Always felt this was a huge number, too, but as you say, Ghouls are by far the largest group to be likely listed under Other, so ... taking these numbers as given, 1% Ghouls stand.


Not entirely. Setting a competition between medicine and organ donorship aside (because Shadowrun offers plenty of workable medical alternatives), Ghouls still need much more organs than a comparable group of potential receipients, because unlike the man with the bad heart, they don't need one or maybe two or three donor organs in their lifetime, but one a week. And I still cannot see why donating one's body to Ghouls would become a mass phenomenon; there is too much religious interference there, even setting a Shedim threat from corpse storehouses aside.


While the waiting list for food is a nice idea, it would get the bleeding heart Ghoul Liberationists up in arms, since you can hardly wait months and months between meals.

------


The AGS isn't even a state, it's a mess of little fiefdoms that boggles the mind ... anyway, you're right, SINless populations seem to have exploded since NAGNA. Okay, so the SINless last the Ghouls a month before they're all eaten. Not exactly workable.


HIV cannot be caught by tears or Saliva. Flu can (at least some strains). Flu also is transmissible via droplets, which is lung exhaust and saliva. HIV cannot. The fluids with high percentages of the Virus are blood, lymphatic fluid, semen and vaginal fluid. That DOES make it a VD.


the SOTA books had most relevant info on that. You could also check out Fields of Fire, and Loose Alliances' UN chapter. I think they are still in effect, but I am not going to verify this now; maybe later. Start a new thread if you want, though, because this is way off topic.

And Europe will be empty in less than 100 years because each year ~1% of the population die and humans are absolutely incapable of reproduction



The ICD begs to differ...


Will do, if I remember it.

That's nonsense. Humans reproduce in decades, while ghouls eat them all in a matter of months.
It won't work out, even considering only 1% of the total population is Infected with Krieger's AND ignoring the 5% food requirement in favour of the 1%.


Considering WHO and most european health agencies seem to disagree, I'd like to see a source on this.

Which numbers would work out?

It would probably work out if ghouls where used to fix that other unresolved demographic issue with ork birth rates.

The UCAS has around 200 milion residents, that makes around 2 Million Ghouls. Annual death rate is assumed analogous to the US, which is 8.38 in 2010. Annually, this means about 2,49 million corpses.

Workable, if socially doubtful: A ghoul needs 1% his body weight in food each week. An average American weighs in at 100 kg (metas drive that average up). Let's consider all that is edible, makes 100 kg of food for a ghoul. Now, Ghouls are average people and do not change body composition drastically, so that is 1 kg a week needed, which makes for 52 kg per annum. Under such idealised circumstances, each Ghoul would need half a metahuman in this most generous of calculations, and that could well be satisfied, providing no further infections and a serious social change.

SR3: A ghoul needs 1% his body weight in food each week. An average American weighs in at 100 kg (metas drive that average up). Let's consider 60% is either bone nor half-digested nonhuman matter, makes 60 kg of food for a ghoul. Now, Ghouls are average people and do not change body composition drastically, so that is 1 kg a week needed, which makes for 52 kg per annum. That would at the very least be pushing it, though maybe if everybody gave themselves up for consumption (including the ghouls) it could work out. Barely.

RC: A ghoul needs 5% his body weight in food each week. An average American weighs in at 100 kg (metas drive that up). Maybe 60% of that is neither bone nor half-digested nonhuman matter, so that's 60 kg of food for a ghoul. Now, Ghouls are average people and do not change body composition drastically, so that is 5 kg a week needed, which makes for 260 kg per annum. No way this could work.


Shadowrun =/= demographics ... oh, and what if elf women would bear a child every 10 years (on average)? By canon, we'd have a total fertility rate of 40 for them, going by ED life expectancies. That's a slower population explosion but, if it kicks in, we have only orks and elves left.

