Well, nanotech works just about as well as biotech, I suppose - though I'm rather a fan of "who can tell?"
An expansion to a limitation: Handwavium doesn't build *anything*. It adds to, augments, and enhances. The core of the thing, whatever it is, is still going to have to come from good old hardtech. (Honestly, I think this has been pretty well established, but it sounds like it's good to have such things codified for RP reasons.)
Also: modifier to the stuff I put here - I'll happily edit/preread for anyone who wants it, but my writing bandwidth is both erratic and limited, and it's not likely that any of it is going to fall here. I'm mostly in the discussion out of an aesthetic appreciation for well-built universes. If any of the actual author-types really doesn't like the stuff I'm saying, feel free to ignore me.
Suggested limitation to the "eat me" effects: Inert works just fine by itself, but if you want to play around with wierdnesses, they should have the following attributes:
- Nondangerous: Whatever they are, they shouldn't hamper you past the "annoying" level in any practical sense. They shouldn't be horribly ugly. They will likely be rather on the freakish side, but you kew that when you signed up.
- Permanent: You get one, you get only one, and once you've got one, you never get rid of it. Do ya feel lucky?
- Balanced: most of these should have some benefit and some negative. Neither should be overwhelming. If it's the sort of thing you're really into, it'll be really cool, and you'll happily accept the minor issues it entails. If it's not something that you're into, it'll be added to the list of Life's Little Aggravations, though you do have to admit it comes in handy every once in a while.
(Image: one guy lucked into variably magnetic feet. It's really cool... except... you know how sometimes you get a cramp, and one of your muscles tenses waaaay up, and it takes you time time and effort to get it to relax again? Yeah.)
- Relatively Minor: Nothing overwhelmingly powerful. Nothing that naturally weaponizes (mind you, many of them could be things that might be useful in a brawl, once you learn how to use them, and a few might give you a bit of an edge right off the bat, but nothing like a Giant Scorpion Tail of Doooom, or anything)
- Explicable within the native psuedoscience: Nothing like lazerbeams out of the eyes unless you have a *really* good explanation. Basically, even if the Laws of Physics are just a guide, they should still be a guide.
In order to get the effect, you have to destabilize the stuff in some way - run some radiation through it, sit it under intense vibration, extremes of heat or cold, electric current - whatever. Eventually, the folks downstairs might figure it out well enough to really *tune* the effects - which, in turn, will allow a sufficiently well-trained tech with a sufficiently well-equipped lab to give you almost any body your heart desires - but for the moment, if you go with fast and cheap, the results are appropriately unpredictable.
Oh, and a suggestion: the goop provides some appropriate and reasonably doable way to lift off the ground and get into space, but it's *really* not fond of atmospheric burn - or even winds that are too strong. Getting out of the gravity well is surprisingly easy these days (personally, I figure it's some sort of wacky grav effect, but that's not important here.) Getting out of the *atmosphere* takes a while. This allows the average fen with average resources to get ahold of some goop, spend a while culturing it, and eventually leave mother earth, but means that trips up and down the gravity well will still be pretty infrequent for most of them. The moon, on the other hand....
Oh, and an NPC to throw into the mix: After an appropriate amount of time, you get the previously mentioned spaceworthy submarine. Seeing that they were bing left behind in the rush, eventually the military bit the bullet, and just started setting systems up, looking for quirks they could live with. They wound up lucking into a batch that has almost *no* requirements, quirks, or foilibles... except that it Really Really Likes John Philip Sousa music. A Lot. The folks in charge looked at this, shrugged, declared victory, and crewed it with a group of Seamen, Soldiers, Airmen and Marines who all scored high on the appropriate tests, and who *also* Really Really Like John Philip Sousa music. A Lot. The armed services do have access to a rather large pool of people like that, after all.
Also, it's worth remembering that the *ship* is the one without many foilibles. Before you decide to introduce this character, run a google search on ["bubble skippy" submarine]. It should help a fair bit.
For a second character... well, after you've infeced a submarine with handwavium, it's *really* hard to get it clean again - and that's without the moral issues. So what do you do with the thing? They figured, yank the weapons systems and sell it as surplus (this wasn't as expensive as you might think - the subs were due to be decomissioned anyway.) Now, that'd be pretty expensive for a single person - but the subs were pretty big. A *consortium* of military otaku....
(This becomes potentially even funnier because from external appearances there's no way to tell them apart - and the only way to tell them apart by communicator (assuming you don't know them personally) is that the real military types have John Philip Sousa in the background almost al the time, while the otaku only have him on at those times where the chief navigator has control over the stereo system.)
Feel free to yoink either for anything. Ownership devolves individually to first person to use them in a story. I personally suspect that they work better as people for your characters to run into, but it anyone wants to take a shot at running from an inside perspective, please do have at.
