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 Inside
By Clinton R. Nixon
In a far-too-soon future, the world falls apart. The tyranny
of the elite draws the blood of the weak. Bleak skies "the
color of television, tuned to a dead channel" blanket
the ground below in oppression.
But, there is an escape. A simple telephone jack, and one
can be transported into a world without aging, without pain,
without hunger, without ugliness – as long as you obey
the rules. Will you go Inside?
Inside: a Sorcerer mini-supplement
Inside is a cyberpunk-themed supplement for Sorcerer,
the game of power and temptation by Ron Edwards. (www.sorcerer-rpg.com)
In it, the players take the role of hackers, people with the
ability to re-code Inside, a vast virtual world world of beauty
and structure.
There is no set setting for Inside. Like the game Sorcerer,
I’m painting with a wide brush here, allowing you to
create your own setting from the pieces and themes I’m
throwing out. You could have a world like "The Matrix,"
in which the majority of humanity knows nothing but Inside,
and the characters are freedom fighters waking everyone up.
You could have a world like Jim Munroe’s excellent novel
Everyone in Silico, where people conduct everyday business
in this virtual world—and more and more of humanity is
moving to conduct their entire lives inside, leaving mortality
and pain behind. You could have a much more conventional cyberpunk
world in the vein of William Gibson’s Neuromancer,
where the majority of humanity lives in the gray here-and-now,
and the powerful and elite of the real world are building
a new, even more intrusive power structure Inside.
No matter what sort of setting you choose, there are a few
tenets that always apply.
All characters are hackers. This isn’t Shadowrun,
as much as I like that game. This doesn’t mean your character
doesn’t have useful real-world talents. Take Hiro, Protagonist
of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. He’s the
best swordsman in the world. He’s a perfect "Inside"
character–and he’s a hacker.
Hacking is prohibited. There are no exceptions to
this. Programming Inside might be legal–with a license
or some such business. Freelance coding is strictly prohibited,
though, whether by law, robots, or yakuza assassins. Therefore,
your character is an outlaw.
The player characters can get outside. Even if you
take this setting to its apocalyptic Matrix-style end, where
all of humanity has enslaved itself, the player characters
can get outside Inside and be, well, humans. That doesn’t
mean it’s necessarily easy; getting out a different way
than the way you came in requires a Contact roll.
Building a perfect cage
In presenting this mini-supplement in Daedalus, I’m hoping
not only to present something fun to use in your game, but
at least show the first steps to making your own Sorcerer
mini-supplement. In creating a mini-supplement, or even designing
a campaign, for Sorcerer, there’s a few questions you
need to answer.
What is a sorcerer in this setting?
In "Inside," as mentioned before, a sorcerer is
a hacker. As defined by Eric S. Raymond in his essay "What
is a hacker?":
As you can see, a hacker is not exactly the negative stereotype
of today. It’s someone driven to hone a unique skill–in
this case, and in most uses of the word, programming–to
a level of ability that it can be used to solve any problem.
Don’t throw out the entire baby with the tub of soda,
though. This sort of insatiable drive isn’t the healthiest
thing. In order to learn more–control more–sacrifices
have to be made. What will your character give up?
What is sorcery in this setting?
In this setting, sorcery is the ability to code. Coding will
let your character make new constructs Inside, take control
of existing constructs, and understand the underlying structure
of the virtual world. It can even be used to make your character’s
avatar–his representation Inside, his very self there–different
and more powerful.
The ability to code provides no special powers Outside, though.
When choosing to stay outside Inside, your character makes
the decision to leave his most powerful weapon checked.
What is Humanity in this setting?
To be honest, this was a hard one for me. I originally starting
mapping Sorcerer’s rituals to the programming
metaphor and thought I had something. Soon, I realized I had
very little if I couldn’t follow the metaphor through
to Sorcerer’s central question: What will you do for
power?
