Given that a touch from a ghoul is enough to transform you in a ghoul (unless you regularily can roll 24 dices without a medkit in a body test), I am wondering who among you has characters, PCs and NPCs alike, tolerate ghouls near them. Working, living near them, maybe even with them.

No. They live in sewers, where they belong.

And what do you do if it comes toward you, and won't stop? Can you shoot it to defend yourself?

Damn right I will shoot. As far as I am aware there is still a bounty on Ghouls in the UCAS. Sure the Corporate Courts consider them sentient and capable of having rights, but that doesnt mean squat if you are on UCAS territory. And what are the chances of a Ghoul having a SIN? Noone will care if it kicks the bucket, hell I would probably be thanked by the local 'Star for helping keep the infection down.

Ghouls are dangerous walking biohazards, any transfer of bodily fluids (By fluff, I know RAW rules Contact contageon, but as a GM I would rule that it has the same transferability as lets say, AIDs. i.e the most likely chance of transfer is exchange of bodily fluids.) is a potential death sentance to me. Gotta bring it down before I get myself infected.

D-D-D-Double Post!

I was just going to make a splinter thread, following Bulls Mod post, but you beat me to it. Shall we keep it altogether as both rules and fluff threads will inevitably converge and start repeating each other?

Shall we link back to the original thread for posterity?

Presuming that's okay, I'm going to reply to AH, here.



I understood that. I was just using "DV" because that was used in the toxin rules. My mistake. Anyway, to bring the rules together Fuch's concern about how this affects cannon, it does pretty much mean that ghouls have a super-high infection rate.



I'm not sure how protective gear should work in this case. If you've been infected, I can't see that keeping your biohazard suit on day after day will continue to have an effect. As regards the following:



The average person with a Body of 2 or 3, could never succeed at this. In fact, anyone with a Body of less than 8 can never succeed. I'm going to disregard Dwarves and Adept Powers as minority cases - correct and useful to know, but irrelevant to the general case I'm interested in. Cure Disease is interesting. Again, it's not likely to help much. For a start, it has a drain value of disease DV -2, so the magician is taking 6DV each time they cast it. I suppose you could put it on a sustaining focus to keep it going. You still only get an extra dice for every hit on the sorcery test however, so even with a powerful mage casting, you'll probably only get four extra dice, maybe five. That's probably not enough to stop you turning into a ghoul. You don't need to have 24 dice to score eight hits if you get ten attempts. But you still need around... (checks calculator) around 10 Body to have a fifty:fifty chance of not becoming a ghoul. And that's with a pretty powerful magician casting a sustained Cure Disease on you.

Basically, this backs up Fuch's point that Ghouls are incredibly contagious if you let them get close to you. Which brings us on to the following:



The question is why anyone would want to do anything other than what you suggest? By cannon, ghouls have become a little more accepted over the years. This level of virulence undermines it a bit.

Although on the other side, you do have to have contacted with infected material which doesn't just mean a ghoul claps you on the back in a friendly manner. It means, blood, saliva or sexual fluids, I would guess. The "contact" in the disease vector refers to contact with these rather than the entire infected person, I presume? That should at least assuage some of Fuch's objections. Though it still seems pretty potent to me. Those "unnecessary people" you refer to may come back to bite you if they're infected.

It certainly has a very serious impact on the rules for PC ghouls.

I'm with Codebreaker: HMHVV is comparable to, say, AIDS. True, I wouldn't necessarily shun any sort of association with an AIDS patient (although I'd watch myself) but HMHVV has the added drawback of creating a dangerous predator. The truly feral ones, like ghouls and loup-garoux and dzoo-noo-quas, would probably be shot on sight in the SR world, as they usually are. The other HMHVV infected, like vampires and nosferatu, would probably be OK to associate with for a bit, as in a meet or something, but not run with on a regular basis. Now if some corp were to discover a way to suppress the animalistic nature of, and/or preserve the intelligence of, HMHVV-infected, then we'd talk. As for now, I'd keep them in the NPC realm.

There are some things to note, though:

First and foremost, the general disease rules can be read so making the first test keeps the disease from taking any effect - only if not making it, subsequent tests are needed.

If subsequent test are needed, however, the remaining Power accumulates... and you aren't healed until the minimum tests have passed and the Power then is reduzed to nothing. That means that most people will need to make much mure than just the minimum 10 tests, to get the Power to 0.

