actually they're sick, but the same race as before they got sick.

So ya gotta contain/eradicate the disease, stop the spread of it, <insert other catchy phrase>.

I entirely agree. Deckers have been known to spread all manner of diseases, from Anti-RTG ICE deficiency syndrome, to sudden outbreaks of rash-like malicious code.

Filthy creatures. Thankgod they usually stay indoors.

Though, I rarely resort to hunting them. I think their palid skin, and penchant for living virtual lives is something to invoke pity, not hatred.

read my signature

I like the great Dunkelzan prefer treatment over killing of people with a disease. Remember that one of the awards in his will was for the first to come up with a synthetic flesh for ghouls to eat.
As written in cannon, ghouls spread hmhvv via successful attack; That doesn't mean that they will attack everyone they see, nor does it mean that casual contact will spread the disease.

Well, there used to be, sorta.

Darkfather was a decker, and eventually an otaku. He was also very rich, had cyber eyes and skin treatment, and tailored pheromones to fit in with "normal society". Past tense because he's dead now.

Which has puzzled people ever since it was written, because synthetic human flesh was something you could buy out of the medtech section of the first edition Shadowrun basic book published in 1989 and reflecting the technology of 2050.

So some 7 years before the publication of Dunkie's Will, it was already canon that ghouls could put money into a credreader and walk away with a double-armload of human flesh that was complete moral and legal for consumption. Obviously either:

1. That section of the Will was a misprint brought about by an over excited freelancer.
2. That section of the Will was written over twenty years earlier and Dunk never got around to erasing it.
3. That was a small amount of money that he was actually giving to Aztechnology's Medicaro branch and he simply dressed it up in flowery language to attempt to get the corporation to embrace the more humanitarian uses of their research into gratuitous evil.

Take your pick. But ghouls can definitely eat synthetic flesh and always have been able to. They eat dead flesh, which is exactly the same as cloned flesh, which is another word for synthetic flesh.

-Frank

I like this one, personally.

The problem with that option is that there are a lot of entries that would have been more recent, and he would have accessed the Will a fair deal in the interim. Dunk'n'Donuts was no fool, and something like a Will entry would not slip his mind, especially as he knew it very well might be imminently needed.

I prefer the third option on Frank's list.

I think Cake said it best:

Yeah. Ghouls have been hanging around cyberclinics to eat the leftovers for 20 years, it's too late to take that back. Ghouls eat cloned meat. Cloned meat even has Essence (which is why you don't lose any when you swap your blown off arm for a cloned arm), so if there was some mumbo jumbo about how the dead meat had to have been living human tissue at some point, it doesn't even matter.

Cloned donor bodies are real human bodies from a chemical, biological, and even magical perspective. Ghouls can eat them. They have been eating them since first editiion. And they'll continue to eat them long into fifth edition. Every sooftem people forget that cloning in Shadowrun is really easy when considering the horror (or frankly lack thereof) of the ghoulish condition in SR, but there you go.

Now Wendigo have to eat the living tissue of a concious, living human under emotionally charged conitions. They can't eat stuff out of clone vats because the stuff in clone vats doesn't feel any emotions. They really need something funky to survive without murdering people. That's a major social problem.

But Ghouls don't. And they never have in any edition of Shadowrn ever. From the first edition (where they were explicitly a Goblinized form of human), to the current one (where they are the result of a disease that is massively misnamed because they don't actually get the signature effect of the disease's title), Ghouls have always been able to persist on the dead flesh of a human. And cloned flesh is the dead flesh of a human. At least, it is once you keep it out of the nutrient bath for a few hours.

-Frank

Is that to say you disagree?

Hm. What about this?

Infuse the synthflesh with some of that astrally-active plant matter and you've got Ghoulie Gardenburgers! Hooray!

Veganesque ghouls. Mmm, tofurkey. TofORKey?

Fuck yeah, gives a whole new meaning to Seitan
BTW did you know that tofurkey doesn't actually contain any tofu, but is mostly seitan/wheat gluten.
as to the will, there is nothing in canon that explicitly says they can eat "cloned flesh" as a substitute. In fact if they could, why would anybody have any problem with ghouls.
lastly my favorite ghoul had to be grid reaper the badass decker who was in chicago

No. They aren't a variation on the same virus, they just happen to be magical viruses.

