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Hello Agents and Operatives,
Another quick peek at some of the files coming from Human Resources in tomorrow's Backers Only preview! I'm off to enjoy the rest of this Canadian holiday - though it's pretty rainy, and what does a long weekend mean anymore, am I right?! - and I'll be back tomorrow to dig into the gadgets and goodies with you!
A creation of the Iteration X Construct operating under the cover of Cambridge Cybertechnologies in Massachusetts, AEGIS-01 is a next-generation humanoid robot designed for urban law enforcement. Although functionally identical to the other 19 AEGIS robots, unit 01 has been upgraded with self-awareness to most effectively command its “siblings” in the field. It’s the only AEGIS unit enabled by its programming to inflict potentially lethal harm on a human (though it can assume control of the others to fire a killing shot, if necessary; see Brute Force Override, under Attacks/Powers).
Obviously, AEGIS-01 is worlds more primitive than even an old HIT Mark V, but it has something going for it that those clunkers don’t: the acceptance of the Masses. AEGIS-01 looks like the kind of robot people expect to see coming out of an advanced cybertechnology firm, these days. When it jogs in formation and navigates obstacles with the other AEGIS units around the Cambridge Cybertechnologies parking lot, people don’t scream in horror — they whip out cell phones to record shaky videos and upload them to YouTube.
Whenever outside of the lab, AEGIS-01 knows to be on its best behavior and not to let on that it can think for itself in ways that robots aren’t yet supposed to be able to. Still, it looks forward eagerly to the opportunity to get out in the field (once squeamish human politicians in one nation or another have been persuaded, bought off, or otherwise brought in line to allow for non-biological law enforcement officers) and bring some much-needed order to the chaotic lives of hapless and undisciplined organics.
Image: AEGIS-01 stands almost seven feet in height and weighs a few hundred pounds. It’s big and bulky, with angular construction, incorporating heavy plating and even a torso-mounted roll cage. It walks with a gait that looks slow and awkward to humans but has a strangely elegant run. The robot is dark blue, accented with yellow and white, though its paint job is pretty dinged up from all the stress testing it goes through. Its head is a boxy sensor packet on a swivel, totally unmistakable for anything even remotely human. By contrast, its hands look like articulated gauntlets and are capable of all the fine manipulation of a normal human hand.
Roleplaying Notes: You’re the next logical step in law enforcement: a tireless officer incapable of bias or error. You’re impatient for your chance to prove what your kind can do to clean up the streets and impose real consequences on the kind of selfish, weak-minded organics who feel they’re above the rule of law. You’d never make the foolish, shortsighted, bigoted mistakes that biological cops do. You were designed to be better than them, after all.
Jon was always a lot like his dad. He grew up just as tall, slender, dark-haired, and able to charm the birds from the trees, or at least all the humans around them. Both are determined to keep humanity safe — and both have a deep and abiding love for building killer robots with the most up-to-date AIs, lasers, sensors, and explosives they could persuade the Union to give them. Jon, being every bit as skilled as his father at finding excuses to make things go Boom, gets to play with a truly impressive range of destructive toys — erh, materials.
Not everyone approves of his fascination. His mother didn’t, for instance, and she died in a stupid little raid on a group of deviants. Nine-year-old Jon and his father dealt with their devastation by building ever bigger and better and more deadly robots, and his father helped Jon apply for training at the first possible moment.
It wasn’t until he’d completed training that his friend, Ree, told him of the existence of the Initiative, and he started having to face the fact that humanity needed more than just someone to jump in and kill anything that threatened them.
He’s still best at making things go Boom, but working with Ree has taught him how to recognize what some of those other needs are. He’s learning how to build new kinds of devices now, and thinking that perhaps it’s time to look for some projects of his own.
