Cybernetics
Cybernetics in terms of gameplay mechanics are a type of augmentation trait that players may optionally purchase. Unlike regular traits, which are taken only during landmark advancement, Cybernetics can be purchased at any time, provided the character meets the base requirements and has the appropriate story-driven access, including the downtime to recover. Cybernetic augmentations are artificial constructs which are attached to the body as implants or prostheses and which enhance the natural abilities of the host, often quite considerably. The effects of each kind of cybernetic has its own unique properties in addition to those discussed more broadly here. Having such a cybernetic usually represents having both an Active Trait and a Passive Trait.
Metadata
In addition to gameplay mechanics, cybernetics-as-traits have some important metadata worth noting.
Periods of Availability
Like all technologies, Cybernetics evolved over time. A well-written Cybernetics Trait includes enough historical information to make it clear when the cybernetic became available and for whom, in historical terms. This helps Facilitators and players make decisions about which cybernetics to use that helps them fit within the overall progression of the Chain Breakers setting.
Manufacturer
Of particular note considering the role of Megacorporations in the setting is which company produced the design, and who their parent megacorp ultimately is. This is largely a bit of window-dressing for many purposes but may have campaign implications. If the party is a group of Chain Breakers attempting to thwart the ambitions of Axis Polytechnical, they won't want to use augs built by Axis subsidiaries, or might take special precautions when doing so. Similarly, if the party is mostly Corporate Drones working for Diversity Conglomerated, they might focus on augs built by their company's subsidiaries, and at Facilitator discretion, may be either required or encouraged financially to do so.
Implanted versus Prosthetic Augmentation
As mentioned above, cybernetic augmentations can very broadly be split into two categories: implanted or prosthetic. Note that this is not a precise medical deliniation. For example, many of the more advanced prosthetic limbs available used "base joints" which included crafted or cultivated neural interfaces that are arguably "implanted" in medical terms, but for rules purposes are considered prosthetics. These special edge cases should be discussed within their own entries for anything that would affect mechanics.
The chief distinction in gameplay rules terms is whether or not the augment is "externally accessible to the body" as well as whether or not the device is of a nature that requires the user to take anti-rejection drugs to avoid medical complications over the long term. If the former is true, the augmentation is considered prosthetic. If the latter is true, the augmentation is considered implanted. Both features can be true simultaneously.
Theft of Prosthetic Augmentations
Main Article: Stealing Cybernetic Augmentations
Augmentations which are prosthetic may be stolen by nefarious characters, though this is not necessarily a trivial process (and depending on the brutality of your campaign, may also be true of implants). A stolen augmentation is not readily or immediately usable and must be chainbroken to restore its functionality if it wasn't broken already. A stolen augmentation also carries a risk of being partially or wholly non-functional depending on the theft method in question and may need to be repaired. However, once put in good order and properly chainbroken, a stolen cybernetic may be installed like any other.
Risk of Implant Rejection
A cybernetic implant may be rejected by the body's immune system. This can happen when the user loses access their anti-rejection medication, usually Regedofin as the most common cause. While there is a rare gene mutation that prevents rejection of cybernetics, in the earlier phases of the adoption of Cybernetic augmentations this was extremely rare, even unknown.
During rejection, the host of the implant becomes very ill, possibly even risking death. Fortunately in the majority of cases, even once rejection begins, its is usually possible to stabilize the patient with supportive care (including resuming treatment with Regedofin). However, in some cases, the implant itself may become impaired in function and require surgical intervention to repair.
Owing to these requirements and the generally poor nature of humans with regard to building medication habits, Implanted Autoinjector fed with Regedofin were an extremely popular implant shortly after their introduction to the market.
Powering Cybernetic Devices
Many cybernetic devices were passively powered, regenerating their necessary standby voltages and currents using natural biological or biomechanical processes, like capturing waste energy from the movement of the body or low-level voltages via thermocouples; some even relied on extremely long-lived power sources. If a cybernetic replaced a normal human body function without enhancing it, it was usually of this type.
