Tech

Bod • Brains • Con • Crime • Face • Focus • Heart • Hit • Make • Move • Network • Prod • Recon • Ride • Rock • Scrounge • Sneak • Spot • Miscellaneous

Tech represents your ability to do cool stuff with physical technology. A Decker knows their way around information-processing technology and can build and maintain anything from servers to cyberdecks. A Rigger knows what they’re doing under the hood of vehicles and drones. A Covert Operations Specialist knows how to tap communications cables and plant bugs. A Surgeon can perform endoscopic surgery.

Most technology available in chrome form is available for cheaper in a standalone tool or drone. It takes longer to use because it isn’t interfaced to your nervous system, but it can do the same job.

Unlike chrome, you do not usually need a stunt to add Tech to a skill. Simply make sure that you have the relevant gear, often with a Scrounge+Tech or Make+Tech roll. You do need to spend an action getting it out or otherwise establishing you have such gear.

Bod

Respirators help you cope with smog-choked streets, and mechanical advantage can provide tremendous strength. Gyro mounts (e.g. Street Samurai Catalog p67) can increase your effective Bod for resisting recoil.

Hearplugs are high-tech foam earplugs with a microphone at one end, a speaker at the other, and skinlink communication to your Scape. You can hear reality and your Scape at the same time, and they save your hearing from loud noises.

Mobility Frames

By 2050, wheelchairs are rare outside hospitals and hospices, though particularly fragile people still use them. Mobility frames are essentially anthroform drones designed to wrap around a person and give them as much help as they need to move around, and then act as personal care robots to help them get in and out of the frame. With a control rig, the wearer of the frame can be faster than an unaugmented human. Even the lightest mobility frame is about 10kg.

Combat riggers often use mobility frames to move their bodies around the battlefield without having to pause their session with their control deck, and combat deckers and mages wear them and hand control over to the team rigger when they have to enter full VR or astrally project.

Partial frames are available. Ones that only assist the legs resemble high-tech overalls. Ones that only assist the arms resemble corsets that go all the way to the neck, with high-tech sleeves.

Mobility Frame (1): when adding Tech to Bod, Hit, Move, and Sneak, you are not limited to your base skill. Mobility frames are unexceptional in all civilized places.

Linear Frame (1): a scaled-up mobility frame designed to amplify the user’s size and strength, giving +2 to Bod (so if you have Average (1) Bod and Fair (2) Tech, you functionally have Superb (5) Bod when in your linear frame). It can scale up a dwarf to a human, or either to a troll. They are often used by construction and dock workers. Security and military versions are expensive (start at Superb (5)) and only seen on high threat response teams and in war zones. Linear frames are not designed for stealth and are immediately attention-getting outside their normal operating areas.

Brains

People have been complaining about other folks augmenting their brains with technology ever since Plato said of writing If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. Everything from libraries to search engines to design workstations can help with Brains tasks. With higher tech, it goes a lot faster.

Con

The biggest consumer of contractile myomer technology, worldwide, is smartbras— which change their support between office, relaxation, jogging, and push-up on command— and other such dynamic shapewear. (The cybernetic use of myomers is a fraction of that market.) Changing the parameters on dynamic shapewear can alter profile, posture, even gait, all of which can support a disguise. Cost: Fair (+2).

The same technology can change the drape of fabric, and combined with cheaper versions of the same color-changing fabric used in a chameleon suit, your outfit can look very different in moments. Cost: Great (+4).

Given preparation time, you can design and print custom facial prosthetics as part of a disguise.

Crime

A bug scanner makes intermittent noise and monitors the local airwaves for increased transmission rates, while a white noise generator makes it more likely that they’ll have nothing useful to report.

A voice mask attached to the throat vibrates the larynx and changes the timbre of the voice, making it hard to identify.

DNA chaff is full of skin cells swept from the seats of buses and packaged into convenient spray cans; it can make DNA evidence at a crime scene useless.

Face

Focus

Heart

Running a Social Interaction Enhancer on your ScapeSpex isn’t as fast because you have to read the information from the display instead of having it fed to you via simsense, but it still helps you get a read on people.

Hit

A smartgun link talking to your Scape can help with aiming. Smartbow technology also exists, calculating where an arrow will hit based on the aim and current draw of the bow. Flash-paks blind opponents with bright strobe lights, but your teammates won’t be bothered if the shutters on their Scapes receive wireless timing signals to engage at just the right moment. Net guns (Street Samurai Catalog p72) and bolas guns are good for capturing people while risking less harm.

