Forums of the Megaverse®

What have you done to modify/tweak the Borg, Juicer, or other classes to fit the CE setting? I know that you can run a Pre-Rifts Juicer as a slightly modified main book Juicer, and the same for a Borg, but I want something more.

The Pre-Rift Borg, Diablo Joe(Black Market) is an example of what I mean by a little something more due to a few "experimental" systems. Maybe add a few more common skills to a Pre-Rifts Borg. I'm not talking about overpowering, but things like the basic skills of Literacy, Basic Math, and maybe an extra pilot skill like pilot car or basic hover.

For the Juicer there is a bigger difference between pre and post Rifts. For example, I see the Juicer in the Golden Age having a few tweaks/benefits missing in later generations, such as a few cybernetics, and maybe a smaller harness and similar. I also see a Pre-Rifts Juicer most likely being a Spec Forces guy or gal with a skill set closer to the Special Forces (Mercs) or the Military Specialist/Intel Agent(CE) then the Rifts Juicer who is likely to be a street ganger who juiced.

Has anyone made tweaks along these lines, or something similar before? Thanks for any input.

On a side note, I've used JAEP/Euro-Juicer Implants for German Special Forces in Rifts and US Special Forces in CE, and it fit well.

I always figured that pre-cataclysm they'd have been more likely to make a Juicer nearing last call into a Borg precisely because they were more likely to be highly trained, and it is a waste of resources to let someone like that die when you could keep benefiting from their expertise and experience for a long time in a Borg body.

Juicer Technology was not widely used outside the less advanced nations (2nd and 3rd world to use real world terms) due to the major health and ethical issues. though apparently it was popular with some parts of the criminal world.
i suspect that the JAEP system (found in WB5), which is a pre-rifts jucer derived tech that employs weaker chemical mixes to create a system that is much safer but also weaker over all, was more readily available in north america.
lack of replacement chemicals though would render most juicers and JAEP users in a difficult situation within a few months of the cataclysm.. forcing detox for most. JAEP users that can get resupply likely would be unable or unwilling to maintain the "three on, three off" schedule required for safe use, so likely would start seeing the side effects of that. (not to mention that JAEP chemical mixes are specialized.. and switching to a new mix without the three month detox period from the previous one is implied to be as bad or worse than using one mix for more than three months.)

as far as cyborgs go i would assume that most recipients of it would have been either people injured in the line of duty, or born with major physical disabilities. since i highly doubt that there would be the same acceptance of throwing away perfectly functional body parts to get converted. in military use i would expect that partial conversion would dominate (if correcting injuries) and full conversion would be less common. i would also assume that the borg's would be much more standardized. that they would have a set suite of standard implants beyond the basic limbs, with additional implants standardized around specific battlefield roles. i would also assume that the "walking tank" type bodies found in rifts are more rare in the first world, and that design preference would be for lighter humanoid designs meant to make use of infantry and PA gear. so more like Ghost in the shell than Bubblegum Crisis.
i would assume that civilian partial and full conversions would make use of a lot of non-bionics. biosystems, cybernetics designed to mimic human appearance. civilians would obviously have more options in the cosmetic area but i suspect that the more inhuman cosmetic implant options from the bionics sourcebook wouldn't be very accepted (if they exist at all yet). civilians also probably would have much more limited access to things like built in weapons or espionage type gear.

The Chinese Crazy/Lightning Warrior is sort of a Crazy version of what I was thinking about (minus the Chinese Martial Arts). Basically, a SF/Commando type character with Crazy conversion on top.
See, I always figured, based on nothing mind you, that a Pre-Rifts military Juicer would be detoxed before he hit last call, at least in most countries. 100% non book, just my thinking.

I don't see tons of Rifts style Juicers running around NA, but the tech was well known and easy enough to be pulled out of storage and used. Japan says as much, at least for the Republic. What I was thinking of is more SF operators, and special units making use of Juicers. The other easy option is anybody with access to Juicer conversion using it to protect their strong hold. Again, this was one of the early reactions of the Republic of Japan.