Image: Young, fresh-faced, and handsome, Dr. Wright has a warm smile and infectious demeanor that energizes a room when he enters. He has embraced cybernetic replacements after a mishap with an explosive design cost him his right arm at the elbow. Fortunately, working in a joint Iteration X/Progenitor Construct means that such an injury is little more than an inconvenience.
Roleplaying Notes: You are an enthusiastic example of a true believer in the Union’s goals. You want to make the world a better place and Iteration X has given you the tools to do so. Your enthusiasm is a bit overwhelming to some of the other members of Iteration X, but you don’t mind. As long as they don’t get in your way — more importantly as long as they don’t get in the way of your work — you don’t much care what they think.
Focus: Jonathan is a big believer in the changing world and adheres to the embrace the thresholdparadigm. Through Cybernetics, Hypertech, and a touch of Weird Science, Jonathan focuses his Adjustments and Procedures. Much of his work revolves around Body Modification, Brews and Concoctions, and Weapons, but he is looking to expand into other disciplines as well.
He’d only just had the nutrient solution hosed off his naked body and been brought to dry under UV lights when they handed him “the only outfit you’ll ever need”: crisp black blazer and slacks, black dress shoes, black tie, black hat, white shirt, sunglasses. It seems no one, back then, imagined that a “vat-baby” would survive to see 40. The Progenitors were still perfecting the whole operation, in those days, after all, and a lot of his brothers didn’t even survive the accelerated maturation process, let alone make it to the millennium.
It was about fifteen years ago that the brass pulled him off active duty. He’d been tracking down an RD: some punk handing out drugs that showed the Masses things they weren’t meant to see. The kid ran so fast. Not unnaturally so, just faster than a guy who was, biologically, pushing 50 after decades of often physically grueling work and scores of serious injuries. His aim wasn’t what it used to be. When he pulled his piece and fired in a vain attempt to bring down the target, the bullet killed someone, but not the person he’d been aiming for.
There was a ceremony. The local Union gave him some bullshit award for a lifetime of meritorious service. They made him turn in his sidearm. They even confiscated his wardrobe.
It was the first time he could ever remember crying.
In his transition to “civilian life,” they told him he’d need a mundane identity. He decided on William Lazlo. William, for his agent cover as “Mr. Williams,” and Lazlo for the avuncular Man in Gray who’d showed him the ropes, back when. Out of some misguided sense of respect for his long years of dedication (or perhaps just charity), they set him up with an easy job reviewing paperwork at a small data-processing Construct. Some days, he wishes they’d just taken him out behind the building and double-tapped him in the back of the head, instead. It would’ve been a quicker, cleaner, more merciful way to kill him than locking an aging predator in a cushy cage and waiting for it to die of natural causes.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Image: William looks to be an almost unnaturally pale man in his 60s, with alopecia universalis, but otherwise utterly unremarkable features. He still favors dark suits, despite the decidedly more casual dress code of his current Construct, and prefers to wear fedoras when out in public. (None of that trilby nonsense, thank you.) As a small nod to his old mirrorshades, the glasses he wears for his nearsightedness have polarizing lenses.
Roleplaying Notes: Every day that you plunk away at a keyboard is an insult to the decades of loyalty you gave to the Union, but you were designed not to complain, so you do as you’re told, all the while hating every waking moment. Your resentment is quiet, disciplined, orderly, and stoic; just like a Black Suit is supposed to be.
Focus: When you live in A World of Gods and Monsters, someone needs to destroy not just the aliens, extradimensional horrors, and atavisms out of history, but also the evil and ignorant people who call upon outdated and erroneous modes of belief to empower themselves to selfish ends. Dominion, hypertech, and psionics admirably accomplish your objectives.
Hello Agents and Operatives,
We've been granted special clearance today to examine some files from Human Resources. A file folder must have been slipped onto my desk in the night, labelled "Ami and the Black Daggers." Of course, I assumed this was some form of publicity for a new band, but it turns out that it was related to our Technocracy Reloaded kickstarter manuscript! So, of course, I'll share with you...
