DIGITAL BURN

A Resource for a Cybernetic Future

Digital Burn is a new D20 setting put out by Living Room Games. It's basically a cyberpunk world intended for use with the new D20 Modern system.

Some first impressions: it's kind of thin (159 pages) for the $35 retail price, but one store I visited had ordered several copies and put a $25 price tag on it, so it may just take a little shopping around to find it at a good price. It's hardcover with gray-scale interiors and a lot of black & white photographs. The photos are all pretty high quality, although a few of the models could have been posed better. Overall, the book looks nice. I took my copy with me on Christmas vacation and it held up to a lot of abuse being dragged along and read in cars and on airplanes.

The setting is very cyberpunk... a series of natural and man-made disasters between 2008 and 2012 killed off about 30% of the world population in a period commonly known as "The Burn". Most of the deaths were due to disasters involving genetically modified crops that crippled the world food supply. As a result, cloning and genetic engineering were eventually banned almost everywhere. The field of cybernetics was developed instead.

Corporate law has been almost completely deregulated. The Sherman Antitrust Act was repealed, along with a host of other laws. Government watchdog agencies were shut down, bought off, or replaced with privately run agencies that weren't nearly as independent and unbiased as they claimed to be. Now a handful of Megacorporations have pretty much divided the world up amongst themselves. The national governments mostly just handle "national defense", and it's rare for them to act publicly against one of the Megacorps.

The gap between rich and poor has widened astronomically, and now the only comfortable middle-class lies in the corporate-owned housing developments. On the street, it's a handful of folks doing well and huge masses of the homeless and impoverished. Bland entertainment keeps the mindless masses occupied, while the Net provides entertainment to almost everyone else. Millions are addicted to virtual reality fantasies and couldn't care less about the state of the real world, except inasmuch as they have to pay for all of that computer equipment somehow.

In short, it's the traditional Cyberpunk dystopia, where the world is sinking into an amoral, high-tech gutter with no real hope for change. At least not by working in the system, which mostly exists to keep everyone exactly where they are right now.

Section By Section:

So, the details: the introduction has a tired cop discussing the rise of cyberware, spurred on as it was by the "organlegger scare". Basically, since medical advances had made rejection-proof transplants possible, a black market sprang up providing new "parts" to folks who had a lot of money and didn't care exactly how the "donor" of their new arm or leg happened to die. Sure, you could use parts cloned from your own DNA, but that took a lot longer and was actually less reliable (all of those bans and restrictions in the early 2000s really hampered the development of that technology). To combat this trend, the government funded and deregulated the development of cybernetic replacement parts, figuring that at least no one had to die for you to get a new cyberarm.

Next they give you 9 Advanced Classes (Digital Burn uses the D20 Modern system) for you to pick from. PCs are assumed to start at 3rd level in the Burn... otherwise they just wouldn't live long enough to matter. The nine classes are Blank (the faceless street-dweller who gets ignored by everyone but sees everything), Cop (keeping the street marginally safer), Fixer (arranging deals and sales for anything on the street), Ganger (the unlicensed, local alternative to a cop), Hacker (the cyberpunk staple), Icon (celebrity types who use their fame to get what they want), Medico (healing for dollars), Merc (killing for dollars) and the Spanner (the technician who specializes in pretty much anything electronic). Each has its own description, advancement table and class feats.

There are a load of class-specific feats here. I'll mention a few cute ones. The Blank's City Rat (level 2) lets them find the fastest route through the urban sprawl, with their Streetwise roll determining exactly how much time they can shave off doing so. Street Ghost (level 7) lets a Blank disappear tracelessly into an urban area, making it nearly impossible to find him again.

