Depends, I imagine. If you're working with heritage genes, then you have your ethnic stock predetermined, plus or minus gene splicing for this reason or that. Otherwise, I'd imagine it's based on what's available through genetic samples and what your budget is for retroviruses. I get the impression that such things are available, but by no means cheap and subject to caveat emptor. Given the sheer malleability of genetics through all the tech in EP, I get the feeling that ethnicity has become more about fashion than culture, at least in the richer areas. Biochauvanism seems to have taken the baton from the sort of racism/prejudice we have today. That said, based on the art, it seems like new ethnic clades are popping up, if the red skin all the rusters and martians seem to favor. Amongst the glitter blocs, conversely, I can just see the fashionistas modifying their looks to suit a particular style, having the equivalent of prissy hairdressers with racks and racks of little genetic vials on display and oh, a little bit of Sami would suit that look so perfectly, darling, and maybe just a touch of something a bit more Mediterranean for the jaw... That's actually a bit of serious values dissonance, writing that. It feels outright objectifying or racist from our standpoint, but in the culture of EP, it's probably not that far off. I mean, who cares what color your skin is as long as there's no seams in it or metal under it, right?

Given the way those areas, Luna in particular, are written, probably, yeah.

I think that many of the common morphs have "ethnic" varieties. Many are because that current model is based off of a specific set of ethnospecific genetics. However there is a large group of "ethnic" models that are the equivalent to blackface/yellowface/raceface/etc except that many people who identify with those ethnic groups have adopted those models as their own. For example the Splicer and Exalt morphs have many varieties of every ethic variety available for purchase. However higher end morphs like the Menton or Olympian would have most ethnic groups covered and fake versions of the rest. The highest end morphs may all be made up of fake ethnic templates. On another note I am not a fan of red skinned Martians. So when I run games it is actually a racist trope that pops up all over the planetary consortium's media feeds when they show Martian "rednecks".

Rob had stated somewhere on the forums that there was the intent of the PS+ team to replace the alpiner bikini picture with something more not terrible. But then real life, or saturday morning cartoons or something got in the way. This is my slap dash fix I made in MS paint and inkscape. [URL=http://imgur.com/B7KCxGV.png][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/B7KCxGV.png[/IMG][/...

Bursting Eagerness Soul wrote:

who decides which 'ethnic models' get made and how many?

I think in the inner system it is marketing teams. So if the habitat/city/colony/area/place has an XXXXX population group then those groups would be marketed too. In the outer system I can see it going both ways. Either everyone and anything is covered or there is one look and people are pressured to leave their ethnic labels behind along with their older economic models and power structures. I think Titan is like the second option. First because they have been decanting just under 16,000 biomorphs a day for a decade. Second because of in book mentions that everyone looks the same. And third because of that passive aggressive you will adopt our Nordic culture of quaint however then hell we are kind of attitude they have. But I also think that because of mentions of the popularity of body-sculpting to overcome that everyone looks the same no one gets a rep hit for looking different. They just get the hit for acting different.

Yeah, as a personal sucker for Planetary Romance, I'm firmly in the "Rusters (and some other Mars-adapted morphs) are red" camp. Especially when skindyes are so very cheap. I mean, in some sections of the system, it's probably popular to be green, purple or blue or something. Which may or may not be relevant to this discussion.

My picture of things has largely coencided with jKaiser's. Okay, flats and old-model splicers may have an ethnicity as we think of things, but in my head the vast majority of biomorphs are explicitly designed to be easily customizable, such as by having the epidermis have a bare-bones version of the chameleon skin augmentation instead of being a specific colour, reconfigurable facial bones and a "passive" sex-switch. You still need a Vat to make large-scale changes, but all it really "does" is activate and monitor innate functions. Beyond that, morph genetics/design has essentially replaced ethnicity. Rusters are red because it's a marketing gimmick by the designers, who've set it in the "factory settings". As for pods... they don't have faces. Faces are [s]sold[/s] grown seperately.

I assumed that you could buy morphs in whatever ethnic "phenotype" (how something looks) that you wanted; the number of genes needed to swap around skin color or other ethnic features are basically trivial. It might cost slightly more than the base, which might have a particular ethnic look, but if you want a West African or Central Asian phenotypic bouncer morph, it's probably available for just a couple thousand credits more, at most.

Zarpaulus wrote:

If nothing else Bodysculpting can change your ethnic looks in a few hours and cheaply, if your habitat even uses money. Possibly the genes too but not sure that should matter in an age of biomods and designer babies.

Indeed. For mass-market morphs, the appearance they're born with doesn't really matter. The manufacturers and resellers would have healing vats on site and will happily customize a morph's appearance to your tastes for a small fee. Of course, if you want the appearance to breed true, you'll need a genehacker's help, and that will be substancially more difficult and expensive... As far as appearance goes, though, that doesn't really matter because if it bothers you that much you can have a computer merge the parents' features and bodysculpt the child to match that, and the kid may choose their own appearance when they're old enough to care anyway. Being able to afford genehacking and claim your looks are 'natural' might be some sort of status symbol, though. Obviously, high-end morphs that are themselves status symbols are a different matter -- you want everyone to know you have one, so you stick with the default appearance (or bodysculpt your splicer to try and look like one.) Here, what ethnicities are available might actually matter.

to add a more horror feel the shadier dealers might literally take the face from "stock" put ito n your order than send that stock into a healing vat for 30 minutes

Great work with the Alpiner. Is there any chance that you could do the same thing to make the Remade NOT purple? Failing that, is there an illustration of Said Remade somewhere that isn't purple that you could refer me to? Thank You.

