One of the big advantages of stubbornly reading your entire rpg collection (and of foolishly collecting random books out of a misguided sense of completionism) is that occasionally you'll come across a dark horse that is much more interesting than its bland title and generic back-cover blurb make it seem. A big disadvantage is that sometimes, as is the case with Cyberscape (Owen K.C. Stevens), said dark horse will be too short to fully develop its best ideas. I guess that's why it's a dark horse, though. If it were twice as long and consistently as good as its best parts, it wouldn't have been so easy to overlook.
At its outline, Cyberscape is a book that hews closely to the standard d20 Modern gameplan. It offers a broad but shallow cross-section of different approaches to its core idea (cybernetic implants) for purposes of allowing GM to pick and choose a la cart, which elements they want to use to build their own custom setting. And to be clear, it does nothing particularly special with the format. It's exactly the same sort of book as d20 Past or d20 Apocalypse, except the subject matter was narrower and it only had one sample setting instead of three. . .
Although, in fairness, there's a bit at the end where it suggests mixing "Cyberrave" with some of d20 Modern's other mini-setting, and while the suggestions are only a paragraph each, half of those paragraphs are sublime:
Cyberrave + Bughunters: Privately contracted mil-sf among the stars as cybernetically-enhanced mercenaries fight hostile aliens to work off the debt from their implants and vigilante gangs defend the slums because defending against an alien invasion is just another hollowed-out public utility that turns a profit by immiserating the poor.
Cyberrave + Wasteland: Megacorporations control the few oases where human life is still possible on a blasted Earth.
Cyberrave + Star Law: Humanity survives its cyberpunk era to become a peaceful and democratic interstellar civilization, but government agents must be on constant guard for corporate revanchists who threaten to turn isolated planets into new capitalist hellscapes.
Also, one of the suggestions was to throw Urban Arcana into the mix, but that was just an even more on-the-nose version of "store-brand Shadowrun."
Which sort of captures the duality of d20 Modern as a whole. It has some absolutely delightful high points, but the median experience conveys a kind of stoic pride in offering the blandest take possible. And I don't mean that as an insult . . . exactly. In a way I kind of admire is imperial ambition to put the d20 flag in the exact mathematical center of every genre's bell curve.
Case in point: the "Computer Networks" chapter. It adds d20 rules for the genre-standard inexplicable virtual reality internet and the deckers . . . um, "node-runners" who specialize in it. And you can just copy-paste all my wool-gathering from Shadowrun's Matrix supplement. The vrnet adds nothing to anything, but it's not uniquely pointless. It's something that you've come to expect in every cyberpunk game and it's here and it's presented in a pragmatically middle-of-the-road way (node-runners have "avatars" instead of physical bodies, and instead of some elaborate alternate ruleset, the avatars have their own character sheet and basically just do normal adventuring stuff in the vrnet . . . the obligatory online night club even has washrooms, used exclusively for "private encounters").
What makes Cyberscape a dark horse is that the workhorse stuff is peppered with inspired details. There's an entire chapter of "Alternate Cybernetics" that fit better into different fantasy or sci-fi milieus - golemtech, nanotech, etc. And one of the alternatives is necrotech. As in, you use the stats of the cybernetic implants, but instead of being advanced technology, they are chimerical grafts taken from dead bodies and animated through necromantic rituals.
In true d20 fashion, the book gives bad advice on how to use this information - "Necrotics are never common even in the most magic-heavy campaigns." Are you fucking kidding me? That should have been the entire book. It's the sort of idea that can anchor a campaign setting. The best way to use it is as the world's central fantastic conceit.
Luckily, the comic-book-style cyberpunk-meets-horror practically writes itself. In addition to the standard implants, there's a bunch of new implants, many of which involve attaching a vampire's internal organs to yourself to gain its powers (gaseous form, charm gaze, energy drain). And necrotic implants don't heal naturally. The main way to repair them is through "coffin nails," cigarettes enchanted with dark magic. They'll fix your superhumanly strong zombie arm, but still give you lung cancer.
Sometimes you are invited to witness perfection. I'm imagining a world where vampires are an endangered species, hunted not to protect humanity but to provide raw materials for high end weapons and luxury enhancements for the super-rich. A mercenary monster hunter for hire takes a long drag off a cigarette, knowing that it's slowly killing them, but also that it's that very death energy that gives them the edge they need.
And that's not an isolated incident. From the description of a prestige class: "As the cyberwarrior grows more experienced, his cybernetic devices literally grow with him, eat away at his biological organs and replacing them with more effective cybernetic alternatives."
I mean yes, please. Or on the goofier end, you can buy a full-body conversion kit that changes your character into a centaur or a mermaid. In between is the "proverb chip," a purely grid-filling implant that exists to boost your Wisdom score, but because of d20's weird legacy attribute names is called a "proverb chip." The book is unclear about how exactly it works (it's "programmed with the common sense of a lifetime of experiences") but I'm imagining that it monitors your environment and occasionally prompts you with a relevant proverb.
Aside: the implications of this are unfortunately not explored, but there is canonically a necrotic version of the proverb chip, which I guess means that in a game world that uses that option, your character can pay a dark sorcerer to desecrate the body of a holy man, remove the portion of the brain responsible for their wisdom, and then magically torture the flesh back to a semblance of life so that it can provide you with spiritual and emotional guidance. And if there's a worse thing to have surgically implanted in your skull, I'd be very interested to hear what that might be.
Overall, Cyberscape was a conspicuously slight book that had a lot more to offer than its meager pagecount could deliver. The parts of it that weren't awesome were nonetheless forgettably competent, and that made for an extremely tolerable reading experience. I'm comfortable calling it an essential companion to d20 Future.
Ukss Contribution: With all the praise I've heaped on it, the temptation is for me to take something from the necrotech section, but there was something I liked even more. Ironically, it was from my least favorite chapter in the entire book. After describing a thoroughly predictable vrnet, the book explores variants, one of which is a magical internet that allows hackers to connect to the astral plane and access offline devices. Which would be cool enough, but then the book does the thing that I always hope books will do and pushes the idea just a little bit further - "as a result it can even access print works with no electronic component - even novels can be hacked."
I love, love, love it when magic defies physical intuition while still following internally consistent rules. It makes no sense to hack a book, but you're using an information network and books contain information so . . .
In Ukss it will also be possible to hack printed books via the Astral Web.
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