A better question - what happens if a shedim possesses the leftover body?

Uh, beg your pardon? There's that thing in the setting called a PAB unit (if memory serves), which allows you to technologically alter someone's personality. How's that principally different from CFD?

Uh? Is that anywhere in the rules? If you get cybereyes or a cyberarm, by your logic, are you going armless and blind in the astral?

Locating taunting massages goes much further than I feel comfortable with in my player group at least...

ummm... is that supposed to be a manufactured disease, or a type of nanite, or something?

because it sounds suspiciously like they're trying to pass that off as a naturally occurring thing, and that just doesn't pass the sniff test at all. a disease that targets nanobots, and only nanobots? how does it tell the difference between the bajillions of natural nanobots that your body requires to function (while not described as such, your body is basically naturally loaded with soft nanites. for example, white blood cells) from the ones that just happen to be in your body? how does it distinguish a nanobot from a viral or bacterial infection?

also, why would not having a soul make it harder to take over a body? if there's no soul to take, wouldn't that mean there's just a vacant body waiting for a soul?

That is correct. You would be missing eyes and arms in astral if you had them cut out and replaced with cyber. But you would not be blind, because astral sight has nothing to do with your eyes.

SR4A p193

Remaining Description as per Hermit's post


As normal toxoplamosis is caused by the regular Toxoplasma gondii which is an obligate, intracellular, parasitic protozoan found in a wide variety of warm blooded mammals, I am gathering it's supposedly an awakened/emerged version form of Toxoplasma gondii.

I do not know. Except for the hard rules text, that's all I found on this. Back when Parazoology came out, it seemed line a "Cyberware can get sick too!" kind of disease but now I kinda wonder. Though it's strongly hinted that the related Blob critter is indeed manufactured.


With magic/technomancy - I mean, who's saying this isn't an Emergent protozooan? Technically they're animals, just like cats, raccoons and flies. In other words, 'because it can'.


I don't know that either. But since there's Patrick's plot with HMHVV going, it may be a reference to that in some way (one that may or may not actually involve souls - Butch has been wrong before after all).

Apologies because this probably goes back to SR2 or SR3, and I'm not going to spend an hour finding it, but while you are correct to a point, there was a clear explanation at one point that cyber could carry over to astral because essence had been paid for it. There was a very specific example of how, although you couldn't target a spell through a camera, you could through cybereyes, since having paid the essence, they were now incorporated into your "whole" form.

Again, I'll concede I am not as up on SR5, but haven't yet seen that contradicted.

So I guess the relevant question becomes, what is the difference between an "injury" and a "voluntary act (for which you choose to pay essence"? And which is a nanite infestation?

SR1, actually.

The explanation is that cyberware detatches the Aura from the body, makes it a less matching image. The Aura is, after all, an image of the body, and if the body is changed, the Aura doesn't fit as well anymore and begins to leak. If too much is changed, it flutters away and the person dies.

However, this applies to cyberware and bioware only. It does not apply to limbs lost.

Not sure that's correct. An astral form is very much up to the magician to determine (idealized appearance). They may have a cyberhand in meat space, and a normal looking hand in their astral form. I would apply this to missing limbs as well.

And this should have zero effect on their astral form, yes. The best you can do technologically is alter their brain chemistry or physically damage their brain. The classical brainwashing, for example.

This has no altering effect on their astral form, beyond what any cybernetic replacements for physical structures would have in the way of Essence damage.



Yeah, lost limbs don't holistically alter the body by attaching things that are not meant to be of it to it. Same reason clonal replacement limbs that match the originals don't usually cause Essence loss, as they're just healing the body to how it should be.

Minding that the astral form is the idealized self-image, it seems to me that changing someone's personality via technological means is perfectly capable of altering that.

Are people confusing "aura" with "astral form"?

Because they are related but not the same thing.





-k

The repeat infection factor for CFD is probably the most interesting.

Even if you currently are a Head Crash with one personality overwrite, they are still vulnerable to being rewritten again. Granted your current batch will resist the new assault but it is possible.

This is a big difference from Infected, a vamp doesn't get changed by being bit by a ghoul, though they could become a carrier.

I know they are saying that there is no 'vaccine' at present using the nanites, any new incursion will have to be slugged out each time.

The Doc was talking about how they can not repurpose the nanites to just go in and wipe out an infection, I wonder if they are not looking at this from the wrong angle.

If we can figure how the personalities are being made, maybe one could download their own personality into a fresh nanite batch and intentionally infect themselves with basically their own personality setup.

Since its the same personaility, not much changes and should blend well so one might then have a better chance of staving off outside personality incursions. It's not a guarantee but it's a possibility.

