In our BE game, one of the growing tensions lies between the slave and noble classes. Phil has a criminal lord FoN who has risen from his slave roots and I really want to needle this. I have a GM FoN, one of his customers, who is a noble using the Practitioner of the Forbidden Arts LP (aka, Human Eugenics, from the wiki) and is generally skilled in doctory science stuff, in addition to being a Psychologist. From the depths of his creepy humanity, he wants to lessen the suffering of the slaves by gentling them.
My problem is that I’m not exactly sure how best to do this.
Mechanically, I think that means retarding Will and Perception stats, or possibly adding a trait, but stat hits would truly do the job of making a person more pliable and less aware.
I could possibly accomplish a gentled slave population as a more abstract story detail with color, but it might be nice to have mechanics behind it in case this monster I’m creating goes awry (and I hope it does).
My first thought was that maybe I could accomplish this by retrovirally manipulating people with Eugenics, but I’m not sure if that’s possible - knocking stats down is serious business. Then I thought that maybe I could build new people with the Alien Lifeform Burner with low Will and Perception stats - this wouldn’t change the current slave population so much as attempt to ultimately replace it with “new and improved” slaves.
But I kind of want the horror of changing the existing population. Using Psychology could be useful for manipulating a few individuals, but isn’t efficient on a large scale.
So my most recent idea is drugs. Drugs would not be permanent, but the nobles would only be too happy to administer them to their slaves and it would really piss off the criminal underworld. So what about creating a drug that temporarily affects Will & Perception? How would you go about doing this? Pharmacology & Poison-wise would be a good place to start, but I’m not sure that’s a full answer…
Any ideas?