28 August 2005

First Impressions: Ex Machina - Tri-stat Cyberpunk

I've just finished reading Ex Machina and very nice it is too. Tri-stat implementation seems good (although I need to do some char-gen and combat to get a feel for the system).

Settings are interesting;

Heaven over Mountain is a biotech closed world orbital beanstalk game. Nicely written but didn't float my boat too much.

Underworld is a dark dystopian future American Empire game that reminds me of a number of B Movie SF films in the late 80s and early 90s. The idea is that the US has large work complexes in occupied territories where civil rights have been removed. Lots of potential. I loved the idea that the corporation which sells neural interface chips also sell surplus cycle time on them for processing exercises.

IOSHI is a very different setting - value is based on skills and talents which are developed by people in a virtual state ('Sparta'). There are dark edges to this which could be interesting, but I couldn't think of an 'in' to run this.

Daedalus is a beauty of a setting. Imagine a world where the government decided to implement a universal ID by implementation of a future development of RFID chips. This is implanted and trackable. Later generations of the chip can administer drugs and further keep people happy. Society is tweaked and increasingly controlled in the ongoing fight against terrorism, and the people in it slowly see it as more and more of a utopia. Emotional responses are moderated to drive society towards someone else's ideal of 2.4 kids and a job for life...

What if one day you woke up in this Utopia to find your chip didn't work anymore and you were an outsider.? Surgery to fix it doesn't work, you loose your citizenship rights, and can only hold a menial job because you have no valid ID that is trusted properly? You become an outsider. What if you find out the truth?

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