Vampiric pawns serve other purposes than "food on the hoof," but yes, this is part of it. It is a master-slave relationship, and an addiction. pawns gotta have their fix every now and again, and there's not a lot of places they can get it. The Rendield drug is what keeps them coming back...because without it, they'll literally wither away and die in a few months.

My work here is not done yet.

And no, I haven't forgotten multiquote, it's just being kind of bitchy today. It doesn't always like my laptop, it seems.

Sorry, not me this time. Some of this has been there since a long time before I got involved in the writing of the game. Thanks for thinking of me, though.

Immunity to Pathogens and Toxins only give bonus dice on the resistance test.
They do not provide a total immunity.
Vampires are still subject to pathogens and toxins, they just possess magical properties that make them very resilient.



This has been aroud since SR1, or at least SR2.
I always viewed it as a pseudo-scientific take on the myth that vampires can't cross running water : the combination of reduced buoyancy and induced dormancy would make them shy away from bodies of water, creating the myth.
Stuff like that made up a good part of SR's original appeal, as well as things like the ork rights and later the ghoul rights movement.
It was yet another deconstrution of classic fantasy concepts, just like dragons running corporations or the elven conspiracies.
It took established clichés and put a postmodern spin on them.

Now, there's obviously issues cropping up when you give vampires more screen time.
Something that was just an eye-winking footnote before, like the induced dormancy, suddenly becomes an accute problem because people don't take it as a footnote anymore.
They start asking questions that simply were not thought off in the original writeup, and in spite of a more detailled writeup, people don't get canonical answers.



I always had trouble viewing SR as truly dystopian.
Most of the setting is too tame for that, not to mention the tongue in cheek writeups typical for larger parts of SR2.
SR always was one of the more family friendly cyberpunk games, nowhere near the grit of stuff like SLA Industries.
Yes, it does transport conditions found in some present-day developing countries to the core of Western societies (although Seattle 2070 is still almost harmless compared to Monrovia 2011), but it lacks the anti-utopian bend needed to justify calling it a dystopia.
Where's the Big Brother in SR, where's the Soylent Green?
Stuff like that is there, but it's deviations from the norm, not central premises of the setting.

As far as the SINs are concerned, you'll get assigned a criminal SIN when you are caught without one.
You are more likely to disappear when LoneStar catches you without a SIN, yes, but their portrayal was a jab at police violence and the problems of outsourcing public services, not a typical example of SR society as a whole.
Some people still view their practices as a problem and there has been a vocal civil rights movement since SR1.
It is subject to the limits of the gameworld's political discourse (for example, unable or unwilling to call the basic nature of corporate <-> nation state interaction into question), but it is there.
People care about this stuff. You can jerk an emotional response out of SR's public when you show them how shapeshifters are treated in captivity, you can make them care about Japan treating AIs like property, you can evoke their pity for ghouls when you give them Tamir Grey's biography to read.
The bleeding heart crowd surely is met with more cynicism and has to overcome greater obstacles, but these obstacles get reduced quickly when corporations realize potential profits for them.

Of course corps will care about getting infected legally recognized as soon as they learn more about them.
Infection does offer some interesting benefits. Just to name one example, there's strains that turn everybody into a mage.
Shouldn't surprise anybody that there's corps backing up infected rights.

Actually, the Induced Dormancy rule has been in effect since SR1, and there was (to my knowledge) nothing in that book about losing powers at Magic 0. This how I interpret the rule:

If you cut a vampire off from air, he falls unconscious - this can be done by: submersing him in water; trapping him in an airtight coffin, shrink-wrapping him - to name a few examples. I'd go so far as to say he falls unconscious just if you prevent him from breathing, but that's just interpretation. This is likely derived partly from the classic weakness of not crossing water - if the vampire goes under, he immediately falls unconscious and can't attempt to get out of the water. This is a serious weakness.



Spit. If she swallows, she'll be sick. and yes, she most likely needs to breathe, but contrary to the vampire a banshee won't fall into a coma if they are prevented from breathing. They'll regenerate and try to go back to breathing again until they succeed, or die.



Well, 'monster race' as in, not fit for PCs, is one thing - I can agree to that, in part. They weren't meant to be playable characters until part-way through 3rd edition, and that forced all kinds of 'special rules' onto them. That doesn't mean that they are 'monsters' in the setting, though as you say a majority ofd people would take that stance.




