Vampires only have to drain 1 point a month. That's not really that big a deal, most regular people won't even notice it's gone.

And Vampires can't actually spend any of their essence, so eventually 1 essence is all they really need to drain.

If you ask me, treating Tamanous as only a ghouls group is also whitewashing. At least, ghouls have no other than option than human flesh to survive. Much darker to have people considering organlegging as a profitable business opportunity, rather than a necessity.

Nope, you just tried to wiggle your way out, generally refering to books that cover different topics (like skillsofts that may or may not make workers a thing of the past). Not relevant to the topic of civil rights for new races (metahumans, ghouls, ect). I was inclined to let that pass, but since you insist: quote on that.


And here I thought this aspect was gone since Nachtwache. Fluff over Crunch and all, for the good of the oWoD memorial character.


I mentioned Tamir Grey, and the 162s. Where did I say anything abot whether other ghouls are feral or not? The bit about ghouls usually not being much more than feral critters is from RC 3E and 2E. Of course, ghoultown kind of collected the smart ghouls since you had to apply and register to gain refuge at Carbini, which is hard to manage if you're a fearl, snarling creature who attacks everyone on sight or hides until it is hungry again.


No, never meant to, the upper ranks were Wendigos and/or Nosferati (according to, IIRC, Threats 2). But Ghouls make up by far most of their members.


The reasoning always was they sell the organs and eat the rest. Make money by eating, so to speak. It's not more or less dark than hunting people purely for food.

I don't think it's all feral monsters. There seems to be 3 classes: feral monsters, ghouls who retained their intelligence but just plain went evil (losing a god portion of their mind will do that to you), and those who retain some of their humanity. Lone ghouls or small communities struggling to normalize themselves works a lot better if the rest are monsters.

As for vampires, well,
There two general ways to portray vampires: One is pure evil, basically a evil spirit/demon in a charming human shell. Nosferatu already do this pretty well, no reason to make this PCs. There's just not a lot to roleplay here.

As for general vampires, there's two problems:
#1 Regular vampires seem Cursed with Awesome, while ghouls are just cursed. There's nothing glamorous about being a ghoul and nobody but a min-maxing street-sam would want to be one, while plenty of people (just look at pop culture) wouldn't mind being a vampire (at least at first). There's an additional problem here: most of the vampiric struggle is internal, while a ghoul's struggle is as obvious as their blind, warped faces. And in an RPG, there's just not going to be that much time to devote to the internal struggle of an NPC who may only last a session or two. Need your players to understand the man/monster dynamic and start roleplaying it? You can spend fifteen seconds describing the ghoul's body or ten minutes listening to the vampire's tragic past.

#2 I won't say vampires are overdone, they're really popular and have been for awhile, but SR seems like a really bad place to do that. The vampiric struggle to maintain his humanity while he must kill to survive seems kinda dumb in a team of runners who regularly assault megacorps and get into shoot-outs with the cops to stay fed. It can be done, and I imagine there are lots of kids who want to play a vampire, which is great, more people playing SR, but you can't just transplant vampires into a cyberpunk dystopia. They need to be fleshed out and right now they're just not.

According to the SR3 rules, you have a one in 24 (roughly) chance to emerge from the transformation without significant personality damage, a 1 in 6 chance to become a psycho, and a sure chance to become something feral. I can't find the SR4 rules, but I remember them harsher.

So after three pages, you still haven't got the clue that I was not talking about different races? Oh well, have fun with that, as well as with your strawman Twilight characters (which is kinda funny, I don't think any vampire groupie would go the lengths you go to whitewash vampires, just to be able to complain about whitewashed vampires)

I made the mistake to assume you understood the topic. My bad.

As for straw man arguments: that is your specialty, not mine.

Vampires may get some extra Charisma, but they nevertheless are pale, hairless, emaciated (where do you think the -4 to swimming comes from) creatures which shy away from daylight. In a word, bloodsucking nerds

Very pretty nerds though. Like Robert Pattinson. Or Justin Bieber.

And where do you get the idea from they're hairless? That's only Goblins and Ghouls. Other infected keep their hair or grow even hairirer!

I think he means Nosferatu - they're hairless if I recall correctly.

That they are.

