are based on those affiliations, this does not help with the unity of the country.

I think it's a mistake to assume that because ghouls have a 1-in-6 chance of being high-functioning, that only 1-in-6 of the Asamando ghouls will be high functioning. Particularly since they selectively breed the high-functioning ghouls over the low, and that Asamando is going to be a destination for ghouls who are capable of making the trip. (I would assume that a feral ghoul is going to have problems boarding a plane in Seattle.) When it comes to the ghouls who are running things in Asamando, those are all going to be mentally capable. (Unless Asamando has a legacy system.)

Feral Cities:

Ghuls of Asamando are infected by a different strain of the virus, so the likelyhood of them being feral is pretty low. The sanity and capacity for intelligence is not in question, not really.

Source? Because I really cannot remember anything about that.


How can it be genocide if you kill off a population of animals? The UN refuses to recognise ghouls as sentients (so says Feral Cities). And why should Aztech clean the ghoulies off? To get their pet warlord to take over the territory the ghoulies used to occupy and run the local mines for them - getting what they used to get with less expenses and, on top of that, make their pet war lord a more prominent figure, strengthening their local standing in politics - and sicne this means access to one of the world's last large oil fields, it's worth a lot to a manufacturing/chemtech corp.


Which Iraqis? There're three ethnic factions, two religious factions, several smaller splinters, local syndicates and sheikhs and whatnot ...


To be fair, in case of Iraq, it was the Ottomans.


Indeed. But that's not going to happen any time soon, I'm afraid.


The one-in-six-chance is the infection, which hasn't got much to do with the infected's genetic heritage, so selective breeding won't get you anywhere. Also, if all these clever ghoulies were immigrants, the Sasobasam wouldn't be the dominat ghoulism strain. This just doesn't come together.


The current queen is, but with Asamondo being a monarchy ...

Note that SR4 makes no specific claims whatsoever about how many Infected become savage.
We can conclude from the given material that numbers greatly vary according to the specific strain, with vampires being least affected and strain II having the most impact (and yes, i'd really like to see something more specific about that issue, as there's a huge difference between adjusting plausibilities and handwaving, one that SR4 is often not aware of).

FC specifically states that almost all sasabonsam retain their sapience.
This does not boil down to them not suffering from adverse effects of the infection, such as becoming more cruel and ruthless, but it makes clear that, besides the negative modifiers on mental attributes, a further decrease of intellectual capacities is exceedingly rare.
So we're dealing with large amounts of mostly functional Infected in this specific case.
Which means that we have to discard your "effectively feral" hypothesis.







I wouldn't overrate the impact of ethnic tensions.
These tend to figure in mostly after a conflict has arisen.
Throughout the 90s, ethnic tensions and colonial map makers have been blamed as the cause of economies based upon upholding a constant state of civil war, but current analysis shows that these theories do not hold much water.

Evidence points mostly to economic reasons for intra-national warfare, with ethnic tensions following after the conflict has broken out.
Of course, local leaders will call upon their own ethnic homebase first, which in turn often leads to ethnic polarization of an ongoing conflict as a side effect, but we have many examples of structurally very comparable conflicts where ethnic separation based on postcolonial structures just doesn't figure in, such as Angola, various states in Middle America and so on.

In the case of Iraq, the main problem is not so much that we have Kurds, sunni Arabs and shia Arabs lumped together in one country, but that these three groups will inevitably quarrel over the distribution of natural ressources in their homeland.
The problem is that there's local rulers who will want exclusive acces to those precious oil fields.
That these rulers have different ethnic and religious backgrounds is a secondary factor that comes in after the conflict has emerged.

The basis for this and comparable situations seems to be mostly a combination of failed or failing national institutions, leading to a nonexistant government monopoly of violence.
If this is combined with the presence of means of enrichment that function best under a constant state of low-intensity warfare, such as illegaly seizing natural ressources, setting up a kidnapping industry, producing illegal narcotics and so on, it already looks tempting to become a warlord and create (and more importantly : indefinitely sustain) a state of cicil war.
If said potential warlords also have an easy acces both to possible soldiers (read : if the population has a large number of undereducated young men whose best career choice seems to be to enlist in a private army) and ties to multinational corporations that will supply weapons in exchange for trafficking in their illegaly acquired goods, the outbreak of a civil war economy is highly likely.

In other words, if the potential benefits of starting a civil war outweigh the potential costs, someone will go ahead and try to to take advantage of this situation.

Have yet to read feral cities, but they never did mention the local populace in Cyber pirates. Positive or negative in that regard.


Exactly my point.


Actually the french and the british. Read up on it. Britain was supposed to get Iraq, Jordan, and Palistine, the Saudis got their piece of desert as did the other countries on the pennensula, and the French got Lebanon and Syria. They did not keep either for too long. Historical side note:the Iraqis did revolt against the british in WWII and tried to enlist the support of Hitler. However all they got was a few german planes and the british took the country over real quick.

By get I mean it was supposed to be part of their sphere of influence.


Hence why what victory the US may get out of it (Bopping off Saddam, and destroying alot of Al Queda Operatives) may be overshadowed by that country's instability. They may suprise me though, as from what I understand most Iraquis don't want to be dominated by the basket case that is Iran (the old adage that we should all hang together or for certain we'll all hang seperately.

Problem is that it becomes a chicken and egg thing. If the population was of one ethnic group, religion and cultural back ground would the fighting begin? Maybe, Maybe not. Add religion, cultural/ethnic differences, and you got youself a sure fire war that flare up is more likely. I don't think there are any absolutes in this though. Alot depends on the populations involved and their idiosyncracies.

