glory!

I'm writing this post partly on request from a friend, but also because this is one of the topics that bumbles around in the back of my brain on a relatively consistent basis, and it's time to get it out into the world.

Future Mara here: this turned out to be way longer than originally intended. There's some game design rules here, including shadowrun/cyberpunk hacks! It's way at the bottom. I think the whole thing is a good read, but if you're just here for "what would she change about the game" it's down, down to goblin town you go my lads.

I am a big fan of the cyberpunk genre, especially in the forms and formats that I encountered in the late 90's and early 00's. Those forms are still with us, though they've been joined by others (no less valid; don't worry, I'm not here to litigate what can and can't be cyberpunk, that's not how I roll) but there's a recurring specter which accompanies them: the dehumanizing and othering of marginalized identities, particularly disabled and prosthetic-using identities.

I mean, this is hardly the only thing problematic about the genre; I'm looking at you, shadowrun with your treatment of Native identities which read as incredibly progressive to a sheltered white college student (and, likely, to the writers - I don't ascribe malice, a lot of their writing has "well-intentioned bumbling" all over it) but it's what we're going to be looking at today. I'm going to have a couple of words about "problematic" as a concept down the line, too, so stay tuned.

I can't just drop "problematic" and assume that everyone knows what I'm talking about, though, so let me do a brief primer on what I'm talking about! Augmentation and replacement are big parts of cyberpunk fiction, whether it's cybernetic arms with or without cool internal weapons, fingers that break apart to do the ghost-in-the-shell speedhacking move, eyes that can zoom in real close, computers in your brain, or more. This has been a piece of the genre since the first definably-Cyberpunk novels, whether you mark Neuromancer or something else, and with it one of the big questions which Cyberpunk fiction asks: does replacing parts of ourselves make us less ineffably Human? Different works have different answers, often falling into a range between "uh, no, arguably it makes us more human than the bastards in power who claim it removes our humanity" and "HELL YEAH IT DOES, AUTHENTICITY FOREVER BABY", but if we're being truly honest it's not about whether the answer for any given book, series or movie falls on that spectrum or as one of the outliers, it's about asking the question in a way that brings the reader to grapple with the ideas much as the characters are, directly or indirectly.

Cyberpunk tabletop games, naturally, handle this question with all the delicacy of a Mack truck going down a 47-degree incline at 76kph into a Grand Piano display convention.

The eponymous Cyberpunk RPG, later Cyberpunk2020 and now Cyberpunk Red, assigns characters an Empathy stat, from which they derive a Humanity score. In the core rules, whenever you install a piece of cyberware, it comes with a Humanity cost: deduct that value from your Humanity score and assign a penalty to your Empathy stat when your Humanity hits certain breakpoints. For added effect, as-written the Humanity cost is a variable amount, which is rolled in secret by the GM and the player is only informed when their Empathy drops (or in some versions, not EVEN informed, as the GM secretly tracks the Empathy penalty on rolls per-player) and so you don't actually know how "safe" it is to install a piece of cyberware. As your Humanity drops too low, you are at increasing risk of "Cyber-Psychosis", a fictional disorder which manifests in multiple ways but revolves around the idea that your character has been so fundamentally disconnected from their Human Self they have no reason to value the physical or emotional wellbeing of others, or even ultimately their lives, past utility needs. It can manifest as coldness and apathy, it can manifest as viciousness, it can manifest as a frothing drive to "purify" the "meat". Cyberpsychosis can be "cured" with therapy, which includes "remove as much cyberware as possible, including pure utility pieces like arms and legs" as step one, and "never touch it again or risk relapse" as a later step. It's monetarily and socially expensive as well.

Shadowrun takes this a step further. In Shadowrun, magic and the "spiritual realm" is "real" (as opposed to Cyberpunk which has various faiths and superstitions and rumors of weird and unexplained powers - and in previous editions some crossovers including vampires and other supernatural beings, but at base doesn't include "real magic") and thus every character has a quantifiable soul, expressed by their Essence score, which derives their Magic stat. Much like Humanity/Empathy in Cyberpunk, installing cyberware costs Essence - a known amount this time, which only varies based on the quality of cyberware, a player is able to precisely barter their soul in Shadowrun - and your Magic rounds down for fractional Essence amounts. Should your Magic hit zero, you basically can't even try to use magic, and should your Essence hit zero, without extreme measures, you die.

