it still has an essence cost, i think.

but, you can get your essence back now iirc.

RC and RW are not exactly eye to eye with what the virus does. By the rules, though, it generates a magus complex. I will not go into that further, and you kow you don't want me to anyway.


You will want a viable gene pool. So you need at least 10.000 genetic samples, preferably diverse ones. Of course, a few incubators and eggs/sperm would maybe work. It's be rather risky, but possible, that this would be a robotic probe that builds a sustainable environment with advanced nanostuff and then proceeds seeding new humans. That would, I imagine, be the minimum ark.


Leonisation costs essence and thus, does not give you immortality. Just extended life at the cost of your soul.

$imon$ez:
Augmentation: 83 "By cleaning up your own genetic background, you won’t pass any diseases to your progeny. Further, you can pass certain special abilities along."
$imoff::
--$imon$ez in an open source [Knowsoft]::code provided by TrnZhX--

I also would avoid sister-boinking on a general basis.

Leonization doesn't cost Essence, but it can only be used a "number of times" before it makes your cells go kerspolody. I think the genetics in SR4 might be worse than the space physics.

The narrowing down of the gene pool and the becoming of till then unknown genetic conditions can't be cleaned up that way, if you ask me. Though an onboard sperm/egg bank might work.


I liked the old rules a lot better.


Not if the implant/genemod is still in place.

Also, what if the sibling is really sexy?

So here's the problem, and an interesting distinction between "genetic disease" and "genetic abnormality". Just because you're not passing on any of your own genetic baggage doesn't mean a) your progeny won't spontaneously develop their own genetic baggage, and b) wide-scale genetic catastrophes caused by inbreeding will be avoided.

Let's posit a medical black box by which any known or possible pathogenic genetic anomaly could be cleansed from a genome. This will eliminate all of the diseases we think of as inherited (or germline) diseases, like cystic fibrosis. This process can't stop any disease caused by a new (or de novo) mutation, however, like certain forms of ataxia, certain cancers, and Liddle's disease. De novo mutation has also been cited as a possible cause for autism.

And that's just the problems with normal, non-incestuous reproduction. As I said before, the real problem with inbreeding, especially with a species as (relatively) genetically "brittle" as homo sapiens, is that our black box wouldn't pick up any problems imposed by systematic genetic drift caused by inbreeding until the genome was beyond repair. Take inbred dogs, for example. Their problems aren't even pathogenic, for the most part - a weird-looking stupid dog with a bad temper produced by generations of inbreeding doesn't have any genetic disease, it's just the victim of artificial selection.

Cold showers, my friend. Cold showers.

This is actually not only an argument against inbreeding, it is also an argument against complete elimination of genetic diseases and abnormalities. The further we reduce the genome variability, the more difficult it is to adapt to problems arising from any number of sources. If the de novo mutations are the only thing selection can act on, your species has a huge problem.

Yup. Two words - banana blight.

The genetics section of Augmentation is, as far as I can tell, early 90's genetics scifi (body horror trope). It's wrong in it's basic assumptions, and takes them in directions that make the mutant baby jebus cry.

Similar to the thread running right now on SR Space, would you start one on how genetics should be done using our present knowledge of genetics? I want gene scifi that isn't 20 years old. Martian_Bob: your serve.

Genetics don't work as easy, though. A mutation may have positive and negative effects, or may express a genetic disease in one sex but not the other. A disease may be caused by introns or triggered by environmental circumstances. Not every inherited disease is as dependable as Huntington's.

That's why I called it a black box - it's a rhetorical device used to make a point, not an actual solution. I know that genetic diseases are much more involved than that, I'm currently a postdoc working in a molecular pathology lab at Columbia University studying the genetic causes of some neurodegenerative diseases.

Genetics in SR is presented as genetics is perceived by most people. I'm always amazed at 3what kind of ignorance there is among people. "I eat only organic food, because it is gene free!" "I do not want genes in my food!" "Genetic engineering will generate plant monsters AND THEY WILL RISE AGAINST US AND KILL US!"

It's the same with many things in SR, like computers (you can blow up shit by hacking!).

