Cyber City Oedo is a lot of fun - a three part OVA about three prisoners who are offered a chance to reduce their thousand year sentences (for the crime of being total badasses) by donning bomb collars and going on suicide missions for the cyber-police.
Nacarbac
joined 2 years ago
It's definitely doable in Star Trek, though non-essential genetic engineering inside the Federation is one of their few holdout prejudices.
There are other ways - it'd probably be "fairly easy" to rig a transporter into the holodeck, cross a few wires, and be uploaded into the machine, because the safety manual for both of those is just the sentence "do not turn on, if you turned it on back away from the console, if you did not back away: pray" repeated a thousand times in progressively larger letters.
I'm most of the way through Vol 1, and it got a lot more engaging. The mass of repetition and minor variation to establish concepts mostly ended (and when it comes up it's in much smaller chunks) and it got into some infuriating and fascinating historical analysis. Perhaps try skipping to those chapters to see if they work for you?
Well GM engagement is supposed to be a big part of GURPS/HERO chargen, to make sure that nonfunctional or inappropriate characters dont happen unless part of the campaign tone is supposed to be having fun with that.
It was part of the series of prototypes for 4E. As they were near the end of the 3.5 run they started loosening up and experimenting, though of course someone (Mearls? I forget) got into power and scrapped the entire 4E project for their own pet idea.
It's an old one, but Roadside Picnic and its loose movie adaptation STALKER are both very good. Not quite a "true" post-apoc as it'd be today, in that The Zone is a small place in a "normal" world that the protagonists choose to enter, but they certainly confront the ending of "what came before" through an Event of sudden and total alienation.
The Earth Abides is also good, a very early story about the aftermath of a superplague. Life goes on, and humans remain human.
And "parts" also includes whatever salvage piles they have, to see if they can rig up a compete thingumabob.
Storywise, Keanu Reeves fucked it up. Playing it again after getting bored, for the Phantom Liberty expansion, I liked his character a lot more - while it barely ever tries to do more than a surface-level "I hate corpos because they're mean and not cool, which is why I'm mean and cool", it's not like he's actually wrong.
But having him there surely took away vast amounts of care from everything else - the really easy example being how Jackie, the starting Best Bud, is totally sidelined by wanting him out of the way for More Keanu.
But what they do with More Keanu is mostly just More Bitter Quips with V slowly going from "you're literally the biggest loser in history, you fucking nuked Arasaka and it did nothing" to "hmm, interesting" - while Jackie's dream was a nihilistic heroic fantasy, it's one that actually could change into something pretty cool over the game, and unlike V he has an actual personality and sense of the world, which is vital to cyberpunk. Even JC Denton had something of a soul, and his flatness and distance were deliberate things done to him by his childhood and training - he could carry a conversation and be the one saying the most interesting part of it.spoiler
well, flatlined
Phantom Liberty is a big step up in writing and delivery, and it even manages to give V some vague ideology... alas not particularly good ones.
spoiler
A: I'm a cool mercenary but I will DIE for the President of the New United States. Being CIA-ish is cool, sometimes you gotta make hard choices and stuff.
B: I'm too cool to be trusting, but like, I'll kill a lotta people for you Madam President. Being CIA-ish is cool, but none of you seem happy.
Optional: Songbird, I have known you for about five minutes of conversation and I wuv you, your very obvious lies are a Big Surprise somehow.
The ending was kinda neat, albeit totally stupid. Killer end credits song. Would have been a great movie (since it's basically Escape from Night City), and they used Idris Elba with much more restraint. Needed a Snake Plisken cameo.
One of the Comedy Bang Bang regulars does a good Werner Herzog.
The nitty-gritty of Shadowrun's version is actually pretty good - it's not actually the soul that is harmed by augmentation, it's "the ability of the soul to recognise its material-plane anchor". Thus most purely restorative things like cloned limbs or corrective surgery, and such don't have an Essence cost (or it's minimal), as there's no sudden disjoint - the astral form was always that way, or organically changes at a rate it can follow.
Essence loss has no real effect on characters IIRC (some effects on getting magic to work on you, maybe a bit of social stuff but with the same "probably the social phenomena of being a walking killing machine, and forgetting to turn off your Wired Reflexes in public" rather than soul damage), until the point that your astral form no longer recognises your body and falls off. This isn't presented morally, it's just a metaphysical phenomenon that can be understood in-setting and therefore addressed.
Advanced tech and magic was slowly beginning to understand how to create augmentations that respected this - geneware, symbiotes, nanotech, to begin with - and had even begun to work on a way to restore that connection (via using the Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which is capable of Essence restoration somehow).
The only real EEEEVIL cyberpsychosis was from the Cyberzombies, a crude and classically corporate black project on "we wanna make supersoldiers but they die if we stuff too many guns in their skull" where they "solve" the problem by getting Blood Mages to staple their dissolving astral form back into their should-be-corpse and add Forced Memory Stimulators to try and constantly trick them into thinking they're alive in between killing sprees. It's pretty fucked.
But I stopped caring about keeping up with Shadowrun with 4E (because of the embezzlement from writers, and subsequent scab takeover of the setting), so who knows how they present it nowadays...
Switching it around on the theme of misuse - motivation and praise might sometimes fit as violence (though one whose damage is probably delayed temporally). Army Recruiters seeming to be a very easy example.