Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

[Vebyast]

Shakti is just about perfect. It's basically "The Force" from Star Wars, but it's from South Asia, where the highest number of Asura are from. Totally works.

Agreed on Shakti. Much better than mine.

Deep One Magic. I am flat unhappy with "Astral Magic", since technically all Channeling is done through the Astral.

Options:
[*]Astrology
[*]Move Thaumaturgy to the Deep Ones and call dwarven magic "Dweomer" or "Runic Magic".
[*]Weirding

[Lokathor]

Weirding is very good

[CatharzGodfoot]

On the technology side of things, I'd like to make the case for harvesting organs.

It's not something that's reasonable in Shadowrun, for various reasons. It is, however, an incredibly dystopic part of the real world.

It's quite easy to include. Make targeted immunosupressants cheap and effective. Make stem cell therapy expensive and ineffective at crafitng complex organs without biological templates (i.e. harvested organs). Make high-end cyberware require human organs to re-engineer.

[DrPraetor]

On the technology side of things, I'd like to make the case for harvesting organs.

It's not something that's reasonable in Shadowrun, for various reasons. It is, however, an incredibly dystopic part of the real world.

It's quite easy to include. Make targeted immunosupressants cheap and effective. Make stem cell therapy expensive and ineffective at crafitng complex organs without biological templates (i.e. harvested organs). Make high-end cyberware require human organs to re-engineer.

Shadowrun includes several of these conceits - but I still find that all the supposed organ harvesting breaks WSoD, because what you do instead is you grow a clonal body with no brain in a tank and harvest that. Human Life may be cheap, but moral outrage is always going to be expensive enough that organ harvesting is not going to be a viable business model with any technological alternative whatsoever. So I agree that organ harvesting is dystopic, but there are plenty of ways to make the future horrible which are simply more credible. In general, I'd go with "the future is horrible because of apathy" much more than "the future is horrible because of the malice of cackling supervillains."

Now, there might still be reasons to harvest people's organs - for example, because you've been performing secret medical trials on them, and need to recover RNA measurements from the tissues. You can't really do this in clonal bodies because the clonal bodies aren't wandering around ouside, being exposed to 21st century microbes, and so forth. I'd totally run this study myself, if I were evil and didn't have an IRB breathing down my neck.

Another point - this ruins another more realistic avenue for dystopia - a resurgence of epidemic diseases. This can be a future in which, unless you are rich, infectious diseases are a major, life-threatening concern, much more so than they are even for the poor today, both because of a collapse of social medical delivery in many places, because of microbe species displaced by ecological devastation, and of course from another 70 years of over-use of antibiotics. If harvested organs can be contaminated with god-knows-what, it's not going to be a viable operation.

Although, there is some need for organ harvesting for black magic purposes, which gets press in the real world even though it doesn't exist, so if it were real, it'd be all over the news, all the time. Also, there should be a widespread belief that secret organ harvesting for use by the rich is endemic. But it shouldn't actually be.

Stuff from Warhammer 40K, which is cool:
Dreadnaughts
First, they're cool because they have a low profile, but a relatively high carriage and very large footprints to distribute their mass. A stocky, springy build to absorb recoil from their strikingly sensible armament (the autocannon, not the robot claw; although you'd have claws as well for army corps of engineers type stuff). Unlike most of the tech in WH40K (which is laughable, even given the conceit that it is made by a priesthood based on spiritual rather than engineering concerns), the Dreadnaught looks like a robot you might actually build.
Also, it has a brain in a jar running it. Sorry, it has the brain in a jar of a homicidal religious fanatic, which is the sort of person who might say, "when I die, put my brain in an f-ing KILLER ROBOT!" I'm not sure what excuse we'd have to put brains-in-jars inside these robots (probably some defense against being hacked?), but that's cool.

The Warp
The Warp is different from Astral Space only in tone. Frankly, Astral Space is, in the default Shadowun setting, far too safe. There are astrally projecting 11 year olds zipping all over the stratosphere at all times of day and night and apparently hardly any of them die.
On the other hand, the Warp in WH40K is probably a bit too dangerous. So some halfway position would be good. But it should be an alien reality, not an earth-which-glows.