In Inside Humanity is the ability to distinguish between
truth and artifice. Using sorcery–and sacrificing Humanity–provides
the characters with great power to create and control beings,
artificial beings in an artificial world. By using this power,
you grant real power to electronic mirages.
The power of truth is different; it is the power to interact–more
specifically, solve problems–on an interpersonal level.
It’s going to your boss and explaining that you have
to miss a day of work instead of coding an ingenious voice-activated
construct to reply to calls and send email in your place.
It’s breaking up with the girlfriend you don’t want
anymore instead of disappearing into the night and erasing
all records of yourself in telephone and other public directories.
It’s knifing the fucker who hurt you instead of altering
his records to make him appear to authorities as a grand-theft
robbing kidnapper.
It is, essentially, staying Outside–in the real world.
What this means for players is that they must make Humanity
checks when their character uses their abilities Inside to
avoid Outside problems, when they use the grid to weave lies.
Players can make Humanity gain rolls when their characters
confront problems Outside that cause them great difficulty.
What does it mean to have zero Humanity
in this setting?
Losing all of your character’s Humanity means that he
has achieved a Zen-like mastery over coding. His skills have
increased to the point that he sees in code; he feels in code.
He is the master of himself and others Inside.
Unfortunately, he’s also on the verge of being only
code, nothing more than an electronic construct. Characters
that hit zero Humanity have to choose between two paths –
staying Inside forever, or never coming back the same.
The mechanics of zero Humanity are covered later in this
text.
Living the mirage
Describing Inside
What is it like Inside? No matter what your final setting
Outside is like, Inside looks the same. It is a late-1990’s
metropolis, clean, with fair-to-good weather. It rains some
days, but it’s never so hot or cold to be unreasonable,
and the sun’s out most days. One important factor is
that almost everything is concrete, steel, and glass. Artifice
likes to look solid.
If you play with a relatively new (timeline-wise) setting,
where people come and go from Inside regularly, they enter
and exit from bathrooms. In designing Inside, it seemed like
the most private place, so people’s "bamfing"
doesn’t disturb others. When people don’t have to
live Inside, it needs something to attract people, so its
theme parks are amazing, with physics-defying rides, and complete
virtual reality simulations of other worlds.
If you play with a relatively advanced setting where people
live their lives Inside, there are no bad neighborhoods. There
are poor neighborhoods, sure, but they’re quaintly blue-collar,
with block parties on the weekend and such.
Being hackers, the characters may find unauthorized places
Inside that are nothing like like the rest. An apartment door
might take them to a Japanese garden, or to a fantasy-themed
land where fireballs are the order of the day. (These may
well be the remnants of old virtual theme parks.)
It’s important to note that nothing overly breaks real-world
rules, though. People don’t teleport from place to place;
they take monorails and subways, or drive themselves if they
can afford it. People still experience hunger and eat in restaurants.
Night and day still come. Inside looks like a typical city,
just nicer.
There is no outside Inside. By that, I mean there is no countryside–no
beach, no place to get away from the city. There are parks,
but that’s about it. In a nod to the excellent movie
Dark City, there may be signs pointing to the beach, and people
might even talk about going there, but it does not exist.
Frisco: an example setting
Frisco is the City By the Sea, an idyllic place of
equality, good jobs, and nice weather. Westwego, a corporation
involved in cutting-edge digital-sensory research, made it
big when they brought out their star product, RealLife. RealLife
gave everyday people the chance to visit a new city, meet
others, and escape the conditions of their own lives, deemed
lesser by advertisement.
When San Francisco fell into the sea two weeks after their
launch, they exploded in a way no one could predict. Their
product offered the city the survivors once knew and loved,
all in its best day. Frisco had no crime, no earthquakes,
low rent, and a job for everyone. In what was termed an act
of extreme benevolence, they offered all survivors a free
Bronze Pass to Frisco They hook you up, stick in a feeding
tube, and you’ve got a new life and a new job. The fact
that their data banks now lay on the ocean-floor remains of
the real San Francisco was emotional icing on the cake. Entire
companies moved their operations inside RealLife’s Frisco,
and families followed.
