I've always heard that lone star and a lot of corps keep a sample of your tissue, if you go rogue they can mess you up.

If you become infected will your tissue sample still link to you?

Thanks!

Whoa, good one. I think it would determine to what extend the HMHVV affects your DNA, it must be a substancial degree considering the gas form BUT the regeneration might lock it on. somethnig to ponder.

That's why the first Shadowrun you do when leaving Lone Star is to replace your sample with one from a Barrens Demon Rat.

Worked for Dirk and a regular rat.

*Pours a 40 on the curb*

I'd entertain, as a Gamer Master, arguments that your aura has significantly changed enough that the link is now either useless or not as useful.

Yeah i'd agree, there are neough changes that it would be like a sample from a relative instead of directly you.

I'd allow it to work as a sympathetic link to you, for someone that had that metamagic, but other than that I agree with Paul.

Thing is: when you turn into a vampire your essence "resets" (you get a new maximum of 12) while your ware is pushed out of you. Not only your essemce mechanic is totally different but the virus also alters your aura rapidly.
Both are signs that former sample materials most likely wont work imho.

That would make for a hell of an arc with a recurring villain.

"But...You were DEAD! The ritual link even unravelled!"

"Yes...I was dead. And now, YOU WILL JOIN ME! HAVE AT YOU"

What he said. The link/sample is pretty much useless at this point, IMO.

Sympathetic link should still be semi-workable.

I mean, hell, you can use a piece of the car seat someone used to drive back and forth to work every day in with that metamagic!

Questionable. Vampirism is essentially making an entirely different being that has the memories of the host, but not a lot of the personality. DeVries is an exception to what seems to be a universal rule.

I doubt that the personality changes because of the virus. It changes because now (nearly) everybody sees you as a monster and therefore tries to kill you.

Ask three people get four answers, a knife to the kidneys and a sales brochure for the line of NERP's.

I would think the now-biological need to bring harm on another living being would serve as more of an altering force than any social stigma.

Not to mention a lot of people tend to experience...mood changes to be generous...when they die. Now yes they're technically infected. However the large bulk of lore surrounding Vampires and Ghouls refers to them as being the "Undead." Now take someone who may or may not really know what is what in the realm of Vampirism and see how they take it.

I think the most jarring part would be after waking up, seeing loved ones, passers-by, what-have-you...

...And not seeing them as people, but as a meal. The smell of them, that metallic tang. The sweetness and the tart. The heat rising from their skin. The sound of their hearts beating. Walking. Unaware.

Unexpected.

Prey.

All the while, part of your mind is screaming that this can't be true. It has to be wrong. It cannot be. But your id, your base desire, the dark core of you knows that it's true. It knows you're hungry.

Wish I had a link for it, but I don't. That said, it seems that pointing people to the intro fiction for "The Infected" in Running Wild seems appropriate right about now....

While this may be true to some extent, one of the key differences that SR's vampires exhibit compared to many others is that, fundamentally, they are still fundamentally human...psychologically, morally, intellectually. They don't have "Beast", they aren't soulless husks, they aren't demons jammed into the head of a now dead person. They're still (rarely meta)human beings, who have undergone a severely traumatic near-death experience (I say near, because while they did actually die, briefly, the Infection process revives them almost immediately and puts them in a coma while they change; their death duration is comparable enough to people that die on the operating table and are revived as to be indistinguishable) and now find themselves suffering from a horrific disease that has changed the way their lives will be until the day they die.

There aren't any voices whispering how tasty people look, you don't see people as walking milkshakes, and while your sense of smell is now supernaturally enhanced, it isn't fixated on BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD to the exclusion of anything else. There isn't even any concrete evidence suggesting that vampires suffer any higher rates of psychopathy or sociopathy than the population as a whole.

Now, that's the "base facts". How people that have been vampirized come to behave based on their experiences are another story. The fundamental issues involved with needing to drink blood and drain essence are going to do a massive number on the mind of any healthy person (the average vampire that didn't have issues before their infection). Long-term rationalization, desensitization, and post traumatic stress reactions will shape many vampires into seemingly "inhuman predators" as easily as they will combat veterans that can kill someone without seemingly any qualms. These reactions will often be even more pronounced in vampires due to the fact that society deems them monsters without any hope of redemption, to be hunted down and killed for the good of all. The construction of an identity reveling in that very monsterousness they're accused of is an easy defense mechanism to seek refuge in for someone on the edge like that, the classic "FINE, THEY CALL ME A MONSTER THEN A MONSTER I SHALL BE" reaction so often seen in people put into highly stressful environments where they're heaped with scorn and labeled as something terrible (criminal, thug, bully, "baby killer", etc). Should they actually kill someone, those behaviors will likely grow even more pronounced, as they face the fact that they actually HAVE done something they may have believed warranted being "hunted down" in their pre-Infection perspective. The struggle to remain a decent person as a vampire should BE a struggle, not against some supernatural urge or overwhelming predator's instincts, but against the same sort of inclinations and damages that produce entirely non-supernatural murderers.

tldr; vampires aren't monsters because they're vampires, they have the potential to become "monsters" because being a vampire means doing the same things mundane "monsters" do.

I firmly believe that being a ghoul or a vampire or other non-feralized Infected shouldn't profoundly change your personality or psyche in any "because you got infected" inherent way. The fact that they're still the same person they were beforehand just make far more interesting and morally complex, whether they DO wind up becoming irredeemable monsters or they remain (or even become for the first time) relatively decent human beings. Both in terms of how they behave...and how others behave toward them.