Human Metahuman Vampiric Virus (HMHVV) was named in 1989 in reference to Human Imunodeficiency Virus (HIV). That's fine, because either through briliance or random chance, that name happens to fall within the established naming conventions of viruses.

But what does that name mean? It means that it's a virus, that is capable of infecting humans and metahumans which causes the traits of vampirism. If another virus affects a different group of creatures, or doesn't cause those symptoms, then it's a different virus. By definitin. Even if it differs in only one base pair along its DNA (or RNA) package, even if it has exactly the same protein/sugar package, it's a different virus. Definitionally.

A virus is not a squirrel or a dog. It doesn't "mate", it can't even swap DNA in the manner of a bacteria. It's not even alive, it's just a package of chemicals that happen to produce more similar packages when exposed to the right kinds of living cells. The "species" of viruses are defined by what they do, not by what they are.

So if something infects a fucking panda, it's not HMHVV. If something consistently fails to give its hosts the Essence Drain power, it's not HMHVV. It doesn't matter how chemically or magically similar it is to a strain of HMHVV, it's not a strain of HMHVV. Nor can it be. Furthermore, viruses aren't named after people, so there's no chance that a virus will ever be named "Krieger's Strain". Even if it was discovered by Dr. Krieger, even if the scientific community really likes the guy, that's not the virus' name.

This particular thing really chaps me. It would be like if they announced that a Fire Lizard and a Hellhound had the same scientific name because they both breathed fire even though they were awakened versions of different creatures and couldn't interbreed. The nomenclature simply doesn't work that way. I understand what they're trying to express, but this is beyond the pale. It simply can't be called that.

I don't know how closely the virus that causes Ghoulishness matches genetically to the virus that causes elves to turn into Banshees, but I do know that it persists in cold blood, is transferable without killing the new host, and doesn't cause the victim to develope essence drain or essence loss, and therefore that categorically it is a different virus.

Even thinking about this particular fuck up makes me really fucking mad. It's like getting the name of the sun wrong or giving the wrong value for the gravitational constant. It's public information, you can just look it up. Whoever wrote the "Krieger Strain" nomenclature into Shadowrun is a jackass. Anything else they've ever done which has ever been cool has to be judged separately from this incredibly obvious, irrefutable total fuck up. You can't hand-wave this as "it's the future, people moved around" or anything. This is an actual constant of the scientific method that cannot change, and they got it wrong.

-Frank

To be completely fair here, I believe the panda bit was a joke. In any event, it was stated by an anonymous poster and has never, ever been confirmed elsewhere.

It might - and here I extrapolate - be the layman's term for the virus. I don't disagree on your factual points, and admittedly there's no outright statement regarding it, but it would be consistent with the general idiocy of large groups of people. Consider "the common cold", which is a layman's term for a number of strains of virus.

Not overly disagreeing with you here, but I believe primary blame probably lies with Carl Sargent, who wrote about HMHVV-II in Paranormal Animals of Europe.

Bullshit, Frank. Everything changes. You can't tell me the scientific method hasn't changed in the last hundred years, nor that it won't continue to change for the next hundred. Hell, there are people today who can and do argue over nomenclature. I'm not saying this is the case with HMHVV - but damn.

I can see that. Personally though, I like stuff like that. The humanizing element, if you will.

"Holy crap, even D wasn't all knowing and perfect" sort of take on it.

I mean, I just read the Haunted Knight series of Batman written by Jeph Loeb, and it's now my favorite Batman series of all time to date. Know what the central theme is? Bruce/Batman's struggle with childhood memories, and how he's not remotely as strong as he must present himself to be.

So yeah, I could spin a whole campaign off of someone finally realizing that some of D's will was just out of date. Hell, maybe there's a newer copy that he never got around to putting in the right hands.

I know, I know, "that's not canon". But I'm not a Fanpro writer. Canon is what I say it is in my games, and it doesn't have to be something that the SR community can agree on.

I could see that if we were talking about something that he wouldn't have revisited as often as he must have in the Will's case. It's just a stretch to think that he would read and reread a document and not once take the minute amount of time it would take to alter it. I prefer to think of the entry as Frank suggested in option #3 ... with a hidden meaning. After all, Dunkleberry was full of hidden agendas.

