When creating a drug, you must ask some questions :

1.) What does the drug do? What benefits does the drug grant the user? Why would anyone want to take such a drug?
2.) What sorts of negative side effects are there? Do these effects occur after taking the drug, or when it wears off?
3.) How strong is the drug? Is it powerful or mild? How easy is it to overdose on this drug?
4.) How long do the effects last?
5.) Is the drug illegal, or can you buy it at any drug or liquor store?
6.) What form does the drug come in? Do you swallow it, snort it, or shoot it?

With these optional rules, you can create new and interesting chemicals to cripple your characters with. The following rules replace the quick-and-dirty Ultra-Tech Drugs rules on B425 and are a conversion for the Gurps ruleset of Ocelot’s Drug Lab for the CP2020 rules.

At each step, answering these questions will mean spending Design Points from a starting pool depending on how hi-tech the drug is. The Design Points total also helps determine the cost of the drug on the street.

Drug Design

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To design a drug, start by choosing the Drug’s Effect(s). Take more levels of the ‘effect’ if you want it to do more ‘stuff’. Next, choose any Features and Side Effects that you want your drug to have, as well as its Strength, Onset time, and Duration. Side effects have negative DP and can be used to keep your drug inside the total you selected. Some types of drugs (e.g. poisons) can be purchased for the side effects; if so then the side effects of the poison become the effects and the effects become the side effects, and you should flip the DPs around – effective poisons still cost more money than less effective ones.

Note that if you stack Drug Effects of different types each additional “stack” costs one more DP than the last. There is no extra cost for stacking layers of the same effect. The same holds true for Side Effects (not Features) – but the increase only takes effect after the first two side effects, so that if you already have two side-effects, a third side-effect that’d normally cost -2 DP would now cost -1, and a -1 DP side effect would cost no DP. Again, for poisons switch Side Effects and Drug Effects around for these purposes.

Once all the numbers have been assimilated, you have the drug’s DP total. This is used to find the drug’s base price.

Finally, choose what form the drug comes in and whether or not it is illegal (the GM has the final say on the latter). The drug’s form and legality will affect its final street cost.

Drug Effects

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Drug Features

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Side Effects

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Side effects are the bad things that drugs do to you. They come in two varieties – Untimed and Timed.

Untimed side effects are the big, bad ones. They happen as soon as the drug is imbibed, and cause permanent damage to the user of the drug. Each Untimed effect can only be used in a drug’s creation once.

There are two types of Timed side effects : Immediate and Delayed. Immediate side effects manifest as soon as the drug takes effect, while Delayed side effects occur after the drug wears off (ie, “hangover”). When choosing a Timed side effect for a drug, you must specify if the effect you are adding to your cocktail is either Immediate or Delayed. Note that the same side effect can be taken twice, one for an Immediate effect and one for a Delayed one. Immediate effects last until the drug wears off. Delayed effects kick in as soon as the drug wears off, and last as long as the drug’s previously rolled duration.

Note the incremental cost of taking more than one side effect as explained above under Design Point Limits.

The list of side effects follows.

Untimed Side Effects

Timed Side Effects

Drug Form

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The delivery form the drug usually comes in modifies the base Cost as determined by the Type x DP formula above, as follows:

¹ Slower Onset time.
² Requires either a vaporizer ($100, neg weight) or the patient’s cooperation to administer (for snorting). Alternatively, smoked like a cigarette, but bystanders are affected by the drug as well at the drug’s listed Strength-3.
³ Requires a Physician roll to administer properly; failure means the drug was injected into the musculature rather than a vein, resulting in no effect.
⁴ Administered either directly to an open wound or under the tongue, to be absorbed by the mucous membrane
⁵ Diffuses straight through the skin, no special preperation required

Drug Legality

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Finally, how legal the drug is affects the street price – calculate the final price as follows, using the drug cost from the step above :

Drug Price

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A drug’s final street price per dose follows the following formula:

Price = Base Price * D * L

Where D is the multiplier from the drug’s delivery method and L multiplier from the drug’s Legality Class. The drug’s Base Price is based upon its Design Point total, as follows:

You will now have a final street cost per dose for your drug. If this is less than $1 then list how many doses can be bought for $1, rounding down. At the GM’s discretion, some drugs may be so common that their price is far lower than given by the method above, and this should be noted in the item description.

Listings for drugs created with this Drug Lab can be found on the Dealer’s Catalogue page.