Make

3-D printers, CNC lathes, MEMS manipulators, and design libraries can make one well-equipped expert as productive as a whole workshop. Endoscopic microdrones can be designed for electronics repair or laparoscopic surgery, which can even be performed under field conditions with only mildly increased risk to the patient if you have a full medkit.

Microwaldo vambraces have multiple articulated manipulators that can obey simple commands like hold this and plug that here (with eye tracking from your Scape). Versions are available for medical and electronic work.

Move

The most basic grapple gun is only of Fair (+2) cost and can shoot a hook 50m; a grapple line that turns into dust after applying a catalytic key isn’t much more expensive. More expensive grapple guns have ascent motors, or even a minidrone grappling hook that can maneuver with compressed air, deploy hooks for varied situations, monitor the target location as you ascend, and detach when it’s time to make your getaway.

Skate boots have slightly thicker-than-normal soles that deploy rollerblades on command.

Leg exoskeletons that let you run 50% faster are not subtle, but they are effective.

Inventions as old as diving fins still count as tech.

Network

Recon

Laser microphones can pick up vibrations from rigid surfaces like windows. Parabolic microphones (usually with a transpaent dish) are unwieldy, but can pick up conversations from hundreds of meters away; a phased array microphone hidden in a briefcase can pick up conversations from 300m, as can a shotgun microphone the size of a shotgun; a shotgun microphone that fits in a ballpoint pen can pick up conversations from 10m.

Ride

For riggers, when your driving skill matters, it’s Ride + Chrome, but when your vehicle capabilities matter (such as pure acceleration), it’s Ride + Tech.

Rock

Professional-grade trideo cameras are the size of a heavy pistol when folded up; activating them spreads the two optics out to eye width.

Scrounge

This is your do I have that gear? roll. If you assembled your ensemble of gear yourself, Scrounge + Tech is its defense against Matrix attacks. For riggers, this is your do I have a drone for that? skill.

Sneak

A chameleon suit can help you evade visual detection. Cost: Superb (+5).

With a subvocal microphone taped to your threat and hearplugs occupying your ear canals (or a bone conduction headset), you can have private conversations that people have to beat your Sneak + Tech to even notice you having.

Almost all modern merchandise has RFID tags that tell refrigerators when food expires, how washing machines should launder clothes, and so on. A person with no RFID tags on them stands out as suspicious; a person who does have RFID tags on them has a fingerprint that can be tracked. Tag erasers are common among fences, but if you want to blend in, add some reprogrammable spime tags that can be updated, or shut down, over skinlink.

If you’re diligent about using scent-free probiotics, your sweat doesn’t smell and your farts don’t stink. You are harder to track by scent. The diligence requires means your Sneak is restricted by Focus.

Spot

Anything they can fit in a cybereye or cyberear can be fitted into a Snake-eye, a myomer serpent with a sensor on the end, or into the bridge of your ScapeGogs.

Miscellaneous Tech

Weapons

In addition to the traditional arsenal of hold-out, light, heavy, and machine pistols; submachine, light, medium, and heavy machine guns; rifles and assault rifles, there are also high tech ranged weapons:

And in addition to traditional melee weapons:

Riggers

Anyone can install a Control Rig, but they might only use it for microsurgery or industrial process controls. A gearhead maintains a stable of customized vehicles and drones.

Gearhead (1): For every point of Scrounge+Tech (or Make+Tech if appropriate), you can introduce a named vehicle or drone (up to your Make+Tech or Scrounge+Tech in value) to the adventure, and you can take an attack on your wealth stress (defended with Scrounge+Tech) to introduce new ones. You should have a character aspect that explains where you get them all, such as Chop Shop Jock, Junkyard Resurrectionist, Racing for Pinks, Fab Lab Wizard, or Squandering My Inheritance. The clock on this resets when you have time to devote to your toy collection.

Named vehicles and drones can have upgrades; nameless ones merely fulfill a simple purpose like observation. Pulling another nameless selfie drone out of your pocket is just a roll; pulling out your Assassin Selfie Drone with the microdart gun is a special reveal.

For each point of Tech, you are expert in customizations related to two skills.

For every upgrade in your Tech (so 3 at +1, 6 at +2, 10 at +3), you can introduce a new customization appropriate to one of those skills. The clock on this resets similarly.

All of these can be revealed whenever it’s plausible that the matter wouldn’t have come up yet, and it doesn’t contradict any previous narrative. If you drive your van off a pier into Puget Sound, you can spend two reveals for the Enviroseal and Wet Drive while you’re in free fall, before you hit the water.

Customizations

Bod
Con
Crime

Helps you commit and defend against crimes.

Hit
Ride

(Rigger 5.0 p154):

Scrounge
Sneak
Spot

Vehicles

Drones