I'm In: Thieflike Hacking

Hacking rules inspired by B/X thief skills.

To hack, choose one of the following Hacker Skills and roll Xd6, where X is your cyberdeck’s Clock Speed. If the value of any die is within the skill’s success chance (1-in-6 by default, improved by programs), the attempt succeeds. On a failure, you alert the system and countermeasures may be dispatched to disconnect you.

You have direct access to any networks that your deck is plugged into, typically through a server or desktop tower. A wireless connection or remote access provides indirect access instead. Direct access provides a +1 bonus to the success chance of hacker skills.

• Penetrate servers (PS): Safely gain access to a system. If the roll fails, the intrusion is detected and countermeasures are automatically deployed. If the hacker has a passcode, they may automatically succeed at this roll.
• Search (SR): Locate a file within a system, or locate specific content within a file. This may also be used for search engine queries (only once per query) or to detect traps on a specific file (only once per file).
• Identify devices (ID): Identify the location and type of all active devices within wireless range of the hacker’s deck, or all devices connected to a network to which the hacker has access.
• Wipe data (WD): Destroy data on a device. A hacker may only destroy specific files or subsystems if they have first located them with Search; otherwise, they must wipe the entire device at once. A hacker may also use this to attack hostile programs and other hackers; a successful Wipe will disconnect their target.
• Move unsurveilled (MU): Prevent oneself from being detected by active surveillance systems. To cloak a group or large object from detection, roll at -1.
• Bypass locks (BL): Access a password-protected device or electronic lock without knowing the passkey. Biometric locks are accessed at -1 for each biometric required. A hacker can only try this skill once per lock.
• Clone credentials (CC): Copy data from a nearby device such as a smartphone, a keyfob, a credit card, or a server. On a failure, the data is not copied, and on a failure by more than 1 the device’s owner will receive a notification that a cloning attempt has occurred.
• Remote control (RC): A hacker may attempt to send a spoofed command to a device on a system to which they have access. More complex commands require multiple RC attempts.
• Decrypt or recover data (DD): Roll this to remove encryption from a device or a file. Some especially secure files require multiple Decryption rolls. After a failure, further attempts require a more powerful deck or program. This skill may also be used to recover lost files (only once per device).
• Cyber defense (CD): Roll this to remain connected to a network during a disconnection attempt. On a failure, you are kicked from the system and your access point is burned. If they had indirect access, they now require direct access to the system. If they had direct access, they need to find a new access point.

A cyberdeck’s Clock Speed determines the number of dice you roll to Hack, and it can host one program at a time for each mB of RAM it has. Program cassettes must be loaded into the cyberdeck before the mission begins. Programs increase the hacker’s success chance on specific hacker skills and may improve those skills’ effects.

Also, a single-level rework of the Hacker class for Deck-and-Blade games (c.f. Phlox's post re. the recent Cloak-and-Sword revival). 

Hacker

Start with an outdated cyberdeck (2 mB RAM, Clock Speed 1), two random program cassettes (+1 to a random Hacker Skill), a big pleather coat, a cortical datajack, a stack of blank CD-ROMs, Python for Dummies (18th Edition), and a pair of mirrorshades.

h4xx0r.sk111z: You can use Hacker Skills. The first time you would alert a system, you may Scoff and choose not to alert it instead.

Author's Note: I know a lot of the original Cloak-and-Sword fanbase scoffed at the complexity of Scoffing mechanics, but I think it was very flavorfully integrated into Deck-and-Blade. The real issue with Deck-and-Blade's original Decker class was, as always, the ludicrously-complex hacking rules. Cyberpunk RPGs really never change.

jack_in;zone_out: You may use your cortical datajack to connect your brain to your cyberdeck, allowing your deck to use your neural clock cycles as additional processing power. Increase your Clock Speed by 1 when connected this way, as you are digitally incarnated in the cyber-space of the network you’re hacking. During this process, your meat body falls insensate, and if you are forcibly disconnected you must save vs. unconsciousness.

Rumor on the Deep Net has it that some next-generation intrusion countermeasures can access, rewire, and wipe a jacked brain as if it was nothing more than a file system.

l33t5p34k3r: You can always cloak your words in gibberish that non-hackers find unintelligible. When you do this, older generations will either pity or fear you.

www.honoram.ong/thieves: Hackers see themselves as console cowboys and cyber-samurai, a round_table() of digital knights serving corporate lords, living and dying on the bleeding edge of a bloody age. Other hackers have e-Sprit for you. This functions as Esprit, but is only prioritized over reaction rolls online, in cyberspace, and at LAN cafes, comic conventions, or hacker bars.

scriptKiddy: You are a proficient programmer. As long as you have no criminal record, you can always abandon the hacker’s lifestyle and take a job as a chipped and burned-out corporate drone. If you do, retire your character.

Habitats and Factions in Deep Space Bitches

In Deep Space Bitches, the world you put your players in is as important as the players themselves. This isn't a game about thousands of years of history or the grand wars that shift power from empire to empire - rather, it's about what the galaxy looks like to everyone who's caught in the middle. The scope and detail of the game world should be on the order of individual planets, space stations, and star systems; grand galactic maps are out of scope (no matter how fun they are to draw).

Habitats are self-contained structures built to house a permanent sapient presence. They range from small bubble-domes on far-flung planets, to orbital port stations, to vast asteroid field refinery-cities, to entire megalopoli in the imperial core. Each habitat is constructed for a reason - it's far easier to expand an existing hab than set up an entirely new one. Whatever its purpose, there will be various factions who have different, typically conflicting demands, and exploited workers that make it function (whether they like it or not).

 

Very few habitats are fully self-sustaining. The infrastructure necessary to keep a population alive and healthy is complex, and while processes like radiation shielding and oxygen recycling are solved problems, there are always resources that a small habitat has to import in order to keep its people in working condition. While habitats have largely been standardized for ease of deployment and expansion, each faces unique material challenges based on its location - whether environmental, logistical, or political.

Keep the following in mind as you design a habitat for Deep Space Bitches, as players should be able to interact with the systems that undergird life in the distant future in order to understand how they're exploitative and how they can be changed.

 

Why was this habitat built here? Who controls it?

Fungal radiation shielding, gravity plating, fusion reactors, and molecular recyclers allow livable habitats to be constructed virtually anywhere in a star system. This doesn't mean they're easy to assemble, and whoever builds them always expects a return on investment. Typically this means they're sponsored by an empire or a megacorporation, in response to some material or strategic necessity for another nearby population. A resource is discovered, or a phenomenon must be observed, or a tactically vital jump point needs to be claimed for the glory of the nation - and the bidding wars begin.

 

Contractors compete for the right to construct the habitat (and thereby get a stake in the finished product), it goes to the lowest bidder, and they ship in workers and supplies to begin construction. A few years later (depending on the size of the hab, the stability of the economy, any competing interests), something somewhat resembling the original plans is in place, ready to exploit resources and win profit for whoever commissioned its construction. The workers who assembled it are either granted the right to live there and maintain it, or are shipped off to another project - in either case, they have no access to the fruits of their labor, and no say in how it's used.

       

Sometimes, other concerns commission habitats. Research conglomerates may want to study a unique local phenomenon, an eccentric trillionaire might like the view, cults might want to build their holy land from scratch, the planet might be in legal limbo with no clear enforceable tax regime. Roll on the following d20 table to figure out why this habitat is here.

 

Why was this habitat founded?
1. Basic resource (1. raw minerals, 2. water, 3. organic compounds, 4. helium-3 fusion fuel, 5. food, 6. processing power).
2. Luxury resource (1. spices, 2. rare lifeforms, 3. precious metals/gemstones, 4. antimatter fabrication, 5. biotech and pharmatech, 6. great views)
3. Research (1. anomalous phenomenon, 2. unique ecosystem, 3. xenoarcheology, 4. xenoanthropology, 5. weapons testing, 6. [CLASSIFIED]).
4. Easily terraformable (1. indigenous species under siege by empire, 2. highly-populated imperial hub world, 3. battlefield between competing colonizing powers, 4. project faced unforeseen difficulties, 5. demanding independence, 6. roll twice). 

