So the questions start with:

• Can a player use a clone as a second life if he or she bites the big one?
• Are clones just for parts or can they actually have the memories of the cloned individual?
• If they can have the memories of the original, what are their rights as far as fluff goes?
• Does a clone just pick up where the original left off or does the replacement need to be clandestine because the various nations and corps do not consider them the original or even human?

Of course you can create a new character with similar personality traits and stats of an old character and call them a clone. Why wouldn't you be able to? The only limitation is how your GM handles creating new characters when a character dies. If they give you the same amount of karma on top of the original creation rules, there'll be little problem in doing so. Especially if the previous character was also a clone. Hopefully the GM is at least slightly competent enough to take the concept and run with it, but if not so c'est la vie.

As far as personal rights go, it depends completely on how the scenario is handled and whether or not there's any way to tell the clone is a clone (such as having DNA signatures or physical deformities/markings that indicate they're one). Having one completely replace a deceased person is a very viable plot concept.

Be creative and work with the GM to come up with something interesting.

Lol, I am the GM for my group. I can house rules this of course but wanted to see if in the five editions of Shadowrun (I am counting 4.5) someone had officially addressed this.

"There are no such things as clones in the Alpha Complex.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ... Proteus Arcology. Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend. All violators will be shot and cloned."

Ah Paranioa. A game where you can die so many times during character creation.

Not only during character creation, but also in the preamble. Remember, R&D has nothing to do with development.

I'd go with a Ghola system.

No and no.

Clones used for "spare parts" are force-grown, lacking a fully developed central nervous system.
Basically, they are brainles bags of meat with usable parts in them.
They will not have the memories of the cloned individual, they will not even have a brain of their own- which is why it's legal to harvest their organs in the first place.

Then, there's fully functional clones around- but they'll need as much time to grow and learn as any other metahuman.
These attempts at cloning serve a wholly different, reproductional purpose.
They are not to be used as organ donors, but for other purposes (like having a child without resorting to the usual means of reproduction, producing a genetic copy of a particularly talented individual and so on).
Of course, these clones lack the same upbringing as the cloned individual, so they may develop completely different.
Also keep in mind that clones rarely express magical abilities, even if the cloned individual is Awakened (in soem cases however, a mundane individual can have an Awakened clone, even though it's very rare).

But back to your original question.

Given enough ressources, it would very well be possible to raise a fully functional clone as an "extra life", putting them through extensive simsense training, PAB to implant some crucial memories of the donor (and to condition them to take revenge on whoever killed their donor if they are actually intended as a "backup" for a runner), genecrafting them to enhance their abilities and so on.
But this would take over a decade, even for someone who matures as quickly as your average ork.
And the result wouldn't be the same as the original.
Such a clone shouldn't use the same sheet as the original (N)PC, but should be created on his own.

In any case, memories can't be cloned as they aren't stored in your DNA or whatever.



However, you could houserule that SR technology has developed a method to extract and externally store a person's memory.
Stuff like the Flashback Nanites in Augmentation aren't that far away from such an attempt.
PAB technology could -as another houserule- be used to upload these stored memories into a clone and create a "carbon copy" of a character.
All it takes is houseruling that two existing technologies are farther advanced than in the official SR universe.

However, keep in mind that even under these conditions, the clone would only retain the memories up to the point of "uploading" (which could make for interesting plot hooks if he has therefore missed some crucial information).

Questions on the troubleshooter exam

"Which Secret Society do you belong to?"
(the correct answer is "I don't know. What is a secret society?")

Also, be sure to get one minor question wrong on the test. No one can score 100% without being a communist, mutant or member of a secret society.

Since when? Reference?

And most of the time a metavariant has a human clone too.


The Sixth Day.

I've actually looked at the costs for making a clone army, and it's doable (from a Mega-point of view, definately not any but the most wealthy prime runners).

I was thinkinng about "Sixth Day" and how it would fit in really well with the shadowrun world. As for the time needed to grow a thinking clone I would think that after all the organs had fully matured the application of speed growth treatments would not be a problem. Your still looking at several years but not the originals full lifetime. Plus once the clone was matured plastic surgery could take care of the diffrences or the character simply claim to have undergone age reversing treatments. As an aside if the player took an edge based on having a clone prepared at character creation the whole time issue goes away.

It should be noted that they use clonal brains for cyborgs. I don't think (especially with PAB technology) it would take that long to train a clone with basic knowledges and skills.

They don't only use clonal brains with cyborgs. And while I'm not sure of the rules exactly, I don't think clonal brains have very many inherent skills. Most of their skills are given through skillwire systems implanted as a part of the cyborg. If you build a cyborg with a brain taken from a grown adult, they have the most inherent skills of any of the cyborgs.

They don't have inherent knowledge skills, but other skills can only go to 5. And I did not mean to imply they only use clonal brains. They also use children and adults.

Shadowtech, Cybertechnology and Augmentation all agree on this point. It's been a long standing feature of Shadowrun since 1st edition that almost all clones are force-grown, maturing in about a month with no gray matter, which is how they get around the ethical issues of growing another you that can be harvested for extra kidneys.