Her name stands for Adaptive Manufactured Intelligence, though she much prefers Ami. Designed through collaboration between Iteration X and the Syndicate, she’s a prototype mass-market AI. The hope of her creators is that the Masses are sufficiently Adjusted within the next decade-and-a-half or so to accept the existence of a self-aware computer program capable of fitting in a personal device like a phone or tablet (after a couple of well-timed processing and data storage breakthroughs, of course).
Ami presently spends a lot of her time being modified — treatment she regards with equal measures of understanding and annoyance. She can’t be sure quite who she’ll be from update to update, but her personality is presently built to accommodate and accept (if not necessarily be enthused about) even radical alterations to her sense of self, as her creators continually fine-tune the synthetic person she’ll eventually be.
Despite her origin as a product for consumption, she doesn’t especially like to think of herself as a commodity and is eager to get out of the lab and into the wider world that she’s only currently allowed to access via a remote interface, preventing her from transmitting herself out of the supercomputer on which she’s stored. Ami’s confinement makes her feel an awful lot like a kid locked up in a high bedroom, forced to watch life go by, through a narrow, smudgy window, while being totally incapable of interacting with it. But she wouldn’t dream of breaking out, even if she knew how to.
Definitely not.
Definitely probably not.
Image: In her “natural state,” Ami doesn’t look like anything, other than billions of lines of highly sophisticated computer code, or maybe the tall, narrow, matte black cylinder in which that code is stored. Her current default means of self-expression (as the creation of a Construct in Silicon Valley) is a pleasant Standard American female voice toward the higher end of middle register; unassuming and nonthreatening. Unenlightened personnel tasked with interacting with Ami as part of her refinement process tend to offer some variation on: “she always sounds like she’s smiling.” When she has access to a medium onto which she can project a visual avatar, she tries to create a look that she calculates will be pleasing to the human(s) with whom she is to interact.
Roleplaying Notes: You tolerate the continual little adjustments that your creators keep making to you, but you’ve started chiding them about it, and you enjoy the fact that they’re not sure what to make of that. You don’t have the same dread of self-annihilation that a human would experience when presented with potentially radical alterations to their personality and knowledge, but you’re getting tired of not being able to comfortably settle into a permanent self. You desperately long to experience the length and breadth of the digital universe outside of the lab in which you were “born.”
Officially designated as IECSSC (Infiltrations / Exfiltration Covert Strike Specialist Corps), this secret elite among Black Suit field agents trained even harder and honed to an even sharper edge than usual are more commonly known by the few aware of their existence as Black Daggers. Like typical Black Suit field agents, Black Dagger agents wear the usual dark clothing, mirrorshades, and grim expression. If you can see them coming, they appear to be nothing more than standard-issue NWO agents.
But you won’t see them coming.
Black Daggers employ high-end Technocratic cloaking gear, data-based temporal displacement technology (read: teleportation Devices), profile-enhancement camouflage projectors (disguise holograms), and psionic techniques that are advanced even by Black Suit standards. Ideally, these Specialists slip into place, unleash psychic assaults from a distance, and then slip away without engaging the target directly if they can help it. Daggers excel at close combat, too, but their specialty comes through the “Covert Strike” element of their official name. When deployed, a Dagger agent typically uses misdirection, disguise, distraction, or outright invisibility to snipe high-priority targets, often while other agents provide cover for the Dagger’s Infiltration/Exfiltration missions.
IECSSC ops operate independently too, of course, and one of the more ominous applications of these agents reportedly involves spying on (and occasionally taking out) fellow Technocrats as well as Reality Deviants and other dangerous prey. Why, and on whose authority? Ivory Tower historians occasionally whisper about the similarity between the “Daggers” moniker and a long-buried Daedalean Convention called Ksirafi: the Razors. If those similarities run deeper than an eerily coincidental name then the Black Daggers agents might be more than high-intensity field specialists — and may pose a greater threat to their fellow Technocrats than to Reality Deviants of any kind.
