You'd better believe that it's worth it. That's a lot of 'ware!

Furthermore, how many PCs actually stay in play for a whole year in game-time? I never keep a given PC for that long; I always get bored and make a new one. So if I wanted to just go around obscenely ripping stuff up, I could just make a cyberzombie character and try to go for some kind of world record of NPCs killed in a one year gaming period.

And friend and I wrote up a pair of them when I first got the cybertechnology book. Went with 10 million cap, -6 essence. We ran them once, decided it was no fun. Everything died. Go figure. Crumpled them up and tossed 'em.

In case you want to kill Ryan Mercury. Really, by that reasoning, everyone should be making one!

1) Research. Cyberzombies aren't just unstoppable soldiers, they're testing grounds.

2) Offense. One cyberzombie is significantly more mobile than just about anything else you can send in of equivalent power, likewise for n cyberzombies for small ns, and they're immune to jamming unlike the next best thing.

3) Fear. A row of Sentinel Ps inspires fear, a -8-Essence cyborg inspires terror.

~J

Number 4) doesn't really do it for me. Sure, they are slightly harder to affect with magic, TN-wise, but they are also permanently dual-natured and might have a lowered Willpower. I imagine that cyberzombies that are still under corporate control will have some sort of magical backup, otherwise they are too easy for a mage right out of char-gen to pick off.


Like everyone else has said, a cyberzombie is more of a guinee pig than a practical use of resources, and it's unlikely they were completely aware of or consensual to the procedure. Although there might be some people who would volunteer - generally emotionally dead psychopaths.

Actually, a low essense combined with 3 or so points of bioware will give you more advantages than most negative Essense builds. The only build that really lets a cyberzombie outclass the normal sammies, is the full arms/legs/skull/torso with lots of armor, combined with move-by-wire 4 (and optionally, an articulated arm holding some kind of nasty heavy weapon).

Roxborough comes to mind.

Only if you circularly define anyone who chooses to become a cyberzombie of their own free will as not intelligent, sane, rational, or well-informed.

~J

Thats a joke right?

I was remarking on the "I wouldn't imagine" not the farsighted.

Why does the research into immortality need to be mass-marketable?
You don't think immortality for themselves would be reason enougth to spend billions.

As David Xanatos once said. "What good are all the riches on earth if Fox and I can't enjoy them forever?"

So money and power are still the goals, but they hope to find immortality in cybermancy so they there power will be everlasting.

Nah, they're about profit. Sure that can include dissolution of the human soul by default, as dedication to greed tends to do that. But with the exception of Aztechnology's board of directors, and the odd psychotic who makes it into upper management in other places, they're about profit. That's one of the things that makes them nasty, that so much misery and destruction comes about through simple old-fashioned avarice.

But that doesn't mean that cybermancy isn't an attractive use of resources, even if it is a long and uncertain path. It's the sort of thing that attracts investment - promises of breakthroughs, spin-off technologies, immortality, all that stuff. It doesn't matter if it never works right - for all that time they're developing it, they're attracting investment. And it works inside the corporation, too. Heading a project like that nets you fat salaries and bonuses. Even if it doesn't make profit for the company, there are divisions of the corp eating it up resources from the inside like a cancer, promising the directors that success is just around the next corner. Look at the music business. You have the RIAA terrifying the big labels with nightmare figures about music piracy that only they can stop. The reality is that they can't stop it, and P2P hasn't actually impacted on sales anywhere near as much as the RIAA pretends. And yet they are attracting lots of funding from the big labels which becomes fat salaries for the directors and employees. No profit is involved at all, and yet it goes on based on lies and promises. The same could be true for any Cybermancy department.

"The next one, boss. I promise you the next one will be sane."

Psychosis = a break from reality. The reality they experience is different, and potentially wholly alien, from that varied-but-apparently-generally-consistant reality the rest of the world shares.

Psychopathy = fearlessness and the impulsivity resulting from it, lack of empathy, possibly some unknown degree of emotionlessness.

Impulsivity is certainly bad for executives, but confidence born of lack of fear combined with an inability to understand the harm one does to others can be a meaningful advantage in the workplace. Psychosis, on the other hand, is pretty much guaranteed to keep you out of middle management, let alone the boardroom.

~J

LMFAO!

Fans would have to wait until 2071 for the next Duke Nukem game.

You're existence pissing off neighborhood mages

Solid gold!

...reaction of 20(+)? I think so.

Had a total munched out elf sammy in the group I ran with a 19 Reaction. Basically he would have a good bodycount going before anyone else got to shoot. Threw a couple of CZs against the team once. His character and one of the CZs tied in their initiative rolls. He proudly mentioned of his gawdawful reaction as I started gathering dice I simply responded "twenty"

The look on his face was worth all of the time it took to design the two CZs

Yeah, CZs may be weak against mana spells, but that's Only if the opposing mage gets to go first.