I've reposted this in it's own thread per the request of several people via PM.

This is a collection of suggestions and possible uses for toxins, poisons, and drugs during combat.


If you REALLY want a knock-down, load a hold-out with Narcoject Capsule rounds.

Toxin Resistance Tests are done with Body + Any chem protection.

Splash is a contact vector so even with an ass-load of bio/cyberware and fairly good chemical protection, even Trolls will have a tough time handling that.

A Streetline Special costs you 100 and 6 cap rounds will run you 180 on top of the 300 for 6 doses of Narco, that's 480 nuyen worth of "drop almost anyone."

It gets even more fun when you get into automatics. Pick up an assault rifle and load it up with Narco cap rounds then use suppressive fire. All you need is a single hit to require any target to impose a "Make a TN 10 Body roll or eat concrete". If you've got a little more cash, pick up an LMG if you want a knock-out hose.


Cyanide is a lethal alternative to Narco. It acts immediately, has many different vectors, and has a high power rating. Couple shots of that will drop even the most...determined individuals.

Gamma-S is another good combat drug, especially if you mix it with Narco. Immediate effect, high power, and causes Paralysis.

K-10 is a good choice if you're hidden or can make a getaway. Load a sniper rifle with K-10 Cap rounds and clip one guard in a cluster of other guards or in a public street to draw attention and watch the fun. K-10 does 18S unresisted and requires an Edge (1) test to not stay PERMANENTLY berserk, NO ONE stays standing after K-10 wears off.

Ringu introduced through the AC system is a nice trick, but Ringu will probably be difficult to get a hold of in quantity, being a chemical weapon and all.

Warp isnt a bad choice either, good for creating distractions and chaos. Fling a splash grenade into a line of guards and watch their ranks get a little....blurry.

Red Mescaline and Woad applied to a crowd of people on the street or an office full of drones will give cops or guards a definite distraction and cause non-permanent damage.



Injection bolt/arrows are a barrel of fun, depending how permissive your GM is. Loading one with a solution of saline and metal particles will shred arteries and veins, causing immense pain and profuse internal bleeding. Throw in a dash of anti-coagulants for extra giggles.

Large doses of insulin can induce a hypoglycemic coma within usually a minute or so depending on how massive the dose is, adrenaline can cause tachycardia and in high doses will send a heart into lethal arrhythmia and kill you fairly quickly. . There are a hundred medications that, at the right dosage, will cure you and, also at the right dosage, kill you. The only thing that separates life saving cure or lethal injection is dosage.

A simple puff of lye will burn exposed tissue and cause extreme pain, blindness if it gets in the eyes, and serious chemical pains. Adding aluminum to lye creates an exothermic reaction and hydrogen gas. A solution of lye coupled with a dual injection of a suspension of any aluminum compound would start the reaction. That reaction inside the human body would be horrifically painful and the hydrogen gas is extremely flammable.

Even something as simple as air can be fatal. An injection of a couple CC's of air can stop the heart in a few seconds if you hit an artery. If you hit a vein, not as helpful but you can cut off blood-flow to a portion of the body. Even if the air is only injected into the skin, it can cause immense pain and necrosis of the tissue, but that will be less useful during combat. Small versions of commercially available cans of compressed air can be fitted into injection bolts and arrows AND they have the added effect of their product being exceedingly cold that will damage tissue.

Chlorine gas is an option for gas grenades, but you have to be careful not to run into it yourself. Injection of the gas into the bloodstream can cause it to be pushed into the heart or lungs and either stop the heart or eat away the lungs. It's somewhat slow and horrifically painful.

FreezeFoam isn't a terrible choice. Injected into the body, you're basically introducing a mass into the body that can block bloodflow, tear through tissue, and severely damage organs. If you manage to get a dose of it into the lung, you can probably burst one lung and choke off the second or drown him in his own blood. A gut-shot will cause crippling pain and massive internal bleeding. A shot to the heart, head, or neck is virtually an instant kill. Hit a joint and you can destroy the use of that limb.