Cops get Codes (the right to make arrests and the ability to make an Intimidate roll to try and convince perps to give themselves up) and Dog Call (the ability to call for backup in an emergency) at first level. Upper level feats mostly boost Dog Call (at level 9, you can call for a SWAT team and expect to get it). The way they handle membership in a police force is this; you can (circumstances permitted) take 1 level in some other class while still retaining membership in your police force, but your next level after that must be in Cop again or they'll kick you out. Ex-cops lose a lot of their special powers. There's also a kind of confusing description that makes it sound like any cop who leaves the force (for whatever reason) will be considered a "traitor" and never allowed to rejoin (you can't take any more levels in Cop, ever again), but I'd probably toss that like I've always tossed that sort of restriction in D&D games.

Fixers get Grapevine at 2nd level. This allows them to make an enhanced Gather Information check. A high level Fixer can find out almost anything. Blank Check (6th level) lets a Fixer call in favors for things like military hardware, getting charges dropped by the police, or a plain old loan of enormous size.

Gangers get Colors at third level, the gang equivalent of Dog Call. Initiated (level 2) lets them size up opponents to estimate their combat capabilities. At 7th level, they get Know Thy Enemy, which lets size someone up so accurately that the target is automatically caught flat-footed (no Dex bonuses) unless they have an ability that prevents it.

The most interesting Hacker feat is R0v3r, which gives them an AI companion to help them out in the Net. The R0v3r gets tougher as the Hacker gains levels and actually gets some special feats of its own.

Icons get some cute ones like Not the Face! (which lets them add their Int modifier to their AC when lightly encumbered) and Garcia's Liver. To quote:

"Garcia's Liver: At 8th level, an Icon gains a +6 to Fortitude saves against toxins and diseases due to his constant overexposure to things that'll probably not only kill him but could very well preserve his corpse."

Medico feats mostly enhance their ability to treat wounds and are boring and utilitarian. Stat is kind of cute; it lets a 9th level Medico move faster and roll a 20 on Initiative automatically so long as all he's doing is running towards someone injured to treat their wounds.

Mercs get some impressive combat feats, including Hardwired at 7th level. Hardwired gives a merc one free attack of opportunity per round... which he can use on anyone who missed him with any attack that round.

Spanners, like Medicos, mostly just get utilitarian feats that expand what sort of things they can repair and modify. They do get Torque (5th level), which lets them "maximize" a piece of gear so that all of its random rolls automatically roll the maximum value, but it breaks after as many uses as the Spanner's level.

After all of the classes, they discuss new skills and modifications to existing ones. These are pretty straightforward; for example, the entry for Streetwise lists some DCs for surviving in the urban sprawl. The book also tweaks a few D20 Modern feats and adds a few new ones. Cold Start, for example, lets you start a vehicle the same round that you jump into it. With all of the vehicle feats, it's kind of odd that they don't have a vehicle-oriented Advanced Class, like the Rigger from Shadowrun.

Finally we get to the chrome of the setting- the cyberware itself. 33 pages of implants and replacement parts, always available at several different levels of quality (and cost). The only thing better than Military equipment is Scientific or Luxury equipment, and then only for things like the Digital Microscope cybereye module, where the military types just don't care that much about it. In most cases, the Military quality equipment beats every other category. Each piece of cyberware has a base price (multiply by 3 for Luxury or Military versions), any mandatory prerequisites (a lot of things require the Man/Machine interface implant that lets you control your cyberware with your thoughts), the benefit it grants, penalties for having it (major implants will tend to penalize your stats according to how much they mess up your brain or internal organs) and any special notes.

It definitely looks like they put a lot of thought into the cyberware. There are in depth descriptions of how many implants work and I found very few errors. Most pieces require periodic maintenance and many require you to replace certain parts as they wear out or get used up. Unfortunately, there weren't any prices given for this; I think they're kind of assuming that the costs are negligible, but I didn't see anything that spelled it out one way or the other.

As I say, there were only a few problems with this section and they were all pretty minor. The layout is a bit confusing; the descriptions are in alphabetical order, but broken up by "type". Unfortunately, the big table at the beginning of this section doesn't tell you what type a given implant is, and it's certainly not always obvious. In fact, there are two versions of the Pain Editor implant, one of which is found in the "Specialized Grade Models" section under "Implants that do not require a man/machine interface", while the other one is found in "Multiple Grade Models" under "Implants that require the man/machine interface". Basically, the ordinary Pain Editor (which dulls all pain, all the time) comes with a -2 Wisdom penalty while the other one isn't as effective but since you only turn it on when you need it you only suffer a -1 Wisdom penalty instead.

