Story out of Sequence part five

“Vehicle is a white Monte Carlo year 1980, excellent condition, plates number is SD4 56T. Doors appear to be locked; windows are rolled up, no keys present in ignition.” Detective Samantha Haberlin circled the vehicle talking into a small recorder in her hand. “In the back seat there is a plastic rifle case, several boxes of ammunition and a closed green sports bag. In the front there appears to be an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, an unfolded straight razor, loose cartridges for a pistol on the floorboards and a photograph of a girl. Oh and a sealed blank envelope on the dashboard.”

“You always seem to beat me to the scene Sam.” A voice sounded off from behind her.

“That’s right Murphy, always have and always will.” She turns to see the detective making his way around the police cruiser blocking off the alley. He looked like death warmed over this morning, probably hung over again. “Rough night?”

“As usual. It locked up?”

“Yeah, we’re supposed to get the keys for it sent down here once Julia gets done with the shit bag down in the morgue.” After pulling a five out of her coat pocket Samantha flags an officer over to her. “It looks like we will be here for a while why don’t you go get us all some coffee. Make mine black.”

“Same here.” Murphy spoke in as he peered through the side window of the car.

“Yes ma’am.” The officer turned away and headed off towards another patrol car on the street.

“So you think it’s going to be awhile before we get the keys Sam?”

“Well the body got pretty well ventilated. Jones is the one that finally took him down and you know how trigger-happy he is. With the way this guy went off you know he didn’t spare him any lead either.”

“Last count I got on the way up here was nine dead and fifteen wounded. With two of the dead being cops. I just can’t wait until we get a bullet count of how many rounds he put into him.”

“Detective Haberlin?” An officer approached from the end of the alley. Sam turned and gave him a nod. “Miss Bates down at the morgue wanted me to deliver you this. She said you wanted it as soon as possible.”

“Thanks.” Sam takes the envelope and looks inside, “Better glove up Murphy. For once somebody worked in our favor. They went ahead and sent us the keys.”

“I call dibs on the trunk.”

“I figured that much.” She sat the envelope on the hood of the car and slipped her gloves on, then pulled the keys out. “Quite a few on here, guess later we get the honor of trying to find out what they all go to.”

“Yeah lots of fun that will be. Hopefully he had some local next of kin to help us out when we get ready to do that.” He made an angry face as he pulled his gloves on with a snap.

“You always look like you’re about to give a cavity search every time you do that.”

“Yeah but the guys down at the jail hate it when I do one, my hands are to big for their tastes. Now come on let’s open the baby up.”

Sam looks through the keys a bit before finally selecting one out. She slides it into the lock on the trunk and turns it. “Well time to see what a psycho gun nut keeps in his trunk.”

“Oh didn’t know we were going through Jones’s car.” Murphy said with a grin as the trunk rose. “Okay now that’s not what I expected.”

“Holy shit…” Sam raises the recorder up to her mouth, “Inside the trunk there are several knives lined up in a rack, varying in size. A box of latex gloves, plastic bags, several rows of duck tape, rope, a Polaroid camera and some storage boxes.”

“I’m opening one of these boxes.” His hands gently lift the top of one of the boxes open while attempting not to disturb anything else. “Pictures, um … nothing special just a few… wait a second.”

“What is it?”

Murphy stood back up and goes through a hand full of Polaroid’s while Sam looks over his shoulder. “Victims I assume. Bound up and apparently being cut to death.”

“I recognize that person. She’s one of the victims of that serial killer that disappeared about a year ago. You remember that?”

“Yeah the one who got nicknamed the slow slasher since he took his time killing the victims. That means our man lying on the slab at the morgue is probably him.”

“I’m gonna go call this in. This pulls it out of our jurisdiction now.”

From the mouth of a fool

Okay I haven't made fun of the RPGdipshit in a while so I think now is the time. Over on his forums there has been a poll with various games listed and the question is 'which of these are storygames?'. Now the raving fool is all mad because his favorite game is scoring high as a storygame. He makes this comment:

This is a stupid thread. You don't vote in a poll to decide what's a storygame or not. Its a question of the landmarks that define gaming. If the majority vote differently, all that means is that they are misinformed.

Now keep in mind this is the guy who thinks that HE decides the landmarks and writes the definition of what is an RPG. He will completely refuse to see another persons point of view if they think differently and label them as 'swine'. He is like Ron Edwards but only with a different set of favorite games... although they both hate White Wolf stuff most likely because they will never be that successful.

Yeah so his thinking is that everyone is misinformed because they refuse to follow HIS set of rules. Ron Edwards all over again. He is what he hates.

The Other Side visuals

This is what you find when you make your way to the other side. The bleed was at an amusement park, one minute you were walking through the crowds of people smelling of popcorn and sweat. Then you saw the crack and you stared at it a few seconds to many. Then in a blink the people are gone and all you can smell is the mold and stagnant water.

You really don't want to be caught there once the sun goes down.

The Other Side - quick overview.

A few notes about 'The Other Side' which I'm currently getting ready to start working on. It's my own personal little horror setting with influences from a bunch of different places. Some of the terms I have used before with other ideas or in various discussions about games I've ran. But they all seem to just lead right back to one place.

The reality we know is only one of many. They sort of exist like a spiders web, all tied together by various strands. Some exist right next door to us while others we have to cross more than one world to get to. Problems arise when the walls between these realities begin to weaken or crack and they start to bleed into each other. This also allows for things to travel between them.