Ten years later, the West Coast of America is a ghost town.
Conditions from San Diego to Vancouver are brutal, with enormous
unemployment, high crime, and filth cluttering the streets.
A full third of the population lives in sinister black cubic
buildings, hooked to machines offering eternal life. Inside
these black boxes, there are always free terminals offering
guest passes to RealLife, but rumor on the street is that
not everyone entering a Westwego office comes back.
In this setting, Inside is controlled by the Westwego corporation,
large, faceless, and with no clear leader. The characters
might live in the outside world, or be trapped Inside, under
the watch of the enormous Transamerica building, now the RealLife
offices of Westwego. What happens in those black glass boxes?
What happens to the bodies of people who sign up for RealLife?
Why are people disappearing? Who exactly is staring down from
that monolithic Transamerica tower? And do the ghosts of the
real San Francisco haunt the brave new world of Frisco?
Characters
Characters are created using the same rules as Sorcerer. The
statistics are a bit different, though. Following are the
new descriptors and rules. Humanity is computed as normal.
Stamina
Body hacker: As you analyze and slice code, so
you do to your body. Raw-egg shakes, protein supplements,
and a bizarre regimen–often martial arts–keep
you in shape.
Keyboard jockey: Your body’s been toned by nights
under fluorescent lights, typing away and munching on snack
food. In other words, you’ve ignored it. This does
not denote a low Stamina, though–you could be whip-thin
in that lanky way, or alternatively, one big eatin’
dude, impossible to put down.
Hopped-up: The goth sister to "body hacker,"
you take coffee and speed in the morning and phenobarbital
when you’re ready to crash for 16 hours.
Trapped in the wrong body: Your body was born to
play football, and your head was born for compiling. Your
natural health keeps you going.
Rebel: Your anger’s as easily seen in your
fists as your eyes.
Will
Focused: Your mind is like a laser, able to concentrate
on one thing for hours at a time. You’re not easily
distracted from your personal train of thought, though.
Ideology: You believe in an ideal, a personal reason
you do what you do.
Thrill-seeker: The truth is, controlling your own
little electronic world is fun.
Self-absorbed: If the faces just knew what you
do, if they could just understand; they’d be just like
you.
Fu
Formal training: (Fu 2+) The powers-that-be judged
you of good character and trained you to be one of the architects
of Inside. They judged wrong.
Underground student: (Fu 1-3) You found a mentor
in the underground, someone who taught you how to code.
Confederation: (Fu 1+) You are a member of an illegal
group, organization, coven, cartel, or whatever you guys
call it.
True hacker: (Fu 4+) You’re an original gangster–a
hacker who’s been there since the beginning, and will
never give up your right to change the electronic world.
Natural talent: (Fu 1+) You were born Inside. You’ve
got unnatural talents, though, talents that have led you
to believe something’s not real about your world.
Cover
In Inside hacking is illegal. You must have a license
to code at all. That means your character can’t just
be a hacker–he’s got to do something for a day job.
He might be a fully legal coder, or something much different:
a courier, a street marketer, a dopehead, or a powerful executive.
The choice is completely up to the player, and this becomes
your character’s Cover.
The Cover score is determined like it is in Sorcerer. It
serves one other purpose than it does in that game, though.
When your character is suspected of hacking, his Cover score
is what you roll to portray him as nothing more than what
he seems.
Martial Arts
If you own the excellent supplement Sex and Sorcery, every
single hacker knows martial arts using those rules when they
are Inside. Why? Because it’s fucking cool. Major villains
should be given this same ability.
The Price and Telltale
Your character’s Price and Telltale are things
that affect him Outside. As defined in Sorcerer, power comes
with a price. Your character’s Price is something he’s
poor at because he is a hacker. With the Telltale, it’s
similar; it’s a giveaway to those in the know that he’s
not exactly legal. This will vary greatly depending on the
setting. The fact that Tank, from The Matrix, doesn’t
have a big plug-in on the back of his head would be a pretty
good example.