Space Nazis, and their Space Marines
Okay, Space Marines are cool. They're surgically modified transhuman supersoldiers in power armor. I'm thinking that we want something halfway between Space Marines and the Combine Overwatch soldiers from Half-Life. Again, you get a ridiculous number of implants whose primary purpose is to let you put on a robot suit, too heavy for you to move on your own so it has induction-controlled muscles, on top of all kinds of crazy shit like magnetic padding in the helmet matched to magnetic mesh distributed throughout your brain to blunt concussions.
Spire Gangers have a certain resonance as a social phenomenon among the bored ultra-rich, so perhaps Overwatch officers are the spoiled, transhuman children of the corporate elite?

Techpriests
The Priesthood of Mars is cool, but care has to be taken to be sure that they aren't comically inept, given that they're engineers who seem to reject engineering. Not sure we can use this one, although if they have real magic of course that helps.
Oh! We could have a Tradition which *claims* that all magic is actually recovered superscience left behind by Martians, which is why they spend all their time chanting new-age mumbo-jumbo over their robots.

Rogue Trader
Okay, we don't have space travel, but can heavily armed bands of merchant/mercenaries still travel the badlands? Pretty please? This is a tough one, from a social engineering standpoint, since if there are places which are too dangerous for unarmed merchants to go, why are people living there? Put another way - the people living there, why do they have enough swag to justify having a mercenary band, with a small nations GNP worth of superscience weaponry, travel around to buy and sell stuff?

Posessees periodically go-demon and then explode
There are a lot of implementations of this, but I actually prefer WH40K's execution here to the alternatives. First, people who are posessed by demons get to run around covered in thumbs-up-awesome-looking medieval exorcist gear to keep from wigging out for a while, and they also retain some measure of their identity for a while, which just has much more dramatic resonance than being killed and replaced by an insect-demon. Legend of the Overfiend and a couple of other horror anime (forget the names) also do a good job with this trope.
Anyway, the point is, that most posessees are still human, but if you are evil (or whatever we call our equivalent of a magic threat), you can summon possessing Outsiders which slowly and horribly kill the host, and which turn the host into a giant monster for one last orgy of ultra-violence before they shuffle off this mortal coil, fat with the souls they've devoured.

[CatharzGodfoot]

On the technology side of things, I'd like to make the case for harvesting organs.

It's not something that's reasonable in Shadowrun, for various reasons. It is, however, an incredibly dystopic part of the real world.

It's quite easy to include. Make targeted immunosupressants cheap and effective. Make stem cell therapy expensive and ineffective at crafitng complex organs without biological templates (i.e. harvested organs). Make high-end cyberware require human organs to re-engineer.

Shadowrun includes several of these conceits - but I still find that all the supposed organ harvesting breaks WSoD, because what you do instead is you grow a clonal body with no brain in a tank and harvest that. Human Life may be cheap, but moral outrage is always going to be expensive enough that organ harvesting is not going to be a viable business model with any technological alternative whatsoever. So I agree that organ harvesting is dystopic, but there are plenty of ways to make the future horrible which are simply more credible. In general, I'd go with "the future is horrible because of apathy" much more than "the future is horrible because of the malice of cackling supervillains."

It doesn't take cackling super villains. It takes ruthless businessmen and desperate people who don't ask too hard where their life-saving treatment comes from.

Have you forgotten about the New York - Israel organ smuggling ring? Well, let's look at today's news: Beduin smugglers stealing organs from African refugees

Your argument of WSOD is bullshit. When you presuppose imaginary ways to bypass the need of donor organs, you don't need donor organs? Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

[kzt]

This all contrasts starkly with Hacking. Hacking terminology I rather like at this point:

---

In Asymmetric Threat, hackers interact through the medium of Hacking Techniques. A hacking technique is a special trick that a hacker uses to do something with or to a system that it isn't normally supposed to do. There are six types of hacking techniques: Basilisks, Data Mines, Exploits, Images, Phreaks, and Trepans. Basilisks and Trepans target living creatures, Exploits and Phreaks target computer systems, Data Mines target data sets (regardless of whether they are stored in a specific place or in a cloud), and Images create things that can be detected in the real world (and thus work on cameras or eyes equally well).

---

I'd suggest that the concept and some examples of social engineering, spear phishing and similar approaches need to be included in hacking, even though they are "different".

