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Ex Machina is Guardians of Order’s (GoO) stab at modernizing cyberpunk roleplaying. Most cyberpunk games came out during the late 1980s and early 1990s after the first major flush of cyberpunk literature, and their age shows. Flip through most explicitly cyberpunk RPGs and you’ll find lots of chrome, rock and roll as the dominant form of music, and more ninjas than you can shake a monokatana at. Ex Machina’s goal is to move past the usual 1980s trappings of cyberpunk games, look at what the heart of the genre is, and bring it up to date. The included history of the genre, ranging from the 1970s to the present day, shows that what makes cyberpunk cyberpunk isn’t the 1980s fashion statements. Instead, it’s the social effects of new technology and the struggles of outsiders to find a place in this new society. That sounds good to me.
Physically, the book is the usual 8 ½ x 11 inches in size, hardbound, and 352 pages long. The type is small but legible and margins are reasonable, so there’s a lot of meat to be read. Rather than having small images scattered throughout the text there are a number of full two-page illustrations. Some of these illustrations are quite nice, but many are mediocre, have large amounts of wasted space or don’t seem to have much to do with the game, such as the all-girl team on pages 22-23. And the breasts on page 284 look like implanted cyberware designed to shoot down enemy aircraft flying overhead. With some pretty long stretches between illustrations, it’s impressive how interesting the layout is, with slick sidebars, stat blocks and so on breaking up the text. I never felt bored while going through lots of pages between images.
Tri-Stat d8
GoO’s in-house generic gaming engine, Tri-Stat dX, is the system used here, with a d8 (for “posthuman” power levels) as the game die. Tri-Stat dX was released as a separate book, but everything you need to run an Ex Machina game is here. It’s a point-buy system, and as with most such systems, it’s quite possible to come up with unbalanced characters who have a single area of expertise. It’s best to come into character generation with both a firm character concept and GM supervision. Character generation takes up the bulk of the system rules, and you can make pretty much anything you want from scratch. There are also many templates provided, both based on occupations and for alternate “species”, such as full cyborg bodies, A.I.s, and androids. Notes on customizing templates are also provided.
As you can probably guess from the name of the system, there are three stats: Body, Mind, and Soul. These may not seem like enough, but you can fine-tune a character to make the strong but clumsy character that seems to be so popular.
There are also Attributes, which are most of what defines a character, Skills, and Defects. Attributes include such traits as Superstrength, Servant, Gadgets, Armour, and Invisibility. This being an effects-based system, you can make Superstrength occur due to a cybernetic arm, genetic manipulation, bioware, adrenal glands the size of grapefruits in your shoulders, or whatever you want. You then fiddle with other aspects of the Attribute with other linked Attributes and Defects, so your cybernetic arm might be immune to pain but not be able to finely manipulate objects, while a bioware arm might look gruesome enough to cause social problems if left uncovered. It’s conceptually similar to the Hero system, though not so math-intensive.
Skills are just what the name implies. The cost to buy a skill is based on the importance of that skill to the genre, so in Ex Machina the Computers or Electronics Skill costs more than Animal Training or Swimming. Tri-Stat dX values Stats over skills; an ordinary person will have a Stat of 4, and a skill of about 2 as a reasonable maximum. PCs will have much higher values for both, but Skills will still lag behind. Cyberpunk as a genre generally relies on skills more than innate talent, so more skill points would have made more sense.
The effects-based mechanics mean that characteristics that you might not think would fit well into a cyberpunk setting actually do, once you explain it. Reincarnation is one example. It might not seem very appropriate until you think of it as saving a mind on a computer and downloading it into a cloned body’s brain. Other Attributes have been dropped entirely from Tri-Stat dX, and a list of these excised Attributes is given. Computer Scanning might seem an odd choice to remove, but it’s definitely overpowered for a setting where computers are so important. Own a Big Mecha is likewise dropped, probably due to the fairly hostile reaction its treatment in Tri-Stat dX received. Examples are given of how to make up vehicles as Items of Power, or you can always buy stock vehicles as Gadgets. Somewhere in the GoO forum wilderness is a semi-official rewriting of Own a Big Mecha, if you choose to hunt around there for it.
