133: Drooga

ENTRY 133: Drooga

For three weeks, drooga was the most popular tipple in Phelan’s Recourse, before the Fireeater Riots broke out. Drooga next showed up in Nova York, sold in double-bulb squeeze-bottles and labeled as “Friendmaker;” it lasted six days before the Long Night of Tears, a series of carefully choreographed murder-suicide art projects. On Profunda, an “energy injection” called Anyana maintained an underground presence for six months before statistical analysis determined a strong correlation between its use and clinical depression; chemical studies of captured samples proved Anyana’s near-identical composition to drooga. So it is, throughout dozens of habitats over a decade, drooga continues to pop up, in a number of forms and names, usually to quick acclaim and eventual catastrophe.

On the surface, drooga is a flavorless alcoholic spirit, nearly identical in appearance, smell, and lack of taste to higher-proof vodka. Chemically, things are more complex: while there is alcohol in drooga, it’s little more than a delivery system for a cocktail of strange carbon-structures, long-chain peptides, and traces of synthetic neurotransmitters. Firewall has identified components which parallel sequences of the Watts-MacLeod Virus, and combined with its effects the general consensus among those secretive groups familiar with the exsurgent virus is that drooga is some form of psi drug. Of course, that just begs several more disturbing questions, such as who has the know-how and capabilities to make such a drug, and why they would do so. Studies of past drooga “outbreaks” have not shown any definite connection or distiller, leading most to assume the worst-case scenario: the recipe is out there somewhere on the Mesh, just waiting for someone to find and make it again.

Mechanics

Type	Application	Onset Time	Duration	Cost
Bio	Inj, O	20 minutes	1 hour	Typically Low or Trivial

Drooga is a weak psi-opener (Eclipse Phase¸ p.325) which boosts latent telepathic potential and receptivity, while the alcohol content impairs judgment and lowers inhibitions. The result is that drooga users in close proximity begin to experience each other’s emotions, which tends to lead to the quick formation of deep emotional bonds; treat this as temporarily gaining the Empathic Scan sleight (p.226) and the Psi Vulnerability trait (p.151) for the duration of the drug’s effect. The duration and side-effects of drooga mimic that of alcoholic drinks of similar volume, but bypasses toxin filter augmentations; users take 1d10 mental stress when the drug wears off, usually masked by the hangover. Chemically, drooga is mostly alcohol by volume and does not register differently to casual chemical analysis. Like alcohol, drooga is mentally addictive with an addiction modifier of -5.

Seed

• Firewall has captured a supply of drooga and wishes to experiment with it as an interrogation tool. The player characters are asked to participate, subjecting themselves and the target to the psi drug by various means and running through a series of interrogation scenarios (good cop/bad cop, a friendly fellow prisoner, etc.) The target is a suspected lead to the drooga manufacturer.