Sure you can strangle them, but they'll keep regenerating the damage done. I'd interpret the 'lack of air' in a way that would case unconsciousness if you prevent them from breathing, which would give you a minute with an unconscious vampire.



What 'non-existant' rules are you referring to?

I don't think there's any assumption to be made in most cases. It's stated that vampires breathe and have a heartbeat, and there are immunities and such to deal with most special situations. I think the problem may be that people expect vampires to work a certain way based on what they are in OTHER games and fiction. If you ignore everything that isn't Shadowrun, it's fairly clear-cut.

The same goes for any other creature, by the way - all of them are only named after legends that in turn were based on similar creatures at unspecified points in the past. Compare Chimaeras, Basilisks, Krakens, Unicorns, etc. It doesn't matter what they are in other games, fairytales, fiction etc - in SR they are their own separate creatures that science or popular culture have named after the legends.

Ah, thanks! I gathered that it works the same as in SR3 pretty much, but haven't bothered to search the rules for it.



I'm not sure why you'd call it a 'waste'? The pawn can go about doing whatever the pawn would do anyway.

Renfield-pawn loses 1 point of Essence a month.
The Renfield drug lasts a week, which would mean the pawn will get VERY antsy if he only gets it once a month, given the addiction.
Each dose gives him 1D6 Essence.
Assuming a Renfield has the same Essence x2 limit that vampires do, this will likely cause an Essence 'overflow' of somewhere between 1 and 20 per month, depending on how many doses he gets.
(I'm ignoring the full implications of Dietary Requirement (Renfield) here, and I'm guessing it means 1 dose a week instead of 5% of body weight: errata needed?)
Since each dose costs the vampire 1 point essence, there is a 1 in 6 risk of essence loss, 1 in 6 risk of breaking even, and 4 in 6 chance of gaining 1 to 4 points if he drains the pawn.

It would be a waste for the vampire to NOT use Renfield as a source of Essence...

He or she could even use the Renfield to enlist the services of other beings with Essence Drain power, letting them feed in return for their services.

It makes vampires and nosferatu a lot more powerful; able to use their Essence for attribute boosts a lot more frequently and just 'refill' from their pawn.

A metatype other than "human" is not human...who would have thought...

This was certainly one of the more appealing parts of SR for me when I first discovered it. As the game aged and matured further, the maturing of how it examined those questions it originally raised was an ongoing source of further enjoyment. They were no longer simply "gimmicks" of a sort that the game conjured up to be unique, but were simply a fact of the SR world that had been created and come to be one of the richer and more complex fictional settings out there. The examination of those all those facts that don't exist in the real world and how they tied into all the other aspects of life within the setting's world remain one of my favorite bits of writing to stumble across or revisit in books both new and old. The integration of the fantastical (whether magical, monsterous, technological, or what have you) and the "mundane" (clearly based on the real world we all live in) to form a richer whole is my single favorite part of the game.

Just to pick the most contentious example from this thread, with some thoughts off the top of my head: What is it really like to be a vampire? Personally, I would think that it'd be a pretty horrible existence, something that would genuinely provoke some serious angst in people faced with the prospect. To be hated and feared, most likely, by everyone you ever knew and loved. Even those you might be lucky enough not to lose to those emotions, you put in danger; not because you can't help but eat them, but because the authorities will likely eventually put 2 and 2 together and threaten them in one way or another (help us catch the monster or go to jail, aiding and abetting by not reporting, etc). If you do manage to make friends post-infection, are they really your friends because they like and care about you, or are they some vampire fetishist weirdos or opportunists that only care about what you can do with your new abilities? The latter being a question vampire runners would have to ask themselves every time they work with someone. Are they just tolerating you because you can turn to mist and get past those pressure pads in the run site? Will they turn on you to get an easy bounty once the job's done? Do they have a grudge against the infected in general that'll prompt them to turn on you for no reason?

The fact that you can never eat or drink anything again without being violently sick soon afterward. It might seem like a little thing, because that's something we tend to take for granted, because we've (on average) never gone without for any serious length of time. Think about just how socially ingrained breaking bread with others is in so many aspects of our lives. What would that do to your psyche? For runner vampires, how would that complicate meeting the Johnson in a restaurant, for instance?