Sample character: Chi Mack, hacker
at large
Chi missed out on the RealLife exodus. At the time, he was
too busy selling the old way to escape reality–pills,
grass, and anything else he could find. As downtown Vancouver
grew more and more desolate, he realized he was missing out
on something big, and it ticked him off. He’d always
had his ear to the street.
When he finally got Inside on a visitor’s pass, he liked
the concept, but it was a bit too ordered. Sure, it was a
great trip, but you only got to explore the pathways that
were obvious. Making his way through a couple of acquaintances,
he found the Flesh Consortium, a bunch of malcontents dedicated
to showing those jack-heads that they were missing out on
a whole world of sensory experience. Sometimes the politics
get a little boring, but he thinks they’re on the right
track. Screwing up reality, even when it’s just an electronic
illusion, is a damn good time.
Stamina: 3 (hopped-up)
Will: 5 (thrill-seeker)
Fu: 2 (confederation)
Cover: 5 (street fixer)
Humanity: 5
Price: -1 (addiction: penalty to all actions if he’s
not on hallucinogens. Reality bums him out.)
Telltale: All members of the Flesh Consortium have scarification.
Chi’s is a spider-web on his left forearm.
Power, control, and gasoline
While Inside looks like the real world, it’s most definitely
not. A motorcycle looks, feels, and smells like a motorcycle,
but it’s a piece of code. It’s the same with a front
door, walking stick, ink pen, or monorail operator. All of
these things are daemons, pieces of code that can be created,
altered, controlled, and destroyed by people who have the
knowledge.
The types of daemons in Inside can be broken down into several
groups.
Types of Daemons
Avatars: Avatars are representatives of real people
Inside. When someone enters the simulation, a digital facsimile
is created. Avatars look like the people that control them,
and are generated directly from the brain’s own self-image.
Turings: These daemons can interact like humans,
and are also called artificial intelligences. They don’t
necessarily look human, but they can talk like one and put
on a good replica of a personality. Most utilitarian jobs
are done by Turings, and most mid-level functionary positions
are held by them. There are rumors of uncontrolled Turings,
powerful daemons that have the ability to control others.
Utility: These daemons look like inanimate objects
and are programs written to assist a Turing or Avatar. Almost
everything that doesn’t walk and talk Inside is a Utility
daemon.
Virus: These daemons can overwrite other daemons,
controlling them. These daemons are used by the powers that
be to control Inside, change an Avatar’s actions, and
enforce their will. It is illegal for a normal person to
use a virus, and mentioning them is discouraged.
Unlike in Sorcerer, most daemons are stand-alone with no
one particularly controlling them. Everything is a daemon
Inside. You might ride in a taxi Inside, but it’s still
a piece of code. (It’s a pretty sweet ride when you Chmod
and re-Code it.)
Daemon statistics
Like humans, daemons have scores that define them They use
different terminology to reflect the different nature of their
world, though. The scores are as follows:
Robustness: When two daemons come into conflict,
their Robustness helps their code overcome each other’s.
This is like Stamina Outside, and it is most often used
in physical conflicts.
Interface: On the other hand, daemons can interface
with each other, attempting to exert influence over each
other via normal protocols. Their Interface is how well
they can exert this control. This is analogous to Will.
Fu: Much like a hacker’s Fu, a daemon understands
code. Unlike hackers, they cannot create new code on the
fly, but they can help someone analyze code or understand
what another daemon is doing.
Power: This is the strength of a program, and a
measure of how powerful its code is. With more code comes
more self-awareness and ability to perform autonomous actions.
All daemons, even those without abilities, have a minimum
Power of 1.
Daemon abilities
Abilities are used as written in the Sorcerer rules,
but are extrapolated into a meta-verse. Some examples:
Warp would be used as normal to change the shape of
things Inside.
Perception could be used as normal, or like Hiro’s
Bigboard in Snow Crash, which he could use to obtain the name
and public information about everyone in a nightclub.