And thus, the world is populated by ghouls.


Now, for the loophole after the fact for player characters, but pretty much no-one else:

Technically, you best option is not to worry about it for the 9 first days. Make tests, lose 0.9 Points of Essence.
At the 10th day, the Power most likely has accumulated to insane levels... so you burn a point of Edge to exceptionally succeed at that test. It's the tenth test, thus the minimum tests have passed - and the Power is at 0 with 4 hits to spare.
Revitasation won't get you the lost essence back, though - but it doesn't need to: It's essence loss by a disease, so that is treated by Cellular Repair.


Then again, you are better off abusing the loophole you can use in advance. Or by ignoring this insane retcon.

I'd advocate the latter.

Actually, it's worse than that. Much worse.



So, while 10 dice may be enough to give you better than even odds of succeeding at one Threshold 8 roll in 10 attempts, that's not good enough by a long shot. Let's suppose that on your first roll, you get slightly above average results with your (very impressive) 10 dice. That leaves you 4 short, so your second attempt is against a threshold of 12. Your second roll, you actually get lucky and manage all hits (odds are roughly 60,000 to 1 against this). It's still not enough to avoid losing essence, but it at least means youäre back down to a threshold of 10 for your next roll. Except that this one is a bad roll, 0 hits. Over-all, you've managed fairly well so far (14 hits on 30 dice, average is 10) but not only haven't you managed to succeed at a single roll, the disease's power is up to 18 for your 4th roll. To get the disease's power back down to a level where you can succeed on the 10th roll (the last one within the minimum duration, and the absolute latest that you can succeed and have it mean you're not a ghoul at the end of this), you're going to need 48 hits over rolls 4-9 (averaging 8 per roll), just to be in a position to be able to avoid becoming a ghoul if you can again manage all hits on that last roll. And even if you manage to roll well and make the first couple, you're still likely looking at power accumulating enough over the remainder of the minimum duration that you end up succumbing on day 11 (or 12) instead of day 10.

Because of this, even the 24 dice needed to have 8 hits be an average result isn't really a reliable protection against being infected, a low roll makes it that much more likely that you'll come up short on the next one as well (which, in turn, worsens your odds for the one after that). To really feel safe against HMHVVIII, you need something closer to the 32 dice needed to just buy 8 hits so that you aren't facing the prospect of an unlucky roll cascading into an impossibly high Power on the following ones.

Or you could avoid coming into contact with the slavering, corpse eating crazies who are basically infected with Awakened Rabies?

But according to canon you shouldn't shoot them on sight. Only in "your little world" you can do that, and devs are glad that's the case.

I'm going to avoid overquoting and try to address the key issue:

Fuchs is incorrect. You do not need 24 dice per test, ten times in a row. You need 8 hits per test, ten times in a row. Obviously he was thinking about cashing 4 dice in for an automatic hit (in which case his math is a bit off, but hey); this is only one way to handle it. For a normal person, this would necessitate a lot of luck, immediate medical diagnosis, and probably magical intervention (either the application of multiple Cure Disease spells or the Rock Lizard Blood magical compound - possession might work too).

Yes, ghouls have been made much more virulent. This was on purpose, to make them less of a joke-critter, which is what they were before. Call it "Our Ghouls Are Different." Yes, the time the disease takes to run its course is severely reduced - this was a decision that came down on high, and if you don't like it I'm sorry. Feel free to blame me if you have to blame anyone.

Uh, nope. I was thinking of basic probability. To get 8 hits of 5 or 6 you need three times the number on average, since 1/3 of all dice will be 5 or 6s. lease do not assume I can't multiply 8 and 4 - which would net 32, not 24.

And the decison to make them more of a danger is one thing - but making them more accepted at the same time simply doesn't fit. The fact that a normal person ends up a ghoul is the reason why I asusme any sane one would shoot at ghouls on sight. Not let them get rights.

As far as I am aware canon only states that the *corps* should not shoot them on sight. And even then I dont imagine they actually take any care not too. Isn't this the entire reason that the Barrens exist? To keep all the nasty nasty Ghouls in, and all the loyal Citizens disease free? I mean, if I remember correctly, Redmond is basically one giant walled off hellhole, and to leave Redmond you need to either go past a checkpoint or through to no doubt electricuted and drone watched fence.