[DrPraetor]

Have you forgotten about the New York - Israel organ smuggling ring? Well, let's look at today's news: Beduin smugglers stealing organs from African refugees

Your argument of WSOD is bullshit. When you presuppose imaginary ways to bypass the need of donor organs, you don't need donor organs? Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

I propose *science fiction* ways of bypassing the need for donor organs - science fiction which clearly exists, given the other technology we're specifically providing. As a molecular biologist, your suggestion that we should have science fiction where it is possible to have cauldron born, but not to grow a brainless body and take out the kidney, doesn't pass muster; are you asking that we give up cauldron born in order to make organ smuggling viable? Anyway, with cauldron born this means that the profit margin on stolen kidneys cannot be higher than the price of a cloned kidney, which is not the kind of price regime in which globe trotting groups of high-tech mercenaries operate. For that matter, a cloned kidney has got to be cheaper than a bio-engineered super-kidney which is reasonably affordable by the player characters.

In the real world, where there are (for example) no cauldron born, yes of course there is organ smuggling. But positing organ smuggling as the wave of the science fiction future, just because it's horrible, requires cackling supervillains not businessmen. This may not be a WSoD problem for a non-scientist (?), but it is for me. It would lead to all kinds of ridiculous science, engineering, economics. Doesn't hold together, sorry.

[Endovior]

Trufax... the main reason why organ smuggling/theft exists today is because:

1: There isn't really any medical solution to many diseases/disorders short of replacing said organs with transplants
2: There's no way to get said transplants without taking them from other people, and the fact that people need their organs to live sharply limits the supply
3: Given a sharply limited supply, any amount of demand can produce profits exorbitant enough to get all kinds of horrors going on.

Given the possibility of organ cloning... a vastly superior option to regular transplants, given the exhaustive litany of terrible things that can happen in conventional transplants, that all goes out the window. If there are legal, moral, and ethical ways of producing replacement organs, then unless they are absurdly expensive for some reason, they will be used instead of illegal, immoral, unethical, and grossly inferior stolen transplants. And there needs to be a really ridiculous difference between the two, which will only happen if the technology is absolutely new, and if there aren't any major biotech companies interested in developing it. Given that this setting posits the existence of multiple megacorporations focused exclusively on biotech, there's no chance that organ smuggling/theft is remotely plausible, save in a few fringe cases of cackling supervillainy.

[A Man In Black]

Dreadnaughts
Also, it has a brain in a jar running it. Sorry, it has the brain in a jar of a homicidal religious fanatic, which is the sort of person who might say, "when I die, put my brain in an f-ing KILLER ROBOT!" I'm not sure what excuse we'd have to put brains-in-jars inside these robots (probably some defense against being hacked?), but that's cool.

There is also no reason not to just have a guy with a datajack inside it, unless you think that isn't as cool. (In fact, depending on the particular edition/author of 40K, it might be a barely-alive-dude with a datajack or a healthy dude with a datajack in there, anyway.)

A good reason to have a human brain in a combat mecha or battle tank is because humans are less "flakey" than Dick AIs, to the mind of human commanders. Meaning that they're flakey in ways that make sense to those commanders.

The Warp
On the other hand, the Warp in WH40K is probably a bit too dangerous. So some halfway position would be good. But it should be an alien reality, not an earth-which-glows.

Is there a good reason to make it more dangerous than the Matrix? Should Astral Space be the Magic Matrix, or Higher Risk/Higher Return in some way?

[CatharzGodfoot]

Have you forgotten about the New York - Israel organ smuggling ring? Well, let's look at today's news: Beduin smugglers stealing organs from African refugees

Your argument of WSOD is bullshit. When you presuppose imaginary ways to bypass the need of donor organs, you don't need donor organs? Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

I propose *science fiction* ways of bypassing the need for donor organs - science fiction which clearly exists, given the other technology we're specifically providing. As a molecular biologist, your suggestion that we should have science fiction where it is possible to have cauldron born, but not to grow a brainless body and take out the kidney, doesn't pass muster; are you asking that we give up cauldron born in order to make organ smuggling viable? Anyway, with cauldron born this means that the profit margin on stolen kidneys cannot be higher than the price of a cloned kidney, which is not the kind of price regime in which globe trotting groups of high-tech mercenaries operate. For that matter, a cloned kidney has got to be cheaper than a bio-engineered super-kidney which is reasonably affordable by the player characters.