Cover is used to make a daemon appear to be an everyday,
legal, doing-good sort of daemon; Shapeshift can be used for
similar results.
Special Damage is just what it sounds like.
Travel and Transport allow, or subvert, the normal
modes of transportation Inside.
Utility daemons with very mundane powers that do not fit
into a Sorcerer ability do not have to be defined with
abilities. An ink pen can write without a special ability,
and a wall can prevent people from walking through it. A monorail,
however, has Travel and Transport, and a massive Robustness.
There is one new daemon ability: Crossover. Crossover
lets a daemon’s abilities affect the real world; it is
a linked ability, like Ranged. The most obvious use
is with Special Damage. Normal Special Damage
attacks can destroy someone’s avatar Inside and kick
them out dazed. Crossover Special Damage will attack
the very electrodes attached to your character and blow his
brain out the back of his head.
The non-obvious uses are for electronic representations of
real-world objects. Some examples:
- A monitor that is connected to a camera Outside.
- A wall of repelling code that keeps a real-world door
locked.
Needs and Desires
In order to allow for some sort of economy Inside, the designers
built inertia into the system. In other words, while a program–something
composed of data, with no moving parts–should be able
to work forever, the inertia Inside stops programs from doing
that. Each program has something that must be input into it
on a regular basis in order to work. A virtual motorcycle
needs virtual gasoline, for example.
Desires, re-titled Purposes, are a bit different. Each program
has a Purpose built into it and barring other instructions,
will attempt to fulfill this Purpose at all times. With Utility
daemons, this is somewhat obvious and boring; with Turings,
this can drive an entire game.
Avatars
Your character’s avatar is his body Inside. While it
is a daemon, it is not an external program. Instead, it is
the representative of the person using it to access Inside.
Avatars, by default, are based off the user’s mental
self-perception, within algorithmic limits.
Avatars follow special rules from other daemons. Since all
their actions come from the user, Robustness, Interface, and
Fu are always the same as the user’s Stamina, Will, and
Fu. Robustness is not limited to the normal Interface restrictions.
Avatars are the only daemons that cannot be Chmod-ed, and
they can not be re-Coded; the identity conflict is impossible
to overcome. The new sorcerous ritual Hack is used for temporarily
altering an Avatar.
Sample daemons
Bigboard, an invisible monitor
Bigboard appears as a watch, but when in The Black Hole, a
power-broker’s bar, it displays the names and public
information of everyone in the room to the owner, visible
only to him.
Type: Utility
Robustness: 3
Interface: 4
Fu: 3
Power: 4
Abilities: Cloak, Perception (everyone in the Black
Hole), Perception (all public data about people in room)
Need: The user must have an interrogative conversation
with Black Hole denizens. Bigboard thrives on data.
Purpose: To disseminate data.
Telltale: The user’s face has a greenish glow
upon it when Bigboard is being used.
The Tea Garden, a room unto itself
The Tea Garden appears as a door in the owner’s home.
When it is opened, it gives access to an outdoor landscape,
a Japanese garden surrounded by rock faces and waterfalls.
Type: Utility
Robustness: 5
Interface: 6
Fu: 3
Power: 6
Abilities: Transport, Confuse (anyone in the Tea
Garden), Warp, Psychic Force
Need: The Tea Garden needs to trap Turings or Avatars
inside it. When the door is closed, those daemons are attacked
by the Tea Garden until they are absorbed.
Purpose: To obscure information.
Telltale: The doorway has no handle or knob, nor
any visible way to open it.
Gabriel, the avenging angel
Gabriel is a rogue agent of Inside, turned in a fierce battle
with one of the original hackers, who Chown-ed and re-Coded
Gabriel before his own death. Gabriel is powerful enough that
he tends to pick his own master.