There were a few entries that looked like they had obvious problems, but which turned out to be correct upon closer examination. For example, I originally missed the difference between the Wisdom penalties on the two Pain Editors and wondered why one was superior to the other despite being the same price. You'll want to read the descriptions carefully. In another example, I at first thought that Passive Infrared Vision was better than the Active Infrared... it was cheaper, gave a +2 bonus to Spot & Search in the dark instead of +1, and it couldn't be detected as easily as the Active version. It was only on closer examination that I realized that the +2 bonus only applies if whatever you're looking for has a significantly different temperature from its surroundings, whereas the +1 bonus always applies. If one of your players takes some piece of cyberware that seems overpowered or unbalanced, take a closer look at the description. It may not be as good as you thought it was.

The cyberware section closes off with some optional rules for having people go nuts if they get too much cyberware. Basically, if the GM feels that the situation justifies it (the book doesn't give any advice on this, so you'll have to wing it), they can require a d20 + Wisdom bonus roll on a little "Going Buggo" table. As an example, if you manage to roll a negative number, you become a crazed psycho who has to make Will saves every 8 hours or start killin' folks. If you get an 11 or better, there is no effect. The table is kind of cute, but not very practical as a way of enforcing cyberware limits since there's a very limited set of results. I'd rather just enforce all of the periodic maintenance and refueling requirements ("Sorry, man, I can't go on this mission. I've got seven major parts that need overhauling and I've been putting it off for months now. My left cybereye can only see shades of green and my arm keeps seizing up. I'll be at the cyberdoc's all weekend.").

Naturally, after the cyberware we get more normal equipment. There are 22 guns listed, giving you a nice spread of types. I don't know enough about firearms to catch any serious goof-ups here, but I understand that one of the designers sells them for a living now, so I expect that this stuff is pretty accurate. And I've seen a television special that demonstrated the "Objective Individual Combat Weapon" (OICW) they have written up here. That's a nasty gun. My only qualm with this section is lack of detail; I would definitely have liked to see a discussion of the practical differences between ammo that's fed by belt, cylinder, internal magazine or linked. Several weapons have ammo entries like "15/65/110B". 110B means a belt of 110 rounds, I believe, but I'm not sure what the first two numbers are. Just different sizes of belts available? Or something else I'm missing?

The armor here ranges from the innocuous bullet-resistant clothing (AC +3 to +6) up to the utterly gross sealed and powered clamshell armor (AC +15) that you'll probably never see unless you're being chased by the army. There's a minor goof-up in that the generically named "Light Armor" has an entry in the table but no description later. I don't see anything that tells you which kinds of armor are Light, Medium and Heavy, but I don't think it would be too hard to tell.

They only have 3 kinds of grenade, which seems a little sparse, but I'm assuming that D20 Modern has stats for some more kinds. Oddly, there's no description for the Airfoil grenade, just stats. Probably an oversight.

Their standard equipment list is serviceable without being really extensive. Typical prices are given for a wide range of things, including stuff like household furniture and sports equipment. Like the cyberware, they're available at several price ranges, giving you a choice between low-cost crap and high-cost & high-quality equipment. We also get stats for a variety of typical vehicles.

Finally, we get to the Net itself. It's the traditional cyberpunk virtual reality interface, with the typical user logging on via a skullcap or headset. The power users all have direct neural interfaces (DNI implants) that let them plug in directly. Only the poorest folks actually still use monitors and keyboards.

Naturally, a DNI is the fastest and most efficient way to access it, but it's also the most dangerous; there are ways for people to hack through its protections and shut down your brain with an attack program. Skullcaps and keyboards may be slower, but there's no way to fry your brain through them.