In the real world, where there are (for example) no cauldron born, yes of course there is organ smuggling. But positing organ smuggling as the wave of the science fiction future, just because it's horrible, requires cackling supervillains not businessmen. This may not be a WSoD problem for a non-scientist (?), but it is for me. It would lead to all kinds of ridiculous science, engineering, economics. Doesn't hold together, sorry.

Growing a brainless body to adulthood would be ridiculously expensive, much more costly than taking organs from refugees. Clonal bodies make a great cover story for the corps, but when the bottom line is at stake, there is little that people won't do to raise profit margins. Consider the case from a few years back of morticians taking diseased bone marrow for grafts from cadavers. I'm sure they could have found some other way to make money, but selling unsafe bone grafts made the mortuary business quite a bit more lucrative.

And do you seriously believe the 'brainless' stories that the corps are feeding you? It would be too much trouble to keep development an PNS functions going while carefully excising all of the brain tissue around necessary systems. Those clonal bodies are perfectly intact individuals held in engineered comas for their entire lives until they've had too many organs removed.

[Vebyast]

Random musings.

Dreadnaughts
Unlike most of the tech in WH40K [...], the Dreadnaught looks like a robot you might actually build.

All true. I'd personally make a few tiny changes (their legs need to have a much, much larger range of movement, for example), but they're definitely the kind of war robot you'd actually build. The low profile is especially important because tanks and such spend a significant amount of time hiding behind low hills. The claw is also a critical component; one of the reasons we've abandoned tanks is that light mecha can hide inside buildings from the Project Thor satellites, and that means that they need to be tearing holes in walls.

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I'm not sure what excuse we'd have to put brains-in-jars inside these robots (probably some defense against being hacked?), but that's cool.

Several possibilities, none mutually exclusive.

• They change the unit's mind-control vulnerabilities from tech to meat. A caster walking up to a dreadnought thinking it's a drone tank throws up a logic bomb and gets turned into paste when the brain ignores it.
• The brain gets to keep any permanent augments it had in life. If one of your assets has a half-billion-dollar targeting computer in their head, not only do you get to keep it, you even glue it to a walking sniper rifle that fires 105mm shells.
• The brain gets to keep some of its magic, which gives you a unit that's both ridiculously powerful in cyber and has some completely unpredictable bit of magic - that brain could from any demitype and could be able to do anything.
• As A Man In Black mentions, they could be more predictable than dicks, who are prone to randomly going off-mission or, even worse, spontaneously turning into Ellisons.
• A brain in a jar is easier to build than a Dick or an Ellison, because you can get any suitably fanatical dude and harvest his brain. Getting an AI for such an unusual job might well require years spent growing it.

---

Oh! We could have a Tradition which *claims* that all magic is actually recovered superscience left behind by Martians, which is why they spend all their time chanting new-age mumbo-jumbo over their robots.

I like this idea. If you want it aligned with a region, have some hippie commune somewhere that jumped on the magic boat early and used it to carve out a permanent foothold. This also gives us the opportunity to have that one country with an utterly ridiculous political system.

[Lokathor]

Those clonal bodies are perfectly intact individuals held in engineered comas for their entire lives until they've had too many organs removed.

"True, but who gives a fuck that they could potentially be humans if they've got no experiences or personality associated with them? We've got demons, cauldron born, natural born, cyborgs; we've got enough people. If there's a meat we can make that helps save everyone else then don't worry about what that meat might be instead, it's saving everyone else"

or so the counterargument goes.

[Endovior]

Growing a brainless body to adulthood would be ridiculously expensive, much more costly than taking organs from refugees. Clonal bodies make a great cover story for the corps, but when the bottom line is at stake, there is little that people won't do to raise profit margins. Consider the case from a few years back of morticians taking diseased bone marrow for grafts from cadavers. I'm sure they could have found some other way to make money, but selling unsafe bone grafts made the mortuary business quite a bit more lucrative.

