Ah, I see. As I wrote earlier: you want (need?) hard rules for that. MMV, as I think that such matters can be solved between GM and player, but I see where you're coming from.

Let's say I learned hard rules on such matters are a boon. Maybe it's me being cranky and paranoid, could well be, but I know a number of players where a good thwacking with hard rules every once in a while is nescessary to cut down endless 'but nowhere is written this is forbidden!' type discussions.

So yes, it's at least half need. But full want, if you will.

Fair enough - and it explains a lot about your postings and point of view.

As much as I generally agree with Hermit's stance that PC Infected are "bad" I also stand by Grinder's point that what this issue mostly boils down to is communication and the social contract in use(or not) at the table. The authors and developers have more important uses for their under-paid time than trying to word the rules to stymie every conceivable munchkin with a disruptive character concept.

Yeah. I may be a bit unfair there, but my experience is that you before long need such rules.

Besides, I still do not think Shadowrun is the right system for an in-depth roleplay about the dehumanisation (or keeping your humanity) as a vampire. VtM or CP2020, who both have a humanity attribute, are far better suited for this. Shadowrun, where essence refers to ED patterns and holistic body integrity and says zip about your humanity, just lacks any gauge for this.

And I firmly believe not everything is better with vampires (or elves, cthulhu, or lasers, for that matter).


Sure, but to keep retcons to a minimum and to avoid the more glaring problems isn't that much to expect, is it?

1.) Scroll up to the top
2.) Hit search
3.) Enter "infected" as keyword and "hermit" as name

...

Provide a quote or don't claim there is one.

Ah. We Trekkies were there first. Personally, I prefer "torture porn" or "guro," now that I know what we're talking about.

The creature Kirk blasts with his makeshift bamboo tube, charcoal and sulfur powder bazooka? Digging up half forgotten childhood memories ... been a long, long time since I watches TOS.

Torture porn or guro. Will keep this in mind.

Vampires only result in
angsty gothy crybaby chars or food for the gorn trolls
(because there is no other way to play Infected). Even worse,
you can easily build Twilight vampires
(and the "mundane" twilight cast, too.) The consequence is clear:
The rules are crap
because playing Infected comes down to
comes down to emoness, gorn and nothing else

And that was just one thread...

Ghoul caps that allow anything besides painlessly starving to death seem to be an urban myth. I don't expect anything official in that direction.



The UCAS find it hard to let go of bounties. The biggest ghoul community in the country is located in an urban wasteland where central authority has collapsed almost completely. Cabrini Green was described as a total hellhole back in the day. Infected rights are always described as a hotly contested topic.
In contrast to this, we do not have a single description of mainstream culture fully accepting the infected.
We have to piece the picture together ourselves, but all hints point towards the leper colony version.
A more humane way to contain the plague than to shoot on sight, nothing more.



Which is why Feral Cities describes that the moderates among the ghoul community, those who only feed on willing donors, are universally close to starvation.



Bugs are about as human as a xenomorph. They are an entirely alien, incomprehensible threat solely intent on overtaking the material plane.
All that remains of the host is merely there to impersonate a human being or to add a set of skills to the hive.
We could as well discuss tyranid rights.
From the beginning, ghouls have been eager to help in the fight against the bugs (and got nothing but FABIII in return, thanks a lot Ares aka Weyland Yutani).
So it doesn't rely belong here to compare the two.

BTW, regarding the whole wendigo issue :
older editions never provided more exact rules for them than SR4.
It has always boiled down to "they prefer to eat their cult members, but there's nothing that says they have to, and the only rule we give for this is the Influence power."
Here's the text from the SR4 BBB :


Exactly what we had in older editions and there's nothing in RC or RW that contradicts this, so it's still valid.

Yes. It is sufficient for NPC. For PC, hard rules are needed.


Point being: it is the same with the Infected, at least the Vampiric infected who have died during infection. Whatever they are, it isn't (meta)human anymore. Ghouls and their ilk are perhaps different, as Patrick's proposal discussed, because their infection does not involve death.

