In a hypercorp or other transitional economy, sure you can clone the futura, but you've committed copyright infringement by doing so, and morph-cloning vats are restricted from general use anyhow. With that said, I think that (based on the response I got for my question on the new economy) the prices in the back of the book are really geared towards transitional economies. The futura morph blueprint has undoubtedly been cracked by the argonauts and autonomists by now, so the effective cost in the new economy is solely the resource drain that you're pulling (which, for a biomorph, is not insignificant but not Expensive either). You might lose rep if your hab thinks futuras are weird enough to make a point about it, but autonomists are usually pretty big on "hey, do your own thing, man!" Ask your GM.

HappyDaze wrote:

OK, the Lost generally start with a Futura, but replacing this model of "exceptionally rare" morph is supposed to be quite expensive (50,000+ Credits). This cost doen't appear justified by the morph's capabilities but instead by its supposed rarity based on it being out of production. I have to wonder how/why a morph model can go 'out of production' when they talk about cloning your morph and having copies available at other sites. This seems to imply a build-on-demand policy which strains any concept of rarity among morphs (just as nano-fabrication does for many other goods). So, if the rarity can be bypassed (such as by cloning your current Futura), is there really any good reason that getting another Futura should cost any more than a Menton, Olympian, or Sylph?

How about "the same way a car in the modern day goes out of production despite the fact that any person with the resources and dedication could probably continue to produce them". Hell, you can change "car" to just about anything you can think of. Rarity is based on supply, and apparently futura morph supply is low. Hence the rarity, and therefore the cost. Remember, credit costs are more based on modern economic models than anything. They are a function of whatever value the common supplier would place on the goods in question. If one thinks about the concept in logic of production capability, just about every item in the game should be of value equivalent to mass. This obviously isn't the case

I know what you mean, but to me, the principal point is that almost no one wants one of that morph in his/hers collection because of the stigma that is upon them. So in fact, there should be very few people who might have one. It's like a bad RPG game that no one wants, even if there is 100 of them on the net, getting one would be madness because no one would copy, so for getting one you deppend on the same people all the time. But, if you have it and one to clon it, the cost should be the same that any other morph, plus the cost of the particular gears that it have implanted. Now, as the futura morph is a """secret""" project and a failure as experiment, the posibilities of finding the genoma map, plus the way it have to be grown, plus all the little things that have to be done in the cloning proces to be succesfull (maybe it has to be rise from child, or you need to put it in some kind of stasis that represent a womb, or who knows, you have to tell it you love him very much xD) that would make the procces to be more expensive to a normal corps bank/clonning hyper corp.

Tiempo wrote:

I know what you mean, but to me, the principal point is that almost no one wants one of that morph in his/hers collection because of the stigma that is upon them. So in fact, there should be very few people who might have one. It's like a bad RPG game that no one wants, even if there is 100 of them on the net, getting one would be madness because no one would copy, so for getting one you deppend on the same people all the time.

You make a good point about the 'stigma' involved with producing a new Futura morph. In a reputation based economy, a clone bank or gene cruncher wouldn't want to risk the negative rep backlash if it ever got out they were producing something as distasteful as a Futura morph. That kind of bad karma could very well ruin them. And in a reality where people quite literally don't forget, the negative rep could stick with them forever. When you think about it, a rep based economy goes a long way to promote the self-policing and the social contract for better or worse.

That is a good point. Some communities might have 'shoot on sight' policies concerning Futura morphs.

Hmm. Weren't futuras all cloned from the same stock in a single generation? So all Futuras look like John/Joan Cusak (as an example.) My vision has been that a certain morph type could be identified in the same way a certain model car could be identified as to make, model and year. "Yep that looks like an AF6 Ghost made by Skinthetic. See the set of the nose and the area covered by the gecko pads on his hands?"

Yep, definitely another reason why everyone watches what the Gliterati will be 'wearing' this year. On further consideration of the OP. Page 276 says that it takes a year and a half to make a biomorph. It also says that for the forseeable future demand outstrips supply capacity. So the rarity of the Futura morph is based on the idea that none are readily available. Sure you can have one cloned and it wouldn't cost anymore than cloning an exalt, but it's rare that any one with morph production capacity would tie up a tank cloning a morph that no one wants. I think a character could commision a Futura morph for about the same price as a Remade but then have to wait 18 months of game time for it to get done cooking.

