(Shadowrun) Man and Machine: Cyberware

There are certain risks that I knew I would be subjecting myself to when I started this project. Certain experiences that could very well be anticipated as unpleasant, but necessary. So I really should not be coming at this like some kind of martyr. I knew what I was getting into.

But man, these Shadowrun rules expansions are going to kill me.

I suppose Man and Machine: Cyberware was a bit smoother than Rigger 2, probably because I find the subject matter - cybernetic implants for illicit, off-the-books mercenaries - to be slightly more interesting. But then I get to stretches like the new Implant Stress rules, where it implies that every single damage roll in the game should have a new additional step where you compare the die result to the attack's final adjusted damage total in order to determine whether you need to roll on a chart and apply location-based wound effects (which can render specific, individual pieces of cyberware inoperable), and I wonder "what has my life become?"

I've confessed in the past that there's a part of me that's tempted to run one of these ultra-granular games, complete with individual limb damage, a seatbelt-remembering minigame, and daily protein consumption tracking, and this book does an admirable job of bringing that fever-dream to reality. However, when I think about what I want from a Shadowrun game specifically, I'm not sure that punishing reckless gunplay and making the magic users constantly fear the possibility of losing their schtick is really a part of the picture. I mean, there is literally a piece of equipment in this game where if you have it and fail the wrong roll, your character gets leukemia. There's a context where that is hilarious, but it's not "sci-fi/fantasy heist capers."

All-in-all, I cannot bring myself to recommend this book's rules expansions. They mainly serve to create an environment where subjecting yourself to invasive, unnecessary, elective surgery is a total pain in the ass, when, in reality, all I've ever asked of a cyberware book is "let me be big, scary robot man plz."

Luckily, Man and Machine: Cyberware is not just a rules expansion, it's also an equipment book and in that latter role, it serves admirably. Some of the new cyberware is questionable - why would you install a flashlight in your eye-socket when you can just carry a flashlight. Some of it is a little goofy - extendable limbs is just some straight-ass Inspector Gadget shit. But there was some solid stuff here. You can get a machine implanted in your inner ear that is so effective at improving your balance that you need to re-learn how to drop prone voluntarily. The Data Filter - which temporarily shuts down its owner's ability to form new long-term memories and is mostly installed involuntarily on various servants and administrative assistants who don't need to be remembering their employer's meetings - is an effective bit of cyberpunk horror and a good excuse to kick off any number of plots, even if it's an unlikely choice for PCs. When I wasn't being drowned in new rules, I was having fun.

The strangest thing, overall, about this book has got to be the conspicuous absence of transhuman ideology. I'd say it was a generational thing, but transhumanism has been a thing since at least the 50s, and in any event this book was only 3 years prior to GURPS: Transhuman Space, so it's likely either an oversight or an intentional omission. I'm not sure it's a theme the game needs, per se. It might interfere with the punk elements to have both the transhumanist enthusiastic objectification of the body and the capitalist coerced objectification of the body existing in the same context. However, the absence of a positive motivation towards transformation did make me wonder, on multiple occasions, why anyone would be doing this to themselves. Maybe the existence of smart phones has made me jaded, but I just can't imagine wanting to get part of your skull removed to allow yourself to send faxes with your mind. Not when there's a handy pocket-sized device that does it for me.

I don't necessarily think it's a significant flaw - having chrome body parts is just a part of the overall genre aesthetic and would probably need to be there even if they were merely superficial - but I do think that maybe a lack of ideological drive might have negatively influenced the curation of the book's cyberware. Like maybe, if you realized that giving a person entirely novel senses would change their most fundamental perceptions of reality and subsequently have knock-on effects on how they chose to exist within the world, and if you realized that this change could be an end in itself, and you wrote your fiction around the idea that society was rapidly transforming under the weight of a new and unprecedented epistemological diversity, then maybe you'd get more heady, thought-provoking stuff like the Data Filter and less silly stuff like Cyberskates.

Which is not to say I'm entirely down on whimsy. A character who, faced with the Faustian power of unlimited body modification, chose to get integrated roller skates installed into their feet, can be fun and funny and challenging. The objectification of flesh could lead to the triviality of flesh, making the fact that Cyberskates are kind of a joke into a theme. It's just that I'm pretty sure that's not what Man and Machine: Cyberware is trying to do.

I can have this confidence because of the Cybermancy chapter. The premise behind cybermancy is that corporate engineers, surgeons, and sorcerers have developed a process in which they load down a victim with so much cyberware that their biological body would die without the application of foul necromantic rituals that bind the soul to a terrible prison of cold steel and cancerous, subjugated flesh. These cyberzombies rank as the corps' ultimate weapons and shock-troops, but they must be fed a continuous supply of drugs, alchemical reagents, and electronically-induced memories of their human existence, lest they lose the will to live and rot away in a melancholic yearning for the freedom of the grave.  And the bulk of the chapter is devoted to complex rules that assume the PCs will want to become one.

It's not my place to yuck anyone's yum, but that is a thematic whiff if ever there was one. On the one hand, kudos to Shadowrun for not making a major setting element "NPC-only," but on the other hand, get yourself sorted out, Shadowrun. Like, really.

Overall, I did not especially enjoy reading Man and Machine: Cyberware, but I can respect it as the sort of book that wasn't really meant to be enjoyed. I guess I can use the equipment and some of the rules and supply my own themes as a GM.

Ukss Contribution: Carcerands, a pharmaceutical technology that creates a kind of molecular sheath around toxic or medicinal substances. The body gradually breaks down the carcerand and only then is it subject to the substance inside. This allows for all sorts of shenanigans, my favorite of which is giving someone a delayed-action poison and then blackmailing them with the antidote. It's something I would never do to a player as a GM, but it's a great start to a plot. Like maybe Mr. Johnson was on the receiving end and rather than submit to the blackmail, hires the players to steal the antidote. 

I just think it's a great thing for a setting to have in its back pocket.