How much would it cost to purchase samples of biowarfare agents at character gen? What kind of costs does a corporation go to to develop diseases?

Can a character purchase a medical shop or medical facility and produce diseases?

OK, the very idea of a starting character just "Having" bioweapons as starting equipment as if they collect it like other spores, moulds and fungus...

Yeah, no.

O_o

How hard can it be to design bioweapons in Shadowrun? Or, more to the point, how much harder would it be to design a harmful bacteria than it would be to design a soft nanite Savior Medkit?

The sad part is, not very. Good luck getting ahold of Smallpox, however. But there's lots of other options.

Which would probably flip off all kinds of flags if posted about.

the easier it is to genetically modify anything the easier it is to produce a virus capable of wiping out the world. Hell even most fertiliziers are modified on some level.

Mana-Active Aura Deficiency Syndrome is going to set off flags? I'll have to use more dragons and elves in my examples then.

Anyway, there are some great magical diseases that would be fun to introduce to Shadow Wars. We can dump MADS all over the playground and then all the ghouls would die without us having to shoot each and every one of them.

The cost of developing a new agent (not to mention weaponizing it) would be well beyond the means of a starting character. A medical shop or facility is unlikely to have the necessary equipment. You'd need a microbiology lab (shop) at the very least and even then I don't think you'd have what it takes.

And such things are best left as plot devices anyway.

There are few bioweapons in the arsenals chemical chapter in the toxins list, Whitestar and Ymir you can even get at chargen with Restricted gear.

You want a bioweapon? Lets see...HMHVV III...

1: Chemistry Skill
2: Armorer
3: Demolitions

Find Ghouls
Kill Ghouls
Liquidate Ghoul in giant food processor
Mix DMSO+Ghoul Smoothie
Add mixture in Splash Grenade

Do the above but pour mixture in large drone with the Flashflood water cannon

What you need:
Land based ghoul hunting drone (X2)
GM Nissan Dobermans: 3000Y
Elephant Rifle: 6000Y
Smartgun Link: 400Y
Capsule Round: Pepper Punch (Will disable or knock out ghoul)

Land based ghoul transporter drone
CrashCart Autodoc: 4000Y
Mechanical Arm X2

Ghoul Bioweapon Dispersal Units
GTS Tower: 25000+ Water cannon 5000

Final things you WILL need:
Escape plan
New identity
Some stooge that gets blamed for the holocaust...

I'd say 'yes' but it brings several problems
* it will take some very specialized knowledge. Genetinker aren't common. Genetinkers with sufficient knwoledge of metahuman physiology and how diseases works to cocncot their own variations are even rarer. And probably monitored closely enough to make such knowledge very unlikely in a shadowrunner

* the genemoding is the esay parts when it comes to material requirements - what's going to take deep pockets is the security features and the testing. Sure you might be able cook up a bioweapon by yourself in a motel room. But until you release your little babies, you'll have no reliable way to figure out things like contagion and mortality rates, how the various methauman stocks will react and so on. There also a very good chance to catch you own disease before you're ready as you'll have very little in the way of safety features...

*Last but not least, the mindset of a character willing to hang on potential genocide-level disease sample and play with them is one very few characters would want anything to do with. The reaction will probably be more 'flamthrower' than 'handshake'

Testing can be done in the wild. I'm guessing that the relevant point to prohibits most of this for characters is that we are disallowed from playing twisted or toxic characters. Even if the player is mundane, the angry spirits will still make their life hell, and a full facility for magical security is probably needed to manufacture anything that can be considered a "sin against nature".

And since I'm tired of other players PKing my characters for being amoral monsters, I think I'll accept that bioweapons are GM tools.

The Ghoulpocalypse is upon us! Repent and rejoice! But seriously, I've house ruled the HMHVV rules with my group so that a ghoul with a head cold isn't gonna start Ghoulmageddon.

"The end is near!" "It is for you. Mmmmmmmmmmm... Type AB Negative blood?" "Yes..." "My favourite flavour marinade for the meat."

actually, unless you houserule it the DMSO isn't necessary. ghoul blood is naturally contagious by contact (hmmm.... perhaps DMSO is made of ghouls! 0.o)

Testing in the wilds seems a very bad idea for several points :
* control isn't very effective : you can't be sure that what happens is from your disease or some other external factor
* there's not a shred of containment if the diseases doesn't turn out as planned : affects other targets, turns out more dangerous than expected, mutates into an awakened variant now that it's out of the mana-poor confines of a lab...
* depending on what sort of disease you're playing with (and since you mentioned biowarfare agents, I'd think 'deadly and higly contagious') it can gets damn obvious - and I'd think even rival coroporations will tend to cooperate if some jerk is spreading that sort of diseases out in the open.

