Geared Up

December 11, 2021

Ayyy, Frankie! Long time no see buddy. Hittin' the gym? Nah. Well, I mean, sometimes. My hand? Nah, it’s okay to ask about it. This shit’s mangled because I had to pull a pilot out of his mech. What? Oh. Yeah, well, it turns out punching through a cockpit to toss a motherfucker out of the sky does a number on your knuckles, lemme tell you.

Some people don’t care about longevity. They just wanna hit hard, go fast, and live for a few years like a demigod. So they gear up and by the end of that first year they’re barely human anymore. They get a harness, a personal physio computer (PPC), and a good-good cocktail of drugs, nanobots, and a seriously unhealthy dose of fenix blood. If they’re careful and conservative, they can make it a whole year before they need to replace their gear. Most of them don’t make it to three months.

Live Big, Die Spectacularly #

When you decide you’re done living the slow, peaceful life of a person who stands a reasonable chance of being killed by something other than the inhuman cocktail that transformed you into a being beyond typical mortal ken, you have one more choice to make. What sort of gear is going to kill you?

You can become an Interface, an Ogre, a Spurter, a Sunny, a Twitch, or a Volcano. Whatever you choose, two things are certain:

You’ll be more than human.
You’re going to die horrifically.

Getting geared up is expensive, dangerous, and irreversible. To do so, you need to find a gear shop or a gearhead willing to work on you. Gear shops are institutions and generally have financing options. Gearheads won’t work on you if you don’t have someone else to vouch for you.

When you get geared up, you gain the specified domain as a d6 and all that gear’s related tricks.

Gear Shops #

To get geared up at a gear shop, you’ll need to pay the max roll of your HD times 1000 silver. If your HD is 5d6, that’s 30k. You can’t haggle with a gear shop if you want to live, but you can:

Sign a contract to pay +25% over 5 years. If you miss a payment, the shop’s collector team will come for you and you’ll be on an industry-wide block list. You won’t be able to get more gear and any affiliated organization is encouraged to turn you in for the bounty.
Sign a contract as a freelancer for the gear shop. They’ll give you jobs to complete to cover the costs. When you want to get more gear, they’ll give you another job. If you ever want to work for another gear shop, you’ll have a handy letter of recommendation.

Most people who go to a gear shop become freelancers. Only the most optimistic take the loan.

Once the financing is worked out, you go into initial therapy. For an entire week, you’re moving back and forth between the med bay, the gym, and the assembly bay until your harness is fully installed, calibrated, and the microdoses are stabilized. Up to this point, the staff are fully capable of keeping you alive.

Whether you survive the effects of your gear once it’s administered, well, that’s between you and the gear. If you do, you’ll need to pay a nominal fee to gear up again, merely 1000 silver a visit. If you can’t afford that, you can always finance it.

Gearheads #

Gearheads are a cheaper, if harder to locate and convince to take the job. They also typically specialize in a single gear, unlike shops, which can provide you nearly anything on the market. Most gearheads won’t even admit they can do the job if another customer or friend doesn’t vouch for you. If you can find one willing to get you geared up, you need to know two things:

You don’t stand a very good chance of surviving this.
You’re going to become very good friends because no one else can gear you back up.

Unlike gear shops, which use the very best resources and have a vast team of specialized professionals to keep you alive through the process, gearheads are more like auteur hobbyists. They’ll get the job done at a price you can live with, but it’s going to be of an art than a science.

You’ll need to pay the max roll of your HD times 100 silver. You can haggle with a gearhead, but they’re more likely to want you to do a job for them than anything else. Gearheads never seem to be short on enemies or requests for materials.

Once they’ve got the cash, you get scheduled for operation. Gearheads do it all in one go, no easing you into your new life. Roll your HD. For every 1 you roll, lose 1 HD. You might well die on the table. If the operation doesn’t kill you, there’s always the chance the gear will.

If you survive to gear up again, you’ll need to make your way back to them and hope they’re alive. If they’re breathing, you need to pay them the cost of the gear (usually 300–500 silver) or, if you’re low on cash, do a job for them.

Interfaces #

Forget the ghosts in the shell, Interfaces are gods in the machine. They become semi-abstract entities, their cells replacing their nuclei with organic nanites. They can reconfigure their entire body in seconds, conserving their mass or making use of nearby raw materials like other lifeforms.

Interface gear includes DNA recombinants and an array of psychedelic compounds for time dilation and visualization, enabling them to ride electromagnetic waves and shift into a digital dimension. Interfaces don’t talk to machines so much as they incorporate them, melding with any system and staying ahead of the most precocious hackers without even trying.

When an Interface is in the real, they have a hard time managing their information overload and staying slow as molasses with everyone else. Meatspace is frustratingly linear and limited, even if their body isn’t.

When you gear up to become an Interface, roll 2d6. If your result is a 2, you immediately turn into Goo. Standard protocol for any sensible shop or gearhead is to blast your cells with liquid nitrogen, pulverize your matter, and dispose of the remains. You’re supplied with 6d6 months of gear in your harness, depending on your tolerance.

If you survive to gear up again, your tolerance has gone up. You roll one fewer die to see how many months it will last you. When you reach 1d6, you’re counting the weeks instead. The next time you gear up, the days. After that, the hours.

When an Interface’s gear runs out, they quickly become untethered from reality. Their form flickers and recombines continuously as they mind begins to wander at hyper speed. Every time you use an Interface trick in this state, you risk everything. When you would mark a trick, add a die instead. When you roll a 1, erase a mark from that trick. If you would erase a mark from a trick without any, you become Goo instead as you discorporate into an organic supercomputer stuck in dilated time, living centuries in a minute, consuming everything you touch to keep yourself alive.

