I and some friends were discussing possible combinations in shadowrun (namely, which of us could come up with some really, really stupid items and combinations) when a brainwave led one of my friends to the following. He was not drunk, though he is Irish, and thus might have some sort of internal thing going. Auto-Injectors with Guinness? Maybe.

In any case, there is a weapon known as the humble Ares Super-Squirt. This can be loaded with any chemical. Such as Laes, Leal, Pixie Dust, or Laesal Wine. Now don't stop reading. These mind-blanking substances can then be shot at someone with DMSO, causing the person to absorb the chemicals through their skin, becoming affected by the strong-ish effects of the mind-wiping drugset above - namely, some Stun Damage, a period of being knocked out, and losing their memories of around 10 hours (or 5, or a few minutes, depending on the load). This could similarly be used with K-10 to cause angry raging berserker (or badger) attacks in cities, or hell, with Aisa, to make them see funny hallucinations. This could also be great at raves and parties, where a repeated firing of eX into the crowd would begin an orgy. And then you turn your gun on yourself.

In any case, this is a brilliant idea - let's assume you're a shadowrunner running amok with a Super-Soaker (whoops, "Supersquirt") loaded with mind-altering substances. You can, like someone with a gun or taser, knock people out of the fight, but unlike gun-boy, don't end up just killing them on the spot (and thus you could leave them alive if you wished to avoid retaliation), and unlike taser-boy, the person would not wake up and remember your identity or look or anything at all. It would be great.

Anyone else want to comment on my friend's mind-breaking suggestion (our usual GM was pretty much crying by the end of it, and I'm not sure it was in laughter), and anyone got any other brilliant combinations?

Oh, and until a friend glanced at the errata, none of the toys in the Spy Toys section of Arsenal were illegal. Including the Laes cigarettes and the briefcase rocket. Or the tube you shove up your ass. Just another fun thing to play with. Although the errata, which we only recently looked at, sort of ruined it...

Add in some Slab to that Squirt and I've already talked about it.

But here's one for you:
LoneStar FlashFlood Water Canon.
DMSO.
Oxygenated Flourocarbons.

There's a big problem with the supersquirt concept : you have avery little control on the amount of drugs which effectively ends up on the target. Which means a dosage high ghto get reliable effect will end up expensive, and also add a non negligible chance for overdose.

Dartguns and the like are far more reliable in that department.

... No. The Ares Super Squirt fires specific packages of one dose. We're not talking about an IRL Super Soaker.

EDIT: And my post about the water canon was specifically to force an overdose - if you overdose on Oxygenated Flourocarbons you suffer an embolism and take like 14P damage with no Resistance Test.

But none of those have the fun of K.O'ing someone with a shot from a super soaker! Or you could dual-wield Supersquirts loaded with Laesal Wine or something....
The water cannon, though, sounds awesome. And Slab could work.

Add in some rum to add suspicion to anything they can recall afterwards. No one will believe the "drunk" guard. He'll probably get fired too.

While I love the idea of a forced embolism for 15P unresisted, one must factor in the detail that OFCs come in 5 liter treatments. Even if you could somehow afford to use the 5.1 - 10 liters worth of OFCs and DMSO necesarry to produce an overdose for every single target, how viable is it that a human body can absorb 5.1 - 10 liters worth of liquid, even with DMSO aiding the absorption?

Otherwise this would be my dragonkiller of choice.

~Umidori

Just curious: Where exactly did you get a look at that errata? Because it isn't the currently published one…

I just realized I totally missed a logical step in my last post.

A human body might have trouble absorbing that many liters of liquid, but a dragon could easily absorb it. You actually could kill any non-great dragon instantly with that.

Of course, that assumes OFCs affect dragons in the same way they affect humans. If nothing else, the dosage would differ I suppose. Yet if that's the case, does that mean all other chemicals require different doses for a dragon as well? That particular hiccup, combined with the fact that most "medicines" aren't really stated to be usable as "toxins" by RAW, kinda shoots down an otherwise awesome idea.

~Umidori

Yeah, I would assume an overdose amount on a great dragon would be about the same scale as trying to get a human to OD at range. You'd basically need a lake of the stuff and the GD to hang around long enough to bathe in your cannon stream. Otherwise he just seems very refreshed while he rends the hell out of you and maybe takes a few more hits off your weapon while you bleed out. End result you're dead, he has a pick me up and hell of a story to tell.

I wonder what you could do if you loaded the squirt with nanpaste trodes and called for head shots? Presubscribe it to a back up commlink with a hot sim module and have three agents waiting there with black hammers for the poor bastard to come in hot? Or Blackout if you want him to walk away at some point. Add in a psychotropic effect to make things really interesting. Also cheaper than a lot of the chemicals mentioned above. I could see a GM shooting it down, though.

Oo, speaking of that, capsule rounds? My gun could shoot mind bullets...

Guys, y'all can mix DMSO with soap flakes if you just want to poison somebody. There's nothing special about that.