NEMA partial bionics are not unheard of. THe Military Specialist, and Intel-Agent have partial borg options.
Diablo shows that the big nasty combat borg was at least occasionally built for military purposes. I definitely agree that something like the Cyber Humaniod in Bionics would definitely make sense in CE, and probably be more common then the big nasty combat borg. I can also see a military cyborg having a "combat" body and a "leave" body based on being home or deployed.

Any suggestions on tweaks, or lost tech for Borgs? The easy step is to make the Japanese bionics/cybernetics available, anything else come to mind?

except that the tech is specialized and not something that you would just happen to have on hand to use. remember that in CE you don;t have factories or the like producing new hardware. the only stuff that is available is the stuff NEMA had on hand before the cataclysm and whatever it can scavenge from the chicago area. so they won't have any juicer tech "in storage" to use.

WB8 talks about Pre-Rifts Japan having Juicer tech mothballed and in storage by various companies. I assume there is similar in NA.

Let me restate. What was a 3rd world Juicer 2 years before the 2098 like? A 2096 Juicer from a banana republic is going to have some differences from a PA 100 Juicer. Things like literacy and math for example, possible computer operations and so on. If the Juicer was meant to be a total throw away soldier it is one thing, but if they were a highly trained soldier who was expected to detox early, or go on to be a Borg they would have a different skill set then a PA Juicer. That is what I am getting at.

again though. the japanese cities that came through the time warp did so with intact factories and infrastructure. they thus had the mechanisms by which they could take a sample of the hardware and chemical brews and put it into production for use.

NEMA does not have that.

i've noticed a lot of people seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that there is no manufacturing to speak of in chaos earth. nothing beyond the occasional makeshift weapon from scrap. society, communications, manufacturing, infrastructure? gone. all gone. NEMA and the rest are expending existing and dwindling resources and that is why they are doomed to ultimately fail. every round fired, every suit of armor or PA destroyed, is literally irreplaceable.

if a technology is not in use before the cataclysm starts, it is not going to be available afterwards.

Borgs were around in and before 2098. We have at least one example of a Pre-Rifts combat Borg in Black Market, plus two NEMA classes have partial borg conversion as options.

As for Juicer the tech was in North America. Maybe it wasn't used anymore, maybe it was a deadend the US skipped, but it was there, even if mothballed. I don't know who used it, or what form it was at the time. Juicer tech was dug up near Austin to be used by Los Alamos in the PA days if nothing else, so I'm not totally making it up.

That is why I want to see speculation on what a Juicer and Borg class in 2098, or 2096 was like. If you don't think the US would have it in any form, for any use fine. What was a 3rd world Juicer like? At the minimum common Golden Age skills like piloting civilian vehicles, math and literacy would be the norm. I kinda think you would see more of a regular soldier or special forces type with the borg or juicer conversion put on top, but that's me.


Sorry if my tone was unfriendly GB, I think we just see the Golden Age in different glasses. I'll drop the thread.

my point is that if a technology is not in at least semi-common use, it isn't going to be available except as maybe a rare NPC or something. because unlike in rifts where you can just send the specs to a factory and build what you need, NEMA and the chaos earth groups are stuck in a pure scavenger economy.

GB, throw out the wording of my original question. How do you see a 3rd world Juicer being built? Basically any Juicer who was alive in 2098. 3rd world military, 1st world special forces, mob hitmen, super spies, whatever.


FYI: Page 160 of Chaos Earth has references to a CE book that never happen: "NEMA Mission Book Two: Black Ops- The Enemy Within Rogue NEMA and USA military forces, including Juicers, Tranks and others. Adventure sourcebook."

as far as skillset goes i can see two ways you can do it, while still fitting the fluff. the odds of any of them being in the greater chicago area however are going to be low, so these would be more NPC rather than player character use.