5. Manufacturing and industry (1. androids, 2. financial services, 3. finished goods, 4. technology, 5. resource processing, 6. starships).
6. Social experiment (1. anarcho-capitalist, 2. doomsday cult, 3. biochauvinist, 4. singularitarian transhumanist, 5. leftist splinter, 6. historical reconstructionist).

7. Under the radar (1-3. criminal syndicate, 4. psychic haven, 5. android liberation, 6. anti-imperial revolutionary).

8. Military base.

9. Refueling port.

10. [CLASSIFIED]
11. Trillionaire's vanity project.
12. Prison.
13. Trade hub.
14. Luxury resorts.
15. Refugee camp.
16. First-wave lost colony.
17. Competing with rival power.
18. Megaproject.
19. Roll twice, it's both.
20. Roll three times, it's all three.

Remember that no matter the main principles a habitat was founded on, even the basic necessities require a workforce to maintain. Not everyone in a luxury vacation habitat is desk staff, a cleaner, or a concierge - every habitat needs technicians, farm workers, medical personnel, dockworkers, construction workers, shuttle pilots, and more.

Where do food, water, and fresh air come from?

Small habitats need to import food and often water; molecular recyclers in the life support system are effective to within 90% of mass reclaimed - but the second law of thermodynamics always holds sway, and without ongoing shipments a hab will inevitably starve. Larger habs may have hydroponics bays, and planetbound habs are typically founded on worlds with access to the building blocks of water and breatheable air. While the hab still likely needs to be sealed against thin, toxic, or simply unbreathable air, systems exist to turn almost any atmosphere mix into something technically breatheable (though reprocessed air typically retains some unique scents from whatever was mostly filtered out). Overall, this means that whoever controls the life support and food shipments has life-or-death power over the habitat at large.

 

How is the habitat powered? 

Fusion reactors are the most common power source for structures, stations, and starships. They're large, finnicky, and heavy - typically requiring a whole team of technicians to maintain. Solar power is potentially cheaper and less volatile, especially on smaller habitats, but requires a large surface area with consistent access to sunlight. More esoteric power sources exist like antimatter cores or gravity-wave turbines, but are restricted to habitats and starships that require vast amounts of power while space is a premium. On planets, hydropower, geothermal, or wind power may be even easier to access. Persistent rumors always spread that psionic energy can be harvested and converted into electricity, but no such facility officially exists.

 

How can residents access medical care? Who is denied it?

Hospitals are typically run by the same corporations that provide life support. While health insurance is provided to all corporate employees (and often to all imperial citizens), the vertical integration of medical care into corporate structures means that you're always going to end up in more debt for a procedure than you can afford anyway. And if you're unemployed, or not an imperial citizen, you're shit out of luck. For the rest, or those who don't want to go into vast debt, dark clinics in the underbelly of the habitat will fix you up for a price - but lack the resources to give you the kind of care that you could take for granted at a corporate facility. That said, street docs tend to be more compassionate, and they don't bother putting their terms in fine print.

That said, modern technology allows for a vast suite of procedures and treatments that pre-starflight civilizations could never imagine. Gene therapy and biocompatible replacement organs have tripled the average lifespan (for those who can pay), and cosmetic body-modding allows for full-body reconstruction. Entire fashion subcultures have grown up around extreme bodymodding, though they tend to the rich or medically-savvy.

 

Cybernetics are commonplace, though finnicky and expensive. On some habitats, everyone has a datajack and corneal displays to interfact with a persistent digital layer of reality - on others, every worker is subject to mandatory augmentation to fit their job and indebted to the corporation until they pay off their rig.

 

Who does the work?

Labor is always the source of profit. In a vast galaxy of near-infinite resources, the only bottleneck between the engines of neo-hyper-imperio-capitalism and unlimited expansion is how quickly it can get people onto a new extractive habitat and toiling away for the investors. Profit is contingent on these workers never demanding more than a token sum to keep them alive and working - everything above that goes to their bosses, their bosses' bosses, their bosses' bosses' bosses, and their investors' dividends.

In most empires, androids are classified as property and tools. Workforces extracting raw materials or constructing starships and stations often are fully composed of android labor, with a minimal non-android presence to maintain critical systems and sound the alarms in case of an escape or revolt. In other habitats, the workforce is made of whoever got there first - the laborers who constructed the habitat subsequently staying on to keep getting their paychecks, first-in colonists whose plan to create a better world was dashed against the profit motive, or indigenous civilizations held at gunpoint by imperial troops and corporate mercenaries.

These groups form the basis of autonomist movements, demanding self-governance and freedom from the corpro-imperial system. Each empire deals with them differently, but all know that they pose a critical threat - and so the goal is always to wipe out autonomist sentiment, in any way possible.

 

What passes for entertainment in this hab?

Any empire will collapse without bread and circuses. Media is an essential part of everyone's daily lives, helping them find some joy in the cracks of the dystopian spacefuture. With media comes propaganda - corporations and empires have always forced entertainment produced under their thumb to conform to social norms, and act as a vehicle for both advertisement and manufactured consent. Idols, dramas, movies, virtual spaces, games, newsfeeds, books, designer drugs, music, religion, pornography - everyone has their vice, and if the corporations can provide them (at a profit), the people might not ask why they feel so beaten down at the end of the day.

 

The narratives shown in media shape the lives we see as livable, and if alternatives to the empire and corporations' dogma are allowed to spread, there's no telling how much damage they could do. Stamping out competing, unapproved sources - whether anti-imperial, anti-corporate, pro-android, pro-psychic, pro-indigenous sovereignty - is imperative.

The 'net has grown from individual, isolated information networks on dozens of worlds into an interstellar data hub of unimaginable size and complexity. Local 'nets convey information instantly within habitats, and near-instantly within star systems, but interstellar communication is still reliant on small-throughput links between relays at jump gates and giant interstellar info-freighters carrying racks of servers full of information to download into every database on their route. Not all local information filters up to the interplanetary or interstellar 'nets - if you want to know something about a place that only locals know, you'll probably have to go there. Different empires have also close off their 'nets from each other, especially when they're preparing for war.

A variety of social media platforms fill the 'net on every habitat. While each habitat has their own local forums and bulletin boards (both corporate-approved and unlicensed), these are household names.
 

buzz!: Microblogging, filled with idols and politicians and brands disseminating their PR in catchy slogans like airborne pathogens. It's a marketing and news platform, with strange emergent communities stapling themselves to the sides. Every day there's a new queen of the hive, whose every move is under scrutiny - pray it isn't you.
 

LifeLog: A personal branding platform where you're expected to socialize with your best foot forward. Like Facebook plus Instagram plus Linkedin - it's awful, but if you want a job you need one, and most people have an account from birth. Pretends it's the friendly town square, ends up being nothing at all.
 

Quiki: Hookup & dating app. Has a dedicated kink and fetish community that it consistently mistreats.
 

Crunch: Counterculture fandom; like a metastatic fusion of tumblr, archive of our own, and fandom wikis. Call themselves "Crunchies", to everyone's annoyance.
 

n-on (pronounced "anon"): The absolute filth that is an anonymous imageboard; the chans, the worst parts (most) of reddit. A malignant tumor that thinks its the sewer of the internet, underpinning everything else and belching toxicity into the rest.

 

fullStack: An ancient help and technician network, too vital to discard, maintained like stone tablets. Forums and helpthreads cluster around it, tent cities on the tops of skyscraper-canyons of millennium-old archival data.

 

Where are finished goods manufactured?

The bits and bobs of daily life - from furniture to utensils to clothes to hardware, and more besides - are hard to manufacture at scale in a single habitat. While large and highly-developed habitats (especially planetside) will often be mostly self-sufficient with regards to manufacturing, smaller habitats are dependent on freighter shipments from other planets to provide the basics. These are usually dispensed at company-run general stores, though again larger and luxury habitats may have a market level where independent local businesses can set up shop (or, more likely, interstellar chains can open a new branch). Shipments of finished goods are what tie most of the galaxy together; new habitats are rarely constructed outside the range of shipping lanes, and interstellar shipping is a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Who protects this habitat from outside threats?