A character doing that sort of crap isn't what you'd want to be associated with - even when you remove morals from the equation, hanging around that sort of peoples is like camping in the middle of an outdoor firing range : likely to get you killed. Unless the game centers around the character and it's diseases, he's likely to bring in more trouble than whatever else he brings his worth. The moral angle will make it even worse, but even a completely amoral character is likely to take exreme measures if forced to tag along with that sort of dangerous partner. After all, if it's between his safety and the loon's life, the decision is very easy. Perhaps even easier than a character acting out of morals.

On the other hand, having around a medic who in his pare time plays with things like improved colds or super-turista as a way to hamper the oppostion might get me worried (what if he botches..) but wouldn't raise that sort of problems.

The morals I consider to be the larger impediment. All you need to avoid the diseases you are spreading is a full chemical seal, which is easy to come by.

As far as testing in the wild, that's pretty much what the Azzies did to the Yucatan and no Thor Shot popped up.

Control is something you can't get in epidemiology. Your subjects are populations, and the only way to observe them is in the wild.

I'm pretty sure some Gms would let a character have VD at start of chargen. I don't see what the big deal is.

Any one with average level collage biology and chemistry, can grow a bacterial culture as large as they have room, equipment, and inclination for. As well, it not hard to take a bunch of swabs, see what grows. and identify what you found. So yea, if you have the time, talent, and money, you could grow cultures of any nasty little bug that you can find.
Viruses are only a little harder. Again 4 year degree in micro-biology should cover the skill needed to grow any culture you found. Your going to have to get more biologically active samples for the most part. Growing more of the common strain is simple enough. Though requiring more expensive equipment, and expendables.

I think the main point here is: what power level are we talking.

You want:
Food poisoning? super easy!: Egret poisoning? FUN.: last-years flu? easy enough...: explosive diarrhea and a lung cold at the same time? Not too hard.

Dead and bleeding form the eyes in 30sec, NO!

90% contagious @ 12 hrs incubation: 80% fatal within 72hrs? that's a whole story line for you getting the right samples, and a whole story line for what you are running from after the fact.

Hmm. I was thinking about trying to find nanites that attack a specific organ to kill someone very quickly, rather than the more random things like Cutters. Also, designed so that they can stay dormant in someone's system for a few months to be activated by radio command.

(I have an elven Black Mage in my party that has a Slaughter Humans spell.. I don't really trust her..)

DMSO Ghoul Smoothie is pretty nasty though.. Hmm, maybe carcerands?

That would be hard to pull: nanites degrade even if dormant.

Yeah, I wonder if there's a workaround for that?

To give someone a nanite poison, use Carcerand-plus holding whatever targeted payload you want. Nanite systems degrade at 1 rating point per week, or 1 rating point per 3 boxes of physical damage. Your options are to either give them a high rating dose so you have a longer period of time to set it off, or replace a cortex bomb with a nanite hive that keeps them circulating. Unlike a cortex bomb the nanite hives take a goodly chunk of Essence, and are no harder to find on a scan than a chunk of cyberware.

My personal favorite is to hide a nanohive in the victims plumbing, and keep delivering doses that way. You still need to refill the nanohive once a month for 500 nY per rating point, but sending a small drone up a water pipe is easier than trying to get it into a victim.

Oh, that would work yeah. Hmm, maybe carcerands with ghoul smoothie...

You can also stick a nanohive in their pet Smoochems containing Carcerand-plus Intruder nanites, so when Smoochems cuddles up with the target, their infection is maintained.

Expensive, though potentially elegant way of killing someone. The payoff would have to be pretty good to balance out the costs. Tho some might be recouped if you planned on retrieving the assassin pet.

It's more of a "if you do me, I'll do you worse" thing. The player is one of my best friends, but his characters are all very unpleasant people, and it's fun to think of ways to get "insurance".

Full chemical seal might be effective, but it's also very obvious - it doesn"t take a genius to figure out that if somone is wandering around in a 'martian suit' there's something fishy going on. And might not be exactly gentle when asking for explanations.