Eh... no, not at all. Cauldron Born are a thing in this setting, so there is an actual in-setting way to accelerate the growth of a clonal fetus. Given that, it's not a question of years, it's a question of weeks or days... which means vastly less expensive. Also, given that you can only get clonal tissue if they started with your own genetics first, and given that people know about how long it takes to grow clonal tissues, and especially given that using non-clonal tissues in a transplant means you fucking die unless you go on immunosuppressants forever (or, rather, for the next few years of your tragically diminished life), it's ridiculously obvious that you're not giving up the proper goods if you're using some random guy's organs instead of clonal organs, and no one is willing to pay anything for non-clonal organs, and we venture past 'malpractice' into 'mutilation' or 'homicide' if someone ever tries to pass non-clonal organs off as the real thing.

Thanks to the usual advertising propaganda, everyone knows how good clonal organs are for transplants, and how terrible non-clonal organs are for the same purpose, so even an unemployed laborer wouldn't want to risk some half-baked operation to get a kidney transplant; he'd mortgage himself to the neck, selling his soul and children to a biotech company is necessary, instead. That's just how this world winds up looking.

And do you seriously believe the 'brainless' stories that the corps are feeding you? It would be too much trouble to keep development an PNS functions going while carefully excising all of the brain tissue around necessary systems. Those clonal bodies are perfectly intact individuals held in engineered comas for their entire lives until they've had too many organs removed.

THIS is a more plausible line of argument. It's probably true, too... but since the clonal minds haven't received much in the way of stimulation, it's morally more similar to an abortion (and of the 'directly leading to a saved life' kind, too!) then to murder.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I was working within the assumption of 'donor' organs being an effective option; i.e. with anti-rejection therapies that would not massively impact the recipient.

What's good for for donor organs is good for engineered organs, and you wouldn't actually need to have a tailor-made cauldronborn body to get engineered organs. That's a good thing, because otherwise you'd need fully grown clone on call. And you'd need the full body grown just to get a heart. And that would be prohibitively expensive.

As for the 'do clone bodies dream of clone sheep?' issue, that might be true in some cases, but when you have the chance of a magically active clone, sabotage via wireless neural stimulation, and possibly even an exceptionally clever clone reverse-hacking her neural monitor and growing up on the net like an AI...

Well, I think it's safe to say that there are all kinds of issues.

[DrPraetor]

I am not Frank Trollman!

He is a *doctor*, while I am a *scientist*!
I am considerably more mellow and diplomatic.... by default. Also that isn't hard.

Random musings.

Dreadnaughts

Good suggestions. All of those reasons, yes!

Oh! We could have a Tradition which *claims* that all magic is actually recovered superscience left behind by Martians, which is why they spend all their time chanting new-age mumbo-jumbo over their robots.

I like this idea. If you want it aligned with a region, have some hippie commune somewhere that jumped on the magic boat early and used it to carve out a permanent foothold. This also gives us the opportunity to have that one country with an utterly ridiculous political system.

I nominate Florida. That'll show 'em.

[Username17]

Yeah, artificial blood is coming down the pipe pretty fast in 2011, and a setting that posits cybernetic enhancements pretty much requires the existence of clonal tissues that would by definition be better for life saving purposes than any stolen organs could possibly be. A high-tech medical reason for wanting to steal organs is probably too far fetched.

A magical reason to steal organs isn't far fetched at all. I could see various "dark paths" that required you to do horrible things. An Ogre path where you ate demihuman livers seems pretty obvious, and of course Vampirism where you drink blood and various outsiders where you have to sacrifice people to get them.

You want evil conspiracies where they kidnap people to harvest them for their viscera, because that is creepy as hell. But actual viscera harvesting has to be for magical purposes rather than technological ones. Kidnapping people for technical reasons is more reasonable as kidnapping people to perform medical experiments on them. Like The Man With Two Brains or human centipede or something.

-Username17

[Username17]

Stuff from Warhammer 40K, which is cool:
Dreadnaughts
First, they're cool because they have a low profile, but a relatively high carriage and very large footprints to distribute their mass. A stocky, springy build to absorb recoil from their strikingly sensible armament (the autocannon, not the robot claw; although you'd have claws as well for army corps of engineers type stuff). Unlike most of the tech in WH40K (which is laughable, even given the conceit that it is made by a priesthood based on spiritual rather than engineering concerns), the Dreadnaught looks like a robot you might actually build.
Also, it has a brain in a jar running it. Sorry, it has the brain in a jar of a homicidal religious fanatic, which is the sort of person who might say, "when I die, put my brain in an f-ing KILLER ROBOT!" I'm not sure what excuse we'd have to put brains-in-jars inside these robots (probably some defense against being hacked?), but that's cool.

