Essence and chrome
What a body has six of, what an implant costs out of it, and why the street reads a man by how much of him is left.
Everybody starts with six of it and nobody gets any back. Essence is the measure of how much of your body is still the body you were born with. Every implant takes a piece: a cybernetic limb, a datajack, a set of company eyes, a wired reflex. The chrome works, the chrome is cheap enough to finance, and the bill is paid in a currency with no income.
Nobody talks about Essence in a bar. What people talk about is how much chrome somebody is running, and they are talking about the same thing.
What it costs, exactly#
Cyberware costs one Essence per implant. Bioware, which is grown rather than machined, costs half of that and cannot be hacked or switched off from outside, and that is why it costs more money for less capability. Anything you merely carry costs nothing: a gun, a jammer, a good coat, a commlink in your pocket rather than in your skull.
The numbers matter because the losses are cumulative and the effects arrive at thresholds rather than gradually:
| Essence remaining | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| 6 | Nothing. Nobody in this line of work stays here |
| 5 or less | Magic works worse against you and for you: one hit canceled on anything magical |
| 4 or less | You heal worse: one hit canceled on anything trying to fix you |
| 3 or less | Magic worse again |
| 2 or less | Healing worse again |
| 0 | You die |
The two curves are the real story, because chrome makes you harder to enchant and harder to mend, in alternating steps, and the second one is what kills chromed-up people: a mage can no longer reach you and neither can a medic. A street samurai at Essence 2 is a difficult target and an impossible patient.
What it does to magic#
An adept or a mage spends Essence twice. The threshold above cancels hits on anything magical, and the book means everything by that: astral work, spellcasting, summoning, and an adept's own powers. So a magician with a fistful of cyberware is a worse magician in a way that has nothing to do with taste, and an adept who chromes up is quietly buying against himself.
This is why the Awakened in this city run conspicuously clean, and why a mage with visible implants is worth a second look: either somebody made the choice for them, or they were not Awakened when the implants went in.
What the street reads#
Chrome is normal and the amount is a statement. Almost everybody who works has something: a jack, a set of eyes, a hand. Enough of it to see across a room means one of three things, and people will assume the first two before the third: a corporation paid for it and owns the person; the person is in a trade where being replaceable is the point; or somebody was hurt badly enough that the alternative was worse.
The word for going too far is not a diagnosis. People say chromed out, plated, more metal than manners, and they mean it as a class judgement as much as a medical one. There is no clinic that treats it, because there is nothing to treat: the body is not diseased. It is spent.
Cyberpsychosis, which is not a thing here#
Chrome does not make people violent in the Sixth World, and the campaign will not pretend it does. Cyberpsychosis is Cyberpunk's idea: a threshold of implants past which a person snaps and somebody shoots them. The Sixth World Wiki has no article on it, Anarchy 2.0 has no humanity stat and no roll to keep hold of yourself, and nobody at this table is going to lose a character to an implant count.
What the setting has instead is three colder things, none of which is a psychosis:
- Essence, which is attrition rather than madness. You do not go mad at Essence 1. You stop being reachable by magic and by medicine, and then you die. It is a bill, not a break.
- Cybermancy, and the cyberzombies it makes. There is a technique for surviving past the point where Essence runs out, and the thing it produces is technically dead with its soul held in place, expensive enough that only a handful of corporations can build or maintain one. The horror in the source is not that anybody lost their mind. It is that somebody engineered what was left, on purpose, at a cost.
- Chips, which are the real "your head is not your own" problem and are elective. Better-than-life eats people, the trade owns the market, and the first one is always a choice. This campaign plays addiction as a Disposition rather than a stat, which means it gets acted rather than rolled.
When somebody in this city is dangerous, the reason is on their record rather than in their arm. A man with two chrome arms who hurts people hurts people; the arms are how, never why. Play a heavily chromed NPC as expensive, maintained and slightly out of date, never as unstable, and save the sympathy for whoever has to operate on them.
What the crew knows#
- You cannot buy Essence back. No procedure, no clinic, no favor. Removing an implant does not return what it cost, and the street knows it.
- A visible implant is a bill somebody paid, so ask who. Corporate chrome is matched, serviced and logged; street chrome is mismatched, second-hand, and often somebody else's first.
- Bioware does not show and cannot be hacked. The people who can afford it are the people you do not see coming.
- A heavily chromed body is hard to heal. In a firefight the most armored person in the room is also the one a medkit helps least, and that is a planning problem rather than a rules footnote.
- The Awakened stay clean, and someone Awakened who is not is a story.
- Nobody has ever met a cyberpsycho, because this is not that world.