Especially since the infection rate/defense seems heavily influenced by the current nanite population in the body, if you are chock full of your own setup you will be in a better position to deal with invaders which will probably be trickling in and thus less likely to establish a foothold.

One would also want to figure a way to limit the infection to just the body itself, don't need copies running amok.

Yes it is a bit out there, one is not curing it so much as integrating it, but sometimes one has to look at alternate ideas.

Seemingly, because "a projecting magician’s physical body does not determine the characteristics of his astral form. Astral forms are idealized images formed of belief and emotion, and defined by mental or spiritual characteristics." A mage with Body Identity Disorder would show up without his arm even if it's physically still there, a but a cyberarm shouldn't have that effect -- if he likes being cybered, he would even show up with a fancy chrome arm in astral.

And then we can just switch over to Eclipse Phase, eh?

I was not thinking of EP when I wrote this as I was focusing more on 1 body staying with 1 personality and how to reinforce the original, but that is a good point.
I was thinking more like the novel 'A Psychohistorical Crisis' where mind probes had been used in the past to enslave people so their equivalent of commlinks each have their own modified version of a mind probe to detect and counter outside attempts to take over a person.

It does raise an interesting point, say a specific Persona A has ended up infected several bodies and reaches their full development. Now each is probably slightly different as they absorbed their host's identity and picked up bits along the way.

But say these variations of original A strand should meet, how do they interact? Would they share a secret handshake/fistbump and a smirk or do they go all highlander on each other because they feel they should be the only One?

In a world constantly being written and rewritten by battling electronic personality fragments...

SimulacRun™

Pretty much how the Dollhouse TV show ended up, no?



-k

Never actually watched it, though now I may have to.

Indeed... I wish Dollhouse had more time than it received. Much like Firefly. Both ended way before their times.

actually, eclipse phase has rules for that sort of stuff, too

Yeah, but their rules do not reflect the fluff. Like, if you produce alpha forks and then reunite with them, you lose sanity, and the more time your ego variations spent away from each other, the more sanity you lose.
On the other hand, there is canonically a syndicate entirely made up of forks of the same gal, and she syncs constantly and stays sane just fine.

You can fork for a duration and reintegrate just fine. If you fork to long, then you have issues re-integrating. Of course, I don't have all the books, though, so there may be stuff in other books I have not seen which contradicts that.

My thoughts exactly.
While that was an interesting world in that series, and I really liked it, it also opens up a whole lot of possibilities which can change the whole world quite a bit!
(hinting at the narrative of the second season here, up to and specifically including the concluding finale)

Maybe I'll have to buy "Stolen Souls" after all. I was waiting for it to hit the german market in translation, though.

Also, without having read it, I think whoever concluded on "HMHVV-Infected are harder to influence because they have no souls" (was it Butch?) is wrong.

you're not guaranteed to lose it, and you can get help recovering from it over time with the right skills.

It sounds like the infected are straight up immune. Though Butch did infect someone with both HMHVV and nanites at the same time to see what happens.

Spoiler alert

Risky merging starts from being distinct entities for four hours, as the rules say. I've never had a chance to really play with forking, though, so what do I know.

It's a statistical thing. If you merge often enough (and you have to to keep consistency across all the major habs, as the gal is said to do), you're guaranteed to run into problems sooner or later.

Also, what I really don't like about EP, and why I never want SR to go that way, is that they completely failed to consider the consequences of forking for determining the values of stuff. When you can produce a infomorph fork whenever you want, working time loses value. Skills lose value when you can get as many copies of skilled egos as you need, basically free (which also means that the whole Evil Corps holding infomorphs as "indentured workers" makes no sense, especially with all kinds of AIs in the setting). Research capabilities and education lose value, when you can fork your brightest scientists, getting as many copies as you need, and varying the forks to produce different ideas. Etcetera.

Wait wait wait. I've been keeping myself out of 2075 canon after a bad brush with Conspiracy Theories. can you give me a heads up on what all of this is about re: Boston?

https://twitter.com/Jackpoint2075

The story starts at March 15 (https://twitter.com/Jackpoint2075/status/445548085813727233), and to my knowledge that's everything known so far, besides a few off-hand references in G&R.

There's bits about this in the SR5 core and Run&Gun. There also will be a sourcebook (Lockdown) and a computer game (Shadowrun Online) that covers the events in much more detail. Stolen Souls also plays into this a lot and has some foreshadowings, but in-game happens before the NEMA QZ is up.

are birds a transmission vector for the nanites? Because that would be bad.

I agree. It would be extremely bad.

-Temperance

Don't you know about the bird?

I thought everybody had heard, about the bird.

The Bird IS the Word, after all...

As I wrote in the molotov coctail branch...

"Ahhh!!! They're in my brain but can't stop me from burning myself and then - everything else!!! A-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!"

