Player says he's going to coat his slugs with a dose. What effect? Not sure what he's expecting as I didn't grill him on it. It was sort of an offhand thing a player mentioned. A lot of other things going on, and it didn't have any effect on the events last session (he shot someone with a gun he'd wrestled away from an opponent, he only shot a window with his own), and I wasn't sure which way it should go.

While not the normal vector, LSD is injectable (actually, IIRC, the most likely LSD overdose death was from a massive injection). So I suppose it's possible that very poor transfer from a slug via a wound could occur.

So what effect would you expect this to have?

Nothing, a round is subjected to intense heat and pressure that would destroy the drug.

Yeah, it's capsule rounds or needles if you want to put fluids to people.

Imagine my disappointment when I realized that you didn't mean slugs, as in the invertebrates. ):

Not that we couldn't incorporate psychotropically-coated invertebrates into OUR game...

Lace your bullets with PCP, and you have a legitimate "reason" for shooting people in self-defense.

If you can find a drug museum, that is...

I dunno, you could probably roll up a half dozen tabs of LSD and insert it into a hollowpoint, seal the hole with a plug.




-k

That's the thing. I don't think a simple surface treatment on bal rounds would work. I don't think using blotter would work either, too bulky. But a pure crystal deposit in the hollowpoint or under a normal nylon cap. LSD is fairly sturdy, doesn't boil till over 500C. It'll oxydize over time but the heat it'd be exposed to being fired is very short lived, and in a grove like that I don't see melting (80C) being that much of an issue? Dose is in 10's of micrograms, very tiny amounts are required.

The biggest problem with the vector I think is the time to dissolve and then get into the bloodstream, after the slug has made such a mess of the flesh (and therefore the vascular system) in the immediate area.

Tell him the rules for toxin delivery are darts and capsules.

Well actually there aren't....yet. It hasn't really come up before.


Probably though I just really need to figure out just what he has in mind for effects, what the point is. I got the distinct impression that he still wants to sling lead, just have a little kicker of flair. *shrug*

...I have an idea. Avoid French cuisine for the next few sessions.

Even if he did manage to get LSD into a coated bullet and have it work. The effect would be pretty minor.. compared to BEING SHOT.

Indeed. You're better off using DMSO and hitting them with a squirt gun.

For major wounds, yeah. The better part of your hipbone just got shattered by a rifle shot? It isn't going to matter so much whether you are also balls tripping. But for lighter wounds....

'Squirt guns' and the like are easily blocked by impermeable membranes, glass windows, etc.

Anyway, thanks for everyone's thoughts.

Impermeable membranes... over your entire body? Konnichi-wa, asphyxiation!

Duh. FFBA. Any of a number of armor suits. Hell, scotchguarded clothing.

FFBA or Armor Suits are not impermeable membranes. If a suit of armor is sealed, it needs an oxygen tank.
The human body will go into shock if you deprive the pores with their ability to do oxygen and urine transfers.

LSD would be one of those drugs that provides high pain tolerence, someone tripping balls on LSD takes significantly more ammo to drop than someone who isn't.

Even injected though, LSD can take minutes to hours to have any appreciable effect. Not really a useful combat application, but if it's used to create confusion amongst survivors, more power to them! Gotta love psyops.

While LSD has been studied for treating chronic pain (more so at sub-psychedelic dosages), when someone is tripping the sensory/reasoning muddling created by the psychedelic, especially in someone not expecting it, means they don't really need to 'drop' to be effectively neutralized. ((Although doing crazy-ass actions could definitely be a wild card. ))

This is more along the line of what I was thinking (EDIT:but I couldn't find onset times for IM or IV injections). Wing someone, they run and escape, madness ensues.....which is really what interests me with this. I'm thinking this could be highly entertaining used from the other side of the table.

Hollowpoints aren't exactly great at piercing armor, either. I vaguely recall SR4 having hollowpoint ammunition rules added in Arsenal, handling kind of like flechette ammo but less so.

If you want to let your player run these rounds, go for it... it's your game. Use basic rules for hollowpoints, and if the hit inflicts physical damage, the target gets a dose of whatever onboard. This would probably be a bit OP compared to basic capsule/injection ammo, but it's your game. Also, of course, there's the problem of "it might kill the guy," which capsule/injection ammo doesn't have unless you load it with something lethal. I wonder what it'd cost per round, when you figure in the cost of drugs?

RE: impermeable barriers. Chemically sealed armor and things like chemsuits have been around for a while in SR, and we have modern HAZMAT gear which would be immune to weapons like the SuperSquirt. Just because your armor qualifies as an impermeable barrier doesn't mean it's a *skintight* impermeable barrier, which is where you'd run into the more immediate toxicity problems associated with dumb stuff like shrink-wrapping or full-body-painting people.

sabs, obviously you'd modify the armor: Chem Seal, or the less cousin, Chem Protection. I was just responding to Tanegar's incredulous 'entire body?!' question.