Honestly the biggest problem with the ghoul population would be rate of infections. Ghouls given rights would still have to be quaritined and segregated from the general population to avoid a massive outbreak. They accidently scrath you and you turn into one of them would be a huge deterant for acceptance. Also given the numbers the goverment would have to implement some form of population control because as Hermit pointed out 1% of the population is not sustainable my bes guess is about 1 million or less is sustainable for legal food sources.

Thanks for the number crunshing, hermit. 2 million ghouls seems way off to me (even though the math is correct), so I'd change the number drastically down. Then the whole thing could work out.

Sure, if we assume 200.000 Ghouls total or less, the corpse donation and leper colony setup would be far more feasible, even though I STILL don't see the social change nescessary (have Americans all of a sudden stopped being Christian?). I am not going to defend the 2 million ghouls, mind you, it's just what we get from official statistics.

The UCAS make up roughly 3% of the world's population.
According to RW, there's tens of millions of ghouls worldwide. So, let's be really generous and assume 90 millions.
If the UCAS have an average number of ghouls, that would mean 2.7 millions.

However, i doubt that there's a total of 90 millions and that there's an average number of ghouls in the UCAS.

It is safe to assume that ghoul numbers in third world nations are much higher than in the UCAS.
It is also not unlikely that "tens of millions" refers to a much lower number than 90 millions.

One more thing to keep in mind : sprawls do not have to meet the average demographic makeup.
Even if 1% of the inhabitants of Seattle are ghouls, this does not mean that there are 2 million ghouls in the UCAS.
They are more likely to center in urban areas in industrialized nations (because places like the barrens would be where most infections take place, because there's migration to ghoul colonies, because there is easier access to organleggers, squatter and junkie corpses and so on).

So, what exactly count as "Others"?
Nagas, Sasquatches, Centaurs, Pixies, Shapeshifters, Free Spirits(?), Infected (please correct me if I'm forgeting someone/thing).

Ghouls would be 50% of these 2%? It sounds a little way too much to me. If you said that half of this 2% is the Infected population and of these 1% left, half of them were Ghouls, I would buy it.

In short: 2% of Others, half of them are Infected = 1%, half of them are Ghouls = 0.5%. I think this could work.

Also, I'm AFB right now, but I thought only humans were infected with Kriegger, right? This would make the average weight of Ghouls, lower than 100kg, if I'm right.

I'm fairly certain all metatypes can be ghouls

Individually, yes. When seeing the whole population, babies get born and people die every other moment. The dead chiphead who ends as ghoul food is instantly replaced by yet another ork baby, unless somehow ghouls become so populous that this balance gets disturbed - at which point arguing ghoul rights becomes a moot point.


Stright from the WHO...


And seriously, ghouls making up 1% of the UCAS population? That would mean they are more common than Amerinds are today

The "tens of millions" number given in RW seems to be way off too. Don't know what a good number would be, though. 10 millions? 20 millions? Worldwide, of course.

Define "Amerind". You'd be hard pressed to find pure-blooded, as much as many Americans have at least some Natives in their ancestry. And ... what else are these "Other" supposed to be?

Also, with the infection rules, even if you assume a bite is absolutly necessary (which is not supported by any book), 1% is a very, very conservative assumption. Of course, numbing the infectiveness of a Ghoul further and further makes for a growing and growing and ever more ludicrous retcon for the sake of playability.


No, Krieger is the strain which is for everyone.

That reminds me. I have a question for Patrick Goodman.

You wrote that every expression of HMHVV in your book is a substrain. Would that mean that, if, say, a vampire drains a dwarf, the dwarf ould not become a goblin, since he was infected by HMHVV-I-human?


I always took Shadowrun as very urbanised, what with all these people eating monsters roaming the countryside all of a sudden. So yes, I think in a society where sme 70% or more live in urban centers, the Sprawls are a decent, if not perfect, approximation of the general demographics.


Lots of things in RC are off. 20 millions sounds okay in so far as such a population might actually sustain themselves, but that doesn't explain why nobody has done anything about them to date.

Nevermind Amerinds, with a 1% population, Ghouls are as common as Awakened people. This is 6 times more common than a medical professional in my country.