Most Excellent. +5 i-rep to you!! Now, if you could just slip that in to the production files for the next edition and the available PDF ...... (lol) .....

I'm going to get this out of the way and straight up admit that pods are probably my favorite aspect of character creation. But then I've always had a fascination with artificial humans. I've been thinking about how pods would work, partially due to a backburner design project to introduce a DIY pod model that you could grow and assemble with just a standard maker and fabber (as you might imagine, they've got...issues. And mechanically I'm having to break a lot of rules to make them as inferior and cheap as I'm imagining, but I digress). Pods are basically meatware stitched together with cybernetics, and while newer lines post-Fall are likely a bit more aesthetically pleasing, this has informed how I imagine they work and how the most primitive, early proto-pods were. The high-wear body parts, like knees and major joints, are able to be swapped out with procedures that blur the line between surgery and disassembly, with the cybernetics more or less serving to facilitate this sort of swap-in-swap-out body. At least in some models; other lines blur the line between "artificially grown/assembled human body" and "case/synth with a synthetic mask." As far as faces go, it probably depends tremendously on the particular model line, but slap-on faces are a little hard to swallow for me, given how interconnected all the muscles of the face are with the skull, and those muscles are in large part what gives our faces their shapes. More likely heads would be one modular part, with generic faces whose musculature has been committee-designed. (This is where the question of what's cheaper, artificially-grown natural muscle or electroresponsive synthetic fibers, comes in, since that informs both what pods are like under the skin and how much they need to eat, etc.) One of the challenges I've run into as a designer is that the popular look of splitting the body up in sections is rather unrealistic: our muscular systems are incredibly interconnected and interwoven. The archetypal cyber-arm is a good illustration of this, in that in order to get much in the way of proper functionality, you have to replace/augment/integrate everything from the pectorals to the serratus to all the muscles of the back and neck to some degree. Seamlines are a little tricky to justify for this reason (though they look damn cool, so that works for me). More likely you'd either have the aforementioned cybernetic frame supporting a cheaply-grown set of meatware parts, or you'd have bodies with modular parts, with the side effect of them looking strange when they move thanks to the changes in the muscular system to accommodate the swap-out design. That could actually be a good optional for pods mechanically, trade off of uncanny valley in exchange for a bonus to repair/healing to represent variant takes on the design.

jKaiser wrote:

As far as faces go, it probably depends tremendously on the particular model line, but slap-on faces are a little hard to swallow for me, given how interconnected all the muscles of the face are with the skull, and those muscles are in large part what gives our faces their shapes.

Define slap-on. I'd consider the muscles and bone-protuberances part of the face to be attached, not the "proto-skull" they're attached to.

jKaiser wrote:

One of the challenges I've run into as a designer is that the popular look of splitting the body up in sections is rather unrealistic: our muscular systems are incredibly interconnected and interwoven. The archetypal cyber-arm is a good illustration of this, in that in order to get much in the way of proper functionality, you have to replace/augment/integrate everything from the pectorals to the serratus to all the muscles of the back and neck to some degree. Seamlines are a little tricky to justify for this reason (though they look damn cool, so that works for me)..

Again, the "section" doesn't have to end at the seam. It's easier to picture if you imagine an arm also having bone-connectors and spikes of muscle extending from the "end", and gaps for similar connectors from the shoulder. Likewise, a muscle may be attached to a limb on one end but have a hook-like structure on the other, or what would be one muscle could be two with pair of interlocking plates to connect them, or they could mesh together like velcro.

jKaiser wrote:

Pods are basically meatware stitched together with cybernetics, and while newer lines post-Fall are likely a bit more aesthetically pleasing, this has informed how I imagine they work and how the most primitive, early proto-pods were.

Completely off topic but I went to highschool with that artist. He was massively talented way back in grade 9.

Urthdigger wrote:

For those of you who do not know me, I'm a tad obsessed with pods. Well, one pod in particular, but still. The way I see it, the seams aren't real seams. Maybe once, long ago, when pods were put together like Frankenstein's Monster, but nowadays it likely makes more sense to grow the entire outer shell together rather than piece it together. If anything, it's likely internal organs that are made synthetic, outside of any parts modified beyond human (or sciurid.) Heck, I'm fairly certain the books mention one can biosculpt it away, and the company logo, but it's highly illegal to do so. What this tells me is that the seams are likely there for aesthetics while making it quite clear what you are and who you belong to. I wouldn't be surprised if different companies have their seams in different locations to make their brand recognizeable even with the logo covered. On a related note, something I ought to do, and I wish more pod players did, is establish what aesthetic effects their company has on them. I've toyed with the thought that Rocky's morph supplier placed seams to look like a plush doll... Probably not one you'd want to give a kid, but a plush nonetheless.