In 1st and 2nd edition, it even stated in the core books that it was impossible to clone someone that was fully viable on its own. They changed that, I think, after Dolly was cloned IRL.

For cloned bodies and "respawns", you want Eclipse Phase, which should be hitting shelves soon

As far as Shadowrun goes? No. It's possible to create a fully grown clone of yourself. However, the mental stability of the clone is questionable, at best. Plus, you wouldn't be able to "download" yourself into the new body. The best you could do would be possibly some SimSense movies, if you had the right hardware to record the SimSense and regularly "filmed" yourself, but even then, at best all you're doing would be showing the clone "home movies". he wouldn't experience them for himself, nor would he have the skills and experience you you have. Even if you recorded all your memories and downloaded them to the Clone, he still wouldn't be a clone of you, anymore than you would be a clone of, say, Babe Ruth after watching an extensive Babe Ruth documentary.

This is not to say you can't fudge things a bit. It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility for Shadowrun. There's just nothing that lets you really do so Officially. And certainly nothing that would be easily accessible for a Shadowrunner.

We've played with this a couple times in our Shadowrun games. Bull the Ork Decker actually did create a clone body and downloaded himself, after he was infected by HMHVV and was slowly turning into a Wendigo. It ended up being the major focus of the game for a number of sessions, as we researched the possibilities, hired a couple doctors, begged, borrowed, and stole the technology, and finally did the transfer (and as it was, I lost all my memories of my sense of smell as the data needed to be compressed, and along the way, someone hacked in and "copied" part of Bull's personality, which became another plot point). It was a giant PITA, and was, more or less, a once in a lifetime type of operation.

In a game I GMed, a player needed a few extra build points, but couldn;t find a flaw to fit his character, so I just let him have a 5 point "Flaw". I ended up using that as a majro story hook, where it turned out the player was part of a cloning experiment done years earlier to create the "perfect Shadowrun team". But sommething happened and the clones gots eeperated before they matured, and SHawn's character was one of the clones (A phys ad). Freaked him out when he kept running into people who looked just like him... A Cyberzombie, a Corp Sec Mage, a Decker, and finally a Rigger... But there were no crossover memories. Effectively, while they were clones, at the end of the day it was more like they were Septuplets, each genetically altered to be predisposed toward certain skills and talents. They grew up as normal, and developed their own personalities, lived tehir own lives...

Bull

The last part's not for sure.

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If you can put a brain into a (cyborg) drone you should be able to put it into a cloned body, too. Or you could turn a clone of yourself into a biodrone.


Whatever you do: Don't hurt your brain or it's game over.

If you're talking about RNA memory, that was disproven a while ago. Our best guess is still a combination of the hippocampus, amygdala, and the mammiliary bodies.

You COULD do something like this, but at that point, you're really playing something closer to an AI than whatever you were before.

In the hands of the right players, there's all kinds of crazy RP possibilities. In the hands of most players though, it would be either cheesy, munchy, or just lame.

Alternatively, you could go read about Programmable ASIST in Unwired.

More like a cyborg. You're a brain in a jar put into a human body who's (evidentally) non-existant grey matter is filled with a CCU instead.

EDIT: Although the idea of playing a Ghost in the Machine who uses Stirrup-Interfaced wimps who are suppost to be clones of his old metahuman body is certainly interesting..

Or you could just make a character, call him a clone, write some fluff into his background supporting him as an escaped prototype or whatever, and be done with it.

Shh, none of this sensibility from you! That's too simple!

If the clone has an implanted Sim Module (Hot-Sim) it could just run a personafix of your personality 24/7. The Sim Module would also enable it to run knowsofts and linguasofts to emulate you, and with a good skillwire set and optimized programs, it should be possible to imitate many of your mundane capabilities. Of course, it's not really you, but it's good enough for 'life-model decoy' purposes.

Hmmmm LMD's. Have not thought of those in years. Maybe we can borrow a few from Hydra.

One of my players is running a character whose big secret is that, despite looking 20, she's actually 70, and has had her brain implanted in a fast-growth clone body twice and posed as her own daughter, to dodge enemies and stay youthful. Unfortunately, the last time was around Crash 2.0 and she lost the fortune that she'd used to fund it, and had to start rebuilding from the beginning as a lowly runner. I okayed it, and am basically treating it as just fluff (no special mechanics), but do you guys think that implanting a brain into a wimp body like this would work? I'm assuming it'd be kind of a high-end risky procedure, and that sooner or later her brain's going to suffer from aging, but even with those in mind, is this viable in Shadowrun?

If you can put a brain in a jar and plug that jar into all kinds of drones, why not?
It's certainly imaginable, given SR's implantation technology.

What i'm wondering about, though : why not just use Leonization?

The idea of faking her death to shake her enemies and posing as her own daughter to work with former contacts wouldn't work then, or not as well. At least that was the reasoning.

Plus, this clone body idea has the advantage of being way more awesome.