Seriously, been too busy mastering my party and now all ghis nano-virus-stuff.... I made a pinacle of CRASH2.0 destruction and total forbidding of all and every nanotech, otherwise it (the 6th world)would have ended up without any Horrors at all.

Not sure about you, but nanotech randomly driving people insane without any cure, let alone a treatment, sounds exactly like something the Horrors would cook up...

Bought this and run & gun. Beautiful books, stunning art, light years ahead of old B&W art and softcover books.

Still rather have the old then the new. B&W then the color. Just not buying the threat of nanotech take over from eghosts or whatever the hell it is now. Its like a technological version of Bugs/universal brotherhood.....but not nearly as "holy crap what!" factor when the universal brotherhood was revealed as a front.

Think about it. Bugs. Shedim. eghosts. They're all the same basic plot, done less and less well each repetition because there's no surprise left in it.

By 2075, if one of your chummers starts acting unlike himself, you just shoot him in the face, possibly having a mage assense him first to see if it's necessary. Cost of doing business.

Why wait?

Because it could be a perfect merge or similar and you wouldn't even notice.

Shoot them in the face right now.

And geek that mage trying to assense as well, just because.

It's just biz.

Better yet, go from the other side and have a group play as the insect/shedim possessing shadowrunners.

That's an interesting thought: Do people on the far side of the foruth wall notice that body snatchers are not a singular, contained occurrence and act accordingly?

It does tend to get stale after a time. At this point, for me, it is no longer an interesting situation that I care to investigate.

All of the sourcebooks previous to the confused shitpiles in 4e and 5e that mixed fluff and rules in the text interchangably were in-world posts on Shadowland, so one has to assume so. The Universal Brotherhood and Bug City are common knowledge now.

Why bother if he still does his part of work? I'm pretty sure a few runners host plans much worse than these of shedim or insect spirits...

Well, you have to admit that the Shadowland format also alternated between "the chosen few" and "every noob can stumble in here and even get write access". Bugs are common knowledge, no contest. But master shedim, 2XS and other attempts to foster more good bug merges, or Deus' network? I'm not so sure about those...

Depends on how much you want to be an insect spirit host yourself.

I did think about it. Problem is the "ah ha" moment when universal brotherhood was revealed as a bug was way cooler then this was. But yeah, its just repeated a theme that just doesn't work.
Doesn't feel even remotely believable, or realistic...and that says a lot coming from the shadowrun unviverse.

What's next, Star Trek's borg? Deus returns as the borg king, making a hive mind of cyberzombies?

I think one problem has been an error back in the day that continues to be carried forward in current writing, since the writers are pretty loathe to do retcons.

That being nanites as a general rule. WHen people talk about "Nano-bot construction", what they mean is to have a bunch of bots and a pile of raw materials that get fed to them. The bots go to work, build the Thing, then wait for new materials. The finished product can then be moved around and used.

Here's the thing.

The nanites don't go with the product. They sit back at the manufacturing area, waiting for more materials.

In Shadowrun, the nanites go with the product. This allows nano-materials to be rebuilt post-deployment, and gives rise to the "Nano-pocalypse", where someone can hijack the nanites in your building and make them go all cartoon termite, including reprograming them to make more of themselves (possibly using the building for raw materials, killing two bird with one stone!)

If you go back to how it SHOULD operate, with the nanites in the factory and the items rolling out being clean, then things start making *vastly* more sense again, and the Nano Hive is a reasonable thing to have, being essentially a portable factory for teh little guys.

I don't know if this is fixable at this stage, but, there ya go.

I have seen no information on Nanites travelling with the finished device. Where (what book) did they sneak that into? Because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and we have never, EVER, played that way if nanites travelling with finished devices somehow made it into canon. Because again... that's just dumb.

Several places. Teh Nano-pocalypse has several buildings collapsing as teh nanites that were in them since they were constructed woke up and went all termite, for example, and mention of assorted nanite-built things falling apart follows a similar path.

I'd have to go book-delving to find mention of it in earlier books, but it was there if you poked around a bit. I don't know WHY, but.

Well, of course in the new books the nano-pocalypse is a thing... But where was it ever established that that was how they worked? Because, I have never seen it. It's like saying that the machines that helped make a Diesel Truck are bolted to the frame to assist in repairing it if and when it takes damage. That is just such a ludicrous stance that I have a hard time even articulating it.

Please do... Such references may have been in books that I never owned, but I would really like to see who came up with it. It is so counter to common sense that I am amazed, doubly so that it was not quashed when the nano-pocalypse was discussed as a thing. Man, that NEVER would have made it past me had I been in the discussion loop (which would never happen, to be sure). Sheer lunacy.