Ghouls and other Type 2/3 may be eligible for leper colonies (though that would really be more gulags to starve them to death than anything else). Vampires and their ilk are more well served with the bug and shedim treatment, because in essence, they are the same thing - a foreign, parasitic lifeform taking over a formerly human body.


I hear the Necrons are opposed to Tyranids eating their favourite hosts. Does that make the Necros a plausible ally? Ghoultown in Chicago wasn't interested in non-Ghouls any further than eating them, according to Bug City.

And you are accusing the devs of adopting too many pop culture elements regarding the Infected?

HMHVV I victims are NOT undead, and neither has their body been taken over by another hostile intelligence as it would be the case with bugs.

Clearly not for everybody's PCs. I get that you feel they are needed, but I'd feel otherwise. That's not a hard rule that's needed there to handle what you want in play. It simply needs a GM who's willing to be clear to his players about how he wants particular aspects of the world handled. The players either accept that, or don't play that type of character. I'm not sure what more in the way of ruling would be needed.

You clearly are more fortunate with your players than I am. Hard Rules are about the only thing to end an hour long 'but nowhere is written it is FORBIDDEN!' discussion. Might well be a cultural issue, though. Americans are far more willing to accept a ruling than Germans, who tend towqards consensus through incredibly long-wound discussion. Not exactly a fun way to pass an afternoon.

Seems like I'm gaming with Americans only.

It's not just Germans. Back in the early 90s playing SR1/SR2 we got into endless discussions of this nature. Eventually we matured out of that tendency and painstakingly constructed a social contract that works for us. Now I have the luxury of gaming with a group of people in their mid-30s, with whom I've gamed for twenty years. It's important to note that we still have disagreements about rules, but we accept a GM ruling on the spot and argue about it later if we feel that strongly about it.

I can sympathize that you are stuck with a group like this and I can only urge you to point out to your fellow gamers that you're having these arguments instead of playing the game and probably having less fun because of it.

Like Addiction (Cult Member Meat)?
RC suggests addictions like this for the infected.
But that's up to the player to decide, as the infection's impact on the victim's mental condition varies from case to case.

I would have appreciated some more precise information towards how widespread such changes are.
Or even a resistance test as back in SR3, to determine individually how well the victim handles the transition.

But it's pretty obvious that no infection entails an automatic and predetermined change in behavior.

I would think a Compulsion to drive others into cannibalism would work better (and maybe coupled with eventually eating them). But an Addiction might work too.

Yes, more precise ruling or information on how often the Infection results in Psychosis would have been a good idea.

As for the last, a sudden cannibalistic nature and murdering people for food DOES constitute a massive behavioral change in my book, even if this apparently doesn't need to have any influence on the Infected's psyche for sparkles.


Well, yeah ... maybe. Still, hard rules never hurt anyone.

I'm of amind to drop that group anyway. Discussing in great length not only THAT SR3 errata limit the skillsoft expert system to level 3 but also why we do not WANT that is really tiring.

When determining a character's capabilities, yes, hard rules are needed. When determining how to play the character, fixed hard rules are the single worst possibility. Hard rules for addiction are good. Forcing an addiction to Hot Sim on the hacker is not. That is precisely what you are trying to do with the Wendigo - as far as I can tell, it has never at any point been that they must promote cannibalism, or that they must eat cannibalistic meat. It has always been that they prefer that, and I would guess that is not universal. I know more than a few people who would prefer to eat something, but cannot due to allergies, diabetes, & even personal choice.

Well yes, that is a massive change. If the victim's psyche remains mostly unaffected, he will not want to eat others. He simply has to, or he'll starve.
When he goes out and murders people, instead of becoming a scavenger, he's also clearly lost it.
There's infected who do not act this way. I'd also say that among them, there's quite a few who just kill themselves after infection (though less than one would expect, self preservation is a pretty strong instinct).

We can't tell how many emerge from the transformation without becomming feral, or how many who remain able to reason still develop strong predatory instincts, sadist tendencies or the schizoid nature commonly asociated with nosferatu.
There's simply no reliable sources that outright tell us the cold, hard facts. Especially not in SR4.