Does that include nurses?

Hard to say what is included in these statistics.
Dour? Troglodytes? AI?
The numbers would make more sense if they include sapient primates other than metahumans and sasquatches, but these aren't even officially recognized as sentient.
OTOH, none of the listed species where offically recognized as sentients back in the day (with the exception of sasquatches) and the "other" numbers where still about as high as today.



Ghouls are by far the most common infected. There's a few houndred thousand non-ghoul infected around worldwide, and most of them will be loup garous.
Vampires and the like are incredibly rare.
Nosferatu even more so.



Don't know either.
Another factor is uneven distribution.
Ghouls have, from the beginning, been much more common in Africa.
That's where Ghilani wichtiviridae originated, that's where the least could be done to stop it's spread, that's where Asamando is located and therefor, infected from all over the world migrate to.

I'd assume that at least half of the global ghoul population can be found south of the Sahara desert.
Likely more.

I doubt that there's more than a million ghouls in North America (including the CAS, CFS and NAN).

So that makes Africa a giant case of Resident Evil 5?

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68178.htm

Okay. So there are more ghouls in SR than people who choose NA race in modern America. Conceivable. Because many more have NA ancestry in some way.

No, only doctors, proctologists, oncologists, surgeons, pediatricians, etc.

SR's always been terrible at demographics (remember Native American Nations? Six million Inuit?). I think that's the best solution here.

Would you seriously expect anything else?

Are Changelings still noted under their primary metatype, or do they classify as "other" for census? I'm pretty sure dragons fit into "other" as well. Drakes might be "other" too, but i doubt very many of them are 'out' yet.

Primary metatype. Same with metavariants.



Yes, certainly. But...how many dragons are there in your average sprawl?

Re: first point - then why are ghouls not treated the same way? Both are a secondary change to a primary metatype.

Re: second point - always one more than you want to be there.

With a global population of around 1000 dragons and maybe 10.000 Drakes, these really fail hard at being demographically relevant.


Come to think of it, no. I even ran an RE5 game once.


Because the decision to make them an HMHVV variant was made after it had been established in canon that they are some kind of metatype. It's another, older, and more elegantly covered up retcon. Read old novels like The Changeling; ghouls are considered a metatype there (and, back then, were indeed a human only expression, as all metatypes are).

Making ghouls their own metatype and removing the HMHVV link - and the infectious aspect of being a ghoul - is probably the best way to make them more acceptable.

And a sure contender for the prize of stupidest retcon in SR history. Not that I don't agree with you on that making them HMHVV carriers in the irst palce and the whole infection angle was a bad choice, but it's not gonna go away now.

It just went away in my games. You have the power to make the changes in your games too.

But, why would it be a stupid retcon? Because it fixes the problem and leaves no need for bitching about the ghoul apocalypse?

You presume much and know nothing. I can do without your advice, thanks.

It would be especially stupid because it is big and changes everything about how ghouls have worked since 3rd Ed came out. Retcons are cheap and an author's way of failing at storytelling no matter their size, of course.

Making them undead solves a lot of issues.

Having ghouls be hunted, not protected, also solves a lot of issues.

Right, but I would argue that it makes the issue too black and white. I don't think the game designers wanted them to simply be a source of 'exp' and bounty to any runner coming up a bit short when the bills come in. Having at least some laws protecting them reminds us that they are for the most part still human and not critters. Besides, it's not like their rights are well defined or protected...

Has any book ever said that—Asamando possibly aside—ghouls are automatically protected anywhere? A nation allowing some ghouls to become citizens, and "ghouls are protected" are two different things.

I can easily see a country that has a bounty on ghouls, and then grants non-criminal SINs to a handful of ghouls. The ghouls with SINs would have the "protection" of citizenship, but that does not mean that SINless ghouls are protected, nor does it invalidate the collection of bounties for killing ghouls that don't have SINs. There is no contradiction in "hunt them all, except this handful that play nice."