Lidocane in a splash grenade is AWESOME. Lidocane is an anesthetic, most people get it when they go to the dentist to get a tooth blasted out. Injected into the body, it quickly numbs the area of impact. That means that hits from real bullets may not hurt as much, but you wont be running very far or very fast if one leg feels like it's not there and accurate firing gets difficult when your arm is asleep.

Chemical Heaters can be used. When introduced to the veins, you can cauterize veins closed or destroy them entirely as well as quite literally boil your blood supply.

Splash grenades filled with DMSO and an anti-coagulant can help reduce the effectiveness of an opponent's attempts at First Aid on themselves.

If you've got the set up, liquid nitrogen injected into the body would, to use a medical term, suck. Flash-freezing your blood in it's veins and severely damaging tissue, possibly causing massive hemorrhaging.

Mercury introduced into the veins would disrupt the circulatory system due to the difference in density from blood.

High-concentration salt water in a splash grenade may make S&S rounds more effective or bypass Non-Conductivity.

Hell, drain cleaner, bleach, hot sauce, or lemon juice in a splash grenade will seriously wreck someone's shit. Any strong acid or base will hurt if injected or applied to skin. As a side note, bases are better corrosives than acids because bases tend to "stick" more and are harder to control. Base burns also tend to be worse than acid burns and bases are harder to just neutralize on a moment's notice.

Think about your basic home and the selection at the hardware and grocery stores. How much of it is toxic? Consider that a lot of it is still probably readily available in 2070, it's cheap, and it is a virtually untraceable purchase.


Virtually ANYTHING you can snort, snuff, chew, swallow, inject, or get on you can be poisonous. Even drinking lots of water will kill you.


To make a character that uses toxins
The Chemistry skill would be an imperative as well as a high Logic. Knowledge skills and specializations will tailor your focus somewhat if you want to focus a bit more. Medicine and First Aid would also be necessary aid skills. For delivery, Automatics and Archery are all you'd really need for close range. Longarms would let you deliver cap rounds at long range and Thrown Weapon (Grenade) or Heavy Weapons (Launch Weapon) to use with a Grenade Launcher would work. Armorer skill would be important to filling cap rounds and your ammunition.

You may want to consider a high Body and some anti-toxin/poison bio/cyberware or magic in case you accidentally dose yourself or walk into your own toxin. Natural Immunity is a good choice if you plan to be using a specific toxin or drug a lot. If you constantly use toxins and chemicals, your GM WILL eventually clue in and do something to counter that so make sure you have back up plans and a wide variety of different toxins and delivery methods at your disposal.

Equipment would be pretty basic; a pistol crossbow (or regular crossbow for more range) and a machine pistol. Machine pistols give you the concealability of a pistol but the suppressive fire capability. It also means you have the Automatics skill which allows you to pick up something with a bigger clip later on if necessary. I wouldn't recommend going with a bow, pistol crossbow is small and simple which is all you need.

You'll need at least a Shop for working with your substances (a facility if your funds allow it) and weaponizing them. A Kit is good for in-the-field repairs and fixes. Good contacts are an asset as well, doctors are good for medical supplies (CDC doctors can get all kinds of fun stuff) and most anything else you can simply buy yourself. A top-notch fake SIN is a must.

A full-face respirator is an absolute must, especially if you're going to be using gas of any kind. A full-body suit with a Chemical Seal isnt a bad choice either.

If your focus is on damage, you'll need to work out how to get in, deliver your dose, and get away while it takes effect. With the right chemicals, you can be both support and assault so you need to choose your loadout carefully. You can even supply drugs to team members using cap rounds. Suppressive fire is your friend, laying it down on a crowd of enemies when you're loaded with Narco cap rounds can drop half the crowd in a single round.

You can go a safer route by using drones to deploy toxins, but that can have it's own problems. You open yourself up to being hacked and it's very skill-intensive.

A special trick I like to use is the Ammo Selector/Smartlink combo, but it works best if you can mentally command your weapon. Fitted to a Enfield GL-67 grenade launcher (in the case of gas or splash grenades) or to a revolver with Increased Capacity means you can carry a variety of different toxins and deploy them as necessary.

