Okay, so putting cyberware into someone is already very well covered in shadowrun, but what about putting human parts into a machine? Perhaps a drone or vehicle. Is this even possible, or will the person die off first, or is this considered cybermancy?

I'm asking because I just remembered a friend referring me to some old comic where the government harvested human brains to power a railgun targeting device. Sorta got me thinking.

Shucking off meat doesn't cost you a single fraction of a point of Essence, so you're free to have everything down to your brain and spine removed if you really want to. Once you do that, get a VCR 3, Smartlink-2 Ballistic Processor, and Datajack with Internal Transducer at the very least installed. Buy a heavily armored "bucket seat" with "special machinery" and at least one "living amenity" and say that it includes all the stuff you need to keep you alive. You'll need a custom lifestyle to account for your nutrient solution and all that sort of thing (see Sprawl Survival Guide for information on how to make one and synergize it with a living amenitiy).

That should about cover it. 'Course then you could cheeze out and get a bunch of flaws to reflect your predictament. Quadriplegic, Infirm 5, Blind (variant that allows riggers to still function), etc.

If I'm reading you right, essence would be irrelevant, since what you're doing is effectively putting a steak in the freezer. And other than space considerations, you can have as much steak in there as you like.

Now, in a mystical game like Shadowrun, you're not likely to have nerve (or other biological) tissue have any special effects or traits outside of an aura; matter of fact, its biggest advantage is likely to be the ability to "ground" or produce an aura. So while in real (mundane) life biological tissue is an engineering marvel, in Shadowrun using biological parts should always be inferior in a machine; pistons are stronger than transferred muscles, wires are faster than transported nerves, etc.

Edit: ACL's post did raise a good point; you can shuck off meat, and so long as what's left is well taken care of, stay alive. So if you want a small, versatile, and unhackabe "drone", you can have just the head/brain of the person attached to a life support system and modified VCR3. It'd be wicked expensive and of extremely limited use, making it highly unlikely, but you just know some Kevin Warwick out there is itching to try it.

And if you can put brains in jars and plug them into the matrix, there should be nothing stopping you from putting them in drones and/or vehicles.

I don't agree entierly with the whole 'you don't lose essence for cutting stuff off' idea. Limbs could be cut-off, but your body will still need Internal organs, glands, ETC. It wouldn't be as expencive as a full cyber body replacement, but there are still probably bits that would need connecting to your Central Nervous System.

By Canon, you do not lose Essense by loping parts off your body... If it did, you would lose Essense someone hit you with Serious or worse damage.

That's not quite my point, my point is that logically other bits and pieces will need to be connected to replace the organs ETC lost. I'm saying that connecting those other bits may well cost some essence.

This of course explains why Briareos is an inhuman killing machine and Dunnan is all warm an fuzzy.

In short, this 'losing of humainty' is a bunch of crap with no solid psycology to back it up.

Since this was done with Halberstam's Babies in the Threats book I going to say it is canon and you could theoritically lose your meat body and have your brain hooked up in some sort of life support tank. Not really my cup of tea but I imagine there are some billionaires out there dying from some sort of incurable disease that might consider it.

anyone else reminded of the Ship who Sang here?

re: essence loss

A person gets their leg removed by a monosword-swinging adept. No loss of essence. You replace it with a cyberlimb, essence loss. Personally, I would rule the essence loss temporary (and non-lethal for the purposes of death by essence loss) at the point of losing the limb. The body still 'wants' a limb. By adding cyber, you tell the body to suck it up and get used to the missing parts. If you added real flesh, the essence returns.

Maybe those pantom limb pains are the essence swirling in the gap and waiting for flesh...

Wait till someone developes a bio-ware based replacement limb with the overal density of tungsten and the strength of a troll in a convenient human sized package.

I think of Essence as a combination of the body's bioelectric and morphic fields, the astral form and the intangible elements relating to a being's sense of identity (call them a soul if it floats your boat). While removing a body part does not immediately affect the whole (have a look around for Kirlian photography), adding a cybernetic component that forcibly changes that sense of being (eg. a cyberlimb, reinforced skeletal components etc) will thus cause the being's sense of self to deteriorate.
(Yes, I do hit my players with dissociation syndrome regularly- it's the price they pay for the chrome)
As to the idea of a brain in a jar, the above would be true- while you'd need to provide all the necessary life support functions mechanically as well as provide new sensory inputs/outputs and retrain the 'operator' from the ground up in the use of their new 'body', it should be feasable without immediate death from Essence loss. However, I would hit the player with similar penalties to cybermancy (CDS especially) and have his/her Essence decrease over time as the morphic field begins to fail. I'd also suggest that, if they want to play a Full 'Borg, they might be happier with a CP2020 game.

-JH.

Well, according to everyone's favourite bag of chocolatey goodness, the M&M, Essence loss is caused by the brain being rewired to accept the new hardware. Something about the brain not liking it's programming being overwritten with new blueprints...*Shrugs*

Which, of course, explains how you can lose essence if you install a bunch of bioware that never touches your brain, like muscle toner and augmentation. Ignore that explanation.

Like so much in SR, Mulvihill doesn't think before he writes and the stuff just spills out onto the page with wildly varying results.

If you want to complain about it, at least complain about stuff like Dermal Sheathes and Bone Lacing.

But it was so cheap, and the nice man said... aw.

Hoo. Whoops. Mixed up Bio Index cutting into Essence as literally overflowing into Essence. NSRCG can really be a crutch sometimes. Still doesn't explain why you lose essence from systems that barely interface with your brain or interface no differently from stuff you've got now, like muscle replacement, though. Or why radios cost .75 essence. Or, hell, like Lime said: dermal sheathing and bone lacing. So, uh, swap out the explanation. Everything else I said was right.

I'll, uh, just go this way now.

On the original thread topic:

So, anybody read "Legion of the Damned"?

If that was the case, I'll take the less expensive version that takes far less essence but requires me to buy batteries, preferable the Uber ones the Redline uses. Have to change them once a decade or so.

Or, hell, what remarkable power source is used in cranial bombs that was unadaptable to anything else?

I always though it was powered by the sales of RIFTS books, I know they would make my head explode.

Has anyone tried a full revision of the essence rules? I don't think we've had one of those threads in a while...

I think it was the power of pity. The SR developers just didn't have the heart to tell people "Hey, you've got a bomb in your head that can't really do anything useful other than kill you. But in the meantime, don't take any fun cyberware. Your essence is already used up."