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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: JOHANNA BURWELL-KALES <burwell@******.EDU>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 17:32:24 -0700
I had this thought of making a new race for shadowrun. Now, this
might be stupid and it might be cool. Anyway, Has anybody thought what
the ramifications, if any, would be on the game if you introduced
Terminators, Replicants, Boomers, Cyborgs ( from Nemesis ), etc. into the
game.
Most definetly i'm leaning to make a terminator type character as
an NPC, that the player finds while on a run into, say Renraku, a corp. I
mean they would be totally metal. Maybe a Robocop type character, built
around a human brain or spine. Look at the picture on the Shadowtech book.
I don't know, but I sure do liike hearen from everyone else on subjects.
Message no. 2
From: jacob hawkins <HAWKINSJ@********.WA.COM>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 05:43:59 +0200
Yeah one of my friends has been experimenting with creating
"Hellions." Those nasty borgs that appeared in "Never Trust and
Elf." It breaks a lot of rules but is DEFINITELY NOT for PC use.

As for Boomers - yipes. (extreme fear.)


Snakebait
______________________________________________________________________
"Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife | Doctor Emilio Lizardo
Doomed is your soul and damned is your life!"| a.k.a Lord John
| Whorphin
Message no. 3
From: sabrina <sabrina@******.MED.NYU.EDU>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 21:29:34 -0400
> Most definetly i'm leaning to make a terminator type character as
> an NPC, that the player finds while on a run into, say Renraku, a corp. I
> mean they would be totally metal. Maybe a Robocop type character, built
> around a human brain or spine. Look at the picture on the Shadowtech book.
> I don't know, but I sure do liike hearen from everyone else on subjects.

Funny you should mention it... this is pretty much where Zeiss entered
the picture in my campaign. As you'd described, the party pretty much
stumbled on something called the April Project. Later on, they learned
that April was an acronym (A.P.R.I.L.) for Artificial Person: Recon and
Infiltrator Lifeform.

Zeiss had 3 of them mobile. Each pretty much looked like supermodels on
the outside, had EM jammers so that their signature matched human norm,
and were laced with Zeiss' other invention (discussed earlier) called
Nanomechs (which basically kept the whole unit working without exploding
in a massive Cyberpsychosis bomb.

Somewhere along the way, the party managed to get the Humanis Policlub
involved by showing them proof that these suckers existed. The HP was
peeved because they figured that they had a hard enough problem dealing
with elved, dwarves and trogs without having to wrry about new
abominations being created right in their back yards. A riot ensued.

Zeiss' reaction was classic. They, in the words of one of my players,
"...denied they were doing anything and promised to stop." When Zeiss
turned around and offered something akin to ED 209 for Seattle's
Metroplex Guard, almost no one could continue to argue against Zeiss at all.

Anyway, one thing that April said when they asked her how she managed to
survive with so much cyberware, she explained, "You are a human replacing
so much of your body with machine that your mind can't help but rebel. I
am a machine with certain parts of my CPU replaced by parts of a human
brain...or several humans' brains. Machines can't rebel." I
let the nearest character's player know that she followed that statement
up with a very quietly muttered "yet."

Oh... their first mission was going to be to infiltrate Biogene and
destroy their endeavors into a similar project whereby they were using
something called an "Osiris Matrix" to eliminate any need for worry over
Cyberpsychosis at all. Problem was that Biogene's version pretty much
worked by over-writing most of the installee's brain. They literally
became something like Cyberzombies. Biogene's project was months behind
Zeiss' but my party's interference pretty much allowed Biogene to finish
unscated. They have not yet been able to strike a decisive victory over
their construction except to get Biogene to follow Zeiss by denying any
wrong-doing and promising to stop... :)

Ok...long message. I'm new enough that I'm excited about talking over all
this stuff.

