Mad Science RPG Seed: Bear Bombs.

Blame this.

Bear Bombs

These one-shot items (suitable for a sufficiently odd RPG campaign) are, contrary to their names, not necessarily just made from bears. It happens that bear DNA was the first one that Illuminati researchers could successfully replicate, and bears worked out reasonably according to specifications, so… Bear Bombs. Or Bear-Balls, although that name is considered to be possibly in bad taste.

Then again, so is the concept. A Bear Bomb weighs ten pounds and looks like a bowling ball: the insides are largely hollow and filled with a fairly classified fluid called calcium stultitide. Calcium stultitide is top-shelf Mad Science; the kind that’s been refined for a hundred years until all that’s left is the madness and the poor life decisions. In this case, it’s a super-cloning substance: dunk enough genetic material into calcium stultitide and you end up with a living, functioning (and mindless) full duplicate (in miniature: conservation of mass is inexplicably still in play here, although apparently nothing else is) of whatever animal or plant you dunked into it… for about five minutes. Then the cloned animal or plant promptly explodes, and typically sets the immediate area on fire.

This makes a Bear Bomb rather useless as a cloning device, but as something that can be weaponized certain groups felt that there were definite possibilities. Not least the ridiculousness factor: who would believe reports of the Men in Black attacking using exploding, miniature bears? That’s instant-tabloid territory, right there.

To activate your Bear Bomb, simply insert the chosen genetic material into the handy arming chamber, secure the lid, and bowl the Bomb at your enemies. The Bomb is activated by impact, so bowl that Bomb hard – and yes, the Bomb is designed to let you play tricks with it, like a curved ground trajectory. When the Bomb hits something hard enough to activate the trigger, the conversion process takes about a second. Typically, ten-pound bears are not really happy and content when they are brought into brief existence like this: they typically fight like extremely angry housecats that can also effectively use their forepaws. This can often be effective enough, even before the bear eventually explodes. In fact, as a method for clearing a machine-gun emplacement or fixed defense point the Bomb has its points, particularly if you can spin-attack one at its target from around the corner.

Fortunately for everybody’s sanity, they never could get the modified mortar that would shoot these things to work properly.