An expansion to a limitation: Handwavium doesn't build *anything*. It adds to, augments, and enhances. The core of the thing, whatever it is, is still going to have to come from good old hardtech. (Honestly, I think this has been pretty well established, but it sounds like it's good to have such things codified for RP reasons.)
Also: modifier to the stuff I put here - I'll happily edit/preread for anyone who wants it, but my writing bandwidth is both erratic and limited, and it's not likely that any of it is going to fall here. I'm mostly in the discussion out of an aesthetic appreciation for well-built universes. If any of the actual author-types really doesn't like the stuff I'm saying, feel free to ignore me.
Suggested limitation to the "eat me" effects: Inert works just fine by itself, but if you want to play around with wierdnesses, they should have the following attributes:
- Nondangerous: Whatever they are, they shouldn't hamper you past the "annoying" level in any practical sense. They shouldn't be horribly ugly. They will likely be rather on the freakish side, but you kew that when you signed up.
- Permanent: You get one, you get only one, and once you've got one, you never get rid of it. Do ya feel lucky?
- Balanced: most of these should have some benefit and some negative. Neither should be overwhelming. If it's the sort of thing you're really into, it'll be really cool, and you'll happily accept the minor issues it entails. If it's not something that you're into, it'll be added to the list of Life's Little Aggravations, though you do have to admit it comes in handy every once in a while.
(Image: one guy lucked into variably magnetic feet. It's really cool... except... you know how sometimes you get a cramp, and one of your muscles tenses waaaay up, and it takes you time time and effort to get it to relax again? Yeah.)
- Relatively Minor: Nothing overwhelmingly powerful. Nothing that naturally weaponizes (mind you, many of them could be things that might be useful in a brawl, once you learn how to use them, and a few might give you a bit of an edge right off the bat, but nothing like a Giant Scorpion Tail of Doooom, or anything)
- Explicable within the native psuedoscience: Nothing like lazerbeams out of the eyes unless you have a *really* good explanation. Basically, even if the Laws of Physics are just a guide, they should still be a guide.
In order to get the effect, you have to destabilize the stuff in some way - run some radiation through it, sit it under intense vibration, extremes of heat or cold, electric current - whatever. Eventually, the folks downstairs might figure it out well enough to really *tune* the effects - which, in turn, will allow a sufficiently well-trained tech with a sufficiently well-equipped lab to give you almost any body your heart desires - but for the moment, if you go with fast and cheap, the results are appropriately unpredictable.
Oh, and a suggestion: the goop provides some appropriate and reasonably doable way to lift off the ground and get into space, but it's *really* not fond of atmospheric burn - or even winds that are too strong. Getting out of the gravity well is surprisingly easy these days (personally, I figure it's some sort of wacky grav effect, but that's not important here.) Getting out of the *atmosphere* takes a while. This allows the average fen with average resources to get ahold of some goop, spend a while culturing it, and eventually leave mother earth, but means that trips up and down the gravity well will still be pretty infrequent for most of them. The moon, on the other hand....
Oh, and an NPC to throw into the mix: After an appropriate amount of time, you get the previously mentioned spaceworthy submarine. Seeing that they were bing left behind in the rush, eventually the military bit the bullet, and just started setting systems up, looking for quirks they could live with. They wound up lucking into a batch that has almost *no* requirements, quirks, or foilibles... except that it Really Really Likes John Philip Sousa music. A Lot. The folks in charge looked at this, shrugged, declared victory, and crewed it with a group of Seamen, Soldiers, Airmen and Marines who all scored high on the appropriate tests, and who *also* Really Really Like John Philip Sousa music. A Lot. The armed services do have access to a rather large pool of people like that, after all.
Also, it's worth remembering that the *ship* is the one without many foilibles. Before you decide to introduce this character, run a google search on ["bubble skippy" submarine]. It should help a fair bit.
For a second character... well, after you've infeced a submarine with handwavium, it's *really* hard to get it clean again - and that's without the moral issues. So what do you do with the thing? They figured, yank the weapons systems and sell it as surplus (this wasn't as expensive as you might think - the subs were due to be decomissioned anyway.) Now, that'd be pretty expensive for a single person - but the subs were pretty big. A *consortium* of military otaku....
(This becomes potentially even funnier because from external appearances there's no way to tell them apart - and the only way to tell them apart by communicator (assuming you don't know them personally) is that the real military types have John Philip Sousa in the background almost al the time, while the otaku only have him on at those times where the chief navigator has control over the stereo system.)
Feel free to yoink either for anything. Ownership devolves individually to first person to use them in a story. I personally suspect that they work better as people for your characters to run into, but it anyone wants to take a shot at running from an inside perspective, please do have at.