BTW, actual psychosis in the medical sense seems to be rare, at least i cannot recall any sources for infected suffering hallucinations, delusions and similar typical psychotic symptoms in SR material.
Persecutory ideation seems to be common among nosferatu, as well as the aloof, antisocial behavior exhibited by many schizophrenics.
But at the same time, they appear to be able to act rationally and assess situations correctly (in fact, more so than before the transformation- just look at their mental stats) in a manner that does not fit psychotic symptoms.
RC also labels them as schizoid, not schizophrenic.
Big difference, actually.

Some of the fiction to the contrary, I see it as actually fairly rare that many of the classically non-sentient Infected, like the dzoo-noo-qua or the goblin, survive the transformation process without going feral. I haven't really sat down and run hard numbers for the Infected, but my guess at the moment (and I reserve the right to change my mind later if my math doesn't support it) is that, if you met 500 goblins, probably 499 of them would be feral death machines intent on making your lifespan considerable shorter than it might have been otherwise. The other one would be a death machine that could have a reasonable conversation with you while it was shortening your lifespan.

Either way, it's not good for you to be in the company of 500 goblins.

It's not all that common for Infected ghouls to be non-feral, either, though it is increasing. Now, bred ghouls...that's a different story altogether. One I'll address some other time.

Or starve themselves to the point of food rage, wake up in the midst of a torn body, and run away screaming and starve themselves again. Yeah. I think Patrick Goodman's entry in RC mentioned such behavior, too. However, someone who becomes a hunter - as the common cliche'd child of the night is - is showing a massive change of behavior towards the antisocial.


I suppose not very many Infected end up like this; we could use the Ghoul transformation rules as a rough guideline for how many do not make it.


Nosferatu are, from the behavior they show, all antisocial in high degrees, often with sadist and paranoid tendencies - Bruckner-Langer seems to change them like this, explaining their high mental stats and debased behavior. To a maybe slightly lesser degree, Vampires are, too, with some who degenerate into pure hunting machines because it's easier not to think at all.

It would be interesting to know whether HMHVV does indeed cause neural changes that hardwires the Type 1 and B/L infected towards a more antisocial and/or schizoid mind.

That's long been my belief, but I haven't had the opportunity to really explore it yet.

I think so too. Maybe HMHVV 1 causes different kinds of strong social disorders, depending on what metahuman it affects? Since the distortion of the Bodies is very dissimilar, it's unreasonable to assume the distortion of the brain isn't.

It has been a while since I have watched a vampire movie I'll admit, but I don't remember Dracula sparkling. In fact I seem to remember the directors making everything really dark looking and basically the opposite of sparkling. Am I missing something?

There is a quote floating around the intarwebs about Twilight that I found quite humorous.. "Back in the day, vampires sucked blood, not c#ck."

What about banshees, then?
Physically, they are changed about as much as vampires, but they are usually completely nuts.
Wendigo undergo the most drastic physical changes of all strain I patients, they also exhibit strong personality changes, but in a totally different way than any other infected.

Then there's gnawers, who appear to be the most reasonable infected around, in spite of being afflicted with the strain that usually causes the most extensive mental damage.

It's hard to establish a pattern here.

Well, brain and physical distortion needn't be congruent. The Banshee may largely suffer from brain alteration, and only very little would be visible on it's body. Also, I think the Dzoo-Noo-Qua have it worse in terms of distortion, but that is debatable and largely academic.


Possibly because HMHVV interacts with the meta- and mago-genes? And all kinds of weird genetics ensue. Weird, magical genetics.


Yes (the one on the right). Or not. Depending on whether or not you can deal with Twilight.


I LOL'd.

HUh, players deciding how they play a character? What weird kind of concept is this, I want The Big Book of If-Then-Else to tell me exactly how my characters are supposed to act in every situation


PS: As a friend of mine put it "Underworld - when vampires still were hetero"...