I had a player who had his character sleeved in an Ayah morph that was painted white with a huge red cross on their face, as they were a convicted felon/serial killer who was psychosurgically modified to serve as a combat medic in dangerous gatecrasher ops to atone for his killing. Just one example of pod players making efforts to describe their morph aesthetics. Still too many of my players are new to the game and haven't gotten into it yet. But I for one am interested in how they describe how their morph's aesthetics differ from the norm or comply with norms.

jKaiser wrote:

Looking at this and looking over my old sketchbooks for facial anatomy, I could see that, I suppose, though you'd have to account for the muscles in the neck and elsewhere that connect and play into expressions. Though I suppose you could have a face "plate," something like a less ridiculous version of what happens to a certain character in Equilibrium, sword optional.

Oooh, nice image. I can think of two options for the neck muscles. Either have them as as part of the face plate, and introduce elastic tissue into the cheeks and a cartilage hinge to the mandible to allow the “plate” to be folded into place then set in place, or have the neck muscles connect to the face, meaning that morph model will only accept faces compatible with that arrangement. In any case, I think you understand where I'm coming from – not, “that won't work because the anatomy is wrong” but rather “what changes do I have to make to the anatomy for it to work” :D

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

I would assume that any healing tank is loaded with a healing tank AI that can tell the difference between a pod and a biomorph and send up a huge red flag if the morph put into it isn't what it was expecting.

Reasonable, but not an absolute. Once you consider that aftermarket bioware implants might not share the same genetics as the morph they're in, and the possible effects of contagions, nanoweapons, shrapnel and so on, what a morph “is” and “should be” isn't nearly so clear. If the AI is expecting a sylph but gets a pleasure pod, without any other information, it's reasonable to assume that the response would be “Holy shit! This sylph is full of foreign implants and the genetics are screwed! Is this supposed to be a pod? No, the mesh ID is for a sylph (remember; Fraud). Okay, the liver seems to be the closest to what I've got on file, I'll trash the rest and use the liver as the template. Initiate Healing Process! LiverLiver[size=8]LiverLiver[/size][size=6]LiverLiver[/size][size=4]LiverLiver[/size] ...”

Urthdigger wrote:

On a related note, something I ought to do, and I wish more pod players did, is establish what aesthetic effects their company has on them. I've toyed with the thought that Rocky's morph supplier placed seams to look like a plush doll... Probably not one you'd want to give a kid, but a plush nonetheless.

Rocky plushies. The mind boggles. Well, I suppose there'd be a market in more... adult... toystores. In any case, this is (kinda) the reason I love pods. As I've touched upon on other threads, I am all about “dat Juxtaposition”. Characters, factions, monsters... whatever I create, there's always some sort of duality about them – the moral psychopath, monsters born of beauty, that sort of thing – and pods are perfect for this. They're ostensibly living creatures, but they're manufactured and use the “robot servant” design space, so you can use design elements usually assigned to robotic entities and vehicles. On the most simple level, this can be simple aesthetics – a novacrab with “Eat At Joe's” on the side, pleasure pods with “neon” bioluminescence, or a pod-part store where right arms hang in the window like chickens at a butcher's, but it goes so much further than that. For example, we might give a robotic maid an inbuilt viewscreen (So retro!), so that it can act as a TV. This wouldn't be anything really special in itself, but if you replace the image in your mind's eye with a person who can act as a viewscreen... the dissonance is simply delightful. How about if your waiter/waitress has plate warmers built into their hands, or your IT guy has screwdriver fingernails? I really hope if there's ever a new edition that this'll be played up by allowing pods to use both robotic enhancements as well as bioware.

Bursting Eagerness Soul wrote:

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

I really hope if there's ever a new edition that this'll be played up by allowing pods to use both robotic enhancements as well as bioware.

I would allow it within reason in this edition. Like, no industrial armor, but maybe a small weapon mount or something.

I'd hypothetically allow it, but the social penalties wouldn't be spared if pods and cybernetic limbs are already seen as a bit of faux pas

Bursting Eagerness Soul wrote:

I would allow it within reason in this edition. Like, no industrial armor, but maybe a small weapon mount or something.

Why restrict armor? I mean, I get not allowing stuff like swarm composition (because WTF), but how is industrial armor conceptually different than carapace armor? To be clear, I'm not complaining, just curious. To be completely honest, in a 2e I'd hope that +armor augmentations are unified. Actually, I'd hope to dispense with the current categories altogether as anything more than flavor text, and just give augments an identifier at the end of the description saying what types of morph can use it.

jKaiser wrote:

I'd hypothetically allow it, but the social penalties wouldn't be spared if pods and cybernetic limbs are already seen as a bit of faux pas

If I were to actually run with this, it'd just fold it all into general pod prejudice anyway - cybernetic limbs are unpopular because they make you look like a pod.

I'd be willing to take a crack at it.