Type: Turing
Robustness: 6
Interface: 7
Fu: 6
Power: 7
Abilities: Special Damage (with Crossover), Armor,
Taint, Shadow, Daze, Shapeshift
Need: Gabriel thrives on taking over parts of its
owner’s life. He uses his Shapeshift abilities to appear
to be the hacker, and interacts with Avatars that know the
hacker.
Purpose: Destruction.
Telltale: Gabriel’s mouth has no teeth, nor
tongue, nor anything except a black void inside it.
Investigators (En-Vees)
Investigators are continuity cops Inside, designed by the
system to watch for hackers that would alter the program.
Stealthy, strong, and nearly impossible to notice, they are
every hacker’s nightmare.
Type: Virus
Robustness: 7
Interface: 8
Fu: 7
Power: 8
Abilities: Spawn, Hop (with Ranged), Perception (through
the eyes of its spawn), Mark, Boost Stamina, Fast
Need: To create more Investigators. If an Avatar
dies within the Investigator’s presence, it can send
a spawn into the dying program, which gestates a new Investigator
within one to two weeks.
Purpose: To stop all threats to the structure of
Inside.
Telltale: Any Avatar inhabited by an Investigator
gives off a sweet smell, much like orchids.
Chmod strength: 5 (to Inside)
Up against the system
Hacking is the art of subverting Inside to your will. It is
this supplement’s version of sorcery, and follows many
of the same rules. Like sorcery, it involves bringing up inhuman
forces and controlling them; unlike sorcery, these forces
are either created by the hacker or are found all around him
in this supplement’s version of a Mystic Otherworld.
Rituals
Hacking has the following rituals, five of which are analogous
to standard Sorcerer rituals; the sixth is new. Beside each
ritual is the name as used in Sorcerer.
Design (Contact): This is the initial design work
done for a daemon. You have to be able to visualize how
a daemon will work before you can create it. To succeed
at this ritual, a roll of the hacker’s Fu vs. the daemon’s
Power is needed. This process is usually done Outside, and
Design is the only ritual that can be conducted without
being Inside.
There is another version of the Contact ritual, called
"Contact" by hackers. Inside, you cannot exit
except through pre-defined entry and exit points determined
by the simulation. Usually, this is the same way you came
into Inside, and, usually, others cannot see you do it.
A Contact roll is necessary to exit any other time, and
the Power rolled against is the highest Power of any daemon
present.
Code (Summon): Coding is how daemons get built;
it is the part where a hacker sits down and builds the internals
of the thing. This process requires a successful roll of
the hacker’s Will - Humanity vs. the daemon’s
Power.
A daemon (which is owned by a hacker) can be re-Coded to
give it new statistics and abilities. Abilites cannot be
taken away and statistics cannot be lowered in this way.
The roll is two-part: first, Will - Humanity + Chmod strength
vs. the old Interface. Successes from that roll are rolled
over into Will - Humanity vs. the new Interface. A new Chmod
roll must also be made.
Chmod (Bind): This is how a hacker exerts ownership
over a daemon. (Its name is taken from an archaic command
from the pre-virtual Internet.) In "Inside," all
daemons are owned by something; all daemons not owned by
people are owned by Inside itself, except for completely
free-willed, self-owning (and illegal) Turings. A true hacker
can chmod others’ daemons, though.
This ritual requires a roll of the hacker’s Fu vs.
the daemon’s Interface. Chmod-ing a daemon a hacker
has just coded–an unowned daemon–is always successful.
The result is used as the Chmod strength ("binding
strength" from Sorcerer), which is a measure of how
well the hacker understands the program and how much control
he has over it. If the roll was in the daemon’s favor,
well, it has more power in the situation, and the hacker
is not very aware of what he has.
In order to take control of a daemon that someone else
owns, the Chmod strength must be lowered. Any time either
the owner or the daemon takes penalties, that Chmod strength
is lowered like all statistics. If it hits zero, then a
hacker can try to Chmod the daemon. This usually results
in some serious pre-ownership fistfights.
