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Bits and Pieces from the NR Trivia Collection
#1: Schlaghund

by Jens Kreutzer

One of the heavy-hitter cards in Netrunner, Schlaghund has always been a favourite of Corp players who seek a drastic approach when preventing felons from trespassing in their data forts. But what does this strange word mean, anyway? "Schlaghund" [SHLAHK-hoont] is a German compound, although there's no such term in German currently (that might change in 2020, though). It basically means "hit-dog", from schlagen, "to hit, to strike" and Hund, "dog".

The sick concept behind it is: A dog is fitted with cybernetic enhancements (and possibly some sort of "remote control") and then packed full with explosives. The Black Ops department of your Corp then sics it on the hapless Runner - as soon as the dog has tracked the offender down, it simply ... explodes.

It is very likely that this idea originally hails from one of William Gibson's novels, Count Zero. Gibson, a Canadian, is the most famous cyberpunk author - the whole idea of a virtual-reality interface for the Net that's directly hooked up to the brain comes from his book Neuromancer. The following is a quote from Count Zero (New York 1987: Ace Books; start of the first chapter):

"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel."

Why people translated "slamhound" into the German is anybody's guess... (You can read more about Schlaghunde [SHLAHK-hoon-duh, the gramatically correct plural] in R. Talsorian's supplement Rache Bartmoss' Brainware Blowout, p. 98.)