The real issue isn't one of bad info, just one of scope. The idea of cleansing your genome of diseases would do a world of good for the human race, assuming it was of the magic-black-box type that only does good things and never makes anything bad ever happen ever. The issue, rather, was that the tech referenced in Augmentation was never designed to harden a genome against inbreeding. That's something that only generations of careful selection can accomplish.

As far as the progress of gene sci-fi goes, I think our big picture understanding hasn't changed enough to warrant a re-write, at least as far as Shadowrun is concerned. Don't get me wrong, the things we've learned have expanded our horizons greatly, but I don't know that the changes are on the level of things that your average player would really care about. I mean, if we're trying to get our science right, we need to start with the fact that any kind of large-scale genetic rewrite, even one taking a genome in a "better" direction, would be quite likely to kill you, and that's just no fun.

Still nothing on the horizon for gene writing? I know retrovirus don't work, as they kill you dead with the cancer, but I was holding out hope that there was a somewhat reasonable future ahead a bit like GATTACA or something. If 90's gene scifi is as good as we get because it's simply unmanageable for the foreseeable future, then yea, no rewrite.

Oh, don't get me wrong, there's all sorts of awesome going on in gene research, it's just a question of what would be of interest to gamers. For example, a recent advance in gene sequencing uses a nanoscale zero-mode waveguide to detect polymerase activity down to a volume of 20 zeptoliters.

Please elaborate. That does sound wicked cool.

Single Molecule Real Time Sequencing

please continue.

It's a link to the Wikipedia page.

Is it really SMRT? I'm having a Homer moment.

SR is also already incorperating some of the cooler genetic work going on today, in the form of "soft" nanites. These are basically using genetic code to design and instruct a biological base nanite to perform a set task. Genetic engineering on that scale is a whole lot easier than doing so on a human scale (and hey, eventually may be able to be used to do some work on the human scale). On the whole I think SRs genetech is pretty reasonable.

Yes, it really is SMRT.

Genetic infusions? I mean, I like the as a tool, but I don't think the science behind it can be very sound. The leonization/revitalization stuff is interesting, but it feels like it's artificially limited to dodge the issues we are tackling in this thread.

I can't say as I particularly worry about the science behind SR being that sound, as long as the ideas are fun to play with and not so utterly absurd as to break the suspension of disbelief (or at least if they are that they get put under Magic rather than Science as that's what Magic is for).

That actually brings up a good point with the writing style for the different parts of SR. Why do the writers work so hard to separate magic and technology? The guys over at CthuluTech have done a damn good job meshing the two, so it can clearly be done, and done well.

Yeah, but that's part of the CthulhuTech universe, part of what makes it CthulhuTech. SR views magic as something naturalistic, coming from a spiritual place that doesn't play well with technology. Different universes, different feels.

What copyright does CuthuluTech write under?

Because the interface between magic and technology (or current lack thereof) is one of the major themes since the beginning of SR? The are 2 traditions with very different natures, the eventual blending of which could be awesomely powerful and an enormous boon to metahumanity, but there is much work to be done before that has a chance of being realized (potentially centuries worth of work, though possibly significant progress can be made in decades).

The normal kind.

ok. Thanks.

Essentially yes. Most research in the past decades has been about finding out what doesn't work (like cloning simians of any kind with current techniques that work rather well on other mammals for some undeterminable reason). Stem Cells have seen significant progress and slowly, gene therapy is beginning to look viable in cell cultures, and then there's the slowly upstarting viability of implants, but no joy for any kind of GATTACA fantasies.


They should use a variation of mRNA though, because that would actually make some sense, given how they're supposed to work. But what people think DNA can do always irritates me (like the DNA rewriting HMHVV).


Well, it's less genetic engineering as really complex organic chemistry if you ask me, but I agree with you that SR's genetics are relatively reasonable (And, at least, do not go overboard with wacko stuff).


I guess they made some assumptions on the viability of plasmids in eucariotic cells there that don't seem very close to science to me. I like it as a tool too, but try not to think too hard about it. But hey, everybody likes plasmids. Don't you?