No matter what, expect to spend money. Equipment and toxin components can be EXPENSIVE, especially if you're prepping for a hardcore run. Having a good reason for buying a lot of these components can be a good idea, a good cover can keep a lot of heat off you. The entire character concept can work but requires your GM to be flexible and willing to work with you to create new substances that work in the game mechanics.

And, of course, you might not get such a negative reaction from people you're going against if your rep is that you only knock people out, not kill them.

Also, wouldn't it be better for security to be using capsule rounds, since they can shoot as much as they like, and not trash the place they're supposed to be protecting ??

I like a very nonlethal method: splash grenades with R6 freeze foam. It's not a toxin use, but it's listed in the same general section.

My absolute favorite toxin/drug is Slab. Speedballing it with Pixie Dust and DMSO in capsule rounds makes for very expensive but extremely effective nonlethal rounds that won't even leave a bad memory, unlike the possibility of killing people with narcoject (stun damage from drug tossed on top of stun damage from weapon can overflow).

Or a Lone Star Flash Flood Water Cannon with DMSO and P4MO.

Nothing kills like Whitestar.
Sure, it takes 3 CT to have its first effect, but, after that, it's a death sentence in contact form.
Unless you can get to a hospital with specialized equipment for doing chemical flushes, it's 12P every hour until you choke to death on your own blood.

For my money though, I like Breathtaker. Less handling precautions. Pop it into a room and drop nearly everyone inside.
8P stun, resisted by Body + Prot, and if the unresisted power is higher than the character's Willpower, then they're incapacitated.
If not, then they suffer a negative DP modifier equal to the unresisted damage. I would imagine that this is in addition to the regular wound modifiers.

Remember, gas goes in first; drones second.

I normally go with the slab option myself but I have to say love the inclusion of pixie dust too.

Yup - they don't even remember being shot or who shot them, depending on how quickly you opened fire. If you do it as fast as the "Negotiation" scene from The Fifth Element, they wouldn't even recognize you afterward.

Holy Crap, if we all weren't on some gub'ment watch list already...

Good ideas, might need to bust out some of this soon. Especially splash grenades with ... well any of this. Take it into consideration for a complex's defenses. Who needs an actual security force when you can just splat the night shift with K-10 and hire more when those are all dead/start raving lunes?

Again, the P4MO does not work like that.

With DMSO and a Water Cannon it does. Note that I did not mention capsule rounds.

Freeze Foam splash grenades can also be used to block off hallways, as they form a R6 barrier in a 10 meter blast radius.

There's really no reason to think they're absorbing liters of the stuff through their skin. I won't even mention the game balance issues of insta-killing everyone to you, Neraph.

DMSO.

All very creative, but some of your assumptions are a little off.

For example: the saline + metal injection bolt would only work if you managed to thread the bolt into a vessel. Otherwise your saline bolus and metal bits would just stay in the soft tissue. And anticoagulants don't work fast enough to affect SR combat. Heparin for example would take minutes to hours and warfarrin takes up to 3 days.

Also I think your air embolus explaination is backward. Air in the vein can travel through the right heart and lodge in the lung causing a pulmonary embolism which might be fatal, depending on a number of factors. Air in an artery would end up in terminal vessels and potentially cause limb ischemia, but that takes hours (again not practicle for SR combat).

But again, I like the creativity you've applied.

I know what DMSO is. As I said, there's no reason to assume that these people are absorbing *liters* of the stuff through their skin. P4MO is a *treatment*.

OK, I have a sure-fire way of getting almost anyone unconscious and won't even be illegal.

Get. Them. Drunk.

Alcohol, that wonderful "Toxic" agent, legal, cheap, and the more they drink, the easier it is for the Pornomancer to convince them to drink more!

I recall my friends and I were going to try an experiment - soak someone's insoles with a DMSO/vodka mix. It's a potential ticking timebomb of hilarity.

Yerameyahu is right. Even with DMSO the absorption is limited by surface area and diffusional kinetics. Of course, absorbing small droplets of freeze foam or glue isn't good for you either, but the embolic shower that results isn't going to kill you very quickly.

This would work, but might quickly lead to alcohol poisoning. I wouldn't advise doing it to anyone you like.

Or a way to cut down on the time it takes to get a Russian drunk.