Part of the reason is the large number of Born Infected - ghouls et al. who were born that way and don't actually carry the disease. Actually tried to make that standard for PCs but it got vetoed. (We also tried to get some explicitly anti-HMHVV meds in, but it didn't take - oh well, maybe later).

Ghouls-as-people goes back at least as far as Bug City, so don't lay that one at my door. Draw parallels to lepers or any other horrible, highly contagious disease we don't have a cure for yet.

Remember: me freelancer, not dev. I have only a limited amount of creative control which can and sometimes is overruled at a moment's notice. If I had to do it over again, I might have changed the vector to Injected instead of Contact, but it might have been changed anyway. Such is life.

And how does one spot the difference between a born infected and an infected infected, aka, how does one spot a carrier?

Blood test.

That's rather hard to do when one sees a ghoul, and has to decide whether or not to shoot it before it infects anyone.

Yep. Such is life in the Sixth World. Undoubtedly someone is working on that somewhere.

Indeed it is. Such a shame, sometimes a nice Ghoul gets shot.

Such is the life in "my little world". Apparently, in the 6th world, people consider ghouls just another person, and would not think of shooting them just for being virulent disease carrying cannibals. And everyone is working on making them officially people.

I think it comes down to how the thing is acting. If it acts like a ravenous monster, I shoot it. If it approaches normally and talks to me about the weather, not so much.

That being said, I'm not sitting next to one.

It approaches you normally... but it's now close enough so it could easily touch you... or spit on you... or attack. It's still talking about the weather, but what if that's just a ruse? And the stench... but it does nothing,. But it could. Maybe without wanting to, a little stumbling, a sneeze, a cough... and what if others think you are infected? Your family?

RW, p.64: "There are 35 countries in the world that recognize the Infected as something other than wild animals which need to be controlled. Ours is not one of those countries, and neither is the UCAS. Both still carry laws on the books establishing bounties for the Infected, though those laws are seldom enforced these days. Many Infected are eligible to acquire criminal SINs and live as second-class citizens, at the expense of being monitored 24 hours a day. Ghouls have made enormous headway in the UCAS in search of their civil rights, but technically they could still be killed for the bounty. This is beginning to change, as some groundbreaking legislation has been introduced in the UCAS Senate to strike down the bounties on ghouls and loup-garou and offer them a path to citizenship. Similar legislation is expected in the CAS sometime this year."

RW, p. 67: "The loup-garou is a human Infected with HMHVV II. After the virus has run its course, the host is considerably changed. His body is covered in short, gray-black fur. The lips are drawn back, revealing sharper teeth with pronounced canines. The fingernails lengthen and harden into claws. Transformation into a loup-garou is particularly brutal; the trauma often but not always causes significant reduction in intellectual ability. It lives as a scavenger most of the time, save for a peak period of four to six days out of every twenty-eight when it becomes a ravening monster, attacking and killing any creature it can."

/boggle

Like I said, if it approaches normally I ignore it. But if it gets within lunging distance, I move to keep the space there. I don't let people get that close to me in RL unless I know them, why would any sane Shadowrunner? And if it has the mental capacity to talk to me about the weather as a ruse to get close enough to kill me, the fact that it's a ghoul doesn't matter, it's trying to kill me anyway. I don't think Ghouls feel the need to go around spitting on people in order to infect them.

Maybe it's not a retcon, but a new development? The rising mana level has empowered the virus, making it more powerful and virulent than before? Ghouls have just started to make progress in being seen as people instead of beasts and then WHAM, this happens and things start to slide back. Pro and anti-ghoul rights people come into conflict on the streets, infections start spreading... Could be an interesting setup.

To answer your question from the other thread, don't kill them in Asamando because it is one of the nations that acknowledges ghoul rights. There instead of killing a flesh-eating monster, you will have committed murder. I'm not calling it utopia, but I am saying that the Kill on Sight mentality will get you into a lot more trouble in certain nations. Be prepared and understand the choices, if you still kill them, that's up to you, it's not for me to judge.

Edit: the timestamps are caused by our drastically different time zones.

Would pointing a gun at it and then it deciding to negiate or attack be a way to tell? If it negotiates it is sentient and you're able to deal with it and not blow it way like on night of the living dead (hey maybe you want to send them your dead, you come up with a reason). Though there would be a significant ick factor, and your noteriety would take a hit.