Daemons owned by Inside have a Chmod strength from 1 to
5, depending on how important they are to the system and
how much attention they attract. A fire hydrant in the middle
of a neighborhood, only there for appearance, would have
a Chmod strength of 1, while the monorail would have a Chmod
strength of 5.
Nice (Punish): Like "chmod," this term
is taken from the 1990s’ Unix world. This ritual forces
a daemon to calm the hell down, and it restricts its abilities
significantly. It requires a successful roll of the hacker’s
Will vs. the daemon’s Robustness; successes are used
as penalties against all the daemon’s actions. (These
penalties are relieved as in Sorcerer.) Your hacker can
Nice his own daemons automatically, exacting penalties less
than or equal to his Will. Nicing daemons not Chmod-ed to
the hacker is not automatic, and the daemon uses its Chmod
Strength in its roll.
Kill (Banish): A daemon can be killed by unraveling
its code and scrambling the memory of it Inside. For a character
do this, the player must make a successful roll of his Will
+ Humanity vs. the daemon’s Interface + Power. If and
only if the hacker is the one who has ownership of the daemon,
and the Chmod strength is in the hacker’s favor, the
hacker can add the Chmod strength to his roll. Otherwise,
it is added to the daemon’s.
If this ritual is done as a snapshot, as it often is, the
hacker’s Humanity and the Chmod strength are still
used in the roll. Snapshot attempts to Kill a daemon are
often called "disbelieves." Many hackers are fans
of online sword-and-sorcery games where illusions of fearsome
creatures can be dealt with by attempting not to believe
in them.
Hack (new): This ritual is different than any in
Sorcerer It allows the hacker to temporarily–for one
instance–use a daemonic ability. It’s a subversion
of the virtual reality system, and allows for those running-on-walls
moments that all players want. This ritual–always snapshot,
with no penalties–requires a Fu vs. Humanity roll,
and successes on the Hack roll are used for the ability’s
Power. Hack definitely requires a Humanity check, like all
rituals.
Hacking and Humanity
Humanity, as mentioned earlier, is a hacker’s ability
to distinguish between truth and artifice. Because of this,
hacking can be very detrimental to one’s Humanity as
one puts more faith in artificial things. (For the record,
all rules about when Humanity checks are made for sorcery–and
Humanity gain rolls for Banishing–that are in Sorcerer
apply in Inside.)
When a character hits zero Humanity, the player has a choice.
His character will either lose all ability to see the real,
or be struck with it between the eyes. Either the character’s
conciousness will become fully digitized and enter Inside
completely as a free-willed daemon, or his brain will react
violently to artificial sensory exposure. If the latter, his
ability to perform Inside will be forever changed.
If the first choice is taken, the player must make a roll
of his hacker’s Fu vs. Will. If successful, the victories
are added to his Power, which increases Will, now called Interface.
He has become a daemon. If this roll is unsuccessful, any
other hacker present–including non-player hackers–can
attempt to Chmod the daemon in its destruction. The outcome
of this roll is the Chmod strength, and Power is set to the
ex-hacker-now-daemon’s Interface. If no one attempts
to Chmod the daemon, it dies.
If the second choice is taken, the player must make a roll
of his hacker’s Will vs. Fu. If successful, the amount
of victories equal the number of points of Humanity the hacker
regains. However, these victories also count as permanent
penalties to any action taken Inside by the hacker. The act
of being Inside is painful to the brain and causes terrible
migraines. Any time the hacker enters Inside, including the
current time, he has these penalties to all actions, and the
penalties continue Outside from the brain damage (halving
after an hour, and ending after a day). If the roll to gain
Humanity is unsuccessful, the hacker is immediately ejected
from Inside, taking terrible damage. His Fu is lowered by
the amount of victories the opposition rolled; he takes damage
equal to those victories. He gains Humanity equal to those
victories, and he may never enter Inside again without dying,
requiring a successful Fu vs. Will roll every five minutes
Inside to not expire.
