Most of it wasn't even on the RN list. There's a bunch of stuff I picked up from talking with other freelancers and Mike Mulvihill back in the FASA days. Much of it I either don't remember or shouldn't really repeat.
And yeah, SURGE got... out of hand, and unfortunately quickly became the domain of furries and min-maxers. the original concept was that "partial metahuman DNA" awakened, leading to effectively half-breeds. Unfortunately that was deemed a little too limiting and not really taht cool, so more stuff got added. I actually don't mind them when done right (I tend to run them like Jokers from the Wild Cards series), and a number of cyberpunk stroies have done variations of gangs with implants to give them animal traits as a theme (the dog-gang from Johnny Mnemonic, for example), or even gene-splicing gone awry type stuff. this just did it via magic. But it needs to be kept rare and mostly in the background (And you'll note how little SURGE has gotten used over the years.)
Drakes aren't a terrible concept, I just don't know that they should have ever been Player Characters (much like AI's, Free Spirits, Vampires, etc). And they're something of an ED port anyways.
I have used SURGE to do some interesting things with characters. What I really feel is the bad thing about Surge is, sometimes, you
only want some disadvantages from it, none of the advantages. The other problem is that some of the disadvantages are purely
cosmetic. A character I threw together with SURGE that I never got to play had a very tight theme on the effects: Underwater vision,
gills, webbed hands and feet, unusual eye colour(Solid black), can't remember what the other disadvantage was, though. Gave the
character a level 3 Dermal Sheath with colour modifications to it to be dark grey over back and sides, white over the stomach..Character
became an under-water operatiosn specialist(complete with gyrojet). Another, I went with Third Eye, and a few other minor things, and
built the character as a really high powered Conjurer. Then, there is the Thorns, Metagenetic Enhancement:Willpower, and a few others
that we have used to give something similar to the effects of the Ritual of Thorns...which is darned fun to have as a Surge package when
going into, say, Tir na nOg, especially when the GM knows about the double histories.
I don't think SURGE is just the realm of Furries and Powergamers. I think, however, a GM needs to be paying attention to what the player
is trying to do with the SURGE.