HappyDaze wrote:

So, if the rarity can be bypassed (such as by cloning your current Futura), is there really any good reason that getting another Futura should cost any more than a Menton, Olympian, or Sylph?

If you clone your current futura, the immediate cost shouldn't be more than any other clone's. However, the book/pdf doesn't assume you have another futura lying around, nor does it assume you have the blueprints, gear and material to craft your own. It's not like there are any futura-sleevebanks anywhere. Also, extremely rare portion of people, discluding the Lost, had futuras as their first sleeves. This should be the same with the player characters. This doesn't mean that a beginning character shouldn't get this morph, only that in the life before the game your character had to hunt down one. That had to cost some. Okay, I understand this is pretty close to the rarity-issue (which was bypassed), but it's just as much a storyline-issue, fluff-issue or world-issue. Personally, I think the whole Futura model should be unobtainable, unless "you know a guy" or are one of the survived Lost.

I've said this in another thread, but the way I figure it, hypercorps that produce biomorphs probably have a custom base population of genomes that they draw from to produce their models. This population has particular aesthetic traits that they have copyrighted so that their biomorphs, while not looking like exact clones, do look they're all from the same town or village. Say they have 800 male genomes and 800 female genomes and they have a computer program randomly choose two 'parents' to produce the genome for a new body. Then, it genefixes the genome for quality control and to add 'Fury', 'Olympian' or whatever templates and then set it to gestating. This way, Hypercorp A's biomorphs might have a kind of general Polynesian look to them while Hypercorp B's biomorphs have an Eastern European look to them and so on. That way they have a kind of branding to their product. In this manner, Futura's might all look like cousins to eachother. As to the whole genetic diversity thing, it'd be wise for the hypercorps to have some kind of agreement where their biomorphs can all breed with each other. Hypercorp A biomorph and Hypercorp B biomorph could get together together and have a baby that has a mixture of their features. The sticking point would be that the genetic sequences that make them a Fury or Olympian are not inheritable. The baby would be just a Splicer. This would ensure genetic diversity in future generations without having to worry about people 'brewing' their own super hybrids. GMO seed companies have actually started doing this in real life. You can genetically altered wheat seed from them, but if you try to get a second generation out of it the genetics revert to baseline wheat. There's a name for this new practice, but for the life of me I can't remember it. Anyway, that's the general hand waving I'd do as a GM if a player asked about this stuff.

Zophiel wrote:

Onetrikpony wrote:

Hmm. Weren't futuras all cloned from the same stock in a single generation? So all Futuras look like John/Joan Cusak (as an example.)

Now the Pax Familiae is going to look like Joan Cusak in my game. Its all your fault.

The horror! THE HORROR!!!!

I am guessing that cloning, even in EP, is not as easy as sticking a piece of a subject's DNA into a giant machine and having it spit out a fully grown copy in a few months. I would imagine that the designers of particular biomorphs would protect their copyright through many different means including methods to defeat reverse-engineering: genetic booby-traps and copy protection. That said, when the Futura program went haywire, one could imagine that the "blueprints" for that morph would have been mothballed or destroyed, pending further investigation. For game purposes, it would be good if somebody still had the ability to grow the Futura biomorph, but one can imagine that they might have very little use for it, given what happened last time.

Even if that is the case and the fault was entirely with the development of the egos and not their implementation into Futura morphs, I can't see any good spin one could put on the Futura model to sell it. "Futura! Sleek and smart. You'll only look like a fugitive mass-murderer." It's not hard to assume that having dozens of murderous, psychic biomorphs breaking out of R&D would send your company's reputation/EP equivalent of stock values plummeting irretrievably. Reflective answer: I myself am curious about (and plan to incorporate into a game) what sent the Lost off their collective hinges. You would think that in the face of near extinction, the designers would have built an environment that would prepare their creations for the harsh realities of the world they would be entering. Seems kind of dumb to lie to them.