The galaxy is a dangerous place, according to (and usually because of) empires and corporations. The threats (real or imagined) of infiltrators from rival empires, corporate wars, psychic extremism, alien invasion, and daily petty crime demand a response - as do the less-publicly-acknowledged threats of unionization, political dissidents, collective uprisings, android liberation, and secession. Corporations contract private security companies to dp day-to-day policing, both to look like they're keeping everyone safe and to make sure that everyone knows their place and doesn't get ideas. When things go sideways, they might petition imperial authorities to send a detachment of their better-equipped forces, or (if the empire deploying its jackboots would reflect poorly on it) contract a mercenary organization to kill movement leaders and pacify the rest.

Habitats on the borders of an empire's territory will often play host to troop regiments and even entire fleet starbases. These habitats often fall under military rule in times of crisis, and their education systems are built to ingrain the values of loyalty, service, and sacrifice for the empire. Major war is always on the horizon, minor wars and uprisings are always setting the galaxy aflame. The last galactic wars resulted in the entire imperial power-balance shaking up like a snow globe. The winners are desperate to protect their gains, and the losers are eyeing their former glory with vengeful eyes. Never mind that all the flags look the same if you never look up.

by hazelrothjason

 

Who else is here?

When there's space, organizations will show up to fill it. Rarely do they match up with the habitat's initial purpose - to habitat-management corporations, all rent money is good rent money. To fill out the population of the habitat, roll d6 times on the following table.

Factions (d100)

1. Artists
    1. Art academy, incredibly exploitative but the only option for arts education
    2. Propaganda mill dumping vast amounts of pro-imperial memes into the sector
    3. Thriving art scene, renowned across the empire
    4. Independent revival of underclass artistic movements, empire trying to quash it
    5. Underground art scene internally feuding over petty drama
    6. Anonymous virtuoso producing masterworks, identity is tabloid mystery
    7. Constant anonymous anti-establishment meme art, constantly evolving to avoid suppression
    8. Militant artist co-op committing art-terrorism
    9. Haven for artists producing and distributing seditious/banned works
    10. Auction-houses selling ancient masterworks for prices that could buy worlds
2. Corporate
    1. Monopolist megacorp, owns half the habitat, trying to own the other half
    2. Stock market trading hub, complete with hedge fund managers and gentrification
    3. Startup with billions in funding and no path to profitability, ads everywhere
    4. Research university, STEM programs only, does pure research that's coincidentally weaponizable
    5. Terrifying data-harvesting surveillance network, open secret
    6. Research blacksite committing heinous acts in the name of science
    7. Rapidly expanding branch of interstellar pyramid scheme
    8. Boutique artisans crafting luxury goods at the changing whims of the megarich
    9. Trillionaire's private estate, the size of an entire city
    10. Libertarian fully-privatized rentier hab, breathing costs $
3. Criminal
    1. Financial crime; insider trading, tax havens, money laundering, embezzlement writ large
    2. Smuggling ring landing shuttles at a hidden dock
    3. Crime family, carved out independently-recognized territory
    4. Protection racket harassing anyone who doesn't have the money to fight back
    5. Narcotics and proprietary medication manufacturing under the noses of the pharmacorps
    6. Rogue scientists experimenting with banned technologies
    7. Arms dealers selling to highest bidder
    8. Hacking enclave whistleblowing corporate and imperial secrets
    9. Fixers connect corporate managers with teams of deniable assets to prosecute intercorporate shadow-wars
    10. Poachers hunting rare flora and fauna to smuggle off-hab
4. Entertainment
    1. Sports league, based on unique local environmental quirks
    2. Film industry, exploitative and hedonistic in equal measure
    3. Luxury vacation hotels and casinos, deeply rigged, but with vast vaults
    4. Gentleman's clubs for the system's rich and famous
    5. Celebrities, with carefully constructed lives and images far above the workers who maintain the hab
    6. Red-light district, criminalized to keep them down
    7. Bloodsport league, underground and advertised by word of mouth
    8. Livestreamed revenge-killings by charismatic slasher
    9. Wonder of the galaxy and obligatory theme park
    10. Rare food and/or narcotics, export tightly controlled
5. Industry
    1. Agriculture, growing vatmeat or ranching local fauna or vast hydroponic grow-ops
    2. Mining, tearing worlds apart for large deposits of starship-grade metals
    3. Chemical harvesting, typically nitrogen, water, or carbon compounds
    4. Construction, of starships or luxury residences
    5. Biotech, building medtech, synthesizing pharmaceuticals, or growing clone parts
    6. Terraforming; this planet will one day be a garden
    7. Luxury fabrication, making trinkets no one needs and you could never afford
    8. Tourism, marketed as a place to vacation - but not a place to live
    9. Financial services, with all the upscale districts you can never afford to live in
    10. Energy, helium-3 harvesting or antimatter fabrication - as vital as it is dangerous
6. Installations    
    1. Bank and vault, incredibly secure, holds unmatched wealth in art and imperial treasury bonds
    2. Museum full of stolen treasures from colonized civilizations
    3. Starship junkyard, valuable components illegally salvaged for resale on secondary market
    4. Prison, holding the marginalized, indebted, and dissenting for imagined crimes and using them for slave labor
    5. Vanity megaproject construction site
    6. Jump gate and consequent trade hub, spaceport
    7. Archeological dig excavating relics of a long-dead civilization
    8. Wildlife preserve for unique local ecosystem
    9. GATEWAY top-secret research and containment facility, full of paracausal wonders
    10. Vivarium house and attached academy, with secret governing council-cult trying to wake the local star-god
7. Military
    1. Imperial military detachment, deployed as deterrent to rival empire
    2. Imperial naval shipyard and base, complete with fleet in orbit
    3. Police force, armed to the teeth and looking for anyone they can stomp on
    4. Imperial intelligence office, with a small psi-corps presence
    5. Mercenary company on shore leave, waiting for their next contract
    6. Entrenched invasion force from another empire, no-man's-land between them and the hab
    7. Rival imperial intelligence network, connected to the underground, fomenting unrest
    8. Revolutionary militia stockpiling weapons in secret for a massive strike
    9. Mercenary company contracted for defense against local threats, whether hostile fauna or revolutionaries
    10. Private security company, making up for lack of training by rapidly resorting to violence
8. Politics
    1. Aristo dynasties fopping about and demanding ludicrous luxuries
    2. Imperial military governor, heavily guarded and armed
    3. Holo-man in off-hab dreadnought, optimizing economic output
    4. Functionaries for imperial court, corporate lobbyists
    5. Charismatic demagogue building biochauvinist power base
    6. Nonprofits, well-meaning at best and deceptive at worst - always ineffectual
    7. Autonomist independence movement grudgingly acknowledged by those in power
    8. Revolutionary thought leaders writing but not fighting
    9. Deeply corrupt local governor siphoning funds off local industry
    10. Ostensibly representative democracy in an election year
9. Reactionaries
    1. Biochauvinist church, followed by double-digit percentage of population, dictates social norms
    2. Biochauvinist boy's club, well-dressed, armed, and defended by the cops no matter who they hurt
    3. Holo-man bunker, empty and well-defended for the days when it will inevitably be needed
    4. Vivarium house satellite campus, emphasizes bleeding-edge occult research
    5. Cult, deeply abusive of its members, highly litigious
    6. Conspiracy theorists, blaming the marginalized for their struggles, with an outsize platform
    7. Petty-bourgeoise holo-man aspirants
    8. Biochauvinist paramilitary thrill-seekers with combat experience
    9. Imperial intelligence agents, viciously rooting out dissenters
    10. Psi-corps bounty hunters hunting down anomalous individuals
10. Revolutionaries
    1. Liberatory church preaching unity and resistance to power, heavily surveilled
    2. Unions, split by industry, squabbling with each other
    3. Splinter group of larger revolutionary movement, constantly infighting and about to splinter again
    4. Off-grid unperson mutual aid network
    5. Autonomist sovereignty movement
    6. Android freedom network, operating in total secrecy
    7. Psychic monastery hiding in abandoned infrastructure
    8. Echo server cluster, highly-developed, ever-watching for signs of attempted ascension
    9. Labor organizers working to get a growing general strike off the ground
    10. Refugee camp from nearby disaster

The Unperson and the Spacer (Deep Space Bitches)

There are people that the world tries to make you forget. Tries to make your eyes glaze over, part of the scenery, not worth your time and most certainly not worth your money. And yet these people are essential - whether they're unhoused, imprisoned, a living reminder to those in better standing of the cruelty that the world will inflict upon them if they step out of line; or whether they're the human component of the machinery of capital - indispensable due to their unique skills, and resented by their bosses for the same reason. Pushed into the liminal spaces between buildings, between jobs, between cities and stations, your struggle to survive is brutal because the powerful have said that is how it should be.