On the -4 penalty to vampires swimming, it`s not because theyare emaciated, or most infected would get it, especially Goblins. That penalty actually stems from the mythic portrayal of Vampires, which are unable to cross moving bodies of water. Granted, it`s toned down, since they can still cross, but that`s my .02 nuyen.

(Also, another thinnish race, Elves, get a +1 to swimming before they penalties kick in.)

-4 to swim comes from a drastically reduced buoyancy. Something about their transformation appears to make them more dense, or remove air from their bodies. If it were the latter, It could be both funny and not, considering vampires go dormant when there is a lack of oxygen.

I really suggest reading the Essence Drain power again....

It is quite enlightening, in fact...

In the stories told in both Underworld Sourcebook and Loose Alliances, ghouls acts a guards (or driver). One post suggests whoever runs Tamanous finds ghouls useful as "dual-natured security and muscle," which is far from covering the full extent of Tamanous activities. Also in Underworld SB, someone asks if a wendigo may be running the show, because of the Black Tamanous legend. By the time of Loose Alliances, this is still around as a rumor, but someone's also saying a group of NAN shamans started the operation.

Looking at Runner's Companion, p 81, Vampires get paler and get more pronounced canines (and their breathing becomes shallower) but that's it, they still sound pretty normal. I think you're talking about Nosferatu, who get the Orlock treatment.

NAN shamans and Wendigo is not mutually exclusive. I didn't remember the ghouls being only occasionally hired muscle, but the 'men in grey' in their scary chemsuits (that's from Vice I think).

Why does it have to be some magical mojo? All the street docs I've ever met were dabbling in organ-legging (or as they prefer to cal it, recycling), they just didn't manage to bring it to industrial scale.

Or maybe it's just been forgotten in the goblin stats...RC hardly is the most error-free book ever. An aversion to running water would be better represented the same way RC suggest to handle holy symbols etc. - a (psychosomatic) allergy.


IMO the -4 swim modifier stems from the fact that "[a]fter a phase of internal transformation and purging" (RC) the newborn bloodsucker has quite simply purged a good part of his body weight. Also, there's the problem of getting enough nutrition besides the Dietary Requirement. Ghouls have the problem of getting raw meat in world which mostly subsides on soy products, but a creature which can only hold down blood has it even harder...

Except that you can easily factor the cost of the nutritionally required "Meat/Blood" into your lifestyle for a +30% Lifestyle Increase (Oprional Rule for easy bookkeeping). Done and no further worries about nutrition.

As an optional rule, if the GM does not want to bog down the game with things like hunting your dinner.

Indeed...
After all, it is not "DinnerRun" it is "Shadowrun". But then, we don't play Infected at our tables, so it is not really that big of a worry for us.

Maybe someone should make an infected version of "Foodfight!" heh

Foodfight4A: The Food fights back!

(Disclaimer1: Obviously non-canon ideas. I'm sure some people will hate them, but it's something I've been pondering for a couple of days, and I thought I'd share it.)
(Disclaimer2: I haven't seriously read the rules for Infected PCs. I gather they're peculiar; I don't care.)

Vampires have hired "scientists" to study if vampires can survive indefinitely from synthetic/animal nutrition. The studies suggest they can. The vampires make enough campaign donations and finance enough professorships, to keep this going. Of course the whole thing stinks; just like shadowrunners think Aztechnology stinks, this whole scientific "proof" is as believable as smoking not being bad for you.

In practice, vampires just take some people from the Barrens who won't be missed, and after topping up their Essence, throw the remains in the Soylent Food machine. If a vampire gets caught, the rest of the vampires publicly distance themselves, the sucker goes to trial, and may even get convicted (although vampires tend to have good lawyers). Now and then they intentionally create a spare fledgeling vampire to be sacrificed this way, just to pretend to the public that the State really protects the people from rogue vampires.

The whole thing smacks of hypocrisy; that's intentional. Vampires are pretty rare, wealthy and influential. Their main job in the campaign is to show off that society is hopelessly corrupt, that obviously evil people can get away with it.

And yeah, there are vampire hunter groups. They take down vampires from time to time; that's doable. Of course, the State is obliged to investigate such "murders", although a lot of unhappy investigators drag their feet and secretly sympathize with the vampire hunters. So the vampires hire shadowrunners to take down the vampire hunters (and the vampire hunters may earn their keep as shadowrunners...)