If I were to do it, I'd do a tightly controlled dosage. I'm not sure on the correct mix rates for soluability, but if you try and dump a mixed shot in someone's shoe - well, they'll notice. Enough to get it to soak through the sock, but not enough for them to say 'hey, my shoes are wet-why is that'.

Even if you just managed to get it into the skin and not a vein or artery, that's a massive pocket of small knives that's shredding tissue from the inside. For the anti-coagulants, massive doses of it at local areas would provide the same effect. Brodifacoum, administered in large doses, has anti-coagulant properties and can work much faster than Heparin or Warfarin, depending on dose.

If air or gas enters a vein, death may occur if a bubble becomes lodged in the heart, stopping blood from flowing from the right ventricle to the lungs. Air or gas entering the arteries can cause stoppage of blood flow to an area fed by the artery. The symptoms depend on the area of blood flow, and may be those of stroke or heart attack if the brain or heart. Essentially, you can stroke someone out.

Effective "dosage" is highly variable, but a large blast of air into the circulatory system can cause very serious damage and do so very quickly. Coincidentally, it's also virtually undetectable unless the medical examiner is specifically looking for it. An autopsy opens the body to the air, releasing the bubble and any evidence of it's presence. If you can hide the needle mark or find a way of delivering the air without leaving a mark, there's very little anyone can do to detect it and it's very easy to screw up when looking for it and destroy your proof.

I don't think he's disputing that, Socinus. He's saying that the odds of hitting the circulatory system with a dart in combat are far from 100%.

Personally, I think you're overestimating the effect of a few bits of metal and their 'shredding' potential, again in mid-combat. Not pleasant, but not worse than flechette ammo is specifically designed to be.

Yeah, I'm fully aware of how air emboli work. Its a concept I deal with on a regular basis. My point was a.) in your original description you reversed vein and artery and b.) as Yaremeyahu said I doubt the combat effectiveness and/or reliability of such an attack. Like the saline+metal solution and a lot of the other ideas, its all highly dependent on getting the stuff in the intavascular space, which is not a given just because you hit someone with a dart or an injection bolt or even a capsule round. Free air in the abdomen, thorax or muscle is not acutely life threatening, nor would be little metal bitz.

And brodifacoum has the same mechanism as warfarin- they inhibit the production of vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors by the liver, but they have no effect on pre-formed factors so they take days to have a therapeutic effect. Thats why we use heparin or lovenox as a bridge when someone is started on those drugs. The fact remains that coagulopathy is not an acutely life threatening condition, and when you consider the timescales involved in SR combat there's not a lot of benefit.

At some point it's just more practical to shoot people. I personally wouldn't allow some of these at my table, but then I'm a little biased. But if you would enjoy playing a character that uses these tactics (and your GM approves) have at it.

Bullets is cheaper.

That's why it's hooked up to a firetruck (basically - the FlashFlood Cannon).

@the liquid nitrogen - it doesn't work that way. The terribly small amount of liquid nitrogen an injection arrow/bolt would vaporize almost instantly, due to the boiling point of nitrogen and the tempurature of the human body. That means of course that they have nitrogen gas inside their body now, but it would not freeze small parts of their body like you claim.

In fact, humans have placed their entire hand inside of liquid nitrogen before and not had any lasting effects - no freezing, frostbite, or anything permanent. It apparently just feels like you've been holding ice for a long time. Go figure, the stuff is -320(o) F

Proof.

Only for a very short time. Works famously for molten lead, but I wouldn't agree with the implication of saying 'people can stick their hands in molten lead with no danger'.

The point being if you did capsule rounds, dart guns, or injection arrows with liquid nitrogen, you'd end up with nitrogen gas instead of frozen people.

Maybe if you did like a full auto/suppresive fire it'd start working.

Nitrogen gas inside the body is it's own set of problems.

I agree, Neraph, I just felt your comment needed the 'short time' proviso.

I said it already.

I actually did that myself once, it's cold but nothing too serious. The science behind it is the same effect as with water drops on a hot oven plate, the nitrogen around your hand boils and creates an insulating vapor layer between your flesh and the liquid nitrogen. Just make sure you don't carry anything metallic on your hand...