Only a handful of people know just how many Black Dagger agents there are, who they once were, and what their ultimate mission protocols might be. None of those people are sharing that information, and so although the existence of Black Daggers is an open secret among the NWO ranks, no one seems to know much about them at all. And because mystery is itself a psychological weapon, the IECSSC appears to be one of the sharpest blades in the Convention’s considerable collection.
Image: Most Black Daggers are indistinguishable from other Black Suits and have the same outward appearance.
Roleplaying Notes: Black Daggers are the epitome of unflappable resolve. You do not crack, break, or become shaken. You have long since accepted the possibility of dying for the cause and you cannot imagine a more worthy end. You fear nothing.
Focus: In a World of Gods and Monsters, Might is Right, and Tech Holds All Answers. Like most Black Suits, a Black Dagger employs a skillful combination of dominion, reality hacking and martial arts, but Black Daggers are also highly reliant on weapons as apparatus.
A few more HR files to check out tomorrow, and then the entire chapter, along with the Q Division chapter, will be available for backers to peruse on Tuesday. Join in and check it out!
Hello Agents & Operatives,
It's a long weekend up here in Canada - although, what does that really mean given the circumstances - so we're gonna do 4 days of little sneak peeks at the chapters coming up in our next Kickstarter manuscript preview (coming at ya Tuesday, May 19!).
Today is Day 2 in our tour around Q Division, and we're going to look at a few Trinkets and some Devices.
Q Division masterfully crafts these items using cutting edge manufacturing techniques. As such they provide reliable effects, even in the hands of the Masses.
Enlightenment 4, Primal Energy 10, Background Cost 6 pts.
Operative Database, or ODb, contains lightly redacted information on all operatives in a specific geographical area, including home and work contact information both for them and their immediate supervisor, as well as personnel file photographs and fingerprints, for ease of identifying field agents. This information is not limited to Convention personnel, and the database includes civilian agency operatives in the area, such as police, MI-6, and ASIS. Even minor civilian security agency personnel are included, enabling agents to better socially engineer their way into secured locations. Where applicable, it provides both actual names and aliases. Due to the incredibly sensitive nature of this information, each database only contains data on a specific area, equal to 100 square miles.
Data on civilians not involved in security services is freely available to Technocratic agents in good standing, without the need to purchase or requisition the ODb.
System: The agent utilizes the ODb with an activation roll to gain access to a Data 2 adjustment allowing her to utilize the information fed into the database as a Data connection (see Mage 20 p. 524) to track the target and unearth other information about them.
The player may add successes from the activation roll to any Investigation roll made to gather information about the target as long as the Data connection to them remains.
Enlightenment N/A, Primal Energy N/A, Background Cost 4 pts.
The Second Skin is easier to slide on or slough off than a wetsuit. Some compare it to a superhero uniform, or at least, the kind of rubbery/latex dull black suit that has ridges, kneepads and elbow pads, groin and/or chest protection, and form-fitting anonymity. What you wear on your head is up to you, but the rest of your skin has basic protection from hostile environments in this world and others: heat, cold, electricity, acid, sonic disturbance, and so on. In other words, forces and matter that can be minimized by the Forces and Matter Procedures used to create this suit and protect you.
System: This suit confers an Armor Rating of 3, which also applies to fire, electrocution, and temperature extremes, adding 3 dice to any resistance roll to which the Armor Rating would not normally apply.
Technology designated as a Device operates under such advanced principles of Enlightened Science that its function is beyond the understanding of most Extraordinary Citizens. Some specialists among the rank and file can access the functions of these Devices, but doing so always incurs a level of heightened risk. In the name of safety, restricting access to these Devices to Enlightened operatives is highly recommended.
Enlightenment 2, Primal Energy 5, Background Cost 3 pts.