Slipping through the cracks
Hacking, by its nature, will attract attention. Every character’s
Avatar has the ability Cover, at the same level as the character’s
Cover. The nature of the Avatar’s Cover depends on the
definition of the character’s Cover. A character with
the Cover "government programmer" would have the
same thing Inside, while a pizza-delivery-boy character would
probably have the Cover of "tourist" inside.
This Cover is used, usually against Interface or Fu, to make
people believe that your character is most definitely not
up to no good, no sir, no way. If it’s a character’s
daemon that’s suspected of being illegal, things get
hairier. The more powerful a daemon is, the harder it is to
keep hidden. The opposing roll gets to add the daemon’s
Power to it, unless the daemon also has Cover. The character’s
roll does get to add the Chmod strength to it, however.
Running Inside
Hopefully, by now, you’ve got plenty of ideas for running
Inside or a cyberpunk-themed Sorcerer game. Here is my advice
for keeping your game interesting.
Do not forget Outside
Arguably, interactions Outside are the most important part
of running Inside. Players may be loathe to focus the story
there Unlike in vanilla Sorcerer, characters do not always
have the power of sorcery at their command; they only have
it Inside. This, of course, is why Outside is so important.
In a game that questions the value of artifice, it is imperative
to highlight the option between a real world where characters
are no better–and perhaps worse–than everyone else,
and a fake world where they are godlike.
A great way to push this is to make the story interconnected
between the two worlds. Perhaps there are investigators on
a character’s trail Inside as well as Outside, forcing
him to confront them in both worlds. Even better, perhaps
the character’s Outside love interest is his worst enemy
Inside. I reference this book often in Inside, to the point
of liberally stealing the example setting from it, but Jim
Munroe’s Everyone in Silico really is the book
to check out for creating these stories. Snow Crash
by Neil Stephenson runs a close second here.
Turn up the fistfights
What made the movie "The Matrix" so popular? You
can argue for the philosophies of it all you like–and
they did increase interest–but it was their pairing with
some of the most eye-popping martial arts seen in American
movies that took audiences by storm. When you’ve got
this malleable world in which to play and characters who can,
with an action, make immense aerial leaps, smash walls, or
split into multiples, use it for all it’s worth in action
scenes.
Play with the metaphors
Inside being a supplement, I didn’t go through the Sorcerer
rulebook and extrapolate every rule into a virtual-reality
world. The reader should, though. There are some fun metaphors
to discover. For instance, when summoning a demon in Sorcerer,
a character can obtain a bonus from human sacrifice. Now,
that’s pretty dark, icky stuff right there. What would
the metaphor be, though?
Well, in Inside, Summoning is Coding, so whatever the sacrifice
would be would have to be done while concentrating on describing
a daemon in a computer language. That takes time, obviously,
and what takes away free time? Relationships do, of course.
A "human sacrifice" could just as easily be a sacrifice
of another human in your life, whether it be your boss, parents,
or love interest.
The rule for "Inside" would be: A character can
gain a bonus when Coding by permanently severing a relationship
he has. This bonus is equal to the target’s Humanity.
This requires a second Humanity check, though, and the hacker
receives a penalty to this check equal to the target’s
Humanity.
Poke fun liberally
I’ve been rambling on and on about "truth and artifice"
for this whole article, which can get a little cumbersome.
Your game should drop the heavy for the fun often. Think about
the concept of Inside: A world imagined as perfect, copied
from the stereotypes of late-1990s humanity. It’s screaming
for comedic moments. Maybe all cab drivers look and sound
exactly the same because the designers thought people felt
that way anyway. Maybe the clouds in the sky often make pornographic
arrangements on accident because the designers gave the cloud
code the ability to form into what observers were looking
for. Feel more than free to steal from your favorite books
and movies, especially ones that are anachronistic, given
that other hackers can shape their own corners of Inside into
whatever they like.
Whatever the case, Inside is here to be fun while asking
questions. That’s the real pleasure of good science fiction:
it can be wondrous, amazing, and funny while not being intellectually
devoid.
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