A bounty on wolves, does not mean you can kill the ones in zoos and collect.

Runner's Companion, Running Wild.


Runner's Companion is rather murky about details there, and somewhere mentions vampires with a SIN, too.


Barring born Ghouls (a concept of RC's, with some hints in the earlier Companion), they are rather more critter than human.

I disagree. I find the constant "ghouls are people too, don't shoot them, see, there's even Hannibelle" to make it too black and white, compared to the relative lack of "Security guards are people too" ("Don't murder them, it could be bad for your health" does not count).

Ghouls get a far too favorable treatment in official sourcebooks, and as others pointed out, despite any logic.

So you stick with the first retcon because it makes you unhappy? That's silly. My presumption may be that you want to solve the problem you've been bitching about for pages on end, but I see that you'd rather just whine more. So let's get back to the hermit show of "poor me, this is all wrong and there's nothing to be done to make it better" shall we?

can I say I'm still a fan of a third world Ghoul army in Africa or Asia. Were the dictator uses the ghouls to perform atrocities to pacify rebels.

I'd asked about this earlier in the thread, and when told I was mistaken went back and looked again once I got home (I was on a trip).

By my reading, even Runner's Companion never says that the world has embraced the infected. Rather some of the world has recognized that HMHVV is a disease, that does not necessarily turn one into a feral monster.

Noting that as with all Shadowrun books, the non-rule information is deliberately written with an in game POV (and so must be taken with a grain of salt, and may even be false).

• On page 59 we are told that only 35 countries afford the infected any rights, and even in those countries only some of the infected are given such rights.
• On page 60 we are told that UCAS, CAS, and most of the NEEC, no longer strip citizenship from SINers who become infected, rather they have their SINs converted to Criminal SINs, are placed on police watch lists, and feeding on the unwilling is specifically illegal. However even in these countries the majority of the infected remain SINless.
• On page 61 we are told that it is known that the infected must consume 1% of their body weight per week, and that some infected must also feed on "mana siphoned directly from the aura of a living metahuman or other sapient creature". It than says that cloned flesh and blood is usually good enough, but that research continues on a better solution.

All of the above always said to me that even in the "progressive" countries the infected are treated like we currently treat sex offenders.

The we get to rules.

• On page 78 we are told that the dietary restriction is 5% of body weight per week.
• On page 82 we are told that if someone has an infectious strain of HMHVV they suffer a -2 dice pool penalty on all social tests vs. subjects aware of their status.

The 5% vs. 1% may be a typo, but I always thought it was a deliberate indication of the NPC author's agenda in downplaying the actual dietary requirements, and makes the viability of eating cloned flesh even more dubious. The social penalty, just reinforces that even in the countries where you do not lose all your rights when you become infected, you are still seen as a pariah.

I would further argue that since only those with astral perception and good at assessing can quantify essence loss, that most people don't know what "mana siphoned off" means. If they did the infected would be even greater pariahs than they already are.

The fact that some read the fluff—and then read further between the lines—to see glittery infected, is not a bad thing so long as the GM and players remember that glittery is not the truth as supported by the rules, but rather the spin that some NPCs want to put on it.

Well, it's been 1% since Dietary Requirement was introduced in 3rd Ed. Peter (Synner) made a deliberate choice of making the real-world figure 5%, just so that the reality was worse than people think.

I know this because I specifically asked about it as I was gearing up to write about the Infected for RW.

I also question the figure, since I don't think I eat 5% of my body weight in regular food during the week, though I honestly haven't kept real good track of it. One percent, for me, is about a Double Quarter Pounder meal at Mickey D's per day. That makes one meal. I don't eat a big breakfast, and I doubt that my dinner and snacks during the day amount to another 4% of my weight per week. Mileage might really vary on this one, but I think Peter's attempt to show things were worse than we though might have gone a little overboard. (Synner, please feel free to jump in here if you've got better numbers than I do.)