However, many cybernetic augmentations went beyond, often well beyond, ordinary human capacity, which is why they were called that. In such cases, additional electrical power systems were required and many methods of doing this were trialed. Ultimately, a body-wide power management system called Grid3 was established as an open standard and adopted by all the major manufacturers. Additionally, many augmentations required consumable components that had to be replaced periodically.
Grid3 Electrical Power Standard
The Grid3 Electrical Power Standard was created by the MSF Assistive Technology Working Group in 2022 as a means of standardizing power delivery to cybernetic augmentations, which was intended to address a rapidly-evolving situation of conflicting standards creating unnecessarily complex management workflows for patients since the widespread introduction of the technology, circa 2018. The intention was to manage the increasing power demand and rapidly evolving capabilities of cybernetic augmentation well in advance. Gran Turnbull, widely credited with being the first Chain Breaker to use the term, referred to the standard in a contemporary blog post as "the ATX Standard Human Body".
Grid3 established appropriate conductor designs, power level limits, and designs for both implantable and external battery packs, as well as a variety of inter-device communications protocols, all with an eye toward user safety, and since its introduction has largely become the standard. (Facilitator note: Unless it is necessary for storytelling purposes, assume all augmentations that require electrical power are Grid3 compatible). The name is a reference to the idea that the grid is the third of three "grid" systems of the human body, alongside the nervous and circulatory systems.
It became a standard practice for anyone getting their first cybernetic augment to either first, or simultaneously, obtain a basic set of cybernetics called a Grid3 Harness. This harness included the basic framework for "major" trunk connection routing for the power and data lines, as well as a centrally-implanted unit for power storage, and surface "ports" for assistive charging using either mains adapters or (as was the usual preference) Biocells. In some cases, such as prosthetic augmentations with especially prominent access (example: whole or partial limb replacement prostheses) the device was instead powered directly by the use of biocells.
In gameplay-mechanical terms, activating the Active Trait property of your implant has a cost represented as your Grid3 Charge Pool. Many augmentations are available to increase the size of the pool and you can replenish it in a variety of ways, such as through the abilities of other traits or the use of Biocells.
Consumable Reagents
Some augmentations consumed reagents or other elements in order to provide their function. The first type of cybernetic that comes to mind when discussing this is the iconic class of cybernetic weapons, almost all of which consumed one or more kinds of ammunition. However, a far more common example of this was the humble Implanted Autoinjector, which consumed any of a variety of appropriately-packaged medication cartridges to dose the patient when certain conditions were met, or on a certain schedule.
Depending on the specific augmentation being discussed, the difficulty of replacing these reagents varied, though often times the solution was simply a port somewhere on the body or the prosthetic that could be accessed to replace a cartridge, top up or change a fluid level, and so on. Also, the requirement of Consumable Reagents was not mutually exclusive to a requirement for enhanced Grid3 power.
Risks of Cybernetic Devices
Above the risk of medical rejection detailed earlier, there were risks to the use of cybernetic devices. Despite their implanted nature, not all were designed to the high standard the average consumer would expect of medical devices. Many had "user convenience" features that became threat surfaces impacting the devices themselves. Some were even occasionally constructed to be deliberately backdoored. Yet others were constructed with a mind to either planned or unconsidered obsolescence and suffered equipment failures and breakdown.
Remote Hijack
The remote takeover of a cybernetic device was an often-feared, and occasionally-manifested, threat to people who used cybernetics, and one of the main fears that drove the formation of groups like the Disconnected. The practice existed in the zeitgeist with the term brainjacking, owing to the usual fear and occasional reality of an attacker corrupting one or more cranial implants, even to the point of causing malfunctions in other augmentations or creating false sensory input through the abuse of ocular or aural implanted systems.
This was not the most common of attack vectors or even especially easily achieved when it did occur, in part because the executive classes of even the most underhanded of the Megacorporations tended to make use of these products themselves, and this tended to drive advances in security systems. Indeed, most devices were not wirelessly accessible at all, and those that were were often heavily sandboxed. Still, the fear of Brainjacking became commonplace enough that it was even occasionally used as a legal defense.
