Since we were discussing the potential usefulness of a melee style runner, I got to thinking about weapon mods for hand to hand stuff. Now, besides the personalized grip giving +1 dice, there's really nothing else in 4th ed to help the blade man compete. So, I figure it wouldn't be too difficult to have a poison reservoir in your snap blades or cyberspurs, and just a few canals along the blade's length to hold the poison until it comes off in an opponent's wounds.

So, how do you guys see this going down? Just an auto-injector installed, or should there be more cost/problems? Could this basically be applied to any sheathed weapon? What are the best poisons/toxins to use here?

Personally I think neuro-stun isn't a bad choice. It's contact vector, and if it doesn't knock them unconscious outright, it'll leave them with a doubled up dicepool penalty that should keep them from accomplishing anything. Though, I suppose you could consider getting stabbed with a fistfull of knives an injection of sorts, so the immediate effects of narcojet might be better. Warp, of course, is awesome, but expensive as hell.

Pretty sure Chemical Glands can auto-coat weapons, and they don't show up on cyberware scanners like cyber glands do, but i'd have to go check.

Ah yeah. Chem Glands are wicked expensive though, and it seems like a cheap, effective technical alternative should be available.

What about an 'external ammo port'? With your GM's approval this could be loaded with the chems you want, autocoating the weapon.

But each successful hit would use up one dose. Or perhaps lower the power of the poison.

I wouldn't want people getting too dependent on it, so I'd probably make them retract/sheathe the blade for a full combat turn after any poison application if they wanted to re-up their dose. I'm pretty sure that's how it works with a Chem Gland anyway. But, there's definitely mention of poisoning your blades in the Toxin's section. There's just no rules tor it, and it seems like a great way to do damage to Spirits with normal weapons. Imagine hitting a Spirit with Warp coated blades, and while the blades just scrape off doing no damage, the Spirit falls into a psychedelic stupor.

I don't think poisons would effect spirits since that requires things like, you know, organs and what nots

Yeah, you would think, but there's nothing I could find in the rules.

Spirits have no listed immunity to toxins. Insect spirits in fact are particularly vunurable to insectisides.

By this argument maifested Water elementals can drown and earth elementals need a shovel to dig a hole in the ground. Fire elementals can burn to death and at low force it is in fact trivial to do so.

Whether your GM has knockout gas affect an air elemental is something to discuss with them before you pull this trick and even if it does work I would tend to run that most mundanes in the setting would assume it doesn't unless htey have been told/ trained otherwise.

what's even Worse, if you use a high damage stun gas, that actually does stun damage, spirits don't even have a stun track, if i ain't mistaken.
so they get physical damage. so they get sent back to whereve spirits go when their damage track is full.

It would have been good if arsenal had covered melee weapon customization a bit more. I'd like to see something like a smartlinked blade weapon with a poison reservoir in the hilt, letting the user recoat the blade in one of several poisons with a simple smartlink command.

Ringu or failing that Cyanide is the obvious choices to kill someone.

That said, I also like Laes...

- J.

HAHAHAHA! Fighting off ghosts with pepper spray!

Basically . .