Well a double-quarter-pounder is half a pound of meat, but then you have the rest of the burger, fries, drink etc.

Looking at it another way, a medium sized frozen dinner is 1 lb. Assume that breakfast and lunch are only 8 oz. of food each and you have 2 lbs. of food per day not counting any snacks.

2 lb./day = 14 lb./week = 5% of 280 lb. (unfortunately pretty close to my weight). So 5% seems right on to me for most peoples food consumption. Factor in snacks, soda, etc. and I would guesstimate that that most Americans eat closer to 10% than 5%.

P.S. Another example, a 16 fl.oz. soda/juice is also a pound of food, and most people eating out drink more than that per meal these days.

Ghouls may be the most common of the infected, but I imagine most of them are feral. Given their dietary needs, a ghoul rights movement only makes sense if they are relatively low in numbers - I'm not talking about successful ghoul rights, just the existence of ghoul rights as any kind of political movement, at all. Also, I agree with the consensus that it should be an injection, rather than contact, vector, for ghouls to not be hunted down all of the time (as opposed to most of the time).

I like the moral ambiguity of having a few struggling, non-feral ghouls out there. But I don't like the whole ghoul rights movement described with loaded terms such as "progressive". That's just as one-dimensional as the previous feral monster ghouls were. Given that most of them are little more than animals, given their diet of metahuman flesh, and given their ability to infect others, ghoul rights should be a more morally ambivalent topic.

Vampires and their ilk are handled about right - RC implies that only a few countries give them extremely limited rights, coupled with constant tracking. And some of them work for corporations, of course - although I doubt any of them do so openly, more likely they are used for certain types of dirty work.

The wendigo retcon (a bit late to this part of the discussion, sorry), I actually prefer. The specific behavior exhibited by wendigos only makes sense in the context of the original aboriginal cultures where the myth originated. It seemed goofy to me that getting infected with a virus would make someone suddenly start a cannibal cult. The infected version works better with the retcon, especially for PCs. Inflexible rules for this would be like requiring all vampires to wear fluffy lace cravats and talk with East European accents. If they wanted to do the mythical type of wendigo, it would have worked much, much better if they had made it a type of possessing spirit, rather than a type of infected.


Infected as shadowrunners have numerous potential problems, but I think they would work out better in that vocation than they would in other areas. Shadowrunners are already social outcasts, living outside the system, who kill people for a living - infected should fit right in. The only difference is that they need to drain some blood/essence or take a few chomps out of the security guard before they cap him. Granted, that is a bit of a generalization, but an infected being is every bit as plausible as some other concepts out there.

I do think that, just as with a few other more "out there" concepts, they are not for every group of characters. If the group would be okay working with a ghoul or vampire, that's good, but otherwise, they shouldn't have to metagame to accomodate your character. At least, not to the point where their concept of their own characters, or immersion in the game world, is ruined.

Hm, given that the dietary requirement only makes up a small part of a ghoul's diet, as it is stated in canon multiple times, ghouls should be quite prone to obesity. OK, one could argue that ghouls are the kind of people who can eat what they want and don't gain a gram of fat..

For a giggle I did put together a concept for running an infected character for a game as a thought experiment

Ended up with a Vampire adept initiate who worked as a bounty hunter. Took masking for the initiation with the intention of him claiming to be vanilla mortal but works nights mostly as has an allergy to to much sun. If a bounty is dead or alive as long as he was careful feeding shouldn’t be more of a problem then one to three bodies a year plus an increase to lifestyle costs as per runner’s companion.

For flavour added in the enemy (father of someone killed when first woke up) quality to give the GM some options as well

Was planning on running him as very quiet, going with the faux ninja look. Have him claiming to be straight human with no magic just very good at his job and pretty lucky with mostly off scene (one to one with GM until the team find out) doing the vamp thing with the idea being he's hiding it from the team for good reason.

Whilst I do think the infected can be pretty silly and more useful for npc's if played right and with a GM who is comfortable with the differences they can be an interesting counterpoint for roleplay.