Now the fact that in Asmondo-is led by a ghoul. Ghoul does not mean stupid monster. (Some are, but she is breeding that line out). Now packs of the feral ghouls would at best be used for slave labor. An interesting side note-no one want's to fight Asmondo-especially mercs. Would you want to fight an entire army that sees you as its next nukkit burger?

As per canon it is one of the mmore stable African countries.

I have two things to add...

First, I view Ghouls in Shadowrun much the same way as they are portrayed in the Fallout games. A lot of them are monsters, either mindless, ravening beasts that have given over to their hunger, or they're just evil, enjoying their life and preying on humanity (I consider most of these to be relativly insane on some level or another).

But there are those that still retain their full intellect, their sanity, and their humanity (such as it is). These are fully capable of interacting with normal society (for the most part) and try their best to find ways around their "condition", and view it as a curse. I'm sure somewhere on the Matrix 20-something girls write bad semi-erotic fanfic about how tragic and noble they are, and occasinally in this fanfic they probably twinkle and sparkle in the sunlight. Or something

Second, during Bull's original 6 year campaign, we started off in Chicago before Bug City came out, and eventually built up to that event. Bug City was one of the first sourcebooks to really start dealing with the Ghouls on any major level, and they ended up playing a big part in our home campaign. THey were a MAJOR ally, and a big source of information, gear, and whatever else once the walls went up, since as dual natured creatures, they were better equipped to fight the bugs than a lot of the "normal" folks in the CZ. Helping the Ghouls was a small focus of our game after we got out of the CZ even.

<shrug>

There's a lot of ways to play the game, and frankly, a lot of characters in the Canon SR world fully agree with Fuchs' take on the ghouls. And it's a perfectly valid way to run them in your games if you like.

Personally, I view Vampires much the same way, but that's my own personal bias against the bleeders in RL spilling into my game. If I could find a good reason to put Elves into the same category, I probably would

Bull

That's why I said that Running Wild makes the retcon official: It changend history.

Rotbart--How does a new development change history? Knight seems to be suggesting that the rules have changed due to a rise in mana on a recent scale, not an undoing of the past.

Because that's exactly what Running Wild does: It rewrites history. Plain and simple.

The funny thing is that it even goes as far as to claim that KHMHVV is nearly immune to healing magic... just it doesn't have that property. It's pretty messed up.

There is no way making Kreiger strain of HMHVV more virulent would in any way aid their integration into society.

I haven't read Running Wild but this will make ghouls more like zombies out of 28 Days Later. I'm inclined to agree with Fuchs interpretation.

Right now, I have a ghoul NPC cybersurgeon who runs a shadow clinic that my PCs use. Under this re-write, there is no way any sane person would use him as a doctor for fear of Infection.

How the hell am I supposed to retcon that? There's only so much I can write off as 'increasing mana levels'.

- J.

What you haven't played Left4Dead yet?! (That's the only effect I can see from ghouls in a city... with that level of virulence... only thing left being the immune/carriers).

It's time... and I agree w/ the original poster... with this, it's now open season on ghouls.

You can't make the disease that virulent without turning it into a plague. And plagues tend to be one of the few things which wakes the slumbering masses and activates their survival instinct.

It'd be assault for a ghoul to even come close to someone, which means no interactions or some kind of ghetto which no one enters at the very least.

No.

Umm, don't you still need to get bitten, or whatever, to get infected? And again, Ghouls are, generally, intelligent creatures. They need to eat flesh, but that doesn't mean they want to. And the ones that do are much like your classic Vampires... most don't allow someone to turn. They kill them instead for food.

<shrug>

Even with the new rules, I don't see this as the new VITUS. There might be small outbreaks due to feral ghouls (Or just asshole ghouls), but these would likely quickly get contained. Probably by the segment of the ghoul population that DOESN'T want to get hunted out of extinction.

Contact vector, bull. And pardon me, but your idea of ghouls containing ghouls is rather... naive. If ghouls existed today I can guarantee you that they'd not be left to polive themsevels, they'd be exiled to some island at best, and shot on sight elsewhere if they look like they might even be thinking of doing anyhting but waiting on the spot for the deportation team in hazmat suits. It's not aids, it's the black death spread by touch and no vaccine is working.

