Hi.

I've been reading about the CFD in Stolen Souls and Chrome Flesh.

And I have a hard time figuring out how to integrate it in a campaign.

To me the most interesting thing about CFD is the personal development of the headcases - how they change. But for players to observe this, they'll need to be around the person for while and that bring the risk of a CFD infection to player characters and with a cure that only works on a small percentage of infected, it's unlikely that all infected players could be cured by it.

Apart from personality changes, how do you use the CFD? as a a threat? an environmental factor (more costly cvyberware)? as a news-story in the background? or as a fullblown zombie infestation in Boston?

A.

I ignore it, and nano-tech.

Not a fan of CFD, personally. Our GM has yet to use it as anything other than background, at least for now.

Myself and another player were exposed to CFD at the close of our campaign as a way of turning our characters into NPCs and kickstarting the next campaign with new characters.

Part of why I've retro'd my campaign back into the 2050s so we can flat ignore the current metaplot.

Aside from a background scare, an occasional MacGuffin source (and, theoretically, running infected PCs in a special headcase campaign) CFD is effectively a death sentence, meaning infecting PC to explore it is feasible only in special cases; it is too infectious to let close NPC have it (it's even worse than Ghoulism, which already is badly infectious); and it doesn't offer terribly much in terms of participation for PC, except for occasionally spicing up standard missions as a MacGuffin. Since Boston is locked down with the power of I Say It's Impenetrable So It Just Is, running in and out of Boston also seems less than feasible if you want to stay canonic.

I see only limited ways to integrate CFD and Boston as is into an existing campaign, honestly. It's good as material for novels and stories, but less so as material fr games, which have different needs. The upcoming Megacorp Review seems a lot easier to integrate into a standard campaign.

I didn't tell you? Archangel has been a headcase the whole time. And you just thought it was insomnia!

It's been introduced but hasn't played a major role. Several of my players are also playing chronicles so not sure what want to do with Lockdown.

Damn that insomnia...

My players are working for Horizon (yes, they are company men) and currently situated in LA.

They are a disposable team for Horizon. They are all nuts one way or the other and are generally seen as discardable from management. So they were allocated to their handler, who hatched a great plan to make his way to the top: a giant landgrab in LA.

However, someone might need them for a run to the Cognitive Disorder Research Center in Laramie, Sioux Nation. Chrome Flesh mentions it as a place where headcases can go for very expensive treatments/protections.

They'd be told to stake out the location in Sioux without being to what it was about it - and then they'd learn about CFD.

The CDRC would be a sanitarium for headcases, it could be a prison, it could be a blackmailing scheme, it might be a military research facility for the use of the CFD. It depends on the masters, his mood and what will be the most fun - they might even meet a headcase that pleads with them to help him escape (think Cuckoo's Nest/Awakenings/12 Monkeys-style).

And when they reported back, they'd be asked to extract a specific person and torch the whole facility.

However, it is a rather large facility, so they'd need some pretty crazy stuff to do it.

In the center of Laramie lies the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site. It's right next to the Laramie River and looks like a great place for a sanitarium/reseach facility.

And when the players return, their handler starts acting weird - one of the players have become a carrier and infected him.

Fun times....I guess...could work...I guess.

A.

The place is, however, pretty much owned by the Wind River corporation, which belongs to the Horizon Group canonically.


Oh, nice. Personally, I'd give it some more history and make it one of the sites where the old (SR) United States tried to pull off their final solution to the Indian problems in SR's version of the War on Terror.


Hm. Why not the other PCs though? And will the PC also become infected?

Well, the thing is: their handler (Eduardo) is not very competent, but is always eager to help; especially if it brings him upwards in Horizon (aka makes his network stronger). So if somebody more better connected ask to lend his team for a small mission - a week tops - he'll be happy to help.

And their fixer Tryka is a coldheartet bitch, who would sell them out for a penny & a penthouse.

I can imagine quite a lot of things that Horizon can do with the headcases - imagine being able to control CFD - who gets infected and with what. It could be fun to experience the players infiltrating the facility, gettting to the paydata; just to find out the it is Horizon data and that they've been doing a run against their other mother-corporation.



Great idea Concentration camp style wholesale slaughter combined with a great ghost dance would spike the background count to the high heavens and make it pratically for spellslingers to work in there.

And there might even be the spirit of an deceased old indian shaman there, who have been awakened from his slumber by the influx of headcases and who are now ready to pounce on the white cyberwareladen runners, who are infiltrating his domain. I'm thinking tons of illusions featuring magical trials to make the player test their own moral fiber.