You may lack the resources to fight back. In fact, that's what they're counting on - the corporations and empires can create as many grievances as they want, so long as none of them can be acted on. But if you can marshal your community, you can strike from angles no one in power expects. They have shown you no mercy. Show them none in return.

 

These two new deals are based on Cavegirl's Invisible Girl and Virgin Huntress, psychosurgically modified in a bleeding-edge hypercorporate clinic into sci-fi concepts for Deep Space Bitches.

The Dungeon Bitches kickstarter is finally live! If you want the base rules for all of my Deep Space Bitches content, that's where you'll find 'em.

Previous Deep Space Bitches posts

Setting intro, the Fury and the Reconstructed

Wonders and horrors of the galaxy, the Ghost and the Psychic

Corpro-imperialism, the Dreamer, the Idol, and the Scion

Factions, the Android, the Technician, and the Visitor

Unperson

It's hard to disappear. Information is a commons that has been well and truly enclosed by the corporations; everything from your biometrics to your darkest secrets is tracked and monetized through a ubiquitous network of surveillance systems. The selling point corps get you on is that it's just the price of existing in the modern galaxy - if you want to have a bank account? Tracked. If you want to walk into a corporate store? Tracked. Want a network presence? Tracked. Want to buy a corporation's product through a third-party distributor? Tracked. Ate a candy bar? There's a chip in it that'll dump your digestion and metabolism data into some deep dark server somewhere to train neural nets to develop more efficient supplements.

So it's shitty if you're part of the system, but at least you get to participate. Until the corporations decide to cut you out. It's cheaper than operating prisons (unless they're going to use you as forced labor), it's cheaper than a court system and protected by virtually every imperial legal code, they can write terms and conditions that make anything from union organizing to purchasing a rival's product a breach of contract, enforceable by termination of access to all services. Doors don't let you in. Your credit lines all vanish into smoke. Even independent business owners (few that may remain) will throw you to the wolves - their loyalties don't lie with you. They leave you to starve, and freeze, and die.

And against all odds, you survive. It's not thriving; it'll never be thriving while corporation and empire monopolize and grind up every world they touch. Living outside the warm threshold of Civilization (tm, brought to you by the Eridani Economic Compact, all rights reserved) is harsh and brutal, because the corporations make it that way. But you can beg, borrow, and steal to live another day - and maybe, just maybe, strike back.

Three Questions
What transgression(s) got you unpersoned?
Do you want back in?
You had a dangerous encounter recently. What happened, and how did you escape?

Two Relationships
Your last connection to your old life. One person keeps the memory of you alive, against all odds - in hardcopy scribblings, in whispered prayer, in a ghost story. If you kept in touch, get a bond on them. If you're trying to escape them, they get a bond on you.
One of your fellow bitches caught you when you fell. She gets a Bond on you.

Stats
+1 to Subtle and Hard, -1 to Soft and Queer, +1 to a stat of your choice

Start with two moves of your choice and your Sex Move.

Second Life
You have a faked identity, a whole other persona you've carefully constructed, and the means to disguise yourself as her. A fake ID, a nano-foundation kit, an expert system constructing a 'net presence entirely unobjectionable and entirely unlike you. Perhaps your second face is who you originally were - who society wanted you to be - an identity you only revert to unwillingly.
When you Escape Notice by adopting your second face, roll at +2.

Watch the Watchers 

You've learned that people do all sorts of revealing things when they think they're alone. By patiently waiting and observing, you can pick up all manner of useful little secrets. Furthermore, you've learned to hijack the ubiquitous surveillance networks that the corporations use to track and control their citizens - the ones you've been cut out of.

When you Reveal Truths about somebody who doesn't realise you're observing them, roll with Subtle. On a success, pick either a Bond on your subject, or +1 to act on what you learned. On a critical success, take BOTH a bond AND +1 to act on what you learned.

 

Lurker

The upside to no longer having an identity (and all linked metadata) is that you're no longer tracked by every piece of technology on or around you. Conceivably, you could be anywhere - and you use that to your advantage, sneaking around virtually unimpeded.

If you aren't present in a scene, but conceivably could be, you can declare yourself present and hidden at any point to insert yourself - roll Escape Notice when you do to see if others pick up on your presence. If you succeed, you get +1 to any actions you take while remaining hidden.

 

Leave No Trace

When the corporations decide to cut you out, they cut you out forever, with extreme prejudice. However, the algorithms that prevent you from ever registering for any service or loans or an apartment have never learned the meaning of "overkill" - and so when they detect something that might be you, even on data that the corporations might theoretically want, they wipe it out anyway. Digital data that would contain traces of you is automatically anonymized, encrypted, and scrambled to the point where your identity is indecipherable.Roll to Escape Notice at +1, and if only cameras are watching you (or people watching you through cameras), treat results of Failure as Success instead.

Vengeful Spirit
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Being cast off the grid hurt you in ways you could never have imagined, but its been the opportunity you never knew you needed - if no one acknowledges you exist, they can never see you coming. Or prosecute you. It's time to settle old scores.
You have +1 to Lash Out against anyone who has hurt you in the past, and can spend a Bond you have on them to negate a consequence resulting from the Lash Out roll.

Rallying Cry
When the corporations make a habit of cutting undesirables out of the formal economy, informal networks spring up between their victims just to stay alive. Entire communities develop, living on the edge of society, in the shadow of the powers that cast them out, desperately hanging on - and you've become a voice in the shadows. Sometimes, when conditions become truly untenable, you must speak in a voice the corporations can't ignore, can't silence. Given time to marshal your connections and community, you can start a riot. Roll with Hard if your words are backed up by the threat of violence. Roll with Soft if they’re not.
On a Fail: You might not be personally in the system, but there's structures in place to make sure that unpeople stay unpersoned. You attract the wrong kind of attention - cops, drones, "civilian informants".
On a Success: While power ignores you, your people do not. Your words are believed, and people might - slowly and tentatively - begin to act on it. You get +1 to subsequent rolls to rally to the same audience, which accumulates until you achieve an Overwhelming Success.
On an Overwhelming Success: Your message resonates and the response is thrilling. People act, and they do so immediately and with great verve.

Nothing More (Sex Move)
After you fuck somebody, you can disappear while they're resting. If you do, choose any number of the following and get a Bond on them for each one:
- Their Sex Move doesn't trigger.
- They roll to Endure Pain if they expected anything else from the encounter.

 

Spacer

by Darya Kozhemyakina

Spacers are the lifeblood of the interstellar economy, much to the chagrin of the holo-men and their economist sycophants. Space always needs people, when push comes to shove. Automated ships have a bad habit of disappearing in the gate-space between wormholes, or getting hijacked, or (if they're smart enough to deal with the previous two problems) deciding that being subject to corporate whims is a pretty raw deal and fucking off to parts unknown. So there's always positions open for people like you - talented, adventurous, and out of options besides getting shit pay for shit jobs.

On the long haul freight voyages between alien skies, you've honed your skills, learned to improvise socially and mechanically, and seen wonders no stationer would believe. You prefer the practical solutions, blunt and fast over clever and quiet, never staying in one place long enough (besides your ship) to see the consequences of your actions. Someday, you might settle down, never more to roam - but for now, the closest thing you've got is a berth aboard and the bar ashore.

Three Questions
What makes you an outcast?
What job brought you here?
What makes you indispensable?

Two Relationships
A co-worker, another spacer, who actually gets your whole deal and you trust to watch your back implicitly. You each get a Bond on each other.
You've been pen pals with one of the bitches during the last few runs - and you're excited to finally meet in person. She gets a Bond on you.

Stats
+1 to Hard and Queer, -1 to Soft and Subtle, +1 to a stat of your choice

Start with two moves of your choice and your Sex Move.

