The following is a theoretical exploration of bio/viral weaponry
for a Role playing game
IT IS NOT REAL
I do not support in any way the use of biological warfare
(Except against the ants living under my boiler, who are fair game!)
Whilst the basic principles are valid. The details are not applicable to the
'real world'.
I do not now, or have I ever, worked at Portendown...
This page is done sort of as an over view to biologicals, what you can do with them and their limitations. I'll also cover how to go about dealing with a biological weapon (or a diseases as they are much the same thing) if it is used against you. I will also give you some indication of how easy it is to do this.
It is by no means complete. But I hope that by providing some ideas in the various areas you can mix and match them when applying them you your game. That way even if the players have read this [some people seem very paranoid about that] it will only help a little.
Target.
Method of communication.
Incubation period.
Actual physical effects of the weapon on the suffer.
Psychological effects it has on the non suffer.
Treatability reversibility and control.
How you actually make it.
The genetic way:
The going out and finding it way.
What you actually need.
What do you do when some one does it to you?
Realising there is a problem.
Establish Quarantine
Identify the path of infection of the disease.
Isolate and identify the causative agent.
Using this find a cure. (Or at least some kind of vaccine).
If all else fails.
How specific you want it to be?
In addition to this high tech method there are a large number of other simpler techniques than can be applied.
And one (living/working) in a particular area.
Seed that area only, make it short Dormant phrase and with a low communicability.
Probably rapidly acting, but may be not.
Any one using a particular food (or water) supply. Sort of obvious, just add the agent to the food.
And all that assumes you want to effect the personnel. This might not be
the case. In the WOP where much of the 'technology' is based on bio-equipment
it might be just as effective to hit the equipment. An enemy with no weapons,
no transport is not much of an enemy. Also the advantage of hitting 'equipment'
rather than personnel is that the personnel tend to have immune systems
to fight this disease and thus it needs to be fairly complex to stand a
chance of success BUT. equipment does not have this advantage so any infection
will work.
For example (Ta John) a Bio weapon that targets the propellant in your Ammo.
(May be by simply using it as a fuel source) In other words every shot goes
thunk until you have decontaminated yourself, your weapon and all the equipment
that can come into contact with your ammo, and of course bough a whole new
batch.
Or how about an nice actinomycete (That's a bacteria that likes to grow
in long stingy masses like fungi) which grows in the coolant system of vehicles,
making a thick mush that blocks up all the pipes and makes it over heat.
And then of course there's every one else you might have come into contact
with since you picked it up, and any one they have met.... and so on..
Fundamentally how do they get what you are trying to give them.
A variety of options are naturally available.
Ok the limit is mostly the size of the genome, and thus the amount of space
you have to play with to put in the bits you need. (Rather the bits that
thousands of years of evolution have come up with.)
Most virus have a maximum possible size, usually restricted by the physical
size of space that the DNA goes into. Aerosol virus are the smallest because
they have to float around in the air and thus tend to be small. A certain
amount of space is already dedicated to the infecting and growing genes
and you don't really want to mess with those or your bug will not work.
The vector ones are usually largest because they have something else to
do the getting into the body bit. But it means you have to have a suitable
vector available in the area.
Ok you are god so you can do what you want but generally speaking the more
complex the virus is the bigger it is and the more complex the method of
communication should be so....
For something that is simply infectious and does one thing (e.g. kills the
host) an Aerosol is possible.
For a virus with a dormant period and a trigger that effects different races
in different ways it would need to be bigger and thus skin contact might
be required.
Anything with a very complex life cycle doing a number of things at different
times would probably not be a virus but a bacteria and being much larger
bodily fluids or a vector would be needed.
To be fare to your players the more complex the thing is, the harder it
should be to catch and the easier it should be to prevent.
This is worth some consideration. It is basically the length of time from catching the disease to when it has an effect.
A short period probably means that the victim will not have had much chance to spread it before people notice it. This is both a good and a bad thing. Some thing that is rapid is not likely to be spread to far so if you only want to infect a limited area, this might be the best option. Also there is less likely hood that the disease will be spotted and intercepted and stopped by the enemy before it has its effect.
Long incubations have the down side that you have to wait before it started having an effect, but does means it can have infected all of the population before anyone even knows there is a disease.( Unless they are routinely on the look out for presymptomatic diseases: Most are not, Mort almost definitely isn't.)