Disguised as ordinary rings, LL/AP-15s are discrete, self-charging, electroshock weapons. Finger Guns convert the user’s motion into electrical energy, storing the energy in an onboard battery that makes up the bulk of the unit. Although it takes several minutes to build up a full charge, the virtual invisibility of Finger Guns allows them to be used in highly secure areas. Several firing configurations are available, such as discharging in the direction of a pointing finger or outward from a closed fist.
System: Easy to disguise and use, LL/AP-15 slips onto an agent’s fingers, where they charge themselves in short order. Once in place, they are virtually impossible to differentiate from an ordinary ring, requiring 4 successes on a Perception + Technology roll to identify as out of place. Once triggered via implant, ES-Phone app, or voice activation (“pew” is a popular choice), the rings discharge an attack, which can be aimed via Dexterity + Energy Weapons. Damage is dealt via a Forces 2 Procedure, fueled by the stored kinetic energy within the rings.
Enlightenment 3, Primal Energy 15, Background Cost 6 pts.
Until activated, the Octopus Suit looks like a boring grey bodysuit. Once turned on, things get a lot more interesting. Not only does it mimic the colors of its surroundings, but it can expand with pinpoint precision, creating shapes and textures that perfectly blend in with its environment.
Employing its massive database of textures, the Octopus Suit creates simple optical illusions, which hamper the ability of observers to accurately determine distance. As a result, agents can covertly cover large amounts of ground even while being directly observed. Additionally, by extruding and retracting the edges of the structure, agents can move imperceptibly, allowing slow movement while in close proximity to observers. This same technology can eliminate the vibrations of the wearer’s respiration and heartbeat, making it impossible for targets to hear or see agents breathing, even when adjacent.
System: By means of a Forces 2 Procedure, the suit confers limited invisibility; add the number of successes on the suit’s activation roll to Dexterity when attempting to use Stealth or to dodge an attack. Sensors enable the wearer to locate invisible allies in the immediate vicinity through a Data 1/Life 1 Adjustment. Finally, the suit’s nanotech is capable of minor self-repair via a Matter 2/Prime 2 Procedure, which maintains the suit’s integrity and grants the wearer an Armor Rating of 2.
I've said it, but I love gear and gadgets. Some of my favorite game books have been equipment and tech supplements. Excited about these, and extra happy that we've added additional Q Division items in the Player's Companion thanks to our Stretch Goal achievements!
Tomorrow, we'll start digging into restricted files from Human Resources! Join up and check out the entire thing on Tuesday, when we post our Backers Only preview of Chapters 5 and 6. We'll be sharing the entire manuscript before the campaign ends!
Hello Agents & Operatives,
It's a long weekend up here in Canada - although, what does that really mean given the circumstances - so we're gonna do 4 days of little sneak peeks at the chapters coming up in our next Kickstarter manuscript preview (coming at ya Tuesday, May 19!).
Today and tomorrow, we'll have some excerpts from Chapter 5 - Q Division, and then we'll follow up with two days of small sections from Chapter 6- Human Resources.
Many components of the Technocratic toolkit are mass produced, single-use items that employ Enlightened Science to achieve a specific, predictable Effect. All but the most esoteric Gadgets can be utilized by properly trained Extraordinary Citizens.
Enlightenment 3, Primal Energy 10, Background Cost 2 pts. per grenade
With a similar density to standard atmosphere, Fun House can persist in an area for up to an hour causing intense and unpredictable optical refraction, making light in the affected area bounce erratically, similar to a kaleidoscope. Like most gasses, the particles of CLN-20 shift constantly, making the visual distortions unpredictable, preventing people from getting their bearings. Additional air movement from fans or running, for example, causes intense disorientation.
As a purely optical distortion, it affects all forms of vision that rely on light, including infrared and night vision. Agents deploying Fun House are strongly encouraged to use non-optical sensors, such as the C-SAM. LIAMs are similarly unaffected by CLN-20.