Individual augmentations had a property known as the Hardening Score that represented their ability to resist these sorts of attacks.
Denial of Service
A much more common attack against prosthetics and implants of all types was denial of service. More than a few state actors and megacorporations maintained equipment and software packages that would allow them to defeat cybernetics' safety features and prevent the cybernetic from operating correctly. This ranged from the use of special jamming signals to prevent informatics augmentations from making the connections they needed to outright tricking the entire Grid3 system in a person into detecting a fault and shutting down to protect the user.
Individual augmentations had a property known as the Hardening Score that represented their ability to resist these sorts of attacks.
Equipment Failure
If sufficiently damaged or abused, cybernetic augmentations could outright fail. Any time a cybernetic with the damaged property is used, it has a risk of failure equal to its Fragility Score, against which the player makes a Failure Check. Except where noted in a specific cybernetic augmentation's entry, the outcome of such a failure was usually that the equipment would be unusable for 1d3 rounds while it became unstuck, rebooted its firmware, or so on.
Do note that in the event of a critical failure of any skill check or aptitude check that relies on a cybernetic, the player must make a failure check against that fragility score. If they fail the check the cybernetic becomes damaged. See cybernetic repairs for details on recovering from damaged augmentations.
Obtaining Cybernetic Implants
Especially as the Slow Burn became the Corporate Wars era, Cybernetic Augmentations were rapidly becoming a commodity item, with people replacing more and more of their native body-mass with these augmentations. However, the relatively high availability of these augmentations belied the necessarily invasive nature of these augments. Most heavy augment users accrued large amounts of medical debt in obtaining the upgrades, or obtained the upgrades through compensation programs provided by their employers. The heaviest of augmented users were usually accident victims who had obtained many of their augments as replacements for damaged or destroyed limbs and organs.
Invasiveness of Installation
The invasiveness of installation tended to vary based on the type and nature of the augment. For obvious reasons, obtaining a leg prosthesis was often less medically invasive than installing an augmented heart, eye, or a cranial augmentation. However, even the most minor of cybernetics procedures was effectively surgical in nature and involved fairly significant mental and physical recovery as a result.
Immediate Recovery Time
This varied from procedure to procedure and should be included in the entry for each augmentation, but installing an augmentation was not like obtaining a new phone or replacing parts on an automobile. Patients could be hospitalized anywhere from an outpatient basis to a few weeks recovering from the immediate installation and receiving physiotherapy to adapt to new bodily conditions, as well as recovering from the physical strain of surgery.
Long-Term Health Implications
Any implanted augmentation necessarily created issues with immune rejection. As a result, most people with augmentations that went beyond basic prostheses (which were an increasing minority of replacement types) required the drug Regedofin, owing in part to the widespread adoption of Grid3. This lead to dependency on the drug as well as longer-term implications as Regedofin had, by its very nature, a mildly immunosuppressant effect. This also exacerbated existing problems of wealth inequality, worldwide.
Legality of Purchase
Not all augmentations could be legally obtained, and not all augmentations that could be legally obtained necessarily were. Chainbreaking was the practice of defeating the blockchain protections of cybernetic implants (and other devices) in order to restore their proper function when stolen, and other implants were banned by various degrees in most places. All cybernetics entries have a legality field that comments on this problem. This is especially problematic for augmentations that are explicitly designed to be weapons.
"Slots" and Limitations
Unsurprisingly, there's a limit to how many augmentations a person can obtain, because there is a limit to a person's physical size as well as to the extent by which their brains can handle changes in body plan. Facilitators are encouraged to have players explain their way around these limits for storytelling reasons or for the purposes of Rule Zero.
In general, every cybernetic augmentation replaces one body part, be that a limb or an organ. A person may have any combination of augmentations they can afford, supposing that none of them conflict. They cannot, for example, have two replacement hearts or two lung augmentations, but can replace both arms.
The Grid3 Harness modification does not consume a slot for these purposes, but various expansions to it might. Additionally, some prosthetic augmentations are entirely external and are noted as such on their entries.