So, in a very real sense, in Shadowrun as written, cyberware eats your soul.

To make matters worse, in Cyberpunk you can reclaim your lost Humanity by removing the offending metal and doing therapy, but for the longest time, in Shadowrun, once lost you would always have that arm-shaped hole in your soul, regardless of WHY you attached the cyber-arm, and in early editions even if you removed the "costly" cyberware the damage was done: let's say you had replacement cyber-eyes and wanted to upgrade to the new model? Originally, you still had to "pay full price" for the new cyber-eyes. The hole couldn't be filled. It was "fixed" in stages - in first edition, if you lost an arm to combat trauma, your Essence wasn't automatically impacted, but then installing a cyberarm would cost Essence, then in later editions they wobbled back and forth about "when and why" the Essence was "spent", eventually settling on a "only pay the cost for currently installed cyberware" and "if you've lost Essence due to trauma, you can count that Essence loss towards installed cyber without further penalty" but you still have to feed your figurative, but still horribly literal, soul to the machine.

Eventually, they added the very scary "cyber-zombies", experimental weapons who were stuffed with far more cyberware than the metahuman body could tolerate, and effectively techno-necromancied AND actual-necromancied into staying alive somehow... and also another element, essence-replacement therapy. Turns out, if you have the money and time and connection, if you're rich and connected, you can go to these elite clinics (that player characters obviously don't have immediate access to, duh) and... holistically integrate your cyberware back into your essence, up to a point, using the same kind of therapies that would help recover from major physical, mental and emotional trauma damage to your Essence.

These mechanics are, to put it lightly, Problematic. The core cyberpunk question of "what is a human" is one thing, but this isn't that: this gestures coyly at "prosthetics make you inhuman" and "the different is undesirable". When pacemakers have a Humanity cost, this is more than just a coincidence: whether it's intentional or not, this is directly ableist and borderline fearmongering. There are whole essays that could go into establishing that this IS problematic; I am asking you to accept that it is, and urging you to look into it, rather than going through the whole relitigation process (partly because I am very tired of having that particular conversation, if I'm being honest about that). The games don't explicitly state "disability makes you less human", but it's not a slippery-slope fallacy to see a throughline from "an artificial heart causes Essence loss" to "disability aids eat your soul"; the frame is clearly invoked.

So how do we deproblematize this?

The simplest answer is "we don't", really. We can "deproblematize" this by excising it: cybernetics become just another thing. If you have the "slots" available and can get ahold of it, you can have the cyberware! Maybe a cyber-limb can only host so much technology but that's a function of "this limb is only So Big, you can't pack more into it than it physically has room for, but just remove those internal costs and commentary". Nothing says that you have to deal with it. You are allowed to opt out, whether you're designing your own cyberpunk game a la Hard Wired Island or See You Space Cowboy, which both take this approach, or running a game of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk/2020/Red or some other game which takes the same stance. You can just walk out. It's okay.

Some games try to keep an "innate cost" to serve as game balance: a player can't simply cram the most effective 'ware in, even if they can afford it. The 5E setting Crystalpunk and indie game Identeco both take a "blood toxicity" approach, where the technological or magical power cells which run cyberware are dangerous to the metahuman body, and there's an upper limit to the amount of Cool Toys you can use, but both of them are open with their stance of "medical prosthetics and disability aids that just restore base functionality don't play by these rules", and that is also fine. I find it underwhelming, but ultimately fine.

But what if I find myself compelled by the various tension levers that the existing cyberware systems have in play? What if the frictions presented inspire me, but I still have issues with some of the directions the underlying messaging goes?

What if "problematic" was not a word to flee?

Earlier in this piece I promised a few words about "problematic" as a concept, and so here we go. I do think there are words to flee. I do think there is messaging that I simply don't want to promote: racist messaging, bioessentialist and eugenecist messaging, queerphobic messaging, fascist messaging and more. But that doesn't automatically mean "I never want to engage with these concepts in any form in media". I feel like treating Problematic as a red-flag, drop-the-storm-shutters, get-ye-behind-me-Satan do-not-engage qualifier removes far too much from the possible range of experiences: reducing it to a Shun Button renders it useless, locking swathes of art behind a door labeled "Bad". "Problematic" cost us further work by Isabel Fall - cost us Isabel Fall as a person, even.