(Post not directed squarely at you, Doc, it's just that your post offered a good springboard to offer my own thoughts.)

I'm sorry, what was that? You just crit me with a wall of text.

I speak subjectively, of course. Can we concretely say what happen when someone is turned? What's our evidence?

I see that constant urge that the person you're talking to is a tasty snack (Meh, I'd rather have A- than a B+ in blood type, higher grade hurr) wrasslin' with the social desire to remain as you once were: Human. The pleasure in feeding comes in giving into that base desire, at the cost of one's humanity - piece by piece.

You may wake up the same, but the actions you undertake are going to change you in varying ways. Some are subtle, some are overt. You become more of a night owl, don't have claustrophobia as much, and you have severe intolerance to eating. On the flipside, you must feed on the living. You must inflict that loss of health to survive. For some, the guilt is inherent. Built in. For others, less so. As you grow accustomed to it, perhaps that guilt lessens more and more, until finally you don't see it at all. It's just food that talks.

Indeed, one of my points, that we don't have any. There hasn't been word one of any concrete changes in the personality or psyche of someone that's been 'turned'. Which I take to mean that there aren't any concrete 'if A becomes vampire, A's personality, psychological makeup, morality, ethics, what have you change in the following ways' automatic changes. Of course, that's only my interpretation.



That is an interpretation that others have gone with. Personally, I don't really view it as an omnipresent driving force to that degree. It's true that overhwhelming hunger and the mindless need to feed is a behavior seen in vampires immediately upon coming out of the coma after vampirization, but there hasn't been any indication that it's a driving force affecting their every interaction from there on in. Quite possibly, it may surface again if they starve themselves down to an Essence of 1, but even that is left up in the air.

Still, entirely valid for anyone that wants to play it that way. Different people with the same disease and the same symptoms behave quite differently at times, after all.



This is more or less what I stated in my post, and I quite agree. To boil it down further: vampire behavior = nurture, not nature.

Actually, the NERPS brochure is out of date, and was a distraction for the knife.

Luckily, Impact Armour.

We could just as easily see the Essence Drain as the nourishment part, or hunger. The smell/taste desire for blood might be more akin to lust/sex for them. Could work for that sparkly vampire lust angle.

The best part of this, to me, is there is no wrong answer. As long as you're having fun at your table it's victory all around.

Word.

Indeed.

I partially agree with this.
You have listed a good umber of psychological and cultural factors contributing to a vampire's personality and it's right in the books that people can retain their personality post-infection.

However, there seems to be a potential impact of the transformation in itself as well.
There's differences between how likely going feral is from strain to strain, there's specific symptoms unusually common among certain types of infected as well, such as the tendency of nosferatu towards schizoid and paranoid personalities.

There's modifiers to mental attributes, too, be they positive or negative.
These are immediate, following the transformation directly instead of being accquired through a life as an urban predator, bogeyman or pickup artist turned abusive bloodsucker.
We could explain the decreased LOG and the heightened WIL of a ghoul as results of mental trauma, we could say that their raised INT just refletcs their heightened senses, but what about the increased CHA of a vampire, or the significantly enhanced mental attributes of a nosferatu?
HMHVV clearly affects the brain of a victim somehow.

It's definitely not as in Buffy, there's no demon setting up shop in your body and wearing your face as a mask, but it's not far-fetched to say that infection can affect your personality.
You're still the same individual, but you don't necessarily stay the same kind of person, and it's something that can happen right from the start.
One of the few things I liked about how ghouls were handled in SR3 was rolling a test after the transformation to see how strongly it affects the victim's personality. It could end up with you being psychically tougher than before if you performed well, it could end up with a feral, deranged and murderous mess. SR4's approach of glossing over this part and treating ingame infection almost exactly as starting out infected makes things a good deal more unclear.

How much of the personality traits are latent in the infection, and how many simply lie in the individuals that the Infected choose to share their infection with?

Also, I hate to reference another game, but to be honest they've been dealing with these themes and ideas for 20 years now. Vampire (its various incarnations) covers A LOT of the ideas that we are basically rehashing here. Its not wrong to steal or otherwise be inspired by themes and ideas presented in that game. ...as long as you leave out all the angst....well most of it.

There's nothing wrong with angst when your entire life goes to hell and you get a frankly horrible disease. Of course, too MUCH angst, and badly written and "acted" angst is tooth-grindingly bad. Going too far in the other direction and being totally cool with it all because hey super hero with fangs! is also just as bad as too much, of course.

There needs to be a good middle angst ground, basically. Enough for it to be poignant without it being perpetual.

Vampires should be like Spike, basically, little bit of angst, but with a snarl and "been there, done that" mentality.

Spike is my role model for my current character, Typhoid (A Nosferatu voodoo magician). SO much so that he dresses like Freddy Kruger.

Christmas sweater, fedora, single glove, and all?

This discussion, like so many others on this board, has become more a discussion of play style than actual RAW. For me the solution is simple: want Vampires to be monsters in game? *Waves his hands!* Poof. Done. Want them to be poor souls fighting an infection? *Waves his hands!* Poof. Done. What some other variant? *Waves his hands!* Poof. Done.

Got any other requests. I'm here all day. Try the veal. And, please folks, tip your waiter or waitress. They've got a litter to feed.

2 gloves, but otherwise yes