Custom Shadow Amps

The Shadow Amp price list is a construction kit rather than a catalogue. Every amp in the book is the same sum: a base rating for its type, plus a rating for each effect it carries, at 5,000¥ a point. Cyberware starts at 1 and costs an Essence. Bioware starts at 2 and costs half. A Quality starts at 0 if it is your first and 3 after that, and costs no Essence at all. Risk Reduction 1 on a specialisation is worth 2 rating points; Armour +1 is worth 1.

So a custom amp is not a new rule. It is a new name on a sum the book already prices, and the only real question is whether the sum is honest.

Everything on this page has been costed that way and is available at character creation on the same terms as anything in the book. Archetypes has the price list itself; Homebrew has everything else this campaign changed.

Dermal deposits

A Quality. Armour +1, for 5,000¥ and no Essence, if it is the first Quality you buy.

The bony ridging over the brow and forearms that a troll already has, thickened by the same mineralisation. Developed rather than installed, so there is no surgery, no maintenance, and nothing on a scan that says implant.

Base 0 for a first Quality plus 1 for the Armour +1 effect. Your metatype's Racial Quality does not use up that first slot (p. 58), so a troll or an ork starts this page with the cheap slot still open.

The books sell the same +1 two other ways, and neither is written for somebody who already has plate on their forearms:

Three things pay for being the cheapest of the three. It is creation-only, like every Quality, so it cannot be added the session somebody decides they want it. It spends the one cheap Quality slot everybody gets, which is the slot a mentor spirit wants. And it does not stack with the other two: buy this and dermal plating and only one of them applies to any given attack, so the 10,000¥ is wasted.

Available to any metatype whose description supports it, so trolls and orks. It is a purchase rather than a racial bonus, and that distinction is the point. 2.0 deliberately made metatype a set of caps rather than a set of free advantages, so a troll is not born tougher, they are born able to get tougher and still have to spend for it. A troll who spends nothing here has exactly the armour they are wearing, same as anybody.

Proposing one

Bring the sum, not the idea. An amp that cannot be written as base rating for its type, plus this effect, plus that one is a house rule rather than a custom amp, and it belongs in Homebrew instead.

Two things get checked before it lands here: whether the same effect is already sold under another name at another price, since two routes to the same +1 at different costs makes the dearer one dead money; and what it costs you, because every amp on this list is cheap in one currency and expensive in another.