No, I'm not saying Shadowrun is the same level of deep, personal art as I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter (Short Story, Clarkesworld, January 2020, and yes I highly recommend reading this deeply vulnerable piece) ...but I'm saying it could be.

I'm saying 'problematic' is a yellow flag. A warning sign: a blinker to let us know hey, be alert, do not uncritically absorb the messaging seen here, remain aware. And if there's something in the problematic material which you believe ought to be shunned, it shouldn't be waved at vaguely under the term "problematic", it needs to be called out directly, unshielded.

Stepping down from that soapbox: Shadowrun's cybernetic costs compel me on multiple levels. There's commentary to them, even though I think some of it was unintentional.

One of the things which cracked that particular shell was the introduction of Shadowrun's essence recovery therapy; originally listed as an expensive thing which could help a disabled magician recover their impaired magic under the assumption that it was reduced due to traumatic injury, some cheeky diegetic commentary implied that the wealthy were pairing this with bespoke cyber-implants to just... not deal with the drawbacks, building the therapy into the cybersurgery recovery time, and the monster that is capitalism turned its neon eye towards me with a playful wink, and the commentary started to sink in. In CyberpunkRPG land, commentary both diegetic and authorial started hinting that cyberpsychosis was actually not a "thing", that there are specific traumas related to cybernetics -

one such trauma is in fact the weaponization and tokenization of the body in a very direct way. you're an edgerunner, you need an edge. You get an implant to help. It helps. Soon you find you need another edge, or need to replace a damaged part. In this hypothetical, you have lost your hand. You need a new hand. You could get a poor condition hand on your budget, or you could temporarily get a weapon-hand with knife fingers which doesn't have the same function as a hand, but would absolutely help you with the kind of brawling you do as part of your edgerunner risk-filled life. You get the knife hand. now your hand is a knife. later, you think, you can get it replaced when you can afford a GOOD hand, but your hand is a knife. you get caught by rival gangers on your way to a meeting. your hand is a knife. they leave you alone. you wave to your friends. your hand is a knife. you reach for the VIP you're there to extract. your hand is a knife. your hand is a knife. your hand is a knife. you cannot touch your boyfriend with that hand. your hand is a knife. you have to relearn how to scratch your cheek, unless you want to replace more parts of your body. you can now afford to replace it with a Good Hand but your hand is a knife and that has helped you, but also, your hand is a knife.

• but that there is not actually a blanket "cyberpsychosis" issue, it is a bugbear conjured up to paper over stacking hypercapitalist hellscape traumas, people "going crazy" because of cyberware are actually... usually not? they're breaking down because of other pressures.

Of course, the system in CyberpunkRED is just the same Empathy/Humanity system as before, which kind of takes some of the wind out of those sails.

So as covered above, yeah, I'd be within my rights to just jettison it, just walk out. But I don't want to do that, and I have reasons.

One of those reasons is that I have cybernetics, and they dehumanize me regularly. Not because of anything innate to them, but because there are people in my life who think it's funny to hide my glasses and kick away my cane, and when people see the scar indicating my bone-replaced arm it's immediate pity and revulsion, which only intensifies if they find out about the medications necessary to pretend to regular function in our society. Sometimes, much like my trans and otherwise queer identity, I would like to not think about that; I would like to spend some time in a world where it's all normalized.

Most of the time, I don't want people to blithely pretend that I don't exist, and that I am invisible. Seeing my struggles represented in a way to which I can relate feels good. I like to see myself.

There are other reasons ranging from good-friction to "I like the crunchy buttons to twiddle and various dramatic balancing of the game" to even further beyond, but we've already gone quite far afield. Here's what I would do, to keep the parts that make my brain go ZING... but also to remove some of the messaging that hurts.

STEP ONE: It doesn't eat your soul...
...but some people may think it does.

One of the problems that GMs run into is the Unfortunately Reliable Narrator. Because they're the player's only window into the game-world, anything said by the GM is assumed to be truthful; sometimes with players getting very upset if it's revealed to be untrue, even if that sort of misleading would be accepted in a similarly staged video game. This can unfortunately extend to NPC conversation as well, where a character will say something inaccurate, whether on purpose or just mistaken, and the players will take that as actual truth. I'm not here to talk about "how can we fix that", this is a whole 'nother essay. I AM here to say "this happens to RPG BOOKS as well". The writers will present a diegetic opinion held by certain characters, like "Atlantis is 5 miles off the shore of Chicago", and because it's printed in the text, players will assume that this is direct, ironclad truth. This also happens in places like MMO lore-books and quests, it's hardly unique to tabletop games.