Matters of importance in the game are generally resolved by rolling 2d8 and trying to roll equal or under your Stat or your Stat +Skill. In combat, the attacker must not only succeed on the attack roll, but the defender must fail a defense roll to get hit; if the defender makes the roll, the attack misses. With highly-skilled defenders combat can take a while, though trick shots are designed to help this and forcing the defender to succeed to a greater degree than the attacker works pretty well as a house rule. One typical complaint with the system is that weapons don’t do enough damage in combat. With an average person having 40 Health Points and a 9mm pistol doing a maximum base damage (before adding in modifiers such as character skill) of 10, Tri-Stat isn’t the most instantly lethal game out there. If you choose, you could reduce Health Points or increase weapon damage (or both), but even as is the game is more lethal than it looks at first blush. If you take more damage than your Shock Value, you can be stunned for up to several combat rounds. If that damage is from a piercing or edged weapon, you automatically take a point of bleeding damage each round you’re in combat or each minute if you’re not engaged in anything so taxing. If you receive first aid, you will only take a point of damage every ten minutes, but you will eventually die unless you get to a hospital. This rule makes things much nastier, as characters who are badly hurt in combat have to make the decision as to whether to continue, and hurt themselves more badly, or step out of the fight. Even if they win they may bleed to death before getting proper treatment.
As given, there are some ways in which Tri-Stat won’t work the way some people think that a cyberpunk game should. Thankfully, the system is modular enough that you can fiddle with things and not have the whole system constantly fall apart. Don’t like the relative unimportance of Skills to Attributes? Give the PCs more skill points. Don’t think weapons do enough damage? Bump up those levels to where it seems comfortably lethal to you.
Technology
High tech toys aren’t something that this book skimps on. You’ve got a dozen or so sci-fi technologies (from cyberware to bioware to virtual networks to nanomachines), most of which are detailed through Attributes, Skills and Defects, allowing you to modify and make your own with a minimum of hassle. Cyberware alone has thirty or so different examples, and the section on “mind uploading” is a good example of the richness of choices you have: ideas are given for being able to save a backup of your mind and download it into a cloned or robotic body or keeping your working mind in a computer indefinitely. Legal and social implications are also brought up. Can your memories be shared with other people and if so, can specific memories be made commercially available? What if the uploading destroys the original body? What if it doesn’t destroy the original body and you can have multiple copies of yourself running around? Can you swap bodies with someone else? Is someone whose mind is in a computer still a legally-recognized person?
Other gear includes computers, tools and gear (active optical camouflage to nanodocs to metamorphosis tanks), drugs, robots, weapons (fifty or so, both modern and futuristic, including knives, railguns, tactical missiles and the always-popular monokatana), and vehicles (over thirty of these, from gyrostabilised skateboards to attack helicopters). Numerous modifications are available for computers, weapons, and vehicles. It’s easy to make your own gear using Attributes if you don’t find it here.
Money is unfortunately only indirectly covered. Equipment, up to and including vehicles, are obtained through Attributes like Gadgets, so character points are effectively used as cash. This may make sense during character generation, but it how do you explain it when giving out experience? You can convert the point cost of Gadgets to a cash equivalent (as in the IOSHI setting, below) and give the characters money instead of or in addition to Character Points, but it’s a major omission. One way around this might be to count Gadgets obtained through experience or character points as having some degree of plot immunity, unlike items that are simply bought.
Future information networks and hacking into them is pretty central to the genre, and two ways of hacking are provided. The more realistic one involves trying to find passwords, looking for system backdoors, and so on. Basically, it’s the same sort of thing that’s done today. This method resolves attempts with Skill rolls and hardware. Rules are also given for iconic cyberspace, in which the user’s consciousness enters cyberspace and has a separate form. This second method is most similar to that of other cyberpunk games and allows players to roleplay their time in cyberspace. In play this could take up a large amount of time and could bore players whose characters are not involved in the iconic cyberspace part of the session unless they can tag along.