"Dump shock" is the disorientation that a hacker suffers when something cuts their connection to the VR world and suddenly dumps them back into the regular world. It won't do anything worse than make you lose your lunch. A far worse danger is being killed by an attack program, since the damage that they do in the Net comes out of your regular HP pool.

All in all, they've made netrunning a lot like regular D20. You get an AC score based on your Int and the quality of your connection. You use your regular HP score (and yes, you can be killed by a combination of real-world and virtual damage; you don't have a separate Net HP rating). Your attack skills are based on your regular ranged attack rating. This may be unrealistic, but at least it makes it easy for newbies to understand. The major differences is the lack of "range". There's no such thing as melee vs ranged combat. If your system knows where something is, you can hit it and it can hit you. Attacks of Opportunity also don't apply in the Net, since your position is entirely virtual.

Hackers can "attack to disconnect" and try to dump a foe off of the Net. This is just a regular attack made at -4, and if it hits the target will be kicked out of the area and probably off of the Net entirely. There's some discussion of the different sort of programs available and how many you can keep running at once. If you're using a DNI, it'll depend on your Int score, since you're actually running them in your head. Otherwise you're generally limited to 3 at most. The program descriptions have a lot more potential than actual information. We get lots of 1-line examples, but it's short on real detail. They'll probably do a full-fledged Net supplement later; this just gives you the bare bones necessary to run it.

Finally, they discuss the setting itself in more detail. We get the basic history, profiles of the seven "Superpower" nations currently dominating world affairs and write ups of the major Megacorps. The Corps entries are particularly nice, because they not only describe the corporation, they rate them in areas like technology, security and amount of political influence. The final overview for each one has a cyberpunk discussing ways to make money off of them, either by working for or against them.

After the Megacorps, it discusses the police forces of the world. I particularly like the time line that the narrator gives you for his own encounter with a SWAT team. It takes the special forces folks approximately 15 seconds to secure the entire building, leaving half of the perps dead and the other half prisoners. In short, the message is simple: don't mess with these guys.

Then we get a discussion of some of the more common and widespread gangs. Some of these are quite creative. The Hive consists of folks who have wired their brains together via a certain kind of cybernetic implant so that what one sees, they all do. The Templars are nicknamed "the Fairies" for their obsession with medieval knights and sword duels, but no one uses that nickname to their face: they use snipers with very modern equipment to enforce their anachronistic "rules". The Jaz Junkies aren't really an organized gang as much as a trend. Junkies are bored rich kids who get off on pulling dangerous stunts in low rent neighborhoods, then running back to the corporate housing areas where no one can touch them. The Puppeteers are particularly frightening; these hackers commit crimes by "hijacking" someone else's computer while they're logged in and forcing their VR representation to do the dirty work and take all of the risk. Sanity Claus are some particularly twisted extortionists who like bombs with a Christmas theme to them. Finally, the Arrowheads are obsessed with maintaining twisted versions of various ethnic "heritages" and the Urban Breakdown gang is noted for building powerful weapons out of discarded junk.

In the Prestige Class area (ah, yes, the cream filling of the Twinkie of D20) we get such lovely gems as Black Ops (killing for a Megacorp), The Cyborg (can't afford all of the cyberware you want? Get corporate sponsorship and get free upgrades with each level), and The Made Man (killing for organized crime). These fill out some nice cyberpunk archetypes that were missing and give the DM more options for his villains. I particularly like the Guinea Pig feat for the Cyborg. Since you aren't paying the tab for your own cyberware, you'll often find yourself getting "experimental" upgrades that may be great (and destined for mass production eventually) or may be utter disasters. Made Men also get the Makin' Money feat, which gets them a random amount of cash each month. Sometimes this is a major windfall... and sometimes you can actually end up in the hole. The life of a mob boss can really suck, sometimes.

They also offer an example of a Multiclass path. The SWAT path alternates between taking levels as a Cop and as a Merc, granting them better combat capabilities in return for delaying their access to the upper-level feats. This is a really nice way of handling it and they even give you an advancement table that shows your adjustments for each level.