the rare US military juicer is a special forces thing. think Navy Seal, Delta Force, etc. probably part of one of the JSOC elite-of-the-elite Special Mission Units rather than the wider branch specific forces.* skillset wise you would be looking at people trained to be skilled special ops as normal humans, so use whatever skills fit that type of role. we have enough examples of such things in rifts to get a rough idea of what they'd have. the thing to remember there is that the juicer enhancement would be an add-on to the existing training. they'd be taking an existing soldier and using the juicer process to enhance them for a time. odds are that in the normal course of things they'd only sign on for say, 2 years of being juiced, before being forced to detox.
personally i am of the opinion though that the special forces would be using the JAEP harness systems. while much weaker, the JAEP is much safer, and its "3 months on, 3 months off" schedule allows you keep a person enhanced more regularly (as the full juicer system is a "once juiced you have to stay juiced for a couple years" and once detoxed you can't do it again) the JAEP system also would allow you to enhance all your special forces quickly when war breaks out, due to the weaker and safer nature of the enhancements reducing the prep time between starting the process and getting the full effect. plus the JAEP system allows you to customize your enhancement somewhat more, with mixes for strength, speed, and even mental acuity. letting you pick a mix that fits best for the soldier and the environment they will be in for those 3 active months.

*if NEMA absorbed the CIA (evidence is mixed here) they might have an equivalent special op group in the form of the Special Activities Division, but given the CIA's legal inability to conduct operations within the united states, i suspect that they were one of the few of the "alphabet soup' agencies to not become part of NEMA. i'd have to do some rereading of the CE mainbook and SB1r to be sure. odds are that it would be stories of chemically enhanced SAD members that inspired the Julian Amici series of novels and films.. Juicers would be terrible at real spy work, but given film spy work is usually closer to special ops the two would be a natural fit in fiction, especially if some spy agencies were using it for their covert action paramilitary forces.


the other option, and the one i think would be most likely to use the full juicer process, is organized crime. Contract killers for organized crime like (whether the mafia, the Triads, the Tongs, Drug syndicates, etc. possibly including the shadier side of Megacorps like KLS, Cyberwerks, and the like) would find the juicer process very useful. it doesn't carry the huge drawbacks of MOM implants, and is less conspicuous than cybernetics. obviously it still has career impacting issues, especially the reduced lifespan, but would give such individuals an edge that might parley into some quick earnings, gambling that they'll be able to earn enough in 2-3 years that they can quit the juice and still live fairly well. odds are there would be a fair number of people in such organizations that view the juice as the next big drug as well, and would end up in last call. OCC wise they would probably be closer to the rifts juicers (less standardization of the fighting style compared to a military) but they'd have more skills useful for criminal activity (streetwise, various rogue skills, etc) rather than the more military focused stuff the rifts juicer OCC has.

Thanks GB, that is the sort of stuff I was wanting to touch on. The JAEP thing seems to be the way to go. It is a limited form of Juicer tech, but would make sense for special forces, down to the on duty/on leave use of the drugs. I can go with the PA Juicer (OCC wise) being a good version of the criminal Juicer(maybe with literary thrown in, or as a secondary skill or two).


I think a good bit of thinking on CE has evolved over the years. We are told that NEMA absorbed the FBI, similar civilian groups, and I always assumed the CIA as well, but other sources say some stayed separate, or at least as separate divisions of NEMA (RCMP being the Tundra Rangers, and the CIA being sort of an ancestor to the Republicans). Maybe my original take on the survival of the independent agencies was just off.

Rifter 81-83 have official Chaos Earth: Nebraska material.
In that they mention juicers. Specifically the police officer notes that the hostile juicer they encounter is "likely a deserter from a military unit".

Thanks Elia. I'm a little behind on the Rifters, on 78 I think, but I'll look for it.

which conflicts with the fluff from Juicer Uprisings, pg 8. but sadly that seems par for the course with freelancers.
(specifically, that the fallout from the MOM tech debacle [which remember, hit a couple decades before the cataclysm] combined with a public leak of the juicer process long term fatality rates resulted in the use of the juicer process becoming banned (either formally or informally) in the civilized world, with only totally secret and illegal research going on. but those secret illegal projects were started only shortly before the cataclysm hit.)

so unless the NAA was hosting a unit from a third world banana republic dictatorship, there shouldn't have been any known juicer using military units for said individual to have gone AWOL from.