Twilight vampires aren't gay. That would imply that they aren't asexual and antiseptic.
No, that's not family friendly enough.
The quote that best sums this up is still "vampires are the new ponies."

Actually, they're all straight and abstain until married. And before they, at best, dryhump (and beat up the girl while dryhumping, but that is okay because that only shows how much they love them). Who said they are gay? They're wimpy, angsty and brooding in a way that would make every German romanticist proud, they're dull and defanged, they are an immature little girl's dream - but they'Re not gay. Whoever says so hasn't read the books. They clearly lack any homoeroticism, as is evident in many V:tM games and novels.


Awesome.

This makes me want to photochop flowing manes and glittery logos onto them like My Little Ponies...

Is there a negative quality in SR for "Publicly Embarrassing Glitter Tattoos?"

You mean, they don't glitter enough for you already? What would more glitter accomplish anyway? It's like painting a tree green, isn't it? A bunch of red heart stickers that glitter, or a care bear sigil im the stomach ...


Distinctive Style?

You guys know way too much about Twilight.

I am actually looking forward to the fourth movie, because in the middle, the books tone changes rather abruptly, what with the alien style birth of this mutant vampire alien child. Wonder whether they keep it in the movies. Would certainly ruin the PG rating.

Yes, I read all these books. I read all kinds of things. There's worse out there. Far worse.

Captain Obvious sez: Asexual vampires are not heterosexual either

More old-post-to-new cut-and-paste.



I see that the list of "Infected-friendly countries" has been posted already, so I don't know why exactly I'm replying to this other than to say...no. No, it doesn't. The UCAS and CAS especially are not particularly vampire-friendly. One thing I didn't have space to make clear is that, for the most part, when they say "Infected-friendly," I think they really mean "ghoul-friendly," and even that's only to a point for most of them. Perhaps someday I'll get more space to work on that some more.


For the non-German speakers among us? I think I can roughly guess "Where are the Infected?" but I could be wrong, and I prefer human translators over automated ones.

Pretty sure I'm done over in the old thread. Will double-check, of course, but I'll be happy just be in this one and getting caught up....

Ahem. They're the new unicorns:

http://www.bookofratings.com/creatures.html

Keep in mind that entry was written about ten years ago.

This strip (by the same fellow) was a bit more recent:

http://speakwithmonsters.badgods.com/comics/vampire

So never let it be said that I can't laugh at myself as someone who both enjoys VtM and wears black clothing while dancing to Bauhaus and Joy Division. However, it is precisely because of those interests/affiliations, that I am perhaps more disdainful and dismissive of Twilight than most people here ever could be, as I certainly do not swish my cape through the Paris sewers while weeping, nor do have a desire to..."sparkle." That said, I find some of the over-generalizations about the associations between goths, gays, emos (that sounds even more terrible when you pluralize it), VtM, and Twilight to be largely laughable, a bit immature, and perhaps even slightly bigoted as well.

For the most part I agree with the stance that if you want to play Vampire, play Vampire. But if you want to play a vampire in Shadowrun, things aren't going to be nearly as Romantic/romantic as VtM. In spite of that--and I've said this before--I'm surprised there isn't more crossover in the fanbase. They have differing themes, but both are dark in tone and have the "Urban Fantasy" thing going for them.

The citizenship for vamps and ghouls does seem like a stretch, but those are both sub-plots that have seeds that extend back YEARS, as I recall. I'm too tired to comment any further on that, though.

"Who are the infected", p. 60 Runner's Companion. Didn't have the english pdf at hand when I posted, my apologies.

Relevant part: "After decades of denying them as citizens, or even metahumans, most members of the New European Economic Community, as well as the UCAS and the CAS, now recognize known Infected citizens as a special case of medically disadvantaged metahumans and dangerous citizens, and allow them to retain their citizenship,"

Also, this article calls them "post-metahuman", which is the best newspeak for "undead" I have heared, ever.

There is some commentry in RC I think which sates that some infected (mostly Ghouls) can apply for criminal sins, which give some rights but require 24/7 monitering.