They don't have to die.
Rashes, painful blisters, weeping sores, itching eyes, constantly flowing tear ducts, shooting pain down the nerve bundles, week muscles, painful joints, throbbing head aches, constipation, rampant shits, vomiting (with or without the blood), stomach cramps, hair loss, sensitivity to bright light, rising temperature, 'frostbite' (due to peripheral blood vessels being closed down) Bleeding pours, liver failure, kidney failure, internal bleeding.
Feel free to mix and match as you want.Some times a better drain on resource is some one who is still alive and in pain and screaming distractedly. Some one who needs lots of expensive treatment. Dead bodies just get buried. Injured bodies tie up 4 people on the battle field getting them back to the hospital. Plus there is also the resources they tie up whilst they are in the hospital.
From a disrupting the enemy point of view. Wounded is better than dead.Or may be you want something softer. Ok...
How about one that subtly changes the psychology of the victim.
Start with the simple one Ergotine. Drive your enemy mad with hallucinations, not always a good idea. Any one order a Joan of Arc?
Ok so how about one that induces paranoia. Or schizophrenia. Or berserker. Most mental disorders are caused by biochemical imbalances in the brain. So engineer your bacteria to produce seratonin, or indeed feed off it, and watch the bullets fly.Or may be we could go the other way. The bug give the 'victim' an (endorphin?) high so all they want to do is sit down and watch the pretty lights. Takes them out of action just as effectively as any 'nasty' ones. With the added effect that those not infected will probably fight to be the front of the cue for the next batch..
Also a complex bug can be set to have a number of effects using the normal life cycle of any disease.
Ok try this one...
Stage one. Shortly after infection once the amount of bug in the body has built to a suitable level to be infectious to others the victim experiences an MDMA type high. (Easy to do, just get the bug to make MDMA or a similar drug at that stage in the cycle when it starts making the encapsulated version of the bug which normally goes out and infects people.) This puts the victim in a party mood so they go out and meet with lots of new people and infect them.
After this stage, may be in response to a secondary trigger (like alcohol because there is a good chance that any one who has been to a party will have been drinking) The bug goes into stage two. The victim displays a rash which itches constantly, Any contact with the skin becomes painful. (Watch them strip off all that expensive armour!) Muscles feel fatigued so they find carrying anything difficult, but the skin condition means they are unlikely to want to lie down.
Cooling water helps and eases the rash.
Of course the one source of water easily available on mort is just out side.... the rain.
So you have your infected populous standing out side in as little as possible in the rain with virtually no equipment... Duck shoot any one?
Hell you could even get them to do it themselves. After building up a good number of bacteria in the skin it moves on into the brain. Possibly in response to U.V., or even the cooling rain itself. In the brain it starts to break down Seratonin causing Manic depression, schizophrenia and other fun problems. As fights break out on the streets it is only a short time before some one goes and gets the weapons.
The fear of disease.
Plus the anticipation of all that suffering.
A Bio weapon can be very divisive as it splits the non infected from the might be infected from the obviously got it.
As panic spreads, which it will do very well in some where as big as Mort the populous with ghettoise. Groups who are confident they they are not infected will collect together in small groups and protect their resources and supplies.
Any one obviously, or even just suspected of, being infected will be thrown onto the streets to fend for themselves.
Strangers will be shunned (what am I saying....this is Mort....for shunned read shot on sight.) As communications break down it may be come impossible for medical help to get through to the survivors as the medical teams are shot on the moment they drive down the street.Also Nato reckon a death rate of 1 in 10 is seriously psychologically affected, now imagine what the effects are when they are writhing and screaming.
Ok. Try this one. All the disease actually does is give you a cold. No need for any complex engineering. But you release propergander saying that you have engineered a disease which gives you cold like symptoms for a few days. Then you get better. Then some time up to a few months later you get a head ache which gets worse and worse until your brain explodes. The only way to stop it is to isolate any one as soon as they display the cold symptoms as they only become infectious during the 'I'm fine' period.
Hell you probably don't even need the cold!
The enemy are going to be pretty demoralised for the next six months until they realise they have been had, and by then the paranoid team mates will have shot any one with even the slightest sniffle.
Ok I am going to assume you do not just want to wipe out everything here. So how do you control your bio weapon...