The problem is that a active CFD-infection (CFD-positive?) is a death sentence for the character. He might survive as a playable person, but his personality changes. And my players put a lot of effort into their characters. It would be a bit harsh.

OTOH there is a cure for some forms of CFD now: the Coriolis Form (Chrome Flesh page 25). The players would have to find out that it existed, find a technomancer that could do it, a Reverser and pray the AI is xenosapient (aka can't relate to the human form).

The advantage of infecting Eduardo first is that he is very welldefined character in the campaign. The players knows what to expect from him and will be able to perceive his change of personality (from a kind pushover to a raving commanding maniac).

And once he is gone 100% headcase (and will either be dead, running away or quarantined), the next of them starts to show the symptoms after a while. And the rest of them finds out that they have a carrier among them, but who is it?

So they have to find the cure for two people. It could work.

I like

A.

I don't think CFD will ever come up in my group's game. The way it's presented and characterized, CFD is like Bug City but worse. Here's how CFD is exactly like the insect scare:

* It's an insidious presence that takes over people, willing or not.
* It has an alien outlook that is incompatible with metahuman civilization.
* Once you're infested, there's no cure.

But CFD is inferior as a storytelling device. Insect spirits can be disrupted and shamans killed, but you can't shoot CFD. You can't fight it. You can't defeat it. In a cooperative storytelling experience, anything that the protagonists cannot become empowered to defeat should not be used because it makes the players feel disempowered. I can research insect spirits, devise tactics to defeat their hives, and acquire weapons that can harm them. What can I do against CFD? Nothing.

It's probably not where it's intended to go but I'm wondering if CFD might be a tech that develops into Eclipse Phase esque body swapping...? Of course I haven't read Lockdown yet and I'm only slowly getting to grips with how it might work. My runners have been involved in investigating the phenomenon though...

It's kind of shaping up like this, isn't it? Of course, for a developer who wanted to roll back the transhumanism a bit for more "classic 80s cyberpunk", this seems like a counterintuitive way to go about it, especially since the fallout appears to include (according to ChromeFlesh) the Augmented now facing persecution like in Deus Ex.

Or maybe there is no grand plan and some ChromeFlesh authors just loved that game.

It's not just the augmented though is it? I thought anyone could get it if in contact with the nanites? I've got soo much to read

The "Purists" are going specifically after cybered people because fuckwhat really. I don't know, that part of ChromeFlesh didn't connect terribly well to the rest of the book, or the setting as a whole.

I couldn't make myself read Stolen Souls thorougly, so I'm not sure if my application of CFD was completely lore-legal.
The story evolved around CFD-construct of Thomas Roxborough who tried to cheat with nano-machines as a part of his neverending quest for obtaining new body. Experiments were successful, but the result was useless for Roxy - a precise copy of you still isn't YOU, so the construct was isolated in a wired host.

Meanwhile a team of shadowrunners (not PCs) raided Universal Omnitech facility in Vancouver and accidentally one of the runners encountered the construct in the Matrix (he invaded the isolated host). Consequently he appeared to be CFD-infected, so numerous factions began their hunt for him: UO and Roxy wanted to destroy the construct, while EVO willed to capture the twin-Roxy and interrogate him.

PCs were working for Universal Omnitech (though they didn't know that from the beginning: UO hired Shotozumi Gumi and Kenran-kai to search Seattle) and at certain point had their chance to switch their allegiance and support EVO. Needless to say, they hunted for the CFD-infected shadowrunner.

From the perspective of being able to tell cool stories and give the players interesting and enjoyable challenges, has CFD been working in your games?

(Bugs seem to get a response of "that is really scary, and if we have to we'll frag the suckers (or die trying....living but failing is a fate worse than death). But so far I haven't figured out how to use CFD as a motivating factor other than 'here is this scary boogy-man that you can't fight, and can't survive. Be very careful!' I'd like to use it in a more interesting way, but it isn't flowing for me so far.)

I don't like the "let's move the tech backwards" aspect of CFD (and indeed I'm keeping closer to 4e gear costs; I'm really more running an edition hybrid), but I'm also in the middle of running my players through a modified Ghost Cartels right now, so I'm actually thinking I should be able to convert a lot of the runs with headcases to possessed tempo addicts without a lot of issues. Has anyone else tried anything of this sort?