The azzies have played with chemical weapons and biowarfare agents in Yucatan without getting nuked from orbit, but if I remember right, they had to pull out and and do some serious groveling to keep the Corporate Court from issuing an Omega Order against Aztechnology. Which means 'unaligned agents' will get stomped on hard and fast unless some heavy hitter uses a lot of clout to delay retribution.

And there's a lot that can be lab-tested - mortality rate, contagion rate, how long does the agent remain infectious once it has left the body, that sort of things. Which can let you get a decent model of how the disease will act once released. You can't be completely sure the models will be airtight, but you can usually have a fairly good guess. But doing that will cost a bundle and a lot of ressources, up to and including live test subjects

Biolgical warfare is amongst the reddest flags to wave under the power-that-be's nose, which means playing with that tends to bring a whole lot of grief to bear. And I fail to see anything it could bring to a party of shadowrunners to make up for that. Diseases are basically useless for the sort of jobs that are the shadows's bread and butter.

I'm far from an expert on this subject, but here's my two

It isn't that hard to mutate common diseases into something far more sinister. Hell, my freshman year bio lab had us doing three generations of just that. It's also dead easy to do, as long as you know proper lab protocol. Here's all you need for that kind of pet project:

- Petri dishes
- Nutrient agar
- Inoculation loops
- Pipets and tips
- Bunsen burner for sterilization
- Gloves
- Sharpie marker and tape for labeling
- A warm incubator to culture your new unicellular monsters
- Beginning samples: Other people, stair railings, doorknobs, etc.

And aside from the incubator, these are not expensive items.

Edit: And the internet tells me that you can get a used incubator from another lab for like...$500. This is something a very persistent kid could put together on minimum wage in his mother's basement.

The lab equipment isn't the expensive part, it's true. But starting out from botulism and working toward something that counts as a biowarfare agent takes time. And oddly enough, the basic materials to make stuff like that, as per the Chemistry rules, may only cost 10% of what the agent would, but the Availability of materials is the same.

The conclusion I'm at is that if a player wants a biolab to give people Athlete's Foot, they are golden. If they want an agent with a name composed of numbers and a handful of random letters, they are out of luck. Clever players can still do quite a bit of nasty with Athlete's Foot, but it's still not Combatulism Strain-5.

That list is great if you want to culture some normal skin flora or (if you're lucky) a Strep pyogenes, but if you think the stair railings and doorknobs around you are colonized with agents suitable for biological warfare, Id suggest you find safer places to hang out.

There is a helluvalot more equipment involved in developing a bioweapon and most of it is very expensive. A decent thermocycler, for instance, will cost you a couple grand. Never mind the safety features such a lab would need, like a highly-rated laminar flow fume hood. Back when I was doing research we bought a new one for our lab that cost like 20K or something ridiculous. If you really want to get specific, do some research into the operating costs of a biosafty level 3 or 4 facility. Wikipedia has a list of such facilities and you will note that none of them is in some dude's garage.

The point I'm trying to make is that contrary to conspiracy theories developing a biological warfare agent isn't something you can do casually with minimal resources. Its really beyond the scope of most SR games, and certainly isn't something a starting character should be doing. Just my 2 cents...

edit: or what Simon said.

I did mention in my post that the list I compiled was only for the basics.

You don't need much to attempt it - though it's extremely likely you will either end up dead from the disease you were playing with or contaminate your samples beyond utility before you're haflway done. The best outcome from that sort of kitchen lab is in my opinion a premature release of an unfinished bug - which sort of defeats the point if you're aiming for blackmail 'fork the cash our I'll release the disease... hu what do you mean my test subjects have have already spread it out ?'. Even if you're aiming at genocide, there are decent odds that survivors of the half-finished design will get at least partial immunity from the finished product. Once again defeating the point.

Basically, it's the sort of thing you attempt only if you're merely willing to raise as much hell as possible and don't care about surviving the experience. Or are too dumb to figure the danger out, but in that case odds are you'll be too dumb to do the job.

The other thing to keep in mind is how hard it is to design a disease as a weapon even when you have full capability and supply. Ebola, for example, makes a crappy bioweapon, since it burns through a population too quickly. The flu makes a crappy bioweapon, because it mutates too quickly. Diseases, plain and simple, are terrible weapons for a military, terrorists, or mad scientists. They are unpredictable, poorly targetable, expensive to produce, and damn near impossible to hide the development of. The only diseases in Shadowrun worth considering are the magical diseases like MADS and HMHVV.