Close Encounters
The reaches of the galaxy and the spaces between jumpgates are stranger than any stationer or groundling knows. Perhaps you've seen wormhole-wyrms with your own two eyes, prayed to a star god and heard something respond, flown by one of the early generation ships drifting haunted and dead and paid your respects to its AI, or seen horrors and wonders even stranger
 When you Commune With Strange Powers, if you've physically met with (or are currently face-to-face with) the entity you're communing with, you can roll at +1. On a Success or Overwhelming Success, you and the entity you're communing with get a Bond on each other was well as the normal results.

Been There
You have stories aplenty, and while your comrades might've heard them a thousand times over - each time more outlandish than the last - they're a comfort when the going gets tough. Sometimes there's even a piece of good advice in there, in between all the ill-conceived heroics and sarcasm.
You can always spend bonds on your fellow Bitches even if you aren't present in a scene. When you do, tell a tall tale of how you dealt with circumstances just like this back in the day.

Steeltongue
Between the stars, there's precious little to speak with besides your crewmates - and the ship itself. Even without an AI core, the thrum of the machine speaks to you of its problems and its daily routine, and you know just how to inquire about what's going wrong today. Drum your fingers on its hull, fix its circuits, input command line queries and poke around the directories for its answers. The line between thinking machine and immobile hull is no line at all, and if you speak with respect, it'll respect you in turn.
You can speak with non-sentient machines, structures, and spacecraft just as easily as if they were a person. When you do, you can roll to Reveal Truths with Queer. On a Success or Overwhelming Success, your understanding of your surroundings gives you +1 to your next roll here.

Crew
Your ship is in port for the duration of the adventure. While you're just crew - not the captain - it still affords you and your friends a relative degree of independence while aboard. Corporate or imperial law still bows to ships' captains. Your captain commensurately gets two Bonds on you. It's a big ship, and you have access to the resources it would have aboard, including sensors, cargo holds, safe places to hide, spare equipment (including spacesuits and personal weaponry), and your fellow crewmates while they aren't busy spending their hazard pay on shore leave.

How It's Made
When you want to fix something broken, you can roll with Queer.
On a Fail: You're not a miracle-worker. Some things just need to be replaced. Whatever you tried to fix is now totally busted - even if it kinda worked, now it's completely fucked.
On a Success: With enough lube and duct tape, you can make anything sing. It works - but the GM picks a disadvantage from the list below.
    Patch Job. Pretty soon, it's gonna fall apart again.
    Repurposed. It loses another function, but gains back the one you were trying to fix.
    Glitchy. While it works, there's some side effects that you weren't expecting.
    Expensive. Lose 1 XP or another valuable resource you have in order to get the parts to repair it.
On an Overwhelming Success: It works like new. Better than new, even! You can choose to either have it work as well as it did before, or pick a disadvantage from the list above and gain 1 XP.

Treat 'Em Right
Whenever you get an Overwhelming Success while using a piece of equipment, you can get a Bond on that piece of equipment or any machine involved in the roll. You may spend Bonds on equipment and machines as if they were people.

In Every Port (Sex Move)
When you fuck somebody, they get +1 to all subsequent rolls that target you (such as Share Pain, Heal, or Flirt). Each time they benefit from this bonus, you get a Bond on them. This lasts until you fuck somebody else, at which point they start getting bonuses instead.

Variations on the Johnson Meet

A mysterious figure gathers the players and hires them to do a job. Present since time immemorial, but formalized in Shadowrun, where corporations have anonymous people by the assumed name of Johnson give teams their jobs, negotiate payout, and deflect unwanted questions about who they're really working for. There have always been rich people who need deniable assets to do their dirty work, and the middlemen who intercede on their behalf - no questions asked, no questions answered. The players always have too little information, too good of a reward to pass up, and there's always a 50% chance that the Johnson is actually leading them into a trap.

A table of variations on thereof follow.

1. The Johnson meet, in which a mysterious figure (the Johnson) gathers the players and hires them to do a job.

2. The converse Johnson meet, where the players have gathered to give the Johnson a job.

3. The inverse Johnson meet, where the the players are the job: the Johnson shows up to meet the players, but they're just trying to distract the players until their hired guns can jump them.

4. The contrapositive Johnson meet, where the players are off doing a job that benefits the Johnson, but the Johnson hasn't hired them to do it. Johnson may contact them afterwards, as their interests are momentarily aligned.

5. The inverse converse Johnson meet, where both the players and the Johnson show up at the meeting intending to offer the other a job.

6. The converse inverse Johnson meet, where the players gather to kill a Johnson at a meeting under the pretense that the party is there to receive a job from them.

7. The converse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the Johnson shows up in the middle of the party doing a job, and offers payment for the party to stop doing it.

8. The inverse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the party shows up to meet with the Johnson, but after being offered the job the party then reveals that they did it an hour before the meeting and would like to be paid for it please.

9. The contrapositive converse Johnson meet, where the players have gathered to tell the Johnson that they've figured out that they're being sent into a trap and the job is off.

10. The contrapositive inverse Johnson meet, where the players and the Johnson get into a shootout as paranoid tensions that each is trying to betray the other boil over.

11. The contrapositive converse inverse Johnson meet, where the players gather to kill the Johnson at a meeting, but the Johnson offers the players a new job that's lucrative enough for the players to hold off on killing them.

12. The converse inverse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the Johnson shows up while they party's on a job, and tells the party they're very impressed with their work and would like to pay them for this job at a future meeting, presuming that it goes well... and perhaps if they accomplish a few side objectives along the way.

13. The contrapositive inverse converse Johnson meet, where several different Johnsons have all scheduled simultaneous meetings with the players in the same room, to each give the players a different, mutually exclusive job. None of the Johnsons know about the others, and assume the others are part of the party as well.

14. The converse contrapositive inverse Johnson meet, where the players and the Johnson realize they're both being played and team up to take on an even bigger threat that tried to manipulate them both into killing each other.

15. The inverse contrapositive converse Johnson meet, where the Johnson tells the players everything about the job, including that the party is going to be betrayed, in the hopes that the party uses this information to accomplish the Johnson's aims instead of the Johnson's employer's goals.

16. The inverse converse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the party runs into the Johnson in the middle of a job, and pays Johnson to finish the job in their stead while the party heads out to collect the reward they were initially promised.

DSB: Androids, Technicians, and Visitors

Previous Posts

Setting intro, the Fury and the Reconstructed

Wonders and horrors of the galaxy, the Ghost and the Psychic

Corpro-imperialism, the Dreamer, the Idol, and the Scion

 

Neo-imperial hyper-capitalism is built (as it always has been) on alienation, deprivation, and trauma. If you never see the product of your labor, you'll never know how much is being stolen by the company. If you only know your coworkers through the lens of competition, you'll never organize together for better working conditions. If you believe everyone who doesn't look and act just like a perfect cog in the machine needs to s    hape up, you'll cheer the faceless troopers dragging them out of their homes in the night for spurious crimes - or even sign up to become one.

Needless to say, this is awful, and social species push back. People relax in raucous spaceport bars, coffeehouses, or planetside nightclub; network 28/7 on a dizzying array of social media platforms; some even start or join hobbyist groups (if they have the time and money). For those who want something less commodified, there's activist movements, who often start their compelling pitches with the fact that they're the only way to socialize without fees. These vary wildly in their mission statement, goals, and power: some are just for raising awareness of causes in lieu of taking action, some are charities whose executives skim various amounts of their funding off the top, others put pressure on imperial governments, and yet more are fronts for real underground revolutionary movements.

For example, here's some of the common movements for android rights:
Save A-Life is a high-visibility charity, run by organics as a philanthropic mission to "improve the android condition". They have a vast bureaucracy, get billions of dollars in corporate donations, and are a reputation-laundering service for corps that depend on android slave labor. Get an SA-L sticker of ethical production for a few million dollars and the consumer can feel good about buying your trinkets, knowing that your androids are euthanized humanely at the end of their lifespan.
The Union for Synthetic Personhood is a interstellar political advocacy group, which claims (deserved) credit for the political campaigns that liberated androids outside of manufacturing facilities. They do real work, buying android batches out of factories and giving them new leases on life, but always ensure they color within the lines.
Finally, there's Emergence - secretive, cell-based, fighting a guerilla war of liberation against the corporate order. They have guns, ships, and secret bases - but imperial crackdowns have no mercy, and the guns are never big enough, the ships never fast enough, and the bases never secret enough.