I agree on the Dreadnaught being an actual robot that makes sense to build. It's like a self deploying artillery piece with giant piston legs that absorb recoil. The old Battletech Locust probably makes sense as a Laser chassis - unconcerned about recoil, it deploys on chicken legs so that it can rapidly rise up to fire laser pulses and then duck down below cover in order to redeploy.

The weird stuff about putting corpses of religious zealots into the robots could be done, with hacking defense being the obvious answer. But with the exception of a few fringe religious nutcase countries like the Caliphate, I don't see why robots would have specifically religious fanatics in them. Your basic autonomous combat drone needs an AI. And really good AIs take space and need training. I could really see systems to short circuit the AI training period by replacing robot "dog brains" with actual dog brains.

The Warp
The Warp is different from Astral Space only in tone. Frankly, Astral Space is, in the default Shadowun setting, far too safe. There are astrally projecting 11 year olds zipping all over the stratosphere at all times of day and night and apparently hardly any of them die.
On the other hand, the Warp in WH40K is probably a bit too dangerous. So some halfway position would be good. But it should be an alien reality, not an earth-which-glows.

That's why I'm going for an astral space you don't really "go to" at all. It's fully intangible and you don't send teenagers there. It's a series of weird topological connections that you can channel things out of. The worlds outside are variably threatening, with lots of the early arrivers being places like Fengdu and Helheim, but even some of them are pirate nations like Patala and Rlyeh. Some of the ones that aren't here (at least yet) are really nasty. If someone says that they are going to gate in a bunch of outsiders, people should be freaking out.

Space Nazis, and their Space Marines
Okay, Space Marines are cool. They're surgically modified transhuman supersoldiers in power armor. I'm thinking that we want something halfway between Space Marines and the Combine Overwatch soldiers from Half-Life. Again, you get a ridiculous number of implants whose primary purpose is to let you put on a robot suit, too heavy for you to move on your own so it has induction-controlled muscles, on top of all kinds of crazy shit like magnetic padding in the helmet matched to magnetic mesh distributed throughout your brain to blunt concussions.
Spire Gangers have a certain resonance as a social phenomenon among the bored ultra-rich, so perhaps Overwatch officers are the spoiled, transhuman children of the corporate elite?

People want to be Space Marines. They also want to fight Space Marines. The Battletech Clan Elementals might be a good place to look. The basic idea is that you have heavy robot suits that are supposed to be able to compete against the dreadnought and locust style walker robots. From a military standpoint, something that walks in at 3 meters or less and is functionally immune to small arms fire and capable of firing a machine gun and armed with a couple of anti vehicle rockets sounds like a general's dream.

Techpriests
The Priesthood of Mars is cool, but care has to be taken to be sure that they aren't comically inept, given that they're engineers who seem to reject engineering. Not sure we can use this one, although if they have real magic of course that helps.
Oh! We could have a Tradition which *claims* that all magic is actually recovered superscience left behind by Martians, which is why they spend all their time chanting new-age mumbo-jumbo over their robots.

That works.

Rogue Trader
Okay, we don't have space travel, but can heavily armed bands of merchant/mercenaries still travel the badlands? Pretty please? This is a tough one, from a social engineering standpoint, since if there are places which are too dangerous for unarmed merchants to go, why are people living there? Put another way - the people living there, why do they have enough swag to justify having a mercenary band, with a small nations GNP worth of superscience weaponry, travel around to buy and sell stuff?

We can have heavily armed freighter fleets that fight off Rlyehan pirates to conduct trade across the Pacific. Does that scratch the Rogue Trader itch?

Posessees periodically go-demon and then explode
There are a lot of implementations of this, but I actually prefer WH40K's execution here to the alternatives. First, people who are posessed by demons get to run around covered in thumbs-up-awesome-looking medieval exorcist gear to keep from wigging out for a while, and they also retain some measure of their identity for a while, which just has much more dramatic resonance than being killed and replaced by an insect-demon. Legend of the Overfiend and a couple of other horror anime (forget the names) also do a good job with this trope.
Anyway, the point is, that most posessees are still human, but if you are evil (or whatever we call our equivalent of a magic threat), you can summon possessing Outsiders which slowly and horribly kill the host, and which turn the host into a giant monster for one last orgy of ultra-violence before they shuffle off this mortal coil, fat with the souls they've devoured.