Interface tricks include Absorb, Pwn, and Reconfigure.

Absorb #

Roll the trick dice while you’re in physical contact with an organic being. Deal result damage to them they can’t heal naturally and choose:

Gain that much HP (even if over your max)
Convert the HP to marks for your Interface domain at a 6:1 ratio or this trick at a 4:1 ratio (minimum 1)
Gain an extra use of Reconfigure

Pwn #

Roll the trick dice whenever you’re dealing with a digital system. Add the result to any tests involving that system for the rest of the scene.

Reconfigure #

Roll the trick dice whenever you please. You can reform your body however you please that many times. Turn an arm into a chainsaw, replace your legs with the body of a snake, turn your ribs into a cannon, discorporate yourself into a cloud of you-spores. If change yourself too much, you’ll need to use the trick again to put yourself back together.

Ogres #

Muscle and maw, Ogres are living destruction. Their aggression is tuned off the charts and their bodies put the most advanced war machines to shame. Ogres can’t take it easy. Every single twitch of their muscle fibers recruits 100% of their power. They shovel anything and everything into their mouths, the only part of their body that retains any semblance of feeling. Their skin repels bullets and blasts and has the texture of sandpaper.

Ogres can bound a hundred yards straight into the air, throw a tank, and otherwise put entire armies to shame when they’re full. If an ogre is deprived of food, they rapidly weaken, losing 1HD an hour. They can stave this off with autocannibalism and, if things get bad enough, are compelled to.

Ogre gear includes an unbelievable amount of steroids and enzymes that enable them to masticate and digest absolutely anything, even spent uranium fuel rods. Their diet determines their keratin. The stronger they eat, the tougher they are. The gear also floods their system with ghrelin the moment their stomach hits empty, prompting them to feast. The gear can keep you hungry and strong for one year.

When you gear up to become an ogre, roll 1d6. If you roll a 1, your hunger is uncontrollable. You eat everything and anything you can stuff into your mouth, including yourself. Otherwise, you need to eat your body weight every 24 hours. Every time you spend marks on your Ogre domain or one of its tricks, roll another d6. If you roll more 1s than 6s, your hunger is out of control.

Ogre tricks include Avalanche, Devour, and Shrug It Off

Avalanche #

Roll the trick dice whenever you’re angry. Add the result to tests for violence or damage for the rest of the scene. If you have multiple dice, you can split their result between tests and damage.

Devour #

Roll the trick dice whenever you’re starving and trying to sink your teeth into something. If you’re biting something that’s resisting, choose whether to add your result to your opposed roll or the damage. If you’re biting something that can’t resist, add your result to your damage.

Recover HP equal to the damage you inflict. If any of your damage dice roll their max value, roll them again and add the new value. If you roll max value again, keep rolling and adding.

Shrug It Off #

Roll the trick dice whenever something tries to hurt you. Ignore result damage. If you ignore all the damage from a melee attack, inflict result damage on whatever hit you as your sandpaper skin shreds it.

Twitches #

A Twitch is all speed, reflexes and awareness. Their flesh melts away leaving thin whipcords of muscle and tendon with hands that can crush diamonds. Twitches don’t sleep so much as they temporarily hibernate, their bodies shut down except for their minds, which won’t stop til their brains give out.

Twitch gear includes redundant IV lines with exchangeable fluid bags, a feeding tube, a nutrient bank, and a colostomy bag. Twitches are literally incapable of eating and drinking enough to stay ahead of the demands on their enhanced bodies.

The IV bags hold enough fluid to get a Twitch through 12 hours each. They have six of them stored in their harness, which handles flow rates and can be set to autolevel or exhaust the bags serially.

The feeding tube streams an extremely dense nutrient slurry with various enhancement compounds. This mechanism is what makes them a Twitch, keeps them going and going and going and going faster than anyone else. The nutrient bank is rated for sixty days under nominal conditions. Few Twitches make it to day thirty-five without needing to gear up again.

When you gear up to become a Twitch, roll 1d6. If the result is a 1, your heart explodes. If you survive to gear up again, roll 2d6. Every time you survive to gear up again, roll an extra die. If you roll more 1s than 6s, your body can’t take it anymore. You have, at best, result days to live. Every time you use a Twitch trick, choose:

Keep Going. Roll as normal. Every 1 you roll shears a day off your remaining lifespan.
Thunderclap. Instead of rolling, treat as if you’d rolled your maximum. You explode spectacularly afterward.

Twitch tricks include Everything At Once, Mach, and Thunderclap.

Everything At Once #

Roll the trick dice when you want to take the same action against multiple targets. Roll the trick dice. You can take a simultaneous action against up to result targets immediately, even if you need to move somewhere nearby to do so.

Mach #

Roll the trick dice when you want to cover ground fast. For that many moments, you can move as far as you can see as if it was somewhere close.

Thunderclap #

Roll the trick dice when you don’t want to be targets. Up to result times for the rest of the scene, you can vanish as a reaction with an explosive peal, reappearing somewhere you can see.

Wrap Up #

When I started this post, I meant to write up six options each with six tricks but this went on for a while and I’m pretty sure that’s a zine, not a blog post. If this tickles you, let me know and I’ll get the other three options (Spurter, with telekinetic blood, Volcano, with pyromancy, and Sunny, an angel powered by UV radiation) and the rest of the tricks written.

I’m actively fighting the temptation to detour into writing a d6 gear shops, d6 gear heads, and d66 geared up NPCs.