People in the Ganjee (correct name?) river in india managed to goblinize.. into dwarves. Thanks to a manasurge, of course. People can change into Orks and Trolls at puberty, and possibly during extreme mana levels and I'm sure I remember reading about storms in Tir Na Nog turning people into elves.

Could anyone else point out examples for me on the various bits of UGE that I've missed?

AFAIK, the Ganges River people in India changed into Nartaki (among other things), the only known human metavariant (not dwarf). Nartaki are listed in p49 of the Runner's Companion and are a product of the Year of the Comet (specifically, the events that predicated SURGE). It would probably be easiest to just read the SURGE entry at wiki.dumpshock.com.

EDIT: Drakes could also be arguably considered a magical gene expression.

My current PC (Julian Benedict) was born in Tir Tairngire to Elven parents. His younger twin brother (Vincent) is an Elf. Everyone just assumed Julian was a short round-eared elf until he hit puberty and Goblinized into a Troll. There was a bit of a scandal and their parents broke up, something about "the UPS guy"...

I don't think I've ever heard of people turning into elves or dwarves after birth. I'm pretty sure they just started being born after the mana got high enough. I could be wrong though. Mostly I think the only thing you haven't mentioned about surge is its ability to turn perfectly normal humans, orcs, elves, trolls and dwarves and turn them into squid-faced, green-skinned, 4-armed, horned monstrosities after puberty.

Part of it is delving into ancient SR books, actually.

One thing to keep in mind is that goliniation doesn't really occur any longer. Even back in the 2050s, there are numerous statements in the books about goblinization being very, very rare. Yeah, it's in the novels, but novels and the game have a limited linkage.

It does still happen with orcs sometimes at least; I seem to recall some remark about some children born to them being humans, 95% of whom goblinize at puberty. I imagine similar issues between inter-racial couples as well. So it's rarer, but probably not unheard of.

Can you quote a reference, because I don't remember seeing that at all. Not that it means anything other than I may be going senile, but, still

It's simply the first word I picked.

It's not children of humans becoming orks, it's human children of orks, it's in the basic description of the metatype on p. 66 SR4 (p. 72 SR4A) which states:

"When sapiens are born to ork mothers, they will express as robustus at puberty roughly 95% of the time."

Ok. For some reason when I see "goblinization", I think of the first waves of it, the classic "guy goes to sleep a human, wakes up a troll" variety.

that was back in the 2050's(Novel Changeling IIRC) and it was During Puberty (most of the Time)

Nowadays(2072) most of the Metas resemble their Parents

He who dances like his Parents
Medicineman

Never said I was talking 2072. And, actually, you prove my original point; most goblinization occurred in the early days and gets more and more rare as time progresses. Forgot about the orks, though.

i'm pretty sure there are still instances of it happening in general (that is, people expressing as orks or trolls who don't have ork or troll parents, and elves or dwarfs being born to parents who are not elf or dwarf). it's just becoming less and less common. that doesn't mean it *never* happens, but it likely does mean that when it does happen some of the doctors start thinking about writing about it for submission to a medical journal or something like that.