Yeah, true. But where's the style?

If you run a Pornomancer you could mix DMSO with... uh.. actually nevermind.

~Umidori

this somehow reminds me of some book or other i have read...

Hmm... True. I actually heard it from a friend who said it was in the errata, but then, he's the GM - I guess rather than errata, that's houseruled. In that case, RAW, all the crazy-ass spy toys are legal!!! BRIEFCASE ROCKETS FOR EVERYONE!!!
Also, although it's viable to kill someone with soap, I agree that it has no style to it. I prefer a direct application of K-10. Kill everythings around them too! With a supersoaker!

Hmm, mixing DMSO with one's own pheromone-stuff-laced-sweat?

Considering you can't smell with your skin, I doubt that would have quite the desired effect.

...My decker Violet (yeah SR3) loved her SuperSquirt. Usually had it loaded with Gamma-S so not only did it KO her target but softened them up for interrogation later. She also had a few other drugs like Jazz (great to screw up mages with) and MAO which is perfect for handling that jacked up sammie.

During one mission, she did come across 5 Laes darts (she also had a dart pistol) which she ha put away in a very safe place.

ah, right, of course.

Supersquirts are also a prime candidate for getting skills with on the cheap, via skillwires. Supersquirts use the exotic skill, which can't take specializations, which means you can't get a decent skill dicepool on the cheap. If you've got skillwires, might as well get a Personalized squrtsoft 4.

43,000 is cheap? Let me play in your games.


Interestingly, the book doesn't give a hard rule that one dose is 5 liters. It mentions that in a fluff area. Technically, you spend 2k and some DMSO and you can load P4MO into capsule rounds. I just use the Water Canon method to make the idea more palatable to those not yet divorced from the fluff. (note that I actually have it as 5 liter treatments in my games)

I've seen a variation on that in the real world about 10 years ago.

Someone took an off-the-shelf super soaker, loaded it with saline solution, and rigged a tesla coil up to the stream, running off of a 9 volt battery. If memory serves one shot could incapacitate someone so long as the stream was steady.

If you could up the voltage, why not stick a tesla coil onto something that is an electrical conductor and make it a taser as well?

That way, even if you didn't OD the person, you probably stunned them.

4300¥ is cheap, Hacking is even cheaper. Be a Pirate.

Of course, toxins are notoriously bad in combat: They take effect at the end of the combat turn for "Immediate", even. So you still can end up dead.

New skillwire prices are 10k/level, not 1k/level. It is 43,000 for R4 skillwires with one option.

And why hack when you can freeware?

You mean Activesoft - and pirated means 10%. That was probaly the only point of that change in SR4A… and unfortunately the one that ruined the economic viability of skillwires for corporations that don't produce their own Activesofts.

Aside from the fact that Activesoft are not so much programmed as compiled from recordings - Hacking is a lifestyle.

So is keeping your open source software up to date and on the cutting edge, and is actually hacking; downloading illegal software is just social networking, and maybe some cracking.

Except selfwritten and open source software does not degrade.

That's one reason the stuff is so damn dangerous to work with IRL. Even just the oils and dirt on your hands is enough to make you sick if you spill some DMSO on yourself (I speak from experience). GMs - take note of this for glithches and critical glitches.

Also realize that DMSO doesn't immediately dry up. Leaving a doped DMSO cocktail on door knobs, car doors, etc. is another way to deliver your compound of choice. It's also good for making slap patches.

Lastly, consider that DMSO is a very good organic solvent and works on a wide variety of substances. This makes it very common in laboratory settings. And it's usually stored next to things that will kill you if they get into your blood stream. And it's affects are widely known by people working with the stuff. Remember that next time you invade a corp research lab.




I'd say it might work. After all, mixing garlic with DMSO let's you taste the garlic after putting a drop of the solution on your arm (yes, this really works). You wouldn't smell the pheromones, but they would wind up in your blood stream, which is, in part what happens when you inhale them anyways. If anything, I'd be worried about an overdose.

Slap patches probably already have a DMSO'd chemical in them, now that you mention that.

Not that it requires DMSO... or very much substance, but nitro paste would be a pretty effective way to knock someone out as well. I've seen a nurse get light-headed and almost pass out after they forgot to use gloves with the stuff.

That's one of the easiest way to manufacture real ones.

Edit: Of course, you have to make sure the DMSO won't interact with the other materials that make up your patch, possibly including any adhesive.

The DMSO + [toxin] trick has been around for ages. It was introduced in Shadowtech, which was published for SR2 in '93.

Personally, I miss the ELD-AR. Imagine a paintball gun using SR firearms tech (like smartgun) and chemical paintballs. Seems much more plausable than chemical bullets from a pistol if you ask me.

Wasn't the ELD-AR in the Corporate Security handbook?

This kind of thing was actually known as "pooling" at Grateful Dead shows. People sometimes got kicks by tossing cupfuls of liquid LSD on unsuspecting folk -- the "squarer", the better.


Or so I've heard...