That's neither here or there. We are all free to be the Gods of our own games.

The point of this community is discussion though, and there does need to be a basis on which any such discussion can ensue, and in this forum that happens to be Canon Shadowrun. That isn't to say that discussion of non-Canon issues is discouraged, just that it should be taken as a given that each GM is ultimately responsible for the content of his or her own game(s).

That being said ... you're wrong!

Yeah. Although ALS is idiopathic, and probably originally genetic in nature. As such, it could easily be named that for real once the progress of the disease is recognized. Like Huntington's Chorea, which is the actual name of a real disease.

The problem here is that while naming a genetic ailment after a person is wholly appropriate within the present naming conventions, that would imply that Ghoul transformation was a form of goblinization. Since well, a genetic predisposition plus magical effect transforming a human permanently into another body type is exactly what goblinization is.

That's the thing that hurts the most about the bug city revelations about Ghouls.

And under that scheme, I live in a white house.

-Frank

Well, it brings up the uncomfortable question of how, exactly, to classify a clone. Especially if it turns out to not be chemical, but really does depend on the residual aura. In the literature, it's said that they can't clone parts - they have to grow entire (meta)human bodies and harvest the parts when it's done. These clones are considered to be animals at best - slabs of meat at worst. But if these are simply non-human blobs of flesh - why would ghouls, who must eat the flesh of living (or once-living) humans to live, be able to derive any sustenance from them? If clones are otherwise perfectly normal metahumans kept insensate on drugs, or simply left in a feral state, in order to benefit their identical genetic twins... well, that obviously raises a vast number of concerns. Even if they're genetically or surgically manipulated to be of sub-human intelligence (or vegetative), it still raises ethical questions that most people wouldn't want to think about too closely.

But assuming it were settled for certain, the fact that ghouls could eat cloneflesh is a slightly different matter from whether or not they would. Human vatflesh costs money, lots of it - from 7500 to 25000 for parts, according to the BBB. Of course, these are Hospital costs, it may be somewhat cheaper, wholesale, but probably not less than a couple thou, at best. Non-sentient ghouls don't have incomes and even sentient ghouls are hard-pressed to get a legal job that pays anything worthwhile. So, you've got people living Street or Low lifestyles with the choice of shelling out many times their monthly income every few weeks, dying of starvation, aiding and abetting organleggers and other criminals, or killing somebody they don't know or care about.... well, which seems the most likely to happen? Of course, this is off-set slightly because the actual dietary requirement is only between 1 and 2 kilos of flesh per ghoul per week, so a pack could pool their money and share a single body for a while. But the costs still mount up quickly.

All of this, I think, is what the bequest was really about: getting someone to develop a substance (similar to other New Foods) that's really not really metahuman flesh - not just flesh that belonged to people who "are barely considered to be metahuman" - but that ghouls could still live off of. Plus, it'd have to be affordable - which the real deal isn't, unless collected illegally.

The first thing we have to establishis what a virus species actually is.

That's important. A virus species that lives in humans is actually defined by that fact. If these were grouped at all, it would be as "Magic Transformational Viruses" (MTVs). But it is unlikely that people would group the viruses at all because they infect different hosts with different mechanisms, bring about different changes and have different requirements for persistence. Unfortunately, what the ecological niches of a lot of these viruses is hard to pin down, because we don't actually know for sure what the actual properties of all these viruses atually are. But here's a possible interpretation:

• Metahuman Sasquatch Lycanthropic Virus (MSLV) (HMHVV II)
  OK, it's not called the Jarka-Criscione strain because it's a virus. Furthermore, it's not a vampiric virus because it doesn't cause vampirism. There's a lot of things it could be called. Heck is might affect centaurs as well, in which case it would be tempted to call it something like "Sapient Mammal Lycanthropic Virus (SMLV)" or something along those lines. I use the term "Lycanthropic Virus" because it creates Loup Garou and Bandersnatch therefore the signature effect is the carnivorous transformation and the berserking. But the scientific community could settle on virtually anything along those lines. It could be a "berserker virus" for example.
  
