Yeah, but when you have a game that includes things like meat puppet houses and organlegging, that strikes me as deeply retarded. Far better to just stick to fuck and shit. Not like they'll go out of style any time soon.

I actually like drek and frag. It helps... differentiate it from the current world.

This is importnat for a lot of people. I mean, when your team walks past the house your playing at on the run from bugs, it helps to remind them that the Chicago the players are near is not the Chicago the team is near.

Yeah, 'cause if there's one thing hard-core criminal-types try to avoid using in regular conversation, it's profanity.

Assassinate some researcher who's never hurt a fly in their life, kidnap children out of their homes and hold 'em for ransom, and plant bombs that kill hundreds of innocents all in exchange for a month's rent, sure, that's all fine and dandy. But saying "shit" or, heaven forbid "fuck," well... whoa there, cowpoke... that's just going way too far. Best to censor that kind of behavior. Yessir.

I absolutely hate "drek" and "frag." They're total mood and atmosphere breakers.

If by preach you mean go off on a huge rant, then yes.

A-fraggin'-MEN

Drek and frag give the illusion of a child-friendly game, so keep parents more happy. Okay, I do use both words in normal conversation but that is beside the point.

If you play it as shadow-ops with minimal wet-work, this game can be made parent-friendly. There are some styles where you will be gang-raping school-girls and implanting cranial bombs into puppies (give it to the Don's son...) but you do not have to. In many games (like the ones I GM), the aim is to get in and out with no kills; the most violence is narcojecting the guard-dogs. Drek and frag allow this style to stay gritty without objectionable words that could lead to parent-trouble.

If you want, change those words back in your games.

You might as well make a movie about the Vietnam war that has soldiers screaming freak and gosh darn. I'm sorry, but it tends to hurt immersion.

Drek is actually appearing in the mainstream lexicon.

Our office named a newsletter "Tech Drek". And I didn't even make the suggestion. The popular definition here, though, is that Drek = miscellaneous stuff, with perhaps a connotation that it is fairly useless stuff.

One wonders why we would produce a newletter about misc. useless stuff, though.

Sorry to ressurect a dead off-topic, but I believe faggot became tied with homosexuals because cigarettes were callled faggots. 'Real Men' would smoke pipes and cigars, faggots were for women. However, for whatever reason, they became popular among the homosexual community. Hence, they were labelled faggots. When cigarettes became more popular, and the word disappeared in the US, the connection was lost.

nezumi, read through the rest of the thread. That's only one of various theories, and it's one of the far less credible ones.

I too think the cigarette link is probably the key, but I'd expect it to be sparked by the fag euphanism for penis (It'd be like saying someone had a small penis or calling them a cocksucker, not sure which it stemmed from).

I don't see why you think it's not credible. Faggot being linked to homosexuals is a rather recent development, certainly no more than 150 years old. It simply doesn't appear in the language in that context before that. And it is true that in the early 1900's you don't see men with cigarettes. It simply wasn't done.

I did read through the rest of the thread, and I didn't see the connection I stated (that the use of cigarettes was a gender thing) as being stated earlier : P

No, what was stated earlier was the poor substitute theory (ie that cigarettes were a poor substitute for a cigar). Sorry for the confusion.

back to "breeder" = human - the canon explanation is that it showed up right at the time of goblinization. Orks changed from humans, they didn't have little orklings of their own, at leask at the start. So humans were the ones breeding.

That explanation doesn't actually seem to hold up that well, but it's what I heard.

It holds up as well as any other slang term. It's also one of the precious few used in Shadowrun that I kinda dig. It's easy to say venomously, and there is something profane about it even if it's not obvious why. It's about the only one I willingly use on a regular basis when playing a metahuman or metahuman rights activist-style character.

I had always thought a 'Breeder' was a reference to an ork not a human.


I can't remember where I saw this, but it was an old comparative bar graph of race populations in the world dating from the Awakening up to present. In spite of the VITAS toll, the ork population worldwide seemed like it was the only race that was steadily gaining on the humans.

I figured that the insult 'Breeder' was in truth more an unspoken fear of the ork's growing presence by the other races than anything else.

This might be from something other than shadowrun, but I recall somebody calling regular humans "smoothskins", "smoothies", etc... maybe that was the ghouls in fallout. Works as an ork/troll/ghoul insult at a human in shadowrun though, presumeing they have other things to call elves and dwarves.

That was from Fallout. Wasn't an insult, for the most part. Just a netral epithet with a touch of xenophobia.

Yeah, that was Fallout. BEST GAME EVER.

An interesting term for humans I've heard is long-pig. The name stems from the fact that they taste like pigs, but they're longer (Never ones for originality these man-eaters).

It was given to them by Carrien, a race of creatures from the SLA industries game, but I suppose it might have been given by ghouls in Shadowrun.

I've always had to use terms like Sir or Boss. To me, those were vulgar. Behind their backs I usually just call them Sleepers.

Long-pig is a "real world" term that has nothing to do with any games. It's in reference to cannibals and their preferred appetizers.

for some reason most of the orks i play are racist: don't have a term for elves-just load the word up with lots of hate, gimpy or stubs for dwarves, softies for humans, nothin against trolls cause they're put down like the rest of us. humans i play call orks breeders, trolls are bricks or walls.

So far I like the following

Humans-Breeders, Norms, Smoothies
Elves- Nancies
Dwarves- Gimps
Ork/Troll- Skags, Trogs

Not bad but they seem to lack a certain amount of venom, which may be impossible to achieve since these races don't exist.*

We got a little side tracked on the origin of Faggot but good work just the same.
May be we should look into using foreign words like German. I heard German was great for swearing

* Yes, I know Humans do exist but there are no other race to look down at us.

Since we got fairly Brit with the whole faggot thing (god, I need a cigarette now!) here's some from the 2nd ED London SB:

Baldrick - Ork
Hilda - Female Troll
Pixie - Elf
Squid - Troll
Stan - Male Troll

There aren't any which were particularly "Human" although I personally like "Ken and Kylie" for the corporate wage slaves. Incidentally, Rags = cigarettes.

God, I need a fag...

Baldrick? As is 'I have a cunning plan' maybe?

<i>I heard German was great for swearing</i>

not as good as russian tho

Did anyone say "tusker" or "grunge/grunger" for orks?

I think i heard someone of the trollish persuasion refer to normal humans as 'squishies.'

Also, what would the derogatory term for ghouls be? Corpse?

Um, "Ghoul" _is_ a derogatory term. Oh, ok, how about "cannibal"?

I would say "Deadite," but that would be a complement.

If ghoul "_is_" the derogatory term, what would the PC term be? Undead Americans?

Hygine Challenged.