Four Settings
--------------Spoiler Warning---------------------
The descriptions of the settings contain spoilers, so if you want to play in them be sure that you can live with yourself if you keep reading.
Up to this point, Ex Machina provides enough rules and toys for you to make a cyberpunk world of your own (or the cyberpunk of the 1980s), but there’s still more than half the book to go. Four settings finish things off, each running between forty and fifty pages. These really are settings and not scenarios in that there isn’t much space given to adventure ideas, though typical plot outlines for the settings are often given. Then again, the settings are filled with hooks, so coming up with ideas shouldn’t be too difficult.
Reading the final half of the book, one is constantly reminded that this is not cyberpunk from the 1980s. While many of the basic themes are definitely cyberpunk, it’s a new take on the genre for roleplaying. Most of the settings lack an obvious villain, and the corporations (typically the source of all evil in older cyberpunk games) don’t have an obvious, ominous agenda. A GM who runs a campaign in these settings will find lots of ideas, locations, organizations, and individuals, but the ultimate opponent and theme of the campaign is left open.
Technology levels vary quite a bit in the four settings. Heaven Over Mountain and IOSHI are quite advanced, while Underworld has a few high-tech items in a largely modern background tech level and Daedalus has even fewer bits of high-tech than Underworld.
Heaven Over Mountain
Bruce Baugh’s Heaven Over Mountain covers an orbital elevator, also known as the beanstalk, that’s largely grown biotech. The consortium that runs the operation is remarkably benign for a cyberpunk setting; they’re not bent on enslaving everyone or crushing the spirits of everyone on the elevator. They just want to get filthy rich and don’t really mind what you do as long as you don’t mess things up for them. They don’t have any great evil secret, either. The technology is centred on artificial intelligence and biotech, with cyberware available but considered a bit passé compared to bioware.
There are five main settled areas on the elevator and numerous smaller points of interest in between. With roughly two million people and 36 000 kilometers of elevator, there’s a lot of potential here. There are companies, organizations, and conspiracies aplenty. Fringe societies can be found everywhere in this setting. If you come from one of these, you’ll be an outsider almost everywhere else, and if you’re from mainstream society you’ll often come across these weird little groups. Many come to the beanstalk to do contract work or to make a deal in its looser legal environment. Bioware is fairly common, but the darker side is also in evidence through dodgy experimental bioware procedures available to the desperate. Everyone is trying to adapt to the new environment, and those who are new to the elevator get to deal with optional culture shock and stress rules.
At times Heaven over Mountain seems almost more standard science fiction than cyberpunk, and if you wanted to downplay the cultural aspects to you could certainly play it that way. It’s an interesting location and well thought out, with a much heavier emphasis on biotech than usually found in the genre.
Underworld
Underworld is the most solidly dystopian and politically heavy-handed of the settings, basically today’s Special Economic Zones on steroids. The setting takes place after the US has dealt with the perceived threat of global terrorism by basically taking over the world. Rebuilding the shattered foreign economies is a task given to megacorporations, who build Secure Economic Zones (SEZ), ostensibly to train the populations for the skills they will need in the new economy. These SEZs are walled off to protect the inhabitants with the end effect of turning these "Underworlds" into work camps.
Christian Gossett and Bradley Kayl pull no punches here with the most unambiguously unpleasant and depressing setting of the four. The characters have no way of getting out of Underworld 9 and will most likely have to be nastier than anyone else they meet to survive and prosper. It’s my least favourite of the four settings, and by a fair margin. Some of the problem has to do with a lot of the cookie-cutter “themed” gangs (the Razor Saints all have cybernetic arms, the Bloodworms all have dyed black skin with white tattoos, and so on) and the typical Yakuza and Mafia. Also, if social changes wrought by technology and the stories of outsiders in these changed societies are the heart of cyberpunk, I can’t see where this is found in this setting. It’s basically a big prison setting. The technology that’s present hasn’t changed much in Underworld’s society and could be removed with little real effect. I found this setting to be the weakest part of the book.