I remember reading somewhere that during WW1, some soldiers would smash the tips of their rounds into onions so if the round did hit but did not kill, the victim would most likely get blood poisoning and die from that. Coating a round in anything will not have an effect while in combat, but could lead to a very nasty post combat infection that would kill the character.

Onions are poisonous?

Bad onions are.

Maybe they figured if mustard gas was coming from mustard seeds, onions were just potential weapons of mass destruction?

Heh. You'd think open wounds wound be source enough for infection, no flavoring required.

You can always season to taste. This was France, after all.

it also helps that onions pretty much always have lots of mold and yeast on them

Yeah, keep in mind these were onions in open sacks in muddy trenches. Plus onions are pretty ridiculous tubers, they basically turn to acid on exposure to air, hence the eye irritation used to mask crying in so many sitcoms. Probably worse than salt for an open wound - of course who knows how effective it was, most infantry in WWI didn't see the people they were shooting at half the time, much less after their target was dragged away wounded.

Yeah, I feel like it was something someone came up with while bored in the trenches and they wanted to do something with the moldy onions. The trench environment was bad enough to die without even being shot, so someone getting shot in that environment... eh, I don't think the addition of onions would have added much at all.

Heh.

"I might be starving, but lets put our bullets in the onions instead of the onions in our bellies!"

Only in war.

What makes you think they didn't also eat said onions

I personally wouldn't want an onion I stuck a bullet into.

You've never been in the trenches, sleeping in mud for a week+ straight and not had anything to eat in 2 days either

Thankfully no, though I've tromped through the desert for a few days with enough weight on my ruck to seriously reconsider what I was doing - and I wouldn't stick a round in my food before eating it then, either.

Assuming the onion thing happened (I'd like a reference/Snopes for this, it could be a confusion with some of the chem warfare that could create an onionish smell) I'd guess they'd have been using the crappy onions that had gone at least partially bad (mouldy, mushy). Maybe they were thinking that corroding the slug with the acid would increase the [already insanely high] chance of infection/tetanus, the Rusty Spoon Principle? LOL Or trying to chemically score the jackets to return to the days of dum-dums? But would you really want to purposely put a heavily corroded round into your weapon to fire? It all sounds rather futile and superstition...which I guess could still be in line with general public's medical knowledge of the time.

@Shrike30

As per my sig I've left the SR ammo rules madness behind. Although any softpoint ammo does poorly against armor, it still does something against thin barriers like windows and such. Keep in mind that the rules allow for purposeful destruction of cover, and many types of concealment, which isn't going to work with squirt guns.

P.S. One positive outcome of this discussion is that I'm actually now crafting proper rules entries for darts/squirts/paintballs, including expressly forbidding the Negate Cover action for some things and having the numbers be Hail Marys for the others. Prior even tazers were sort of adhoc, I'm going to proper framework for Tests to try inflict and then resist their nervous system damage like that. I think you were on with the requirement to inflict flesh puncture levels of damage.

poor some of the drug into the barrel of the gun, fire, repeat?
would this work? probably only for one bullet, if it was sticky enough to not be left in the dirt while the bullet goes flying.

I wouldn't fuck up a barrel like that. It's inviting early wear, not to mention possible plugging.

I've been looking for a link for the smash bullets into onions during WWI but i've been unable to find anything, and a couple sites have suggested that onions may in fact be used to prevent infections. Like i said before, i don't remember where i heard that from or even if it was true or BS.

http://www.ehow.com/list_5791898_dangers-onions-dogs_.html

They are poisonous to dogs though.


Another possibility is rat poison, of which there has been a couple reports of suicide bombers putting rat poison in bombs for the anticoagulant affect, but those reports have not been verified or in some cases dis-proven.

According to Snopes, the pH balance of an onion only increases the imbalance that mayonnaise puts in a salad - which is why either aren't as serious for infection. Cut onions, certainly as the outer layer is what protects it (and you) from infection. Most outbreaks are associated with green onions which we eat whole instead of peeling.

If yuo want a anti-coagulant, I recommend Garlic

I recommend the blood of hemophiliac orphans.

This kind of inspires me- there could easily be an urban legend of some gang who doses all their bullets with LSD, which might have an odd placebo effect on their victims. "If you go up against the Kacophony Klub, you might get shot with one of their dose-slugs! One graze and you'll trip for days!"

Doctors recommend the slightly less morally questionable warfarin and heparin.

That's roughly my thinking, having some crazy banger gang doing this. It's not particularly effective outside of the psyops thing.

I still think the mechanical effect would be negligible, but the street cred value could still be there. Makes me think of the guy in Brotherhood of the Wolf who uses silver bullets because he wants people to know he was the one shooting them.

The only reason i think there might actually be a mechanical effect (although not necessarily one that'll kick in during your average firefight) is the incredibly low dosage required for LSD to do it's thing. It's measured in micrograms.