Our little world is nearest to one that most simply call 'The City'. It mimics that which bleeds into it better than most others. Most of the surface is covered entirely by a city in various states of ruin and disrepair. Through it is how we gain access to others, but it's a dangerous place and many do not live to tell of their travels there.

Humans have souls, something that sets them apart from many other... things out there. Although there is no heaven and hell or angels and demons as we know them. There are, however, the places and creatures that provided the inspiration for the stories about them.

The characters will be those who are able to see the cracks in the walls of reality. For some unknown reason their minds are able to catch a glimpse of what others cannot. A few think this is an a sign of evolution, others think it's the laws of another reality bleeding into ours, many wish they never had that sort of sight at all. Because when you can see the cracks it tends to be easier to accidently slip over to the other side of them.

Be A Better Player... well nobody will be better player at the moment.

My new Be A Better Player will have to wait a bit. Life has been shoveling me some shit here lately and I've been busy digging my way out. Even when I get time to work on writing anything I'm not anywhere near in the right mindset to do so. So I would rather wait and write it right than hand out some half baked ideas. Hope you all understand

Cyberware and it's cost in humanity.

Been going working over some ideas to adjust the humanity rules (empathy, karma, whatever for whichever system) when it comes to cyberware. Usually the common rule is the more of your body that is not real the less human you become. Eventually ending up as a stone faced killer with no empathy or a raving madman.

Now the main reason I can see this being in most games is for game balance and power limitations. You get your good with the bad, but you also can't get to much good either or you flip out. Now this works but it also acts like a bit of crutch for the GM and is one less thing to worry about. But it doesn't seem all that realistic.

If somebody loses both legs in an accident. This could set you for a life in a wheelchair as a very permanent handicap. So why would a set of fully functional artificial legs run down your human empathy or mental stability. I means it's a miracle of modern science, you can walk, run and jump again. Just doesn't make sense to me that the joy of regaining your mobility would dump you into the downward spiral of cyberpsychosis.

So for me in any cyberpunkish game that I run, having a cybernetic replacement of something that was lost due to an accident will cost zero humanity. As long as it's just a simple replacement, no special gadgets, hidden guns, etc.

Now lets say time goes by and you get something added to those legs for your job or to make life easier. A plug in to power your laptop or recharge your legs batteries, a dermal pocket with a small flashlight for emergencies, stuff like that. Again zero humanity cost.

So when will it cost you? Well when you make the decision to go and have your perfectly good eye cut out of your head and replaced, that's when the costs will start up. The more you have modified by your own free will the more the cost will go up. Because you are consciously stepping away from your humanity, stepping away from your own body. Start carving off your legs and your mind has to been a different state than most normal people.

More on this topic later.

Cyberpunk Sunday 008 - skin tech, t-cells, brainwaves and printers oh my!

Well the last few weeks there have been some really damned amazing stories coming out. It's really hard to decide on which ones to cover here. But at least it gives me plenty of material for the next installment.

This first one was sent to me by a fellow Kultist named Craig Toehill. I had seen a few articles on this already but the one he sent was by far one of the better. Electronic skin grafts, well not quite a graft but an overlay of circuits onto your skin. With the developments and stretchable and bendable technologies (I've covered a bit of the bendies before) this seems to be a natural mix. Attaching the super thin circuits to your skin through a method that, get this, is exactly like putting on a temporary tattoo. They are so thin you can even put an actual temporary tattoo over the top to hide the attachment.

Tons of uses for this. Currently the first to mind for development are in the medical field replacing all the long cords and sticky pads of monitoring equipment. It would allow the patient a lot more mobility and a lot less discomfort. Other ideas come to my mind also, like an old idea I had for a wearable headset that just sticks onto your skin. I'll let you read on this some more and tell me what idea you have for it.

Electronic skin grafts.

Next up is a US study presented in the New England Journal of Medicine. It had my jaw dropping at its implications and the groundwork it helps lay for Biopunk and transhumanism. By modifying the T-cells of patients into tumor killing predators they have successfully wiped leukemia out of three patients who have now lived cancer free for a year. Yeah bioengineering at it's finest. Let me pull up my favorite quote from the article:

"Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Yeah, violently attacked the tumors. I'm pretty sure this is still a rather tedious and expensive process as the cells would have to be tailor made from the individual patient. But this is a success story which is exactly what they need to get more funding to keep working in this direction.

Modified killer t-cells

Now for a few years there has been work with a brain-computer interface with quite a bit of success. They managed to get it down to where the person could operate a computer, although rather slowly. This is a tiny stepping stone into the direction of one of the least likely cyberpunk ideas, netrunning or full computer interface. But now they've done gone and took a step further by integrating it into an online virtual environment. They hooked it up to Second Life. While it's still a slow and hard to control interface and there is a lot of work to be done with the sensors and pads that will read your brainwaves (or maybe not... hmmm... that stick on technology that I listed up above) since it's hard to keep them positioned right on a persons head. But the future is looking virtual.

Brain wave interface with Second Life.

Okay and last but not certainly least the 3D printer. These have been in the tech news for a while here lately but this video gives a really good layman's terms description of how it works and shows them scanning in and 'printing' a wrench. Thanks to Sean Barton for linking to this article now it's my turn to share it with a few folks. Personally I believe in a decade or so this will start to revolutionize some of the commercial industries just like CnC machines have done in the past. It also fits the description of the microfactories out of Cybergeneration.

See the 3-D printer in action.