---

Yeah, I like vampires. I don't like ghouls so much. This whole drive to humanize them doesn't work on me. While vampires are about Hypocrisy, Monsters Looking Like Us, ghouls are degenerate. They're only vaguely human, can't really hope to masquerade. Their existence sucks; dangerous, but also quite vulnerable.

Ghouls are a plague. They aren't really fit to survive for long, but the pandemic is impossible to contain. It just keeps spreading, and the extermination efforts can't really keep up. If their population gets out of control in the Barrens, then the State will burn them out, but the infection always pops up in a new place.

Ghouls are tragic: they've become monsters that don't have long to live, but will probably cause a lot of harm before someone kills them. The most merciful thing to do is put Ex-Ex between their eyes as fast as possible, from a safe distance.

Professional courtesy after all.

Them's fighting words, tabarnac

It's better than Quebec City, at least...

Thats up there with 'Never deal with a dragon' in things that are obvious

Wouldn't know, never been to Quebec City. I have been t the other two. They are looking nicer when compared to Halifax...

Go to Toronto if you want decent streets and large sidewalks. Go to Montreal if you want to have a good time

I used to worry about my father being in Hell.

Then realized, he would just go up to the Devil and say, "Do your worst, I've been in a Quebec City ER with my OHIP card."

It'd be funny if it weren't so true

So I've heard. But, I'm not the kind of person who goes out for a good time. And when I do, I sadly find myself making notes in my head of vcarious things, like general cultural trends, how tight security seems to be, where the exits are, architecture, and just random things no one really cares about. (I don't drink or party, so that may be a part of my reluctance to accept Montreal as a good spot.)

Not even necessarily drinking or partying. We got great food, a pretty sweet mountain and more festivals than we can shake a stick at. Our movie festival has been pretty sweet this year, for instance.

more likely is the chance of kinship between them <.<

Yes, follow this advice closely. I want the good stuff here never to get crowded.

Most places in the Shadowrun world fill a purpose - Africa just happens to be the low-civilization, mixed tech jungle hellhole. Like Australia is the mana-wasteland (Although a place with earth scorched bare and grey, burnt skies with arcane winds bearing curses and roving spirits, walled enclaves of corporate rebels and the like would be awesome in Africa).


I think the entire runners companion book, much as I like it, needs that.

Yeah. Extremly uninspired. Started in Synner's era, and went far, far downhill from there. The worst part (so far) is Hill's bit on Somalia, but Almanac is a close second.

Well, if a character has negative qualities, the player should expect these disadvantages to come up in a game...


But how this is played out is besides the point, my point was that in-universe, a vampire will have a hard time getting his recommended calorie intake and thus is quite likely to look malnourished.

I would like to complain about this, because I think it's an absolute waste of potentially great cities/cultures for runs. However, when I look at India, Central Asia, or South America (outside of Amazonia), Africa actually seems to come out pretty good. And that's not counting the regions like China or the Middle East where the setting is explained and then basically undeveloped.


Then why are you playing a ghoul? Yes, there's discrimination to explore but there's a ton of alternatives if you want to explore that.

I don't actually see that. Since all that is necessary "In Universe" is to increase your Lifestyle costs, it does not seem all that difficult to acquire the food you need as a Vampire. *Shrug*

No worries though...

Easy... I'm Not... My point is that Nutrition is not your worry as an Infected. Discrimination/Being Hunted is the major issue, from what I can see, but your nutrition can easily be handled.

If vampires/ghouls can survive the discrimination and lay hands on money, the diet isn't the big problem. If there's a buyer, someone (desperate) will sell.

True. And for someone desperate, giving up Essence to a vampire for money might be seen as better than selling a kidney to organleggers. No surgery, scarring, etc.

It's not so much about Essence, they don't need all that much unless they burn through it. It's about blood.

This is true. The vamps don't need to eat essance as often as blood, and blood is naturally renewable.

Do vampires still bleed when cut?
If so, can they drink their own blood?

Yes.
...yes... tentatively.

It's my opinion they can eat their own blood, but it wouldn't exactly be equal. After all, that blood goes to more then replenishing blood.

Of course they would not get any essence out of it . .
But basic sustenance would be something else entirely . .
And seeing how they have regeneration, even massive blood loss does not really matter, because the blood is regenerated . .
So, basically, they can have a full tummy all the time, but need to go out and get essence from other beings . .
Maybe from another vampire?