IOSHI
Most of the world is part of a culture known as Sparta. It’s a largely atomized society in which individuals are encouraged to act as rational economic individuals, working almost exclusively on short-term projects. Each project is likely to have different corporations funding it, so the only real loyalty is to the project currently at hand. The global reach of communications allows anyone, anywhere to be part of a given subculture, so a mountain-climbing club nominally based in Alberta may have members in Singapore. Iconic cyberspace can be overlaid over your normal vision, allowing you to look up a public profile on anyone or anything you see on the street. You can integrate your mind with software to better your mind or, if you’ve got the money, get memory plastic biotech implants that allow you to change your shape in a few minutes.
IOSHI (Individually Organized Science and Hobby Index) itself is an education method that lets one get training and education through technology. The only real limit to your abilities is how much cash you’ve got; if you spend enough you can download the skills to be as good as Mozart or Einstein. If you spend more you can be better than either of those hacks. The training that’s possible extends not just to the traditional arts, sciences, and physical training but also to fields such as effective precognition (through trend and pattern analysis) and mind control (through learning practical psychology to a phenomenal extent). The only drawback to learning in this way is the cost involved and the risk of data taint. Just what data taint is and who or what, if anyone, is behind it is left to the GM, though ideas are given. The brief introduction to the setting at the book’s beginning mentions that learning through IOSHI also results in legal entanglements. I’d hoped that there would be something like the End User License Agreement from Hell, but this isn’t covered in the chapter itself. Pity.
Rebecca Borgstrom’s writing can be a bit opaque at times, which can make the setting seem more difficult to get a hold on than it is. It’s also the most radical of the settings in terms of its take on society’s alteration in the face of technology, which can make things more confusing. Still, it’s quite impressive.
Daedalus
The second setting inspired by the aftereffects of terrorism, Michelle Lyons’s Daedalus is a more subtle reaction to the threat of terrorists than Underworld. Here, chips are implanted into citizens’ brains. These chips act as an ID card, tracking chip, credit and bank card, and keep track of preferences in everything from shower temperature to toaster settings. They also modify one’s behaviour, but that’s not known by the general population. Those who are uncomfortable with the chip aren’t obligated to get it, but opting out results in a loss of civil rights, social ostracism, fewer job opportunities, and host of smaller inconveniences. Whether this is a dystopia or a utopia is largely a matter of opinion. Most of the population is perfectly happy in this modern Leave it to Beaver, or perhaps their chip tells them that they are. This is a society that has low crime rates, is environmentally friendly, and is generally quite happy.
Several groups don’t see the situation in such a rosy light. There are several of them, fighting for free will using a variety of tactics. And so the system inadvertently creates the terrorists that it is attempting to protect its citizens from. The player characters are likely part of the resistance, so they’ll see the setting as solidly dystopian, but there is enough that is ambiguous both at the level of the society and the individuals within it to make for uncomfortable ethical quandaries. Good stuff.
Conclusion
Ex Machina is a hefty tome with lots and lots of ideas. A complete system, piles of gear, and four complete settings. What’s not to like? Very little, fortunately. The lack of a way of properly dealing with money is a major flaw, and options to the system to make combat more damaging would have been appreciated. Art is overall mediocre. One of the settings isn’t at all to my taste and I’m not sure what it’s doing in a cyberpunk book. Still, there’s so much going for this book that it’s still a very impressive piece of work, well thought-out and wide-ranging. It’s interesting to look back and see how the our present differs from the cyberpunk of the past. It will likewise be interesting to see how the future that Ex Machina envisages differs from what is actually to come.
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