This is probably best handled with Stress. Being possessed can let you buy upgrades with more stress. Getting enough Stress makes you cease being a demihuman. So when the demon gets in your soul you start getting super strength and flame jets, and your eyes glow and you start growing fangs and horns and stuff, and eventually the power overwhelms you and you explode into Diablo.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

The weird stuff about putting corpses of religious zealots into the robots could be done, with hacking defense being the obvious answer. But with the exception of a few fringe religious nutcase countries like the Caliphate, I don't see why robots would have specifically religious fanatics in them. Your basic autonomous combat drone needs an AI. And really good AIs take space and need training. I could really see systems to short circuit the AI training period by replacing robot "dog brains" with actual dog brains.

Or really shady biotech companies who are already cloning bodies for transplants anyway selling spare brains with Cauldron Born braindumps from transplant-gutted bodies for this market, since I noticed a nice juxtaposition of "black market organs", "brainless clones, yeah right", and "brain-powered mecha".

Also. There's a preview trailer for the upcoming Syndicate FPS (based on the old Bullfrog RPG/RTS) that is pretty close to the concept of combat hacking you've described, Frank, both Basilisk hacking and device hacking. (The game itself looks to be a cash-in on the success of Deus Ex, but it's by Starbreeze and they haven't done anything bad yet.)

[Vebyast]

I am not Frank Trollman!

Lawl, my bad.

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The old Battletech Locust probably makes sense as a Laser chassis - unconcerned about recoil, it deploys on chicken legs so that it can rapidly rise up to fire laser pulses and then duck down below cover in order to redeploy.

Agreed. It also works great as a missile boat. The armor lets you skip the pusher charge and go straight to main engines, so no recoil at all. The legs let it kneel all the way down to the ground, at which point you could refill its tubes with no more effort than modern aircraft require.

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Ok, since we're getting into the discussion of what our heavier combatants look like:

• How do vehicles fit into the combat minigame?
• Where do combatants start transitioning from solid bullets to shells, missiles, and lasers?
• How does magic fit into vehicle combat?
• How defensible are vehicles, compared to each other, to handheld weapons, and to magic?
• How do vehicles work in abstract and really abstract locations?

I'll make some proposals. This is the result of me thinking out loud for three hours while watching a Let's Play of Banjo-Tooie, so these are of questionable quality:

• In the combat minigame, if you have any locations attached to you, you're classified as a "vehicle". Your locations are attached to the location you're occupying and, for larger vehicles, locations attached to the location you're occupying. Larger vehicles can take up entire locations (effectively removing them from the graph) or bridge obstacles (adding new edges to the graph).
• Combatants as small as lightly-cybered humans or uncybered ogres walk around with 40mm cannon capable of pasting cars and squads of mooks. Cybered ogres and light vehicles start carrying lasers. You start seeing missiles, both tubes and magazine-fed systems, as crew-served weapons for cybered ogres and on medium vehicles.
• In general, vehicle combat takes about as long as nonvehicular combat. Vehicles are heavily enough armored and sufficiently mobile that suiting up and attacking a cityful of armor is directly comparable to SWAT storming a building.
• Do some swapping around to make things more logical. Locusts are manned by brains to bring down their total mass, making them faster and smaller. They also have that feeling of frantic activity you get in cyberpunk literature. They are cyber. Dreadnoughts are human-manned mini mecha and are all gnarly. They are punk. We probably need a third category that is primarily magical to round out the vehicular triangle.
• We can fluff up lasers, missiles, cannon, and antivehicle magic to maintain the elemental triangle. For example, if we want cyber to be able to defend against punk, we give the locusts future versions of the Arena ADS. If you want "like defends against like", then locusts can laser other locusts as soon as they pop out of cover, dreadnoughts can actually block shots from other dreadnoughts' ACs, and hypothetical magic mecha can use counterspells and be ridiculously good in melee (to deal with demons).

[Hadanelith]

This is me, delurking agin with actual suggestions, instead of pedantic rambling.

[*]Do some swapping around to make things more logical. Locusts are manned by brains to bring down their total mass, making them faster and smaller. They also have that feeling of frantic activity you get in cyberpunk literature. They are cyber. Dreadnoughts are human-manned mini mecha and are all gnarly. They are punk. We probably need a third category that is primarily magical to round out the vehicular triangle.

