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Torn Asunder: Critical Hits
review...
“... Charisma and wisdom are the names of the game where corporate life is concerned. A successful executive needs good enough social skills to chart his way through the unstable waters of big business and enough common sense to know when his ship is about to sink...” (p. 29, “How Do They Do It?”)
OGL Cybernet is the new old Cyberpunk: lots of chrome, loss of humanity, and lagging dystopian future. The blue-bounded book is trying hard to get the rules of the genre across, without packing a lot of setting in tow. This is good on one hand, distracting on the other. The lack of depth, that may be the authors intent, makes the book feel like a gutted race car–lots of pretty paint, but can’t take it to town.
That’s not to say that the Modern d20 system, here in open game licensed only glory, can’t play nice with the genre. OGL Cybernet does give a lot to the “style over substance” mantra that made it into one of the three laws of Cyberpunk (Style over Substance, Attitude is Everything, Live on the Edge). The book looks slick, and the pages are slick. The rules breeze past those familiar with the d20 system rule set (in either version, modern or standard). Little is new, except where its needed, rules for drugs (adding an addiction rating to the poison rules), cyberware and the Web (OGL Cybernet’s ‘Net or Matrix).
The classes of OGL Cybernet stem from late ‘Eighties hangups with the future, the corporations were taking over and the world was increasingly turning to hyper-culture as a way of escape. Thus in OGL Cybernet we have the Connection (a fixer of people problems, of sorts), the Corporate (those in charge), the Jacker (freewheeling hypercyber-thieves), the Soldier (umm... the one with the guns?), and the Webcrawler(webdeck data junkies) and the Professional (those of the masses that step up to playing with the runners and corps). Prestige classes take the major ideas from cyberpunk and wrap them in a nice package, like the iconic Celebrity, Mercenary, Gunslinger, True Hackers and others.
Implanting cyberware chips away at your character’s Self rating (which is itself based on Charisma). Each implant takes away a number of Self points, as well as do added parts, whether or not you add a waldo (slang for an extraneous arm, not a replacement) for example. A gun waldo may take away 3d6 from a character’s Self score. The neat thing about cyberware that I felt was an improvement (thanks to a film like The Matrix) to cyberware was the inclusion of skill and feat chips (maybe I just missed this in earlier cyberpunk books, I don’t truly remember and it’s been years since I’ve looked at anything in the genre for roleplaying). These chips grant access to certain skill levels dependant on their quality (i.e.: Alpha is just out of the engineer’s hands, while Gamma has a street kid pawning it. Beta and Delta mark the betwixt “qualities”): an alpha skill chip has 5 ranks of a given skill, beta 4 ranks, and so on down to gamma’s 2 ranks. Feat chips give the character access to any feat encoded on it, but the character must have the prerequisites for the feat, if any.
The Web is where most cyberpunk games make or muck things up. The world of Cybernet has this surrounding digital skin which makes up the Web (What is the Matrix?), except only Webcrawlers, and those with webdecks, get to play. A webdeck is a mobile computer that broadcasts a users brain into the digital medium and lets them run around as a Deva (a digital expression of one’s self) program, interacting with the digital world as if it were the real world, just programs take the place of everyday items. Without a webdeck’s program cache, a deva may be defenseless in the Web. (If you don’t got it at hand, you don’t have it is how the world of the Web sees it.)
OGL Cybernet gives a slick drive-by on the cyberpunk genre. The d20 system rules mold well to the genre, even the cyberware feels within reason. I just don’t get a feeling more than a thin veneer lies over the rule set. OGL Cybernet doesn’t try hard to get a world across more than the rules. Its not a good feeling to be giving an audience that may be hard-pressed to relate to the literary movement of the ‘Eighties. Overall, OGL Cybernet gives a good rule-based foundation to a world that one would hope is expanded upon with future releases.
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