Genetic booby traps and bad press aside, I wonder, does the Futura price of X-Tremely X-Pensive assume you're getting a first party sleeve? In a non-commodity society with nanotechnology at their fingertips, bootlegging goods is essentially considered an inevitability. Do you think that the Futura's genetics are sufficiently encrypted (difficult to reproduce and difficult to culture without the Secret Ingredient) that you couldn't get a bootleg cheaper?

Nemo30 wrote:

I myself am curious about (and plan to incorporate into a game) what sent the Lost off their collective hinges. You would think that in the face of near extinction, the designers would have built an environment that would prepare their creations for the harsh realities of the world they would be entering. Seems kind of dumb to lie to them.

A big part might have been that the entire geneline was contaminated by the Watts-MacLeod Exsurgent strain. So not only were all of the Lost psychic from birth, but they also spent most of their time in an artificial environment that amputated their psi abilities as a side effect. That has to have been inducing some serious mental trauma. It would also explain why most of them ended up as sociopaths; their brains had been rewired to run sympathy and empathy functions through their psi senses, but then those senses were completely cut off for the majority of the Lost generation's ego development period. By the time they escaped, those capabilities had atrophied beyond repair, even when they were able to use psi sleights again.

The Sandman wrote:

A big part might have been that the entire geneline was contaminated by the Watts-MacLeod Exsurgent strain. So not only were all of the Lost psychic from birth, but they also spent most of their time in an artificial environment that amputated their psi abilities as a side effect. That has to have been inducing some serious mental trauma. It would also explain why most of them ended up as sociopaths; their brains had been rewired to run sympathy and empathy functions through their psi senses, but then those senses were completely cut off for the majority of the Lost generation's ego development period. By the time they escaped, those capabilities had atrophied beyond repair, even when they were able to use psi sleights again.

Not necessarily from birth; all we know is that at some point before release, they were contaminated. To that end there isn't much information on how exactly their care went. Perhaps they were only kept in infomorph status for a portion of the project, and then placed in their bodies for the final parts (so they could adjust to them). Perhaps they were never infomorphs, and were always kept within their bodies (which were in stasis while they were educated virtually)... which would have unwittingly prevented morph fever. All we know is that at some point they got the virus, and that they all have some degree of mental instability. Not all of them are necessarily sociopaths. They probably developed a wide variety of mental problems, unique to each individual.

TheWanderingJewels wrote:

I'm still reading over the book and missed the bit on the Lost. So we have completely Amoral Sociopathic Psychers here? Charming

While it is true that asyncs are all batshit insane to some degree (unless they have received [s]some[/s] a lot of treatment), it does not mean that they are necessarily sociopathic or amoral. My async character very much does have morals, and he's even crazier than most (2 disorders? You pussy! I have 6!!!).

killj0y wrote:

he's refering to the decriptive bits about the collapse of the Futura Project. The accelerated learning was flawed in its understanding of how warped the children actually were and it inadvertantly taught them to conceal their pathology and become better liars. The children almost entirely grew up to be sociopaths and killers, the psi stuff was just icing on the cake. As for how they became infected keep in mind that exsurgent virii are capable of both infecting both morphs and computers in some cases which means that the infomorph children may have become infected similar to a computer virus while in their time shifted learning states. Other Asyncs who are not part of the lost generation might also become psychopaths eventually but a lot of the lost generation's problems stem from the flaws in their upbrining failing to deal with their natural tendancies. They were born serial killers and then put into an sitation that was permissive and blind to how to deal with that fact.

I still disagree. We know that around half of them were murderers by the ⅔ mark, but it doesn't speak of any further increase in homicidal tendencies (likely because they finally imposed safeguards). It's also very possible that by that time, the rest had either developed a conscience despite their mental instabilities, or were simply a form of sociopath that did not render them a direct threat to others. Still, not all of the Lost are evil, sociopathic, or anything of that sort. The only commonality is psi potential and madness (which, to be fair, is largely tied to psi potential).

Decivre wrote:

Still, not all of the Lost are evil, sociopathic, or anything of that sort.

Just enough of them to give the entire group some incredibly bad PR.