Baby Blood Dolls
with stats for GURPS Third Edition
by Elizabeth McCoy
These little creatures are suitable for any setting which has magic or technological bio-engineering, such as Technomancer or Transhuman Space, or the Vorkosigan universe worlds of Jackson's Whole and Cetaganda (though only by a very rogue element). Baby Blood Dolls fit best into a modern day setting, but a high-magic variant of Rome (for example) might also have the right mindset to create them.
Known by many names, such as "homunculus" or "familiar," a Baby Blood Doll is a semi-intelligent toy favored by attitudinal punks, gangs, and a number of the more violent goth or wanna-be vampire sorts (or, in a world with more magic, actual vampire or werewolf gangs). Dolls are frequently banned from nightclubs and most public schools, in a modern-day setting, and any other "civilized" location will at least look upon one -- and whomever brought it -- with disdain. Some cities, states, or countries might pass laws against their creation and sale, or even ownership. Others might merely demand that they be licensed (with little doggie tags) and checked yearly to ensure they are neither carrying any diseases nor are too psychotic to live.
They are created and sold in an inert state, akin to hibernation, usually in a little plastic baggie that has a poorly-translated-into-English (or the local language) set of instructions on how to care for the Baby Blood Doll. The typical cost is between $5 and $25, with a unique one going . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: December 3, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