So step one is to make it explicit and clear that cybernetic implants do not actually make you less human; that propagandized groups and various movements believe or state they do, maybe there are even scientific theories on the subject, but they do not. Establishing this sets up various stakes in a meaningful way, while also making the principles clear.

STEP TWO: Maximum capacity is just maximum capacity.

Cybernetic implants are tied into the human nervous system, and interface with other systems as well: circulatory, musculo-skeletal, immune, bioelectric, who knows. "Essence" cost and "Humanity" cost now represent the strain on the system. If you go too far, impairment become dysfunction and worse, but burnout from multiple sources is nothing new. We keep the mechanical balance and the how-far-can-we-push dramatic stress, but it is no longer innately dehumanizing. In addition, "essence replacement therapy" and "humanity therapy" is no longer rich-person-woo, but instead holistic physical therapy in which your existing cybernetic system that is your body-self further integrates and balances your new technological additions and replacements. Shadowrunners normally don't have the resources - time, money, AND connections - to undergo this therapy. It's expensive and time consuming, and not only do you need the money to start it, you need the ability to take time OFF to undergo potentially multiple rounds of very intense integration therapy.

But it's THERE, and the human body is capable of amazing things, with the right help.

STEP TWO AND A HALF: What About Magic?

What ABOUT magic?

In core Shadowrun, cyberware impairs your ability to use magic. This is part of the "it eats your soul!" commentary, but doesn't have to be. If it's not a lever you want to play with, you could simply remove the penalty, but let's suggest that we want to keep the balancing factor and encourage players not to automatically double-dip and go for the combat caster with wired reflexes and no penalty.

So, we posit that Magic is interacting with the "mana field" - something that's already in play in setting. Learning to use magic involves attuning yourself to the field and flows, and adjusting and directing them.

Above, we've already established that cybernetics can throw the body's systems out of whack, and it's not a stretch to say that this applies to "interfacing your body's EM system with the mana field" as well. Your Magic penalties from Essence "loss" now represent "trying to force a mystical electrical current through resistors" as opposed to "IDK, part of your soul is just gone".

STEP THREE: Some People Don't Like It...
...but also, some people do.

Let's talk social impact.

In both CyberpunkRPG and Shadowrun, there are pro-augmentation and anti-augmentation sentiments. In both cases it's generally handled better than many of the endings and agendas in Deus Ex: Human Revolution/Mankind Divided, with more intermediate responses, but it's definitely present; as referenced above, Cyberpunk 2020/Red even heavily implies this sentiment is behind the cyberpsychosis narrative!

And yet, this isn't represented in the game at all, beyond vague references of "well, this character may not like it if they see visible implants". So let's fix that.

For your augmented character, track the penalty your character would normally have to Empathy in Cyberpunk, or to Magic in Shadowrun (even if your character isn't a magician!) off to the side. Don't actually reduce those scores... well, if you're using 2.5 above for magic, do apply that penalty, my bad. Sorry, Past Mara, Future Mara inserted that section. Anyhow! Track it as a separate integer: if you've "lost" 2.6 Essence, your modifier here is 3. This applies even if you've had Essence Therapy to restore lost Essence: track how much you WOULD HAVE lost from the normal costs of your augmentations and replacements. That does mean this number can go higher than your base Essence score!

Now it's time for a little extra work on the GM's part. Decide whether any given area is PRO-augmentation, ANTI-augmentation, or NEUTRAL. "Area" can be a physical area, a neighborhood or district or business complex. It can also be a social area, a group, cause, or movement. It could even be individuals, if you want to get that granular.