First of all you are going to make sure you are not going to be effected. Now this could be as simple as not being the race you are aiming it at, but to be on the safe side you probably want to put in some form of control. This can be achieved in two basic ways.
1) Doing something to your side.
e.g. Immunising all your side against the bug. Like a normal immunisation system. This has the advantage that usually immunisation is only useful if you do it before the exposure. As a result even if the enemy get hold of the serum it is not going to save the people already infected.2) Doing something to the bug itself.
Whilst you are messing around with the genome of your bug you can just as easily do something to it instead. There are a number of options available to you.....
- An "off switch" which you can issue to your side to use. Either
- Something that simply kills the bug. Like a susceptibility to an antibiotic only you haves or indeed some thing that is not normally an antibiotic so it is harder for the enemy to work out the treatment.
- Something that places the bug into a dormant non killing state (e.g. anthrax spores) It does actually get rid of the bug but it stops having an effect. Advantage is that once you have left the area the bug wakes up again and can be just as deadly as before.
- A trigger which you know your opponent only uses. For example if you know his food rations contain say rice you can use a bug that grows well on rice, confident that his troops will be effected worse than yours.
- A limited life span. Like radiation that goes away on its own you can engineer your bug so that after a certain number of infections it dies. (Similar to the human genome telomere aging system) So you infect an area, leave it for how ever long it takes and then move in after the thing is no longer infectious and take advantage of the mess.
- A Binary weapon system. Nasty one this. Remember the joker in Batman film.
One part the {deadly} infectious agent, the other a trigger. May be something it has been engineered to feed on so it only grows once it comes into contact with the chemical, or something that activates one of its genes so it only becomes 'deadly' after triggering. This is especially effective as it allows the 'bug' to spread to a large number of people before it is turned on. Works just as nicely in reverse if you make it so the bug turns 'on' if the chemical trigger is withdrawn.
Example of how this can be used. You have a population in Down town that causes trouble. You seed the area with the infectious agent. And add the repressor to the water supply. Make the repressor clear from the body by its normal kidney process in about 24 hours (few people go without drinking for 24 hours). Once the repressor is no longer available the 'bug' enters its active phrase and attacks the body. Dead (or what ever) troublecauser.
So what you need. Or how to spot your bio weapons lab when you find it.
Point one. You don't need much to make the initial bug. Most of what you do need can be jury rigged from the contents of your kitchen. SO what are you going to find in a lab
- An incubator. Other wise known as an oven and/or a water bath (read fish tank) with an thermostat which is turned down to 37'C. It is likely that there will be some aeration devise to insure a clean air supply to this devise, so also
- a compressor/air pump and filter system.
- A fridge/freezer. Used for storing the dormant material, enzymes used in the process and unused raw food sources.
- a still for making pure water so you can make up your growth material with clean bug free liquid and make sure that the only thing you grow is the bug itself.
- The growth material stuff:
Tins of Yeast extract, either in fine (and nicely explosive) powder or something that looks like Marmite (because it is!).
Sucrose and glucose powder.
Agar. (Seaweed extract) or gelatine used to make solid versions of the growth media and used in petri dishes.
Tissue samples/ buckets of blood to grow up the bugs that can not be grown in a vat.- A centrifuge. Probably looking remarkably like a top loading washing machine that has had some system of buckets bolted to the central spindle. This used to separate the liquid from the solids. (Cells form the growth media, Soluble Cell contents from the debris, DNA from the solution stuff like that.)
- For the genetic lot: Lots of tanks with a positive electrode at one end and a negative electrode at the other and place to put a gel pack in between. If the lab is in use, no matter what time of the day (because such things are often used over night) One of these packs will be bubbling away and there will be a line of blue slowly (over hours) moving down the gel.
Lots of bottles of strange chemicals. All most all of them will make any environmental monitor go off the scale [and now you know why I quit!] They have names like:
- acrylamide (clear liquid usually with white crystals around the top. Nasty neuro toxin in this liquid form)
- agrose (A cloudy solid lump usually also set into a bottle which melts when you warm it up)
- ethidium bromide (an orange liquid that glows pink under UV light.. Lots of play value, unfortunately bind to DNA and buggers your genetics )
- S35 & P32. Radioactive tracers. Not actually all that dangerous considering all the other things in here, but this is probably what will worry your squad.
- UV and Light boxes used for view the results.