Sabrina
Message no. 4
From: Thorben Woehler <tew@****.INFORMATIK.RWTH-AACHEN.DE>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Fri, 13 May 1994 14:48:15 +0200
>
> I had this thought of making a new race for shadowrun. Now, this
> might be stupid and it might be cool. Anyway, Has anybody thought what
> the ramifications, if any, would be on the game if you introduced
> Terminators, Replicants, Boomers, Cyborgs ( from Nemesis ), etc. into the
> game.
> Most definetly i'm leaning to make a terminator type character as
> an NPC, that the player finds while on a run into, say Renraku, a corp. I
> mean they would be totally metal. Maybe a Robocop type character, built
> around a human brain or spine. Look at the picture on the Shadowtech book.
> I don't know, but I sure do liike hearen from everyone else on subjects.
>

Wasnt there something like this in one of the novels (cannot remember which one)

SHADE
Message no. 5
From: Thorben Woehler <tew@****.INFORMATIK.RWTH-AACHEN.DE>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Fri, 13 May 1994 15:02:43 +0200
> Yeah one of my friends has been experimenting with creating
> "Hellions." Those nasty borgs that appeared in "Never Trust and
> Elf." It breaks a lot of rules but is DEFINITELY NOT for PC use.

Yeah... that was it... HELLIONS... NEVER TRUST AN ELF... Right!


I should really read all those mails before answering some... :)

SHADE
Message no. 6
From: Lars M Ericson <lericson@***.EDU>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Fri, 13 May 1994 11:31:03 CDT
Just one question? How did Zeiss handle the APRIL units' astral aura?
I mean any two-bit mage wanna-be could pop into astral space and
discover that this person was actually a walking robot.


--
Lars M Ericson: Professional Vagabond <lericson@***.edu>
aka Maxwell Von Talos, 7th Generation Tremere
Team Garotte, Founding Member
Registered Member of a Decadent Society

Life is like a Wankel Engine. In between the emptiness of boredom and
despair, and the compression of stress in one's life, there's that
one spark of enjoyment that keeps you going.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"We don't pay anything. He got cremation for free."
-- Phil
--
Message no. 7
From: Bryan Prince <WALAB@******.HH.VANDERBILT.EDU>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Fri, 13 May 1994 12:18:19 -0600
About the APRIL auras..
How about living tissue/skin grafts that are supported by a biomatrix, or
just lacing the bodies with bacteria (if you havent seen bacteria astrally,
how do you know the APRIL unit isn't alive? :))

Bryan Prince
Message no. 8
From: Ivy Ryan <ivyryan@***.ORG>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Fri, 13 May 1994 13:37:17 -0700
Sounded like a great game Sabrina,
Dia'mons is just glad you aren't *her* fixer after hearing that one.
Enjoy,
Ivy K
Message no. 9
From: sabrina <sabrina@******.MED.NYU.EDU>
Subject: Re: New PC's...
Date: Sat, 14 May 1994 00:29:44 -0400
> Just one question? How did Zeiss handle the APRIL units' astral aura?
> I mean any two-bit mage wanna-be could pop into astral space and
> discover that this person was actually a walking robot.

Nothing's ever perfect. The fact is, this is partly the way the first
APRIL unit was found out. The original project idea was intended to
create 'the perfect soldier' for small scale operations; P&E's, Wetwork,
Hostage Rescue... that sort. The motivation behind the 'big picture' was
Victor Zeiss who was the vampire I was talking about and whohad other
aspirations. Basically, two prototypes were built. One used 'clean' technology.
It looked like a robot, pretty much.
It wouldn't fool anyone except Mr. Magoo on a moonless night (although in
full body armor, they did seem human enough). The other prototype, the
actual APRIL unit as far as Victor was concerned (just not to be released
to the public or the military) was the one I was speaking about...looked
human in all regards, etc. It had no aura to speak of. A slight flicker
of one, perhaps...but it wouldn't fool a mage.

You have to remember, though, magical security has a high price tag.
Having a mage check out every slot that comes through the front door of a
place probably isn't happening without meganuyen. So these things were
pretty much made to look like babes and hunks. WThere were only actually
3 so it was 2 babes and 1 hunk. They merely had to get close to their
targets and that would be that. Easy enough when you look like a model
and meet at a party, in the mall, here, there, etc.

BTW, it did take a Perception roll to notice... so you couldn't just be
standing, scanning an area looking for 'the black hole' to walk by. You
had to astrally 'check' everyone. With a human brain and a living tissue
covering (living flesh), it had some effect... not much (Target was 3 and
1 Success pretty much said "Something is definitely wrong.") but some.

Sabrina

Further Reading

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These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

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