Then we get some standard NPC classes to fill out the gaps. A bunch of optional rules give you new flexibility with driving tests and in combat. Here you get rules for weapon accessories like laser sights and smartgun links and details on non-standard ammunition types like hollow-points and tracers. All in all, this area covers a lot of useful information, from hospital stays to how much damage it takes to demolish a building to the effects of grenades and various drugs. Some optional combat rules make D20 combat far more lethal if that's the sort of world you want, but I think most people would skip them.

We get game rules and specs for a bunch of pharmaceuticals, including simple stuff like alcohol. I particularly liked Neotraxin, which just seems to embody the cyberpunk universe. Neotraxin halts the growth of all cancerous tumors for a year. It doesn't cure cancer, but it does stop it in its tracks for 12 months at a time. Of course, it costs $25,000 a dose and you'll have to keep taking it as long as you live. What more could a drug firm want?

They write up a lot of medical equipment, too, from flash packs (instant first aid in a patch) to spray skin (beats band-aids) to the Med-Evac wristband which summons aid if the wearer gets too badly injured.

Just so you don't feel too good about it, they have a section on diseases as well. These range from the common cold to Ebola.

The "Black Molly" virus is their futuristic version of AIDS which is ravaging many regions of the world. Some areas with poor hygiene and large populations, like India, have an infection rate as high as 1.6% of the population. My only qualm with the description of Black Molly is that the period of time between infection and the onset of visible symptoms is way too short. Five to seven days after infection, symptoms start to appear, and death generally occurs within two weeks after that. That's really fast, far too fast for a sexually-transmitted disease to really propagate. I'd probably give it at least a six month incubation period (probably longer) during which the host is infectious and probably extend the time it takes to kill you, too. Otherwise, I just don't see it being more than a minor, localized problem. Maybe if it were an airborne virus instead.

Finally, we get a glossary and an index. The glossary is fairly decent and covers such amusing terms as "BAMF" (short for Bad A** Mother F*****), "Cement Poisoning" (what you get when you tick off organized crime) and "Climbing the Corporate Ladder" (having your boss killed so you can get promoted). They also cover some interesting historical tidbits, such as the "Obesity Control Act of 2009" which enforced mandatory food rationing and the "Public Health Act of 2012", which authorizes police forces to demolish private property if it's deemed a "health risk". The index is pretty decent, but it's only 2 pages long as thus lacks a lot of entries that you might want. You can't find the description of The Burn, for example.

Final Analysis:

Overall, Digital Burn seems pretty nice. It's thin, but densely packed. The fake "advertisements" and "news stories" add a little color to it, even if they aren't very impressive. The editing isn't perfect, but at least they spell-checked it; the typos that I saw were cases of the wrong word being used, rather than actual misspellings. I found the photos particularly amusing mostly because I've met a number of the gamers who posed for them.

One good test of a system like this is whether or not you could reproduce your favorite cyberpunk PC in it. I don't think I'd have any trouble converting my old professional bodyguard, Sphynx, to Digital Burn. They've got all of his cyberware covered and he'd fit just fine under the SWAT multiclass. In fact, since they don't have any artificial limits on how much cyberware you can take, I could actually upgrade him a bit without worrying about running out of Essence or Humanity.

The book became more impressive the longer I read it. At first it seemed pretty skimpy for the price, but I kept finding sections with a surprising amount of detail and thought put into them, so my opinion of it went up over time. Now, be warned: the authors put a lot of "attitude" into the writing. You might find it cute or appropriate... or you might find it annoying.

Here's an example quote from the cyberware entry for the subdermal pouch (a hidden cavity in your body that you can hide things in):

"Placing an unsheathed sharp object in your pouch causes 1d4 points of damage with no save because you were dumb."

I liked the attitude. It seemed appropriate for a cyberpunk game, and it never really obscured the rules.

Ratings:

Overall, I give Digital Burn a 4 for Substance and a 4 for Style.