Cyberpirates mentions that selective breeding does work, but that was a whole edition ago so things might have changed. (It's hard enough keeping the world coherrent without factoring in mechanical changes that alter the fundamental math the in-game universe is based upon every five years or so.)

Sasobasam is the favored ghoul strain in Asamando, but by no means the only. I think the reason that Asamando has such a high percentage of high functioning ghouls is that they choose to, and they use fairly fascist means to enforce that choice.



So there's that. There are Reaver-style ghouls in Asamando, but they are sterilized and kept firmly controlled. The sasabonsam strain is seen as superior, but it's not the only strain, and intelligence is the main factor in whether or not you get to breed. I think it's pretty easy to explain why there are more sasabonsam in Asamando than other ghoul breeds-- they're native to the area. Whether or not the enforced breeding programs will make the next generation of ghouls smarter is up to debate (in game and out), but it almost doesn't matter. Low functioning ghouls are going to get sterilized and firmly controlled, if not tossed off a cliff, and only the smart ones are going to be allowed to mature.

Personally, I think there are probably fewer low functioning ghouls in Asamando than there are in Seattle. There are certainly fewer uncontrolled low-functs in Asamando. Pretty much every feral ghoul in Seattle is uncontrolled, and I'd be willing to bet almost every feral ghoul in Asamando is chained up in a diamond mine or somewhere similar, and probably being classified as livestock on the census.



I think there is a possibility of Asamando suffering some type of collapse after Thema Laula passes, although I think there is a good chance that the machinery of government she has created would be able to sustain itself. I don't think that just because it is a monarchy, rule would pass to an unsuitable ghoul ("unsuitable" meaning feral, the next ruler might be incompetent for the same reasons any world leader might be incompetent).

I've been thinking about it a lot, and SR's Africa makes no sense and strikes me as a case of lazy writing. The continent's population has been virtually annihilated, with over 75% mortality due to VITAS 1 alone. Entire nations, tribes, have disappeared. And yet aside from Asamando and the elven Zulu Nation in Azania, there is really nothing about Africa that you couldn't say exists today. And that is pathetic. Given the sheer amount of people dying off being from the lower economic and other socioeconomic strata, it baffles me that there is no reflection in the fact that the people who would be most likely to survive include the many members of the Cheetah Generation. Instead it's pretty much just "Fuck it. Africa's savage. Africans are savage. Moving on."

I think that cyberpirates did a good job of describing it. Beyond the cities, there is not much out there beyond the wilderness. Plus it has been a few years since the VITAS 1 hit. I suspect that 60 years later the population has recovered to some degree.

The various glimpses we've had of Africa include Cyberpirates, Runner's Havens (Cape Town), Corporate Enclaves (Nairobi), and Feral Cities (Lagos w/a brief update on other areas).

Of those, 3 deal with more lawless areas - pirate havens, runner havens, and a feral city. As Lagos is the most indepth look at Africa, and is in Feral Cities, it obviously portrays a feral, savage, dangerous sprawl. So yes, the overall picture provided so far are of "savage" areas, as you say. However, Nairobi isn't a feral area, it's a corporate controlled city with a serious spirit problem.

Had the Feral Cities instead been Awakened Cities, and featured Kinshasa-Brazzaville or perhaps Cairo, it would have been an entirely different picture.

There was a SR3 SB that mentioned central Africa VERY briefly, I think it was the Dragons book, IIRC. The description provided there on the "dark heart" lead me to believe that things there are pretty much the same as they are now IRL (violent and bloody). I had a lot of trouble getting details myself a few months back and found the well pretty dry for everything that wasn't related to the ghouls or coastal population centers.

For the record, my story went over well as far as I could tell with my players. The hippos scared the drek out of them

According to the BÖC, the global human death rate is approximately 40,000 men and women every day. This was a low estimate when it was made in 1976 and the current global daily death rate is likely to be much higher. But even if you assume that the low estimate is accurate, that's 14.6 million bodies per year, though 51 million is likely to be a more accurate estimate. Of course, that's globally, and not everyone will donate and not all bodies will be suitable, but it provides a good base to work with.

Perhaps. But like I said, Africa was overviewed in SOTA 63 and various other resources have painted it as something not worth bothering to cover. I was so keen on the idea of the Ethiomalian Territories reference in Shadows of Asia until I read Feral Cities and realized you just made Somalia's anarchy more widespread. Let's not kid ourselves, Shadowrun really has just ignored Africa for the most part and then when it has been covered, and even mentioned tangentially it's a shitberg of stupendous magnitude. I mean, for Christ's sake, Angola is going through another civil war because of communists? Are you fucking kidding me? That was the best someone could come up with in Loose Alliances for an idea? That's pathetic.


Yes, and apparently though statistically the survivors would be the richest, smartest, most inventive, luckiest and magically-active and probably Muslim, and yet Shadowrun's Africa looks remarkably, or rather, EXACTLY like 2009 RL Africa. Funny that.


I believe it was SOTA 63. There was a comment about the whole of the continent, "bugs, war and disease? No thanks." That pretty much sum up Africa in SR all right. And while there may be a couple of places that would reflect the enormous changes that would be wrought on the entire continent by disease, magic and corps raping and pillaging for resources (Congo, anyone?) I am disappointed in not being surprised that it hasn't happened yet.

Cairo is also a city of over 20million people. In SR it would have been a one of the most frightening necropolises in human history with a background count to boot. And while Target: Wastelands and Target: Awakened Lands mention the revival of neo-Ancient Egyptian magic there is but one tiny corner of the second-largest continent on earth. B.F.D.