Doodle of Spear and Fang from Primal

Been watching the first two eps. of Season 3, figured I'd reblog this little guy.

Luis Royo

– Sébastien Grenier

Mortarion

by GJDoran

You know, one of the most shameful consequences of scifi/game authors not knowing shit is cyberpsychosis, or Essence, or whatever in-universe asspull for a mechanical limiter on how much cyberware you can cram into a character sheet.

There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they're both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren't Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you've patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You'd have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they've got.

It's more grounded and more realistic and less shitty and it actively enhances the atmosphere of cyberpunk in a way that "losing your humanity" does not. we are missing out on much because none of these writers know anything about how medtech works

Broke: too many cybernetics are bad because they destroy your soul

Woke: too many cybernetics are bad because your new mechanical body is designed like a Tesla Cybertruck and now if your infrared-detecting cybernetic eyes get too much light in them your mechanical legs glitch out and you start uncontrollably walking in circles

@trve-grimdark

Post kind of misses the point. At least as far as Cyberpunk (2013-2077) is concerned.

Background-wise, the idea that "too much chrome" causes you to lose humanity and go psycho is nothing more than the commonly accepted explanation on the street, hence being the in game explanation for the limiter rule, as its what your average edgerunner/street life punk is going to know.

The narrative behind it however goes far deeper and is exceptionally darker. Its already purposed in game that, the brain can and does get overloaded by the amount of data and soft going into it (which is essentially what OP here is saying).

But on a deeper level, many have begun to suspect that AI elements are the root cause, hence why heavy chipped individuals sometimes may or may not exhibit cyberpsychosis. Being AI in CP universe is, according to Pondsmith, on the level of super beings/gods, they see humanity as nothing more than an equation to solve or to mess with, meaning an individual who has chromed to the gills may have who knows what sort of "alternate" voice/persona in their software/hardware controlling or influencing their actions.

You see this a lot in 2077 with things like "The Ritual" cyberpsycho mission, or if V uses Blackwall tech, he has literal AIs who start talking to him and have names and personalities that interfere with him.

In a fucked up sense, a cyberpsycho may be considered to be legit demon possessed (hence why AI hacking protocols are called Daemons). Alongside their brain being overloaded with competing soft/hardware, especially in the case of your average Edgerunner or person on the street who likely is chipping second hand/faulty/black market tech that may not be up to spec with other components, on the AI side it may not be, "clean".

Nothing in the books says that the GM or players cannot eventually go down this rabbit hole to finding out more about Cyberpsychosis, thus crafting a narrative that makes the limit rule seem more profound beyond what the average lv1-lv10 PC understands.

P.S.

As far as Shadowrun goes, we are talking about a game that tries to shove fantasy into sci-fi and has a major component about spiritualism vs cold faithless technology, which aside from being somewhat cringe hippie trippy fantasy nerd bs, can also easily feed into the concept that software with cyber-tech effect a person on a deeper fundamental level besides just "oops chipped too much tech now I'm losing my empathy as a human being" just as much as reg cyberpunk.

Luis Royo

Kazuaki Iwasaki, from JCA Annual 5 (1984)

Larry Elmore

(via Saber and Powder on X: “https://t.co/n5gsSyWkdS” / X)

Shub-Niggurath

Concept art by Pierre Alary for the Glénat adaptation of R.E. Howard's "Queen of the Black Coast"