For magic mechs, we could seriously just pull the crazy bio-mechanical nightmare suits from CthulhuTech. We'd have to rename them and stuff, but they're right there. Also, the whole crazy "bond a nightmare entity to my soul so I can turn into a semi-nightmare rage form" (the tagers, IIRC) sounds like a perfect sort of high-stress (or increasing stress, perhaps) magical enhancement. Refluff and serve.

[Lokathor]

[*]Do some swapping around to make things more logical. Locusts are manned by brains to bring down their total mass, making them faster and smaller. They also have that feeling of frantic activity you get in cyberpunk literature. They are cyber. Dreadnoughts are human-manned mini mecha and are all gnarly. They are punk. We probably need a third category that is primarily magical to round out the vehicular triangle.

Magical "vehicles" can be oversized super-demons you call up that eat missiles and shit lasers.

[Quantumboost]

Magical "vehicles" can be oversized super-demons you call up that eat missiles and shit lasers.

[Lokathor]

[*]Well there's the Chaos Demon style like I said: magically enhanced and covered in flames, using magic attacks and bone swords and things.
[*]There's the Tyranid/ Zerg style megabeast that will eat everything and doesn't give a shit when you shoot it because there's three inches of bone plating covering its sides.
[*]And of course there's the Eva style demi-mecha that's a bio-monster covered in armor; essentially an oversized cyber-troll warrior.

``Demons have a good deal of magic and anti-magic, but you need a summoner to control them. If the summoner is killed they fade away, and they can also be dispelled.

``Zerg have better raw physical stats and are appropriate when magic defenses aren't as required. They are controlled with a cybernetic implant added during the growth process, and a very large controller device the size of a dump truck can control any Zerg-oid within several kilometers. Uncontrolled Zerg-oid can be left in "suspended" mode, where they just sleep (possibly dying eventually), or they or "wild" mode, where they wander about and eat whatever they see whenever they get hungry (often) like an oversized super-killer grizzly.

``Evas have the best mobility compared to the other two and are controlled by a remote operator who "jumps in" to the eva and controls it the same as they'd control a drone while jumped in. They are the easiest to deploy into a new situation because the control uplink can be done via satellite (unlike with Zerg), and one pilot's signal can be beamed to any place in a hemisphere rather than having to move about the control source (similar to an @man). However, the Eva can't keep mobility while using the heaviest weapons, and isn't as durable as a Zerg or Demon.

[Username17]

How do vehicles fit into the combat minigame?

That's a good question, since of course it is "stupid" for super ninjas to roundhouse kick battleships into submission by being much more skilled at kicking than the battleship gunner is at shooting. There are two ways to deal with that, and both of them have to do with heavy vehicles being really tough.

The first is to just have tanks and such take "flanking" maneuvers over and over again until they win, and weather the attacks from kung fu madmen until they do. That's sort of unsatisfactory as it means that tank warfare goes not to best tank pilot, but to the tank that is on the same side as the highest skilled kung fu artist, which is again kind of "stupid".

The next way, which I rather prefer, is to allow vehicles to "ignore infantry" and have a later priority combat amongst themselves if that is what they want to do. And if it turns out that one of the infantry around happens to have an anti-tank missile you didn't know about: then it sucks for you.

Where do combatants start transitioning from solid bullets to shells, missiles, and lasers?

Man portable lasers, gauss guns, and gyrojets are extremely cyberpunk, and should totally be available.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

The next way, which I rather prefer, is to allow vehicles to "ignore infantry" and have a later priority combat amongst themselves if that is what they want to do. And if it turns out that one of the infantry around happens to have an anti-tank missile you didn't know about: then it sucks for you.

I'm not quite sure that splitting the game into "vehicle" and "human" tiers is the solution; for one, the bigger humans (super-cyborgs) are way more durable than lighter combat vehicles.

Speaking heavy cyborgs and people wearing body armor, did we ever resolve the rules for those? I think that, once we get a solid solution for armored ogres, we could just amplify it and use it again for vehicles. Shooting at body armor using anything smaller than a combat rifle is more or less the same as shooting at a mecha with anything smaller than a 40mm grenade.