Nope... go go magic retcon!
US military not clear if it is only line units or National Guard as well.

But that's par as you said.
The official weapon and armor of the National Guard from previous books? Nope, not what the National Guard is rocking in the Rifter.
And while I have seen lots of new Power Armors in the books...
I have yet to see any of the dozen or so models that we have in the main game that are confirmed pre-rifts designs.
Ditto for armor, weapons, cybernetics, vehicles, robots, pychics... you know... any of it.

Which more and more suggests that the CE game is an alternate universe and not connected to Rifts at all.

Yeah, like a lot of PB stuff we all need to make our own versions of the game setting, even if we are trying to be "by the book". Go through and pick what pieces work or don't work for your game, since there are too many contradictions to take in everything at once.

For a golden age juicer I just build a heroes unlimited super soldier or something from ninjas and super spies and just drop in all of the juicer or MOM bonuses. Especially when running a ninjas and super spies game that is set in the golden age. That's my dream game, it starts off asstraight N&S add in some some HU for bionics and robotics, scrub the major super powers and with out them looking slide in some BTSN.

I am still holding out hope that we will get some mention of the Genetics beyond "Oh yeah, there is a super secret lab in Lone Star"
Hello Amphibs, I'm looking at you.
And the Dog Boy program was apparently a Psi-Weapon version of a previous program. There should be a lot of bipedal animals running around based on the material in SA1, SA2 and Mio... but apparently retcon bat got them too.

It also seems to have gotten the psychics who suddenly got totally forgotten. "its all a strange surprise"... even though there have been psychic warriors for well over 20 years (hello Mindwerks) and that England has an entire Psionic Warfare program complete with production level Psionic weapons!

Never mind the Official Pre-Rifts Glitter Boy Variants.
Or the SAMMAS variants.
Or what the heck happened to the US Military (did they and all their mecha, power armor, millions of soldiers and all the rest all just fall in a plot hole someplace?)
Never mind any of the other "This is pre-rifts technology" which is great for McGuffians in Rifts... but in Chaos Earth that means that it is now MODERN DAY STUFF and needs to be accounted for. Especially if it is stuff that survives the next 300+ years!

But what can I say. The Authors seen to do zero research and just write what 'sounds cool' and seem to assume that "I don't need to care what has been written in Rifts Books, I'm writing Chaos Earth" and there is no such thing as a "line editor" or "continuity editor" at Palladium.

That said, i deffinately see the US mothballing Juicer Tech as a too dangerous to the Agent for use for the amount of training they pay for use on elite agents. Now for a Easy Bake suucide squad of Off the Books Black Ops for rogue agencies with in the DoD for maximum deniability. Maybe,
but these would not be the normal special forces. These wpuld be proxies and the most useable yet most disposable the US has. If a first world nation uses them. But again juicers are more Mercs, Criminals, terrotists and 3rd world nations type deal.

I could definitely see a Dirty Dozen sort of situation for a specific mission in the Pre-Rifts world.

My original reason for this post was to fill in some holes I have in my head as far as what the Pre-Rifts world was like.

Another question, what was the Pre-Rifts Juicer spy movies even based on? Totally made up, or was there a kernal of truth as the basis?

i'd guess they were as based on reality as the James Bond stuff is. when the Julian Amici stuff is mentioned, it was described as a novel series first, later movies got mentioned. so i'd guess that it started as a novel series then became a movie franchise, same way James Bond did.

I just don't see a Bond/Borne type character with the whole Juicer collar/harness setup. Maybe a smaller/lighter/concealed version. If some form of hidden way of getting the drugs was the norm in the Golden Age it would make more sense for the books and movies to have a tiny bit of reality.

If you think about it that would be a Hollywood Juicer movie. The same way a gun with a suppressor is completely silent in a movie a juicer collar would be small and easy to conceal under a tux.