When a character has detectable augments or is otherwise revealed to be augmented:

• If they are in an ANTI-augmentation area, they take a social penalty based on the modifier noted above. Heavier or more obvious augmentation naturally results in lowered opinions and/or increased hostility, naturally based on "how cybered are you".
• Under some situations, a character might be able to "lean into" that fear to flip the penalty into a bonus, such as intimidation or applying social force as a Scary Cybered Individual. The DM is encouraged to allow this, but do mark down that this character is deliberately increasing their Big Scary reputation as a threat, and it'll be that much harder to play it down later, and there may be other knock-on effects, as one does.
• If they are in a NEUTRAL area, they don't have any innate social penalty from their augmentations! They may be able to swing individual bonuses if they lean into "look, I am scary and have a knife for a hand" or "don't worry about this, see, I have a computer in my head and I can search that up for you, I got this" but there is no basic penalty at work.
• If they are in a PRO-augmentation area, you guessed it: they get a social bonus based on the modifier noted above! You are doing the thing that people in the area support and that ingratiates you to them as a baseline.

Depending on the amount of oomph that a GM has available, the amount of "pro-" and "anti-" support can vary: if you've got the bandwidth, you can mark some areas as "slightly anti-augmentation" where the penalty is capped at 3, no matter how deep a character dips, or "fanatically pro-augmentation" where the bonus is multiplied, or unaugmented characters penalized, even; but this is EXTRA, potentially a lot of tracking. The basic Pro, Neutral, Anti guidelines will often work well enough for strong impact in play, and flavor impressions significantly!

STEPS FOUR AND BEYOND: what about cyber-zombies?

...and the like? Those don't actually "need" to be changed very much, with all the reframing that's happened! The magi and doctors doing the horrible experiments are allowed to believe that too much cyberware kills the soul and they need to implant memory stimulators and indulge in necromancy in order to keep their overstuffed hot-pockets of awful death machines up and running, but under this re-lensing, all they're "really doing" is shortcutting. They're taking a delicate process which would normally involve months, years, an indefinite amount of time and heavy work to properly integrate a heavy cybernetic loadout, possibly even doing it in stages, and they're forcing it through quickly, using overcharged adaptation and support. They could have been doing this (sorta) ethically (as ethically as adapting a body into a murderbot can be, anyway) but they've not the patience for it, nor is it profitable to keep your deathdoll-to-be on ice for 10 years while they learn how to be at peace with their new body, so atrocity it is! Cowabunga!

There's other questions like "OK, can dragons and other magical beings get cyberware now, since it doesn't eat your soul" and I don't have a universal answer to that. I could give you several conflicting projections if you want, or just say "that one you'll have to decide on your own for your game, I hope the perspective I've provided helps you" because ultimately, this one IS your call, I can only tell you what I feel in my games and sometimes I contradict myself on that one. I think first ask yourself "why" and that'll give you the answer you need?

...and that's all it takes for the basic suggestion, really. There's still a lot of levers and commentary in place, the friction has not been removed.

For those still wondering "But Mara, why didn't you simply remove the restriction and remove the discrimination, wouldn't that be better", even after the above commentary - and that does remain a valid question, which you're allowed and encouraged to answer for yourself - I do have to restate that I am a broken doll, and I find kinship in combat dolls who require maintenance to function, and seeing myself represented through the struggle.

Because sometimes, the friction leads to a much, much more impactful and fulfilling story, experience, connection to characters, and memories.

Half shitpost as I lay down to take a nap:

If you WANT your game’s cybernetics to eat souls, that’s something you can do too! I’m not saying “oh wow no you should never do that” as much as I am saying “you should have the courage to say so directly, to make that something the game is About. You know, like even DOOM does.”

Some of the time, the actual problem isn’t the Awful Stuff that happens in a “dark, mature” game as much as it is the under the table nudging “haha I’m sure you know what I’m Really Saying about Those People” way it’s presented. Absolutely run a game where cyberware eats users souls and part of the messaging becomes “was that worth it”. That’s rad as hell. Just don’t play wink-nudge-hmhmhm about it. Be real about it, tell people that’s part of your message, build compelling structures around it.

There's a hard-to-google observation, made by the director(? I tried to check but I remember this from years ago and it's hard to google) of Highlander, that sometimes you know there's one line in a script that people are going to walk out of the cinema quoting afterwards ("There can be only one!")

Mara's spectacular power as an essayist is that you'll come out the other end, not just with an idea, but a firmly graspable permanent rhetorical handle on it: Four Capybaras! Your Hand Is A Knife! Explaining things well is a rarer skill than you think, and putting the reader's hand to this kind of memetic affordance is fucking talent, is what it is.