Cyberpunk Tech 8

The MIT developed an exosceleton that attaches to your legs and helps you carry an backpack. More here. (Via boing-boing)

The Big Book of Drugs for Cyberpunk 2020

The Big Book of DrugsTM for Cyberpunk 2020

[This article contains real and fictional drugs to be used with the Cyberpunk 2020 roleplaying game. The author does not advice condone the use of real drugs. Using drugs as a topic in a roleplaying game should used be resposibly. See the licence at the end of this article.]

The More Then Complete List of Drugs for Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0.

Hi. A friend told me to see you. I hear you need stuff, right?

Sure, yes, all right. Don’t be so shy, chombatta. Keep cool. This little thingy makes it impossible to overhear us. Relax! But then you don’t look like you are after Dowers. I guess you need Speed, Man. Am I right? I have it all. ALL. You just need to tell me what you want.

– at a corner near you.

This is the ultimate and complete “BIG BOOK OF DRUGS” based on Ocelot’s Drug Lab 101. I guess it can be used with normal Cyberpunk 2020, too. Check it out!

Your characters won’t use drugs? They read the drugs in the Cyberpunk 2020 Rulebook and said: “No way?” Shock ’em. Give your Boosters all those nice REF-boosting drugs. As NPCs they don’t really have to worry about side effects. If little 10-year-old Billy high on Lace is faster then the partys solo, your players will reconsider… Especially if little Bill is one hell of a shooter with his boosted REF…

Click here to see BIG BOOK OF DRUGS


Creative Commons License

Creative Commons-Licence

The Humble Smartlink Revisited

The Humble Smartlink Revisited

[This article deals with the benefits and problems of directly plugging a gun into your nervous system – what probably every cyberpunk PC everywhere does all the time.]

Author: Chris Lupton.
Taken without permission from his site at (now dead). It pains me to violate his copyright, but the article is just to good to let it be forgotten. I’m sorry Chris and hope you approve what I do here.

The History of and Information about Smartguns

Origins
Operation
Advanced Systems

Origins

The first smartgun systems were developed independently by the US and German militaries in the 1990s. By 2001, smartguns had been adopted by several corporations and were beginning to appear on the street. The US military created the Milspec Smartgun Standard (MSS1) in 2003, after disastrous compatibility problems amongst the smartguns used in central America caused embarrassing problems and several fatalities. Today, almost every smartsystem in the world conforms to this standard. To ignore it means ignoring the large profits to be made selling smartlinks to the US military. In 2013 an improved standard (MSS2) was released, though it has yet to be universally adopted. The army considered it too expensive for its benefits and has yet to make compliance a requirement in weapons trials.The MSS1 standard was essentially very simple. It defined the data protocol between the smartgun and the neuralware smartlink, in terms of required and optional information/functions. This meant that one smartgun link mounted in a neuralware processor or smartgoggles could interpret the data from any smartlinked weapon. Continue reading “The Humble Smartlink Revisited”

Cyberpunk Tech 7

human brain / computer interfaceIn my little series of Cybepunk tech allready available today: The brain-computer interface. The very core of every cyberpunk book – the ability to plug yourself into the matrix.

Well, today you can use it to surf Second Life. Second life is NOT the virtual reality I imagined reading Neuromancer, but some like it there:

All a user has to do to control his/her avatar is imagine performing various movements. The activity monitored by the headpiece is read and plotted by an electroencephalogram, which relays it to a computer running a brain wave analysis algorithm that interprets the imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then translates the data into signals which can be used to control the movements of the user’s on-screen avatar in real-time.

As usual, boing-boing has the details (including a link to a video)

Zombie Drug

I found an article about Scopolamine on boing-boing. It’s a really scary drug, taking your free will away and allready available. Criminals love it – they can force the victim to give them all its money or use them sexually. Its also very likely to kill the user right away. That makes it instant cyberpunk 2020 game material for me. I figured I would need some hard game rules for the drug, so my first stop was Ocelots Drug Lab 101 and the wonderfully helpful Javascript Tool Night-flyer provided.

This is the result:

Scopolamine (Zombie Drug)

Drug Effects:
HypnoticUntimed Side Effects:
Death
Drug Features:
Longer DurationTimed Side Effects:
Loss of Inhibition
Memory Loss
Totals:
Strength: +5
Difficulty: 21
Duration: Long
(1d10 hours)
Legality: Type A Illegal
Drug Form: Powdered/Snorted
Time to Effect: 1d2 Min
Purchase Price: 0 (50eb)

Since Ocelots Rules are mainly aimed at creating game balancing rules, the drug ist without a purchase price – who would willingly take the drug? So I assigned a price tag of 50eb – seems reasonable to me.

[Scopolamine] is as close to pure evil as it gets, a tiny amount of the powder administered to the victim causes one of two effects, a) death, or b) complete loss of free will. Criminals are usually hoping for the latter, as it enables them to tell victims to empty their bank accounts, give away their car, perform sex acts, basically whatever the criminal dictates.

This is where Scopolamine has got its reputation as the “zombie drug”, victims appear completely sober and rational, but they’re really just automatons. (Source for the description: boing-boing)