CodeBreakers Compendium of Custom Morphs

To be fair, we severely modified most of the races we did uplift. All but perhaps the primate uplifts are more massive than their non-sapient counterparts (uplifted birds are the size of children!), and we've even dramatically altered their physiologies (giving those same birds batwings, and octomorphs vocal chords), so increasing the size and shape of their heads isn't too far off from what we've already done with other species.

Also, I don't think that the neo-dolphins and the like are any bigger than their nonsapient ancestors.

That particular character is played with "enlightened self interest," as I understand the term. Just do not ask what happened to the cortical stack of the NPC in question...

Or they throw the best parties on scum barges.

Silly question as it might be, but where is the reference to the Yiff Habitat? I've searched the corebook and Sunward PDFs, but both returned empty handed searches.

I don't think domestic cats could be uplifted to sentience, but what about bigger feline species? like the panther, the jaguar, the Bengali tiger, the lion.
just had that funny idea of a reverend to some exotic Post Fall "church" on an exoplanet (Echo IV, maybe?), and this peculiar reverend has a peculiar origin: he's an uplifted lion. His parishioners nicknamed him Reverend Arslan, based on the centuries old children classic.
(that had to be the FIRST priest I've ever depicted in a good light, ordinary, my priest NPCs are either bad guys or twisted neutral. that's especially true for my Lancea Sanctum npc in Requiem)

By the way, something came to mind considering the neo-hominids.
Are they human-like, as the Mobile Scientist character sample in Sunward, or do they concerve their ape look?
I was wondering because I have a few ape uplifts inspired from DC simian characters
for exemples:
-A Mercurial business"man" gorillah leading underhandly an anti-human uplift terrorist group, and a psi-Gamma level async.
-A french-speaking gorillah uplift mercenary working for a former Argonaut turned war criminal scientist sleeved in flexbot synthmorph. The flexbot was so damaged only the "head" bot remain.
-An albinos gorillah, working as a mentalist and proxy for Firewall. Apparently kind and benevolent, he's totally ruthless and will sacrifice any and all sentinels to fulfill Firewall's purpose for the Greater Good. He's also adept of multiple forking

Also, are police baboons gifted with speech? If just enough to have learned sentences like "Problems, sir!", "Yes, sir.", "No, sir", "I've found something, sir"

Avian-wise, is there any uplifted owl species? that came to mind for a couple of reasons. one is the teaser for Legend of the Guardians, and the second from a possible characters in my upcoming EP fanfiction Paradigm Shift

Great work, btw, CodeBreaker!

A reading I had not considered.

He also gets called Basement Cat behind his back.

This is overkill info, but intelligence is something we still don't know much about in terms of where it is and what it looks like in the brain. The size of the brain doesn't tell you much about how intelligent an animal is, but rather how social it is. While it's true that social animals tend to be more intelligent by our standards, each and every animal is as intelligent as its environment requires it to be. (I've always been somewhat offended by the idea that humans are superior to animals for reasons of intelligence. We're hands-down the most adaptable species on our planet, but that doesn't make us the smartest if you ask me.)

If you were going to "uplift" an animal to have a human-equivalent level of situational adaptability, the animal would still not behave like a human. The most difficult part of that whole operation would be language. Language requires a huge amount of brain real estate. The animal that most closely mimics humans in its use of language is the gelada baboon, which chatters constantly to its neighbors instead of reinforcing bonds through grooming. Any other animal would have to have a completely fabricated language center, along with who knows what else.

My character is a novacrab. Crabs are nothing like humans in any way, but there is a cyberbrain in there and some sort of vocal apparatus has been attached. If you have players that want to play animals/furries, I think the novacrab approach is much more realistic than the "uplift" approach. You make a big old body of the appropriate shape and stick a cyberbrain in it. Bingo, novacat.

On the other hand, uplifting a dolphin or a raven would require just as much brain engineering as it would to uplift a cat or a dog. In fact, dogs would most likely require less work than a raven or a cat. They have a reputation for being goofy and dumb, but more than any other pet dogs are keyed in to our style of communication. A tiny puppy can understand human gestures and signals that even a grown chimp cannot, like pointing to a cup of food. So really, dogs are the most likely candidate for brain uplifting if you ask me.

In the end, this is science fiction and there are questions for which there won't be any answers until we know how to do all of this science irl. In my own games however, I'm going to advocate the use of cyberbrains whenever a player wants to take on an animal body, other than the ones expressly listed as uplifts (except for perhaps dogs of course).

Codebreaker's thread on rpg.net indicated he'd worked out the synthmorph rules half a year ago... What happened with that, CB?