Quote:

I like the testing on a fork version. I also think many petal designers have a lot of hang-arounds who are willing to be guinea pigs just to sample petals for free. Sure, the petals are experimental and potentially dangerous, but they are free!

Absolutely, actually an NPC in my campaign uses that exact method as incentive to his fans, an opportunity to "playtest" the petals during a "vernisage" which is also an opportunity to do a launch party where many grey zone glitteratti go play.

Page 322: "Petals almost always appear as nanopharmaceutical flowers, potted or with a nutrient pack attached to the stem. Plucking and swallowing the petals from the flower triggers the effects immediately. Flowers have 5–10 petals. Multiple users may share the experience if they take the Petals within 1 minute of the first one being plucked; after this all petals remaining on the flower fade to translucent white and become inert." "Because Petals combine custom nanobots with tailored chemical payloads and sometimes connections to mesh servers, duplicating them using fabricators is impossible, leading to an active market of crafters, dealers, and traders." The title "Petalcrafter" is also used. I'd say that petals are actually living flowers with nanotech and drugs embeded/grown into them. I imagine they are produced using nano/biotech in something not unlike small healing vats. Because of the plant portion is alive, a simple hive of nanites isn't enough. You can't have a hive just make the actual flowers. You need either the healing vat like environment in order to rapidly grow flowers, or you need already existing flowers that you modify for your purposes. Of course, that's for making one-off flowers. Once you have your design set, you'll need to produce them in decent quantities. That might require black-market contacts, and might even involve green houses with nanohives and pharmacological quality feed stock. I picture sci-fi variants of grow labs actually. It might take a little longer than force-growth flowers produced in nutrient vats, but it might be more economical for large amounts. Actually making a petal from scratch seems to require a lot of various knowledge groups. You need programming for designing the Virtual components and controlling the nanites. You might need Infosec to setup the hidden/secure server or network components of shared trips. You'll need Psychosurgery to have a real trip instead of game. You'll want Medicine [Pharmacology] for getting the proper chemical tweaks out of the petals. Also consider Art [Petal] as a skill for determining just how good a petal you can make, including tricks, tropes, genres, stylistic movements in the medium, etc. The Art [Field] skill is expressly for use in determining "the approximate value of a piece of art either on the open market, for monetary exchange systems, or in terms of reputation for the artist." That means that while the other skills (programming and the like) are needed to design and produce the petal, when it comes down just how good a trip you can come up with, and how much people will pay for it, Art is the important skill. If a player wants to be a Petalcrafter, it looks like they'll have a good excuse to have a combination of programming, psychosurgery, and even some medicine & infosec skills. Not bad skills to have. As a knowledge skill, Art is useful because you can makes checks in it to gain money/rep. I seem to recall there are even art like examples in the rep gain sections somewhere, although I can't find them at the moment. In terms of designing a Petal in game, something a PC is likely to want to do, I'd make it a Task Action with a period of 2 day per check. I'd expect players to use the "Taking extra time" rule to gain +10 bonuses for each extra day spent on it. I'd call for an Art [Petalcrafter] check with Programming as the Complementary Skill (see page 173). I'd also likely apply a hefty penalty depending on how complex a a Petal trip the character is trying to design. As a whole, petals are rather complex, so a penalty is likely even for simple ones. I might actually call for the player to pick a quality level to aim for (similar to favor levels actually) and apply a penalty to the check depending on that. I might also alter the time period by rank. If the check succeeds, the player gets that level, with the associated rep/cash value. For each margin of error, they drop one, and below level 1 it doesn't work at all. For excellent successes, they might actually end up making it better than expected. Of course, if they extend out the time period long enough with "Extra Time" so they have a rating of over 99, than they succeed without needing a check. Also, criticals (good and bad) make for fun. That just covers designing petals, something I would require they have access to the gear to grow and test one-off samples to do... although that could be done in VR instead of meat space. Mass production would require lots of gear, or a decent contact, as does distribution, etc. EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that a Petal is a nanotech augmentation that is applied to flowers. I'd use Programming and Art [Petalcrafter] for making a Blueprint for that augmentation, and to determine it's quality/worth. To do that design I imagine many people use a Virtual environment and Fork with a simulated morph/brain & body... although I imagine some people might just grow test flowers and feed them to others to see how it goes, although that's likely slower. Once that flower Augmentation "Blueprint" is finalized, it still needs to be produced in what ever scale desired. Like existing morph augmentations, that means either "implanting" it into existing flowers or growing new flowers with the implant included. This could be done fastest by placing flowers in the equivalent of healing vats and "implanting" them, but it's also likely possible to feed nanites to flowers over time as they grow to get the same effect using more standard hives, and possibly in greater volume. I personally like the image of illegal grow labs full or odd looking flowers. That might actually be the difference between potted petals and those with attached nutrient packs. The subculture might be divided over which version is preferred, and some people might pay extra for a potted version of a petal normally only seen with a nutrient pack or vice versa. Either way, the augmenting of the plants tends to require drug feed stock, and that might be a major issue for large scale producers.

Thought I'd throw this out there... [b]PDK - Petal Developer Kit[/b] Petals! Equal parts nano-tech, simspace, psychosurgery, and story-crafting. Who has the time to become a master in all these disciplines or build teams capable of all of them just to make their creative vision? Cue the PDK! The Petal Developer Kit is an open-source programming kit that "dumbs down" the development process. The software contained in the kit allows users to simplify the petal creation process by using compatible templates at any step of the way. Want to write a story, but don't want to do all the other dev work? Gather a standard nanite architecture and simspace from the various libraries, composite them with your story script, and print the result! Petals created with the PDK are far from the most original, of course. None of the big names, like Darkly Selving, are developed with such a system. However, the ability to develop something to express one's creative vision has allowed some who would otherwise have never entered the scene to develop at least some niche. Those who make a name for themselves can often manage to gather a team and expand from there. One of the major successes of the PDK is the Petal known as Nuclear Farmstead, a hard examination at the nostalgic longing for Earth common on Mars through the hallucination of being a pre-Fall tribal trying to eke out an existence in a wasteland. The Petal is said to tell a powerful story and has brought its developer much fame and wealth, despite the simspace and nanite construction being built entirely out of pre-made "parts".