The need to harm other (meta)humans is the most obvious influence on how a vampire would live, of course. How do you get blood? You need a fair amount every month. Do you hit the bar scene or the extremely rough kink scene? Do you carefully buy from blood banks throughout your local metropolis to avoid drawing too much suspicion? Do you pay those on the fringes of society to "donate" at rates better than the blood banks offer? Do you take it by force? Then there's Essence, which is even more problematic. You're going to be doing permanent harm to anyone you take it from, and you need to take at least one point worth in the first five months of your post-infection life. Will you refuse to engage in such a monsterous act and eventually wind up starving to death or being so maddened by hunger that you lash out violently? Will you attempt that seduction route mentioned for blood above, but knowing you'll do lasting harm if you don't tell them about your "status" first? Would you still feel comfortable taking from a decent person, knowing you'll be doing them real and irrevocable harm, even if they claim to be fully willing? Will you target people who "deserve" it; criminals that have done real harm to others and gotten away with it unpunished? Is vigilantism any more justifiable if it's also saving your own life as it is if you're just another (meta) human with a bat in your hands or a gun to their head?

All of the above are far more interesting to me if the answers are more thought out and examined in the context of society in the 6th World than if the answer is just "No" or "Who cares" or "You're a monster, you should just kill yourself, that's a totally natural human response and it's what my characters would do. All of them.".

So, as regards this particular topic ("should the infected be treated as (meta)humans with diseases, and all the complexity and moral greyness that involves, or should they all be treated as simple inhuman monsters to be killed on sight, like rabid dogs"), I am in favor of more complexity and more examination. Always. (Directed largely at Mr. Goodman, since he said he was watching for opinions.)

Where's the bloody +1 button on this thing?

You're thinking of "The Other Forum".

I was colloquially expressing support; I haven't actually been over there. But thanks. ;)

Actually, you can go to the person's profile and rate them there.

EDIT: Somehow, I don't have one star. Can't figure out why.

I am, and I thank you for this one. Very well thought-out posting, and I agree with 3278 on this: Where's the +1 when you really need it?

I hope, as I work on the fiction I'm proposing and working on, I manage to make it a pretty even-handed treatment. I have characters who are not vampire-hunters, but would-be vampirer curers. I plan on making use of Martin de Vries, who's firmly in the burn-them-to-the ground crowd. I've got some vampires who really enjoy it; I've got some who'd kill themselves if they had the guts to do it.

I've got a lot of ideas where I want to take the Infected, and in spite of some of my doom-and-gloom chatter, it's not utter extinction. That's too easy. I do want to make them interesting and scary again, though, and that's going to take some work. Posts like this one make me think that it's going to all be worth it when I finally get it done.

Don't forget the types that are just seeking an alternative to feeding off Metahumanity, like Ghouls looking for replacement food for their dietary requirements. They don't want to be cured, but don't want to be monsters either.

de Vries has been an interesting character since he was introduced, and I really liked his entry in Street Legends. I look forward to seeing your ideas come to fruition! (Maybe one day I'll actually be able to play a vampire PC in an actual game. ...of course, the same could be said of playing any PC, period.)

The 'new' HMHVV expressions in RW are definately a step in the right direction for making things scarier - my players exhibit some genuine fear at the prospect of facing a Harvester again, and their run-in with a Gnawer amongst the ghouls they were trying to kidnap one of ended with half the team defeated (one dead, one maimed, and one infected...lots of fun).

Looking forward to seeing more of de Vries - he's always been a favorite - and I'm hoping we'll see more of the vampire from 'On the Run' again (not Risa; her boss... )

From what I've seen and understood so far, you're efforts will most likely be worth it!

If you need a paranormal hunter then may I shamelessly pimp my Preacher?

The fun things about this one is that he complements his diet by eating his prey, ie other ghouls. It leans heavily on the what is metahuman and what is a monster. In his eyes the feral ghouls must be put down, and those who wallow in sin...

Think Ghoul Version of Clint Eastwood.

That looks like quite a nice character indeed...

I may very well have to use him - maybe I should re-start the campaign where my players had a three Infected on their team...

Patrick -

Would you also be using one JetBlack!?

Because he lives, y'know.

(Another +1 to Eimi's post. The character I Really Wanna Play One Day is a ghoul parkour / grafitti / ghoul rights activist.)

It's not out of the question, but I don't currently have plans to do so. If I think it can be done without looking gimmicky, then sure.

Be sure to make it a sasabonsam then