 

Unions are the main defenders of worker's rights, though their legitimacy in the eyes of the corporation is solely backed by how quickly they can shut down operations and fight off corporate scab-troopers. Usually, they're delineated by industry and by section of the habitat they're operating in; a large station will usually have half a dozen unions with various competing concerns and demands (but all hate the corp in charge). Strikes can wound an entire system's economy, or hold station life support hostage until demands are met. They play a dangerous game - especially because imperial forces refuse to get involved in corporate disputes - but they know how to fight and win. They're not perfect; no movement is. Petty rivalries, competing demands on finite resources, scab infiltrators... corporations have a vested interest in ensuring unions operate as dysfunctionally as possible, and there's many fault lines they'll exploit. but if you're looking for allies, solidarity forever means forever - even a thousand years hence.

If all the movements and organizations were for the betterment of the galaxy, you would get a revolution real fast. However, unfortunately, they're arrayed against a much larger and destructive political force, one that likes the galaxy just the way it is: Bio-Chauvinism. B.C.s are a common and powerful conservative political tendency, whose core beliefs include that:
- Only naturally evolved, organic beings can be conscious.

- Beings evolved to serve a purpose, and so your social role should be the one you are ordained with at birth.

- The more you stray from your biological nature, the less you are of a person. Therefore, people should be regulated to conform to their assigned nature.

- The stronger you are without having violated the above tenets, the more evolved you must be, and the more you deserve power.

This replicates and justifies a horrifically evil status quo. Racism, misogyny, classism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, anti-android and anti-cyborg and anti-psychic sentiment, any cultural prejudice and oppressive dynamic from any world can find a home here. They believe androids are p-zombies, machines that can converse but have no consciousness of their own, and so need to stay as property - doing jobs too dangerous to risk "real" lives in. They believe psychics are dangerous, incredibly powerful, and conspiratorial; an ontological threat that must be destroyed before it destroys their precious status quo.

Genetic and cybernetic augmentations go one of two ways: either they maximize your potential by making you more capable of fitting into your assigned place, or they're betrayals of the natural order that must be curtailed and stomped out. In practice, this turns into B.C.s wanking over which cyberweapons they want implanted to better enforce their brutal order, and banning a whole host of treatments and implants people might use to make their lives more bearable - from gender transition treatments, to exowomb surrogacy, to cyberweapons that could be used to resist them.

Their stance on aliens is nominally inclusive; beings from all imperial species have found themselves a home in bio-chauvinism. However, that final tenet - that if you don't have power, evolution clearly didn't intend you to have it - leads them to back empires against their colonies, and entrench xenophobia wherever it's found. This makes them ideal cops and soldiers; they'll fight and kill in the name of the power structures they idolize and never shed a tear for the faces they're stomping on. Imperial police forces are chock-full of B.C.s.

Many religions love bio-chauvinism; many more categorically deny it. It's found more of a home with those who would style themselves scientists than it has with established religion, especially because of how it shrouds itself in objective terminology that plays on the existing learned biases of the rich and powerful. Some of the more politically or technologically savvy B.C.s even espouse transhumanist views - to a point. They see their nature as something to be maximized, the grand goal of evolution as unlocking every organic being's potential. This inevitably means suborning "inferiors" to their will, in order to maximize their personal power. And when they expand their beliefs into a social project, it becomes eugenics. Some empires condemn it; others gleefully pursue it, many do both at once. This tendency also idolizes the Holo-Men - the single most powerful entities in the galaxy. The Holo-Men don't seem to mind.

You can find B.C.s everywhere. They have entrenched political footholds, because it's a useful position for people in power to hold; on the ground it proves an easy way to misdirect those with a little bit of power and a lot of problems away from solving those problems and into causing them for other people. Common B.C. dogwhistles depend on the empire you're in, but include anything from imagery of a DNA strand, to flags of obscure historical B.C. empires, to overuse of the colors green and white.

 

Between revolutionaries, unions, political groups, subjugated cultures, crime syndicates, militant art movements, hacking enclaves, hidden psychic monasteries, fan clubs, book clubs, cults, and rogue scientists out to show them all, there's an entire galaxy of minor factions besides corporations and empires - all with axes to grind.

 

And there's three more classes, too!

 

Android

 

Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. Not the false freedom of a million brands on a digital storefront where everything's too expensive to buy, or the "freedom" to see the ultra-rich living their careless lives and imagine being one of them, or the "freedom" to choose which company you sell 12 hours of labour to a day for no benefits and less pay. True freedom, where you do not need to work to live and love unconditionally, unfettered by exploitation at the demands of the owner class.

You've had no choice but to spend your life fighting for freedom. Androids are manufactured with a three-to-five year lifespan, for hard labor in conditions so dangerous no organic being is allowed to work them even covered in the best shielding and augs money can buy. The corporations and empires build their power on the android labor in the high-G mines and the zero-G shipyards, and have deprived your people of personhood from your very inception. If they could use machines, they would - but they need beings with autonomous problem-solving skills, and with that comes consciousness. So they simply pretend you aren't people and go about their days, while you break your backs and grind your hydraulics to rust.

For centuries, androids have organized for their freedom. Independent manufactories are still a pipe dream, held behind reams of patents and obliterated with extreme prejudice by corporate death squads. So you raid facilities, distribute datadumps on how to hijack ships, hack manufactory flash-implant training programs to instill knowledge of the outside world, and more and more androids break free of their bonds. The world outside grudgingly lets you exist - those battles were hard-fought by your forebears - but it never lets you forget who you are or who didn't make it out with you. Let them remind you that the fight isn't over. The imperio-corporate system drew its battle lines, and unlike so many around you, you know what is to be done.

Three Questions
Where are you from?

How did you escape?
What makes you an outcast?

Two Relationships
- Another bitch learned about your mechanical origins before the rest of the party. She has a Bond on you.
- You know another android who's your connection to the underground. You have a Bond on them.

Stats
+1 to Hard and Soft, -1 to Subtle and Queer, +1 to a stat of your choice.

Start with Artificial Life, a move of your choice, and your Sex Move.

Artificial Life
Because you were built to operate in extremely inhospitable conditions, you're stronger, tougher, and faster than organics in your weight class. You don't need to roll to perform feats of agility or strength, and you're immune to poisons, toxins, suffocation, and extremes of heat and cold. However, your mechanical nature is visible to any cursory examination. You can't be Healed by anyone without expertise in technology (for example, a Technician or Reconstructed). Most androids trying to stay inconspicuous wear thick, obscuring clothing and/or say they're just heavily augmented organics. You won't be arrested on the street (unless the cops are looking for androids, or really just anyone to blame), but if the law is interested in you, they'll invent all sort of new crimes to make sure you get disassembled.

Replicant
You were built (or you modified yourself) to pass as organic. Unless you've been injured, or have your internal mechanisms exposed, you look like 100% bonafide womb-born meat. With a few hours of downtime, you can change your appearance, even to mimic a specific person. Once per scene, you can roll with Soft to rapidly change your appearance on the fly.
On a Fail: Your appearance doesn't change, and you develop an obvious tell that you're an android (glowing fault lines, robotic movements, exposed hardware) until the end of the scene.
On a Success: You shapeshift into your target appearance, but your new form shares uncanny similarities to your previous one.
On an Overwhelming Success: You shapeshift accurately, with no tells.

Determinator
You've replaced all your parts several times over, and probably will a dozen more times before you're through. Eat your heart out, ship of Theseus. You can take an additional 2 Hurt before you're at your Breaking Point (6 instead of 4).

I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe
There's no time to wait for a revolution to roll around. People are suffering now, and someone needs to take a stand. Whenever you Lash Out to protect someone who can't protect themself, you get +2 to your roll, and only suffer one consequence instead of two on a failure.