Well, if you write a gaming supplement it generally is a good idea not to break the setting you're writing for. The essence regeneration stuff is already pushing it. Personally, though, I'd have vastly prefered they keep the leonisation essence loss that is irreversible, though.


The guys at CT did that precisely to make their setting notably different from Shadowrun. They also pretty much cut out the internet and kept cybernetics at a minimum because they did not want thier setting to be Shadowrun with Mecha.

The opposition between magic and technology to some extent has been a core theme of ST; however, eventually, they should work out something like arcanotech, even thoughj it might not be the magic wonderful stuff from CT. Eventually, of course, does not mean 'now'. Nethertech is around 200 ingame years away from viability, if the setting develops organically and no stupid people decide to speed things up to "make the setting interesting/more accessible to newcomers/more relevant/more appealing to the CT audience/ect."


The kind where stealing their ideas does not only annoy them but might get you a lawsuit.

I have no intention of stepping on anyone's intellectual property, I'm just making sure I know what resources are and are not available and under what conditions. There are about a bazillion (give or take) different licenses to write under as far as I can see. The wikipedia page on the matter just makes me dizzy trying to sort through them. The best thing about forums like this is being able to get a rejection directly from the concerned parties, and occasionally you get permission.

As far as mixing the fantasy and the magic in a way that makes sense, do you think the community has any interest in something along the lines of pre-Transmetropolitan style tech? The Transmetropolitan of Spider Jerusalem's era has taken care of far to many of the problems inherent in tech so Warren Ellis could focus on the social aspects, so it's far too advanced. He does mention the time before it as having acid rain that could kill you (I think places in Seattle are at that level of pollution), tech running rampant as bio-engineered critters started wrecking the food chain, and things like that. Also, Transmetropolitan has time travel, which is blechy, and it's copyrighted, which is to be respected.

The theme I'm thinking of would push the viewpoint that the normal citizen of the 6th world really won't be able to differentiate tech and magic in any real way, as you can use different gear and holographic projectors to make a fuel-air explosive look like a fire spirit. The rules wouldn't change (no need to fix what isn't broke), but there would be some development on the psychology of how people view their technology.

That being said though, there isn't any point to writing something that the people who are supposed to be using it don't want.

I would say the division and eventual unification of magic and technology is to big of a theme in SR to blend together in public perception that easily. This is not to say that it wouldn't be possible. If Horizon for example were set on doing something like that instead of pushing people to accept AI and Technomancers, I would bet they could create some AR and/or holo tech wizardry that would have people questioning the difference between the 2 areas. That would, however, be a PR campaign years in the making costing billions of nuyen, for reasons I have trouble imagining.

Well, if you want that? visit the forums at www.cthulhutech.com - Matt Grau is very present there, you can PM him and he will respond.


Hm. I myself would not like this very much, as this is too CP2020 ZOMG ECOCALYPSE for my tastes.Shadowrun is not a setting that turns the whole planet into Tokyo bay, with the sky above it colored like television, tuned to a dead channel.


Why should they? It's Magic that is the intruding newcomer into this world, not tech. If anything, mages might be considered charlatans showing off SFX until proven otherwise, so they consider magic tech, and not vice versa.

Or are you thinking of an alternative setting?

Thanks for the link, I'll try and chat with him so I can get an idea of what he considers the important separating themes of SR and CT.

"[...] not a setting that turns the whole planet into Tokyo Bay, with the sky above it colored like television, tuned to a dead channel."

^ That was likely the most poetic sentence I've seen on Dumpshock. Grats.

Mages being considered charlatans first makes sense. With 1% of the world as mages, and income potential for the magical being so very high, I would imagine there would be many people who would try to use the [Perception Test](2) of holo-projectors and other special effects to pass themselves off as mages. "Milli Vanilli for the 6th Age."

Exactly. ^_^

That would be an awesome character concept actually. A mage poser.

Especially if it worked.

So, did we come do any kind of consensus on how long it would take before the metahuman immortality gene would pop up as a factor? Or if that's an unwelcome addition to the setting?

If you ask me, unwelcome in any widespread form. A formula for immortality would make a fine MacGuffin,, though, as a number of secret movers and shakers would want it dead and buried, because it robs them of being special snowflakes.