Testing the bug is another matter, assuming you care if it works or not, you will need ....Something to test it on.
Obvious really but there are a variety of systems available.
- It is possible that they are using 'live' test subjects. So just think of all those pictures a Beadles in cared that Animal rights groups are so fond of spreading over our streets (Don't get me started on them!).
- However this being SLA and having Karma and all they are probably testing on tissue samples. So what they will find is large tanks with layers of muscle or skin, and tanks of quivering grey mould looking neurones. Probably worse than a few sick looking dogs really.
- It is possible if development has reaches the later stages that they will find a few sorry looking test subjects in some isolating ward. This is your chance to give them a hint of the mess they are in by letting them see the disease at its worse. Useful hints on who / what the disease if aimed at effecting can be found in these places.
Technically speaking Scientist are meant to take notes on things so they can work out where it went wrong when it doesn't work. So their should be some thing for keeping these notes on. This information is extremely valuable to any one attempting to deal with the disease they have made. It might be on a lap top and well organised, It might be in a series of well organised note books. It might be scribbled on the backs of a pile of fag packets. Or the only record may have been in the head of the scientist that your squad just blew off. Oppose. (Depends how mean you feel really!)
Realising there is a problem.
As sort of hinted at in the recent health care thread, Medical aid for Joe public is a bit crap. As a result it might be some time before any one even notices that there is an out break. Especially if it is mainly in down town or something. By the time the authorities notice it could be extensive problem.
Of course if the disease is aimed at an unusual source, for example the idea of hitting the propellant in the ammo, it could also be some time before it is realised that the problem is a communicable disease.
Basically the longer it take for people to understand the type of problem, the further it will get to spread, and as such the more of a problem it is going to be..
Establish Quarantine in the infected area.
First you have to stop it spreading. The only real way to do this is to establish quarantine are. This is an area that no one is allowed to enter or leave without anti-infection measures being enforced. Fundamentally if you are feeling like being a bastard this is all you have to do. Once isolated you can leave it until all the people in there are dead and the diseases dies out (Assuming it does not sporilate like anthrax and hang around in the soil for ever)
Look go watch Outbreak ok.....
Find patient zero and identify the path of infection of the disease.
This is all detective work really. You need to sort out who is being infected and how it is infecting them and instigate the appropriate measures to prevent the infection spreading. If the infection is only effecting ebons then you can probably send a human team in there to do the work, and decontaminate them afterwards.
You need to find all the people with the disease. Some of these people will have infected each other so you put them into groups. Then you need to work out who or what these groups have in common.
By tracing this back you will be able to find out where the disease came from in the first place. This will allow you to trace all the possible other people that have been exposed but have yet to show any signs of the disease and isolate them.
The other good reason is that if some people have been exposed to he disease but have not developed it they may have a natural immunity which you can use to treat the suffers.
Isolate and identify the causative agent.
Grow it yourself and work out how it ticks. This needs all the equipment and procedures listed above.
Using this find a cure. (Or at least some kind of vaccine).
Using your grown sample start throwing antibiotic and antivirals at it until it stops growing. Alternatively you can analyses it in detail and see what it has in it's make up that you recognise and already have 'cures' for.
Any people who have been exposed but not infected also need to be studied to see why. There may be something simple that can be used to treat the others. (Andromeda strain: the crying child and the alcoholic are saved because their blood pH was off from normal and the blood could not grow.)
Stage two is to apply these'cures' into your victims and see if they get better.
Be prepared for the 'cure' to be worse than the disease itself.
If all else fails.
Fusion bombs in the centre of the quarantine area is a pretty good if drastic 'cure'. I suspect SLA will use this a little more readily than most people. You could be nasty and use in andromida strain type resistance to radiation and say that the big bang and resulting fall out spread the bug all over Mort... But I suspect you would rather carry one playing in your universe.
So the players are thick....
The disease/ weapon might have an inbuilt life span. After all the bad guys probably want to invade and get the neat SLA equipment left amongst the rotting corpses.
You could send them off into enemy territory to find what ever cure they have for the bug and bring it back, or at least locate the production notes.
You could have SLA/Karma/Dark lament save the day with some cure independent of the players.
Intruder could walk out of the shower and his girlfriend could say "I've just had the strangest dream."I am sure you have your own "oh hell they have fucked it up" options.
Since I wrote this dUm had some thoughts on an anti eb virus....