Two situations to ponder

1)
A man is stopped by the cops in a bag he has a ghoul head, man says "damm animal attacked me I'm taking the head in for the bounty" cops scan it and say "fair nough chummer" and drive off

2)
A man is stopped by the cops in a bag he has a ghoul head, man says "damm animal attacked me I'm taking the head in for the bounty" cops scan it and say "thats the head of Mr Iyma of 32nd street, Hands where I can see them" and takes him away

I can see some of the less animal infected going down that route especially if they were good little corp children and workers before they were infected. To me part of the whole setting is people trying to find their place in the world. To some its the hive (not bug) kind of thing with a corp job living in corp housing that kind of stuff, others its the barrens and living one day to the next. What I'm getting at is if you were infected while it changes alot about you your primary instict will still stay the same in some respects a corp drone is still a corp drone.

Brings to mind what happened to the Kriegers (the researcher couple that discovered Strain III and after which Krieger's syndrome is named).
Both got infected during their research and turned into ghouls. What did they do? Continued researching, looking for a cure.



It's probably the only witty thing Markus Kafka (for the Americans among us : not related to Franz) has ever said voluntarily.



If you want vampires in SR that actually sparkle and make all prebubescent girls blush with excitement, SURGE them and pick the Glamour quality.
I'll stat out a sparkledog shapeshifter for that group.



They are, if they are asexual in the "true love waits" sense. If you want to sell sex to pre-teens, you have to lace it with a thick layer of good, old-fashioned family values.



Prophetic. I am impressed.

Well, the werewolf dude actually doesn't really sparkle much; and is a fairly ordinary physad Native American shapeshifter. He's one of the less horrible characters, and the guy who really gets fucked over. Until book 4, where he is served a healthy dose of very creepy paedophilia (Twilight werewolves have something of a bonding to "the one" they are meant to be with, which, upon meeting, hits them like the sledgehammer of ultimate stalking type revelation and they are taken with them forever or until properly killed. Turns out wolfboy's "the one" is a newborn mutant baby. ICK.).


And if he hits you, it only shows how much he loves you!


O_O That guy still exists?! Is he ... post-metahuman?

Be glad that you didn't get the sparkledog reference. Better for your sanity.



I think he's one of those non-biological lifeforms or something like that.

Well, *now* I know. Fairly amusing, in a train wreck sort of way. Yes, this warrants the glamour power. Totally. Like whoa.


This doesn't change my mind about AI and post-metahuman rights at all!

They.
are.
not.
undead.

More old-post-to-new cut-and-paste. And the last one, mostly so it'll be in this new thread and I can address it more fully later, if needed. This makes me happy.


Criminal SINs, while available to many Infected, don't really amount to equal rights and citizenship. The two statements above aren't necessarily, in and of themselves, contradictory. Something I think needs to be addressed, yes, but not altogether contradictory.


And the fact that bounties are still on the books, while the Infected can apply for criminal SINs, is making a lot of people crazy. I see something coming to a head, but I'm not sure what form that's going to take or when it's going to happen.

I disagree about the citizenship. You're a covict, sure, and you have limited rights, but you are a citizen. Thirdclass citizenship still is citizenship. And that means it would, for instance, be illegal to shoot you dead if you cross the street unless you have a sound reason and/or a law enforcement badge.


I would suppose the bounties are only on unregistered Infected, as an enticement to register, or something. Which, of course, won't gain you anything as a society unless you lock the infected up in some sort of reservation, but there you go.

I thought something similar at first. Bounties for feral, nonregistered infected, limited citizenship for those who can actually fill out the forms and agree to have a monitoring advice attached to them or something like that.
I read up again on that today and found out i was wrong.

Running Wild claims that the bounties are still on the books, but about to fall in the UCAS (and not enforced anymore as well).
Same for the CAS, but they are lagging behind a bit.

It's kinda confusing if you hide the explanation somewhere in the running text, while putting the bounties in a sidebar, but it's actually pretty clear what's up with them once you find the corresponding passage.

Note that these laws are not passed yet. In fact, they could still be voted down, especially in the case of the CAS.