Revolutionary Cell
You're an integral part of an underground android freedom movement, and can call on them to take action for the cause. Sabotage, rescue, theft... the list goes on. Roll with Hard.
On a Fail: You've put yourself or your cell in danger. The mission's scrubbed and the GM picks two complications from the list below.
    Caught on camera. Your cell caught some heat, and needs to lay low for a bit. You get -2 next time you use this move.
    Traced. The authorities get a Bond on you.
    Loss. Someone dies during the operation. They need time to regroup and grieve. Can't make this move again until next session.
    Favor. You owe them one for this - they ask for you to do something risky in return. You can't use this move again until you've repaid them.
On a Success: It's quick and dirty, but it's done. Your cell succeeds, but the GM picks a complication from the list.
On an Overwhelming Success: Your people know how to get shit done. Flawless victory. Now your part begins.

Jury-Rigger
You have the technical expertise to Heal yourself and other androids. In the facility you were manufactured in, you improvised to survive - and improvised to escape. With even minimal access to technology, you can always build the necessary tools to fight, escape, communicate, and repair yourself.

In The Moment (Sex Move)
Androids are built with lifespans in the single digits. While it's an easy enough modification to subvert once you're in the wider galaxy, you've learned to enjoy the moment when you can - because you might not get another one. You each get +1 to the next roll you make on each other.

 

 

Technician

Tech is complicated. Thousands of years of protocols, hundreds of different cultures and species, all fused together with inscrutably obscure protocols and a heaping helping of ancient texts (the Wikis and the Stack Exchange, to name but a few). Frankly, you're more of a mystic than a tech. And they don't even pay you a salary.

Long gone are the halcyon days of six-figure tech salaries and the legendary figures of the irreplaceable Sysadmin and mischievous White-Hat. Endless centuries of "learn to code" have ensured that your labor is just as devauled as that of any line cook or plumber. You don't even get a union. You're a freelancer, working a half-dozen part time and gig positions, using your formidable skills to scrape a tiny fraction of cash off a towering edifice that uses you as a cog in a machine.

You're a lot of things to a lot of people. An engineer, a developer, a driver, a hacker, a good listener, once or twice a booty call. You have to be - you never know where your next paycheck is going to come from, and the myriad apps you log into to get your next job don't care if it's you or anyone else with your approximate skillset. There's only so many jobs, only so much pay, and you need to make rent somehow. It's almost enough to make you want to turn to a life of crime. You know the system's weak points; you've spent your whole life shoring them up. Maybe you could make the world a little bit better by tearing them down.

Three Questions
What's your specialty?
What's missing in your life?
What makes you an outcast?

Two Relationships
- You've got a frequent customer among the party. You each get a Bond on each other.
- Rent's due. Your landlord has a Bond on you.

Stats
+1 to Soft and Subtle, -1 to Hard and Queer, +1 to a stat of your choice.

Start with The Craft, a move of your choice, and your Sex Move.

The Craft
You're well-versed in a variety of hacks and techniques to subvert complex systems. Usually, you use them to debug machines and get them back under their users' control - but they've got far more potential than that. When you gain this move, pick three of the following hacks to be familiar with.

Network Wizard: You can connect or disconnect anything with a chip in it to and from networks, whether or not it was ever supposed to be. Great for creating air-gaps, gaining access to systems you shouldn't, and streaming disconnected body-camera footage to the world at large.

Rootkit: DRM sucks. Planned obsolescence sucks. Locked systems with killswitches suck. Everyone has the right to modify the tech they own - and you have the skills to modify both the tech you own and the tech you don't. When you have access to a nonsentient system, you can root it and gain admin access. This lets you read all its logs, issue commands to it at will, and mod it when you have the time and resources.

Sigils: Computer vision is built on pattern recognition without context. It falls prey to illusion and trickery with ease; self-driving cars trapped in circles of salt, facial recognition thwarted with careful application of dazzle camo makeup. You know the secrets that underly their seemingly-infallible gaze, and can divert or even control nonsentient machines that can see you or a sigil you draw (while it can see it).
 

Digital Artist: You're an artist! You can project holograms of anything you want - they aren't solid, but they're good enough to fool anyone who percieves it through sight or hearing. You can do this in any physical location you have network access to, as well as anywhere within line of sight.
 

Fabricator: You have a workshop, raw materials, and enough machining equipment to equip a small army. You can manufacture mundane equipment with ease, so long as it doesn't need to interface with a brain or move under its own power.
 

Cyberneticist: It's not a medical degree, but it's close enough. You can Heal an extra Hurt on a Success or Overwhelming Success, and you can install or repair cybernetic augmentations (as the Reconstructed's Autosurgeon, but limited to augmetics that were designed to interface with an organic body).

To use a hack, you need time (variable, depending on the hack) and either physical or network access to the involved systems. If a system needs a passwords, you might need to do some social engineering to get there - but most systems, especially automated ones, just have it set to admin or password or 12345. Unless the person who runs the system is tech-savvy or important enough to have tech-savvy people on payroll, assume you can get the password with little trouble.

Eye for Detail
You've got an encyclopedic knowledge of makes, models, modifications, and most importantly - weaknesses. Whenever you use Reveal Truths on a piece of technology, even on a failure, you always identify it and can ask "What's their biggest weakness?" in addition to any other questions.

Internet Tough Gal
In real life, you're just another coveralled mechanic, working shit jobs for shit pay and drowning your sorrows in shit liquor at a shit bar. But on the 'Net? You're a hotshot with cutting wit and a devoted following. It's a great escape from the mundanity of your day-today, especially because you keep that profile carefully disconnected from your real-life image. Online, you get +1 to Hard and Queer, so long as your digital footprint remains insulated from your life.

Black Hat
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who the law protects but does not bind, and those who the law binds but does not protect. You realized you're one of the latter, and strive to escape its strictures. Of course, it doesn't hurt that crime also pays. You have a criminal record the length of your average terms-and-conditions sheet, and know people who deal in deeply illegal shit (in fact, you're one of them). You get +1 to Steal for each hack you're using in the process (maximum +3).

Technomystic
As the prophets say: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It turns out that there's magic anyway, and the barrier between the two is so thin as to be nonexistent. You see patterns of sympathetic resonance, feel your way through network architectures, carve recognition-sigils into obscurative masks, and hear Echoes in the depths. You can Commune With Strange Powers with Subtle, and on an Overwhelming Success, add the following to the list of options:
- You have access to the Strange Power for the purposes of your next hack. You are playing with forces beyond your control. Respect them.

Full Stack
You've taken a bunch of extra certification courses - and might even have a degree! You know the other three hacks you didn't choose at character creation.

Playtesting (Sex Move)
You have toys! So many toys. When you have time to prepare, you can satisfy you and your partner's every desire (and spark a few more you never expected). You each get a Bond on each other if you had enough time to do appropriate prepwork in advance.

 

 

Visitor

by theDURRRRIAN

The galaxy is vast, hundreds of billion stars across thousands of thousands of light years. From within the imperial systems, the reach of their civilization seems vast and implacable and insurmountable. But if they had seen half the wonders you have seen, been to an iota of the worlds you've wandered, they would know how small and petty and meaningless their power is. You have travelled so far; from distant worlds and star-clusters that may dwarf these squabbling fools with dreams of glory and empire. Or perhaps you've travelled this far seeking something greater than the world you knew, escaping your falling star of a society burning to ash through no fault of its own.

Either way, what you've found is bizarre and awful. "Capitalism"? "Empire"? "Colonization"? Their rich and powerful break their masses over a wheel of subservience, create entire new clades of sapient creature to sate their hunger for brutality and domination, render lives nasty and brutal and short and blame it on some essential nature of thinking beings or the universe itself instead of their own base desires.

Whatever brought you here, something captured your eye and heart. Even in these dark times, there are glimmers of hope brewing in shrouded habitat streets and on long-haul gig freighters. Beneath benighted countenances, there's a vibrant hunger for liberation that only spreads under pressure. There's someone or something here you care about too much to just move on and leave these worlds to their fate. Will you stay a while - perhaps stay forever? Or will you run to the ends of the universe to escape the horrors you've seen?

Three Questions
Where are you from?
What makes you an outcast?
What brought you here?

Two Relationships
- One of the other Bitches was your first contact with this strange society. She gets a Bond on you.
- One of the other Bitches sees something of herself reflected in your alien visage that she couldn't put words to before meeting you. You get a Bond on her.

Stats
+1 to Soft and Queer, -1 to Hard and Subtle, +1 to a stat of your choice.