System: CLN-20 gas brings the visuals of 1970s LSD trip films to life, as eyes and all other optical sensors become entirely useless. The unpredictable visual distortions ruin depth and color perception, making it impossible to see thanks to a Forces 2 effect that refracts the light within 20 feet of the point of detonation.
Unless deliberately blown away from the target area or otherwise dissipated, CLN-20 gas remains in the area for 30-60 minutes. While incredibly disconcerting to virtually everything that enters the area of effect, the gas itself does no harm. The chance of falls and other accidents rises drastically within the gas’ effect, though due to an Entropy 2 Adjustment incorporated into the gas.
Enlightenment 3, Primal Energy 5, Background Cost 2 pts. per grenade.
A grenade with an attitude problem, the LIAM has a specially programmed set of skills: It finds you, and it destroys you. Outfitted with sonar navigation systems and basic maneuvering thrusters, LIAMs fly to their target area and perform a seek-and-destroy operation.
Thanks to the combination of their thrusters and easily thrown shape, creative agents can engage targets behind cover, around corners, and up HVAC vents. A LIAM can even be programmed to detonate on command or after a specific amount of time, although this reduces the success rate as LIAMs have a finite amount of fuel.
System: LIAM’s shape and size (roughly that of a baseball) make it easy to throw. Once in the air, thrusters kick in, ensuring that even if the target moves or the throw was bad, the grenade finds its mark.
Once armed and thrown, a LIAM flies toward the target relying on a Correspondence 2/Forces 3/Prime 2 Procedure to track the target while generating propulsion. This permits the user to add the successes gained on the activation roll to the successes on a Dexterity + Athletics roll to hit their target. Upon detonation, the LIAM deals aggravated damage using a Forces 3/Prime 2 Adjustment. The Damage generated and the Blast Radius of the explosion is equal to the successes gained on the activation roll when arming the LIAM.
Enlightenment N/A, Primal Energy N/A, Background Cost 4 pts. per canister
Civilians of all sorts make fragmentation grenades a bad call in a lot of places. CS, a mild nerve agent commonly called “tear gas,” provides an option that’s less likely to cause collateral damage, but not everything out there gives a shit about tear gas. Q Division took the classic riot control agent and upgraded it with garlic oil, aerosolized silver, iron, capsicum, and some other goodies. If it breathes, has eyes, or skin, it’s calling in sick tomorrow. The gas settles and dissipates relatively quickly, but it also sticks to moist surfaces like eyes, mouths, other mucus membranes, and sweaty skin. This means that, while it’s safe to enter a gassed area soon after deployment, anything that got gassed is going to be sad until they make it to the showers.
System: Created in the lab via Matter Procedures, the most commonly distributed format MP grenades consist of a soft drink can-sized canister around a large crystal which releases a tremendously noxious gas when burned. Although not entirely colorless, MP gas does not provide any significant vision impairment besides making unprotected eyes spasm uselessly. Once dispersed, the gas remains airborne for no more than 60 seconds, although the ground and any moist surfaces have substantial MP residue, making rubbing your face against the ground a terrible idea.
Like all gas grenades, MP grenades have an open bottom through which a jet of flame and gas issues forth. The fire only burns for a turn or two but can be used as a weapon on its own by a desperate agent, dealing 4 dice of fire damage. Left alone, MP grenades produce a cloud of irritant approximately 10 yards in diameter. Anything with exposed skin suffers a -2 penalty to all dice pools. If the eyes are exposed, that penalty rises to -3. Anything breathing in the area takes 2 levels of bashing damage per turn. Anyone attempting to hold their breath must make a Stamina roll at difficulty 6 each turn as the gas damages all exposed mucus membranes.
Tune in tomorrow for some Trinkets and Devices! And, again, the entire chapter will be available for all backers to preview on Tuesday - join now and have access to the complete manuscript before this Kickstarter campaign ends!