Bull, what Fuchs is saying is that Running Wild retconned HMHVV so that it is not only harder to resist but spreads via Contact, not Injection like you, I and every sane person would run it. With not even a weak vaccine that could be applied (only magic) this would compound the problem exponentially. Fuchs point about it being comparible to the Black Death is spot on. At least I am getting some ideas for a racist, pro human political party coming to power - something analgous to the New Revolution or Nazis.

I haven't got the book btw, just going by what I'm reading here.

- J.

Ahh, well, obviously, I don't have the book myself.

And that's just stupid. So, while i'll keep the virulancy, I'll porbably drop the contact bit.

Not even magic works well:

Cure Disease
Type: M • Range: T • Duration: P • DV: (Disease DV) – 2
This spell is used at any point after infection to help a patient overcome
illness. The infected character receives a number of additional dice on
her Disease Resistance Test equal to the spell’s net hits. It does not
heal any damage already inflicted by the disease (that takes a separate
Healing spell).

So, to reliably beat the infection, how many hits do you need to have enough bonus dice to fight off the disease? You need 8 hits on the test with body. How many NPCs would manage to fight off an infection even with a mage of high power?

That 8 neds to be reduced to something more reasonable, like a 4. Reducing the Penetration down would work well too. And get the damn thing back to Injection.

Contact Vector requires skin to skin contact and Chemical seal offers complete protection (unaffected by Penetration). (Augmentation 129).

Now, Ghouls are visibly different from everyone else--they smell due to their diet, milky white eyes, sallow complexion, etc. If one of them is walking through the mall, you can bet that people will notice. Building on that, ghouls know that all it takes is one asshole with a gun to ruin their day and the worst thing that would happen to the perp is maybe being charged with discharging a firearm in public. Meanwhile, the ghoul is dead...

There are a lot of reasons for ghouls to live on the fringes of society--they live in the Redmond Barrens, Aurora Warrens, or in the CZ. I've never seen a reference to a family of ghouls living in Bellevue. Are ghouls scary? They are fucking terrifying if you get caught in a dark alley with one, Are they going to take over the world? Not today.

I'm curious why the sudden idea of ghouls taking over the world started now though. The disease entries are listed in Runners Companion, so they have been out here for a year. Did people not notice, was there something in the RW text that suddenly pushed the button, is this a rehashing of an argument I missed a year ago, something else?

There are reports of ghouls visiting restaurants and other classy places thanks to disguises - check the Jackpointer Hannibelle.

And both Rotbart and myself argued against such stuff back when the Ghoul Utopia was introduced already.

any ghoul tricky enough to sneak into such a place probably have the smarts to go long sleeves, gloves and face mask of some sort.

and if one think the face mask part is odd, take a look at present day tokyo for instance...

as for shoot on sight vs stop to talk, one aspect to consider is that at least anyone but the sinless will have access to a comlink, so asking for directions or the time of day will no longer be a common event...

I think it changed when HMHVV became Contact based...

- J.

EDIT: At least based on my reading of this thread that is.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that change. Since I haven't been playing a whole lot of Shadowrun, nor am I a fan of the HMHVV races (and hence haven't read the Runners Companion rules for 'em), I really wasn't aware that it had changed...

I think that's something I'll houserule out, like I said above.

And Fuchs, as someone (McQ maybe) said in another thread, we'll agree to disagree on how we see certain elements of Shadowrun. And that's cool. There's about 400 different flavors of Shadowrun. I like mine old school flavored, with a lot of high action, fantasy, and drama, but only a few tablespoons of of reality, just enough to keep it grounded a bit.

Bull

If you house rule the change out you at least partially agree.

I do a bit. Like I said, I don't like the contact bit. It makes my early comments in this kind of unreasonable. You're right, atthat point,they become lepers. They're not even an AIDS equivalent at that point. I think that's incredibly unreasonable, unless Carriers are so damn rare (Like, 1 in 1000 or something crazy) that it renders them kinda moot anyways.

As it stands, I'd probably keep carriers at a decent ration (50% or better), but reduce the transmission vector from Touch to "bodily fluid" (aka, bite or, umm, "other"). At that point, they're icky, most people will be highly distrustful, there will be a lot of hatred and bigotry, but in general they're on par with current AIDS patients as far as virility. Heck, without a 100% Carrier rate, they're actually a little LESS dangerous, by and large.

Of course, your feral and insane asshole ghouls are a whole 'nother story