Cybernetics as Mutation

When I wrote cybernetics for Psi-Wars, I cribbed most of my material by integrating material from Ultra-Tech and Living Better with Cybernetics by Demi Benson. The results were satisfactory, and definitely an improvement over raw Ultra-Tech, but still left a lot to be desired. A lot of this month has been dedicated to expressing and fixing some of those concerns. The Limits of the Human Form was about working out the absolute maximum of what a cyborg might look like when it came to attributes and advantages. Today, I want to look at the costs of cybernetics.

This concept of a “cost” to cybernetics is a surprisingly contentious one. It used to be fairly standard that cybernetics came with a downside, often devouring your humanity or your soul. Since then, Transhumanism and its very optimistic take on technology was quite the vogue. Today, I’m not sure where which way the wind is blowing: I think it depends a great deal on the group.

In this case, what I’m talking about in terms of “the disadvantage of cybernetics” is about more than concepts like Cyberpsychosis or spending “humanity” to buy Cybernetics. Cybernetics in both GURPS Ultra-Tech and Living Better with Cybernetics suggests a host of possible disadvantages, such as Electrical, Maintenance, Unhealing, or flaws that arise from failed surgeries, such as Neurological Disorders or Chronic Pain, and all of this is on top of the “mental problems” that might arise, such as “Cyber Psychosis” or the cyborg slowly growing colder and crueler as they become more and more mechanical.

I’ve noticed a flaw with how GURPS Ultra-Tech and Living Better with Cybernetics, which is that they primarily focus on cybernetics as a piecemeal set of advantages. They work great if you want to take an organic character and give them a single cybernetic element, such as a cyberarm: these rules note under what conditions that arm would give you an Unnatural Feature, or that the arm itself is electrical and might need maintenance, and suggests some additional disadvantages you could apply, like perhaps the character has a constant drug dependency to prevent the rejection of the arm. On the far side, Ultra-Tech does a good of describing what a full-conversion cyborg might look like, in that you can simply take a robotic body and apply a human brain to it. The problem, though, is what happens when you’re in between these two states: at what point should your character inevitably have a maintenance cost? What’s the total set of Unnatural Features from a collection of cybernetic parts? At what point does it become redundant? For example, a cybernetic feature is a surely a distinct feature, but are two cybernetic fingers worth 2 distinctive features? Probably not. Is a hand worth more? Or an arm? What about an arm and a finger on the other hand?

Psi-Wars has power-sets, and such as psionic powers, communion, sorcery, and cybernetics, and characters often want to invest deeply in those power-sets. A character may be defined as a psychic or a cyborg. In the latter case, the character will often interact with that power-system: a member of House Kain may go and get more parts installed, or a Bounty Hunter from the Manticore Initiative will have earned a high enough place for the next set of bio-enhancements. What we need is a cohesive and systematic way to look at the full continuum of the slow transition from partial cyborg (a single finger) to a full conversion cyborg, as most characters will be somewhere in the middle, rather than at either extreme.

And the mutation system of GURPS After the End is exactly such a system. That is, in the end, what it does. As you accumulate more traits that focus on a particular power-set, you gain more and more cumulative generic disadvantage points until you reach a threshold, and then the quantum wave function of those generic disadvantages collapses into a true, full disadvantage: after X number of cybernetic “points” our character might require more and more maintenance, or they may become fully Electric, or they might become Unhealing.

While such a system would certainly solve some problems, it also creates some potential problems. First, if we simply borrow the mutation system wholesale, then 1/5 of our cybernetic “points” will contribute to our “mutation points,” regardless of how they look or what they do. So, for example, cyber eyes that grant Nightvision 5 would apply 1 “mutation point” while Hyperspectral Eyes would apply 5 points, which makes the latter “worse” even though functionally both are just replacement eyes. Second, this implies a gradual change that might not make much sense. If we tie mutation to unnatural features we buy a cybernetic arm that applies essentially no advantage other than the Unliving trait for your arm and perhaps DR 1, that might be worth barely any “mutation points” and thus not be an unnatural feature, somehow, while if we got wired nerves which gave us Enhanced Time Sense and ATR 2, that would surely have a considerably more mutation points than the arm and thus result in far more unnatural features, even though it’s entirely internal, and there’s no reason to believe the character would have any visible showing of their cybernetics. This works fine for actual mutations because we can assume a sort of abstract “otherness” that grows as the character changes, while cybernetics have a difference between external otherness (DR 1 dermal plating) and internal otherness (A full conversion with biomorphic sculpting). On some level, I think any use of such a system will require accepting unusual abstractions. Finally, since I love mutation systems so much, we’ll have several competing systems. What happens to a Gaunt who is in the midst of degradation when he gets some cybernetics? What about Karkadann and their mutations vs their advanced cybernetics?

So, we have a problem: how do we create a cohesive set of scaling disadvantages for cyborgs to represent the downsides to their extensive changes? But the solution, the mutation system, applies its own problems. This post will explore how we might go about resolving those problems.

Wiki Update: Gaunt Degeneration

Mutated zombie by ARTOFJUSTAMAN

I’ve been meaning to bundle up several of my wiki updates into a single post, but I’ve had no real moment to do that, so I thought I’d just drop some notes on this one.

The Gaunt, and I say this nearly every time I talk about them, are weird, follow different rules, and have piles and piles of behind-the-scenes notes that really need to get out at some point, mostly a very extensive bestiary and, uh, necrocrafted equivalents to cyberware, but it’s been hectic gathering it all into once place, and I’m pretty intimidated by Bestiary entries which is something I’ll have to get over at some point (I seem to hold myself to a much higher standard than GURPS holds itself up to when it comes to Bestiaries, but I frankly find most GURPS Bestiary entries nigh unusuable because I have to parse giant stat blocks to figure out how a particular monster would actually work, but that’s a rant for another time).

In any case, one topic I definitely wanted to discuss was Gaunt Degradation. If you read up on the Saruthim, for example, you’ll notice that I talk a lot about how they suppress “Gaunt Corruption,” such as here:

When corruption appears, such as the haunted psychic energies of a Broken Deep Engine site, or a plague of corruption sweeping through a Gaunt population, or Domen Tarvagant is uncovered as infiltrating local elites, the Saruthim have learned to act swiftly to purge the corruption.

What sort of “plague of corruption” am I talking about? Well, when you set aside the zombie aesthetics of the Gaunt, they’re basically wet-nano androids constructed in vats filled with the samMutatione material they’re made of. They have the capacity to be self-replicating, not in a cohesive way like our biology can self-replicate, but in a disastrously uncontrolled, cancerous way that spawns monsters. Of course, the original necrocrafters put up safeguards against this, but during the Monolith War this was seen as much a feature as a bug, as you can drop a Gaunt legion on an Eldothic world and if they eventually mutated into marauding, cannibalistic monsters, was that really such a problem?

But I never really sat down and defined what this would look like. It mostly acts as an aging mechanism crossed with an excuse for some cool monsters, but I wanted to at least set it down in stone. I also wanted a chance to explore my ideas on mutation and corruption: if this plays out well, I’d like to integrate it into a more cohesive cybernetic system and a better variation of Broken Communion corruption.

You can read up on it here and here

• Gaunt Aging and Degradation
• Gaunt Degradation as Mutation

For the “Designer Notes” click “more” below.