“You wouldn’t call it that, if you had any better idea what it does.”
“Burton said it’s a war crime.” “It is,” he said, “and good reason. It’s an aerosol. They’d have a single little bird go down the line, painted black, tonight, spray ’em all.”
“What’s it do?” “Stimulant, aphrodisiac, and, I have trouble pronouncing this, psychotomimetic.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It duplicates the condition of being totally serial-killer sadist bugfuck.”
“Fuck . . .”
“You wouldn’t want it on your conscience. Don’t want it on mine.”
-The Peripheral, William Gibson
With the ability present now to spike consumables with drugs and now, the addition of aerosol grenades, I'd like to suggest that there's a niche now for some new types of drugs. As they currently stand, almost all drugs give you a fairly hearty buff (with some tradeoffs) because they're meant to encourage use and be something your character can chemically enhance themselves with. You throw flash at drugs, they're an upside in return. In their current state, they work great, they're fun to use and they're a booming economy.
However, there isn't currently a -whole- lot you can do forcibly exposing people to drugs. Now's a great time to consider introducing some drugs that -aren't- such a good time, whether they're 'middle of the road' harder drugs that you might conceivably take recreationally, but not come out nearly so functional for taking them (though huge RP kudos if you do.) Or some straight nasty chemicals that aren't a far cry from chemical warfare.
Some ideas below-
Recreational:
-Daze: An inhalant, popular with Parkies. Puts the user into a heavy dissociative state. Trademark symptoms include a flat affect, glassy eyes and heavily delayed reaction times, but users report a warm, buzzy, prolonged high.
-Crash: Discount samurai candy, usually sold as an injectable. Users report greatly heightened physical performance and reaction times, but a mild disorientation, brutal hangover and heightened blood pressure that makes the user highly prone to excess bleeding, leaving all but the crazy, uninformed and the desperate favorable to its use.
-Mindfuck: Taken as a dissolvable tablet. Mindfuck's a powerful hallucinogen, but with unpredictable results. Users report an array of hallucinations characterized in 'good' and 'bad' trips. One high can be pleasant and leaves the user feeling splendor and a peace with the world, another can be a terrifying experience gripped by paranoia and nightmarish visions.
-Sugardust: A close cousin of marcy, almost identical in look and performance, but cut with agents that leave it cheaper to the market at the cost of drastically reducing the body's tolerance to the drug. Overdose by confusing the two is tragically common.
Bad:
-Seraph-9: An aerosol, currently outlawed in most of the world and the suspected product of military RnD. Seraph-9 is a dangerous psychoactive agent. Those afflicted enter a state of severe paranoia and homicidal psychosis, marked by trademark foaming at the mouth and irritated, reddened eyes.
The following are tougher to implement as true drugs via the current code, I imagine, but would be interesting to utilize using the new grenades:
-BB-5: An aerosol agent commonly employed by corporate and law enforcement agencies across the globe as a means of crowd control. Causes pain, irritation and reduced vision upon exposure to the eyes as well as vomiting.
-Dremota: Aerosol, employed by Russian special forces. The agent acts as a powerful but short-lived tranquilitic, rendering persons exposed to it unconscious.
-Eisengriff: A paralytic agent produced for Prussian military and police usage. Disables most of the body's muscle groups for a short period, leaving those afflicted conscious but immobile.
-Mustard gas: Three centuries old, and seeing a resurgence through synthesis by inventive yet reckless home chemists. Causes progressive burns to exposed tissue, particularly in the eyes and respiratory passages, worsening with prolonged exposure.
Some of these will need to see some balancing, obviously, through rarity or countermeasures to keep them from being an outright wash upon use but I hope these are some theme-y cyberpunk examples of chemicals that might have underhanded, risky or outright weaponized uses.