  
• Metahuman Horridus Virus (MHHV) (Krieger's Strain)
  It's not a vampiric virus, it's not named after a person, but it does turn people into a Ghoul (Manesphagus Horridus), so you could get a name that was close to HMHVV if that was important to you.
  
  
• H2 Human Metahuman Vampiric Virus (H2 HMHVV) (Bruckner-Langer)
  It infects humans and metahumans, it causes vampiric activity, holy crap! The Nosferatu causing infectious agents could actually be a strain of HMHVV. As a strain it would have a different protein package surrounding its genetic payload. As the only specifically identified strain of HMHVV, I'm guessing that it would get the designation "2" applied to a hemagglutinin difference found in said package. But honestly, that "H2" designation comes straight out of my ass - there could be 32 proteins already identified in strains that cause the standard vampirization effects in humans and wendigoization in orks, leaving our nosferatus with a 33 or whatever appended to their protein. Heck, there's no reason to believe that it differs in only one matrix protein and so on and so forth. Its designation could just as easily be "H4 MA13 G6 P23". Whatever. The point is that this is actually a strain, and so it's going to have a designation like the dreaded H5 N1 strain of influenza you've heard so much about or possibly get the strict alphabetical designation of an HIV strain (A, B, C, D, F, G, H, J, etc.) - not having access to the ongoing research, I couldn't definitively give this virus strain a designation.
  
  
• Phascolarctos Monstrosity Virus (PMV) (Drop Bear Virus)
  It affects koalas, so we know this isn't an example of HMHVV. And they aren't even vampiric. Arrgh.

What is a virus? Well, here's what the ICTV says about that:

-Frank

Just a minor point, drop bears drink blood, which sound pretty vamparic to me...

this clearly shows that the standard view of vampires is they drink blood. ergo drop bears are vamparic koalas. Your probably right about it being a different virus though, despite the wonderful image of a vampire running round infecting koalas on a lark(it's not like drop bears can infect).

I'd prefer the chainsaw.

Okay, all the old SR-geezers here know the theory that metagenes and all the 6th world expression happens from higher dimensional shadows of DNA blah blah, it was in Shadowtech, right? I seem to remember a discussion in one of those old books that talked about higher dimensional astral shadows of genes and crap like that.
Well, maybe the different strains of HMHVV do not differ in even one base pair. Maybe they are genetically identical, and the only difference is in their astral shadows or other such 6th world stuff.
You can hardly expect your 5th world definitions of "virus", "strain", or any of that to account for that type of thing.

You're right, of course. Sometimes people lose sight of which is being discussed is all, and I like to be clear so people don't think I'm trying to rewrite history.

On the Dunk thing:

See, to me, it's a stretch that anyone at all, Dragon included, can even begin to approach the "infallibility" and overlord-ish-ness that is portrayed in the fiction.

Note that creating the illusion that you've reached that level is not the same at all. Go back to my Batman reference. To criminals, and the public at large, Batman is this brick wall of unrelenting crime-stopping power, with ruthlessness in the pursuit of justice being his only weakness/flaw, and then only if you see it as such.

Behind the scenes though, especially in the hands of a good writer, we see that he's haunted by emotion, guilt, sadness, loneliness, and is always questioning whether he's doing the right thing.

That's my main beef with the portrayal of figures like Dunk in the SR "canon" fiction. And fixers, and CEOs, and any number of figures that are portrayed as popetastically perfect and all thinking/realizing/knowing.

It just isn't..."real".

And since I am behind the scenes when I GM, I get to envision a D that's so busy creating that illusion, that he simply doesn't have the time to actually be perfect (nobody does, I'm sure we can agree on that).

Now, you could say that with teams of lawyers, advisors, aides, etc. a person really could stay on top of all that, but I'd say there are a few problems with that.

The main issue is, if my memory isn't failing me (it's been a while since I read any of the major Dunk fiction), he didn't have that many people that he trusted enough to allow them to handle matters that personal to him.

Secondly is the fact that when you have teams of advisors and what not, you have them so that you don't have to focus on the ancillary matters. You have time to focus on "what matters" because you have all these people taking care of the extraneous issues. If you were micro-managing them to the point that everything they did was perfect and done exactly as you want it, bam, you're back to having no time (and now your helpers are useless, really).

Just my thoughts.