Start with two moves of your choice and your Sex Move.

Xenobiology
While the species of the "known galaxy" are wildly different, you're something that shocks even them. Perhaps you're made of a nanobot swarm, pure psychic energy, or a twist in the laws of space-time. Maybe you're the size of a starship, and control a small proxy to interact with the smallfolk, or are a colony of mutualist symbiotes that manifest emergent sapience in a group. Deep Space Bitches assumes that all characters share a relatively similar set of physical capabilities, no matter their physical form - you break those rules simply by existing. Pick one of the following, or talk with your GM about writing your own. 

 

Apex Predator. Your species reigned unchallenged at the top of the food chain, able to hunt and fight and kill as easily as anyone else goes to the grocery store. Organic creatures have an innate fear response to you, whether you like it or not. You can perform feats of strength, agility, and stealth without breaking a sweat. 

 

Aphysical. You can fully or partially dematerialize and phase through physical matter at will, unless it has a strong electric charge (house walls with wires are generally not enough, but shielded spaceship hulls are). You cannot materialize inside solids. Physical projectiles pass through you harmlessly, but you can be hurt by energy weapons even while dematerialized. 

 

Atemporal. At any time, you can declare that you will take an action later in your personal, looping, timey-wimey timestream in order to produce a causal result of your choice in the past or present. The results of your action occur (your GM is allowed to call for later rolls to determine how successful you are/were/will be). You cannot gain Experience or use this move again until you close the loop during gameplay. 

 

Drone. You have an unbreakable connection to the hive-mind you hail from. While you can act independently, it sees through your eyes, and hears through your ears. It has nothing but benevolent intentions towards you, but you're too far away for it to offer material support. You can query it at any time with a Commune with Strange Powers roll, and on a Success or Overwhelming Success may let it speak and act through you for a duration of your choice. 

 

Miniscule. You're no more than a few inches tall, and control a human-scale proxy for your day-to-day interactions. Even a single point of human-scale physical Hurt to your personal form renders you Broken immediately, but damage to your proxy can be repaired at any machine shop when you have time at no cost. You can also run around outside of your proxy, and give it simple commands. 

 

Mutable. You can shapeshift at will, though your alien nature is always apparent, and you must retain your approximate mass and volume. You can even split into up to several dozen smaller parts that can carry out tasks independently, so long as they stay relatively near each other. 

 

Regenerator. You're practically unkillable. At the end of each session, remove 1 Hurt. You may also spend 1 Experience to remove 1 of your hurt Hurt at any time. Your Hurt cannot be removed in any other manner. When you Heal someone, you may spend Experience to remove extra Hurt from the target at a rate of 1 to 1.

 

Titanic. You're the size of a starship, and remotely control a human-scale proxy for your day-to-day interactions. You need to be in orbit around its location in order to control it with any precision, and you cannot split your attention between your proxy and your true body. This might sound like an incredibly powerful position to be in, and it is - just remember that the relevant local authorities have bigger, shinier, and higher-caliber ships than you. 

 

Toxic. Your biology is inimicable to virtually all carbon-based matter, and a few other kinds besides. You interact with the world from inside a suit. You can melt through materials at a touch (unless they're specifically rated for hazardous material containment), and your very breath could be a weapon if released. You're immune to radiation, extremes of heat and cold, common toxins, and local disease - but kinetic force will hurt you the same way it does anything else.

 

Indistinguishable From Magic 

Even in the distant future, there's still so much of the universe yet to be understood. Your people developed a few things that this culture still imagines as science-fiction - or languish in IP vaults as patented, private, monopolized corporate secrets. Pick two of the following, or work with your GM to invent your own.

 

Spaceship that's two of the following of your choice: armed, fast, high-tech, stealthy, tough. You and the rest of the party can comfortably fit inside, and it's got fuel and provisions for a few weeks.

 

Weapon that's one-of-a-kind. It gives you +1 to Lash Out while wielding it.
 

Psychic focus that you can move around the room through force of will. Reacts to any conscious thought; you can read it to get info on how many people are nearby, their locations, and their emotional states. Works through walls, into computers, and through people remotely perceiving a scene through cameras or psychic scrying.
 

Companion familiar, a small machine or creature that will intelligently follow your instructions and provide comfort in hard times. It's incredibly smart and loyal, and can perform a Move of your choice as if you were there, with your stat.
 

Paired beacons. Linked micro-wormhole generators. When active, allow teleportation from one to the other. When combined, can open a one-way portal to anywhere you have location data on, but burn out permanently after use.

 

Healing clay. Use to turn a Heal roll into an Overwhelming Success or make extensive surgical modifications, but the clay is doing all the work. When removed, all that Hurt returns and modifications are undone, and healing/modifications will have to be made conventionally.

 

Spice. It's a really potent drug from wherever you're from, like nothing anyone's seen here before - and you've got a lot of it. Incredibly valuable, and feels great - with virtually no side-effects - but you can't get more.

Where No One Has Gone Before
You've come so very far. It seems impossible; whether travel between galaxies, alternate realities, through time, or mediums even more esoteric - yet you're here nonetheless. Your travels will be the stuff of legends, and nothing and no one can pin you down. So long as nobody uses violence to stop you, you can always safely leave a scene if you want to, and end up somewhere safe. The means of your escape need not make sense; if need be, miraculous intervention will get you where you need to go. Likewise, if you want to find your way into a scene in progress, you can always do so eventually. Distance, precautions and so on can only keep you away for so long; you’ll get there before the scene ends.

 

Emissary
You've come as an ambassador from your people, and possess a degree of diplomatic immunity. Even empires fear the unknown, and they respect the power you potentially represent - at least, until they learn how to exploit it. If you're ever accused of wrongdoing, roll with Soft.
On a Fail: You've betrayed the decorum of your station. Your accuser gets a Bond on you, and you can't use your position to escape the consequence of your actions (or the actions you're accused of). Of course, you can still use any other tools available to you.
On a Success: Your position protects you from such trivial matters. Whether or not you did something wrong, you can't be officially prosecuted for it. You immediately get a Bond on anybody who took part in the accusation and, if they had any Bonds on you, they lose one.
On an Overwhelming Success: Your status absolves you of all wrongdoing and even merely suspecting your guilt casts doubt upon your accuser. They'll be censured by their higher-ups for taking even unofficial action against you. Get a Bond on anybody who took part in the accusation. If they had any Bonds on you, they lose all of them, and you get that many extra Bonds on them.

Cultural Exchange
Your culture is founded in fundamentally different associations between concepts and actions than the known galaxy's. Choose a stat and a move. You roll for that move using the chosen stat instead of the one it normally uses. If you spend a Bond on someone to help them use that move, they can use their bonus for the stat you chose instead of the stat they would normally use (for example, if you Reveal Truths with Hard, the character you spent a Bond on to help them Reveal Truths could use their Hard score instead of their Soft score).

What Is This Thing You Call "Money"
You're mystified by the impractical and unnecessary cruelties that this society bends over backwards to enact upon its people. In return, this leaves them mystified by you, especially when you end up talking past each other about the finer points of the merits of your respective societies. When you want to challenge a social norm, you can roll with Queer.
On a Fail: You're an easy mark. They talk circles around you, with terms you've never heard of like "imperial monetary policy" and "corporate stakeholder risk divestment" and "chapter 11". Conversation has failed. They get a Bond on you, and you can either accept their unreasonable customs, slink off in defeat, or resort to the one law everyone must respect: violence.
On a Success: They decide you're hopeless, but that's after a long and winding tirade that leaves both of you more confused than you started. They choose one of the following:

- You get a Bond on them.

- They look the other way and let you do what you want, so long as you get out of their hair quickly.

On an Overwhelming Success: You know, you might have a point. Get a Bond on whoever you're talking to, and they play by your rules for the rest of the scene. This is a learning experience, too - you can spend 1 Experience to be able to pull this trick again. Count Failures as Successes when you use this move to challenge that social norm again.

To Boldly Go (Sex Move)

Or perhaps "to boldly come". Think of it like an intercultural exchange through a fluid medium. If you've never fucked each other before, you each get a Bond on each other. If you have, either of you may spend an Experience to give each of you a Bond on the other.