Not Dead But Dreaming: Noble Hunt adventure for Acid Death Fantasy, 24?? Supplement for 24XX games

 Despite 2020's efforts I am not yet dead. I am alive. I have dreamed adventures and things. I have published more things on itch.io. I have more things I must do. I am not yet ready to slumber in a grave, my skull embraced by the warm dirt, my eye-sockets full of worms, my brain-meat translated by them to Earth.

Library of Congress + PHOTOMOSH

2400

If you have not bought 2400 yet, you should. It is a fantastic cluster of systems and settings which covers classic cyberpunk, Classic Traveller, RIFTS/time-asplodin, space horror, science-fantasy... lots of things. There are a ton of hacks for it because Jason (the author) put together a great jam and a great 24XX SRD and template pack. 

Anyway, I wrote some character 'classes' / backgrounds and enemies to go with some of the wackier, more science-fantastical stuff. 24??: Enemies and Allies. There are ant-mecha, there's Entropy Wizards fighting anti-entropy wizards, there's luchadors, there's all kinds of stuff. 

Acid Death Fantasy Adventure: Noble Hunt

Some shit nobles are hunting desert folk. You can hunt them back. And do prophecy-inducing drugs! I took a lot of Dune ideas and jammed them into Acid Death Fantasy, added in a bunch of super-lo-fi 'layout' and, yeah. Noble Hunt. You can explore a titanic skull-cavern and find living memories, you can crawl under razorwire and over worm-traps, you can befriend soldier-conscripts and save them from shitty nobles. 

What's coming

Dang Mork Borg has teased this: CY BORG. I am super down. I am ready. It may be ready in 2021. I cannot wait that long. I have begun to compile a list of Modern/Future Miseries based on, what else, how hard the rich are trying to kill us all for their amusement / bank accounts. Heavily based on a Dread X Collection game, Shatter, which is a fantastic short game about how apocalyptic and horrid cyberpunk could be. Mork Borg has a great open 3rd party license, so I'm going to put some stuff together for it. I'm not trying to steal Cy Borg's thunder because I literally could not, but I want to play some mud-pit-cyberpunk (emphasis on the PUNK) before 2021. 

Hacking everything in the world

I've been thinking about systems that would let you hack everything you can see. Partly inspired by Graverobber's Guide's latest about a cyberpunk dystopia. Here are some Powered by the Apocalypse style rules I'm noodling around with.

It's really easy to make hacking this weird mini-game which takes everyone out of the world, makes 1 player the Special Time Person, etc. I think Shadowrun's move to wireless hacking is maybe a try at getting away from this, but I haven't actually read anything from that setting made after 1992, other than some video game stories. But anyway, that's my idea - everyone can do some kind of Hack Thing, hacking is generally something that you're doing locally; you're co-located rather than isolated. In the world rather than hiding in your basement. 

Implied Setting Blurb

Everything is wired and rewired, injected with nanomachine dust, measured, monitored. But some in the lost corners of the world have learned to twist this panopticon against itself. 

Some actual moves

HACK
When you hack something connected to the Aether, roll + hacking.
        10+: Gain 3 hold
        7-9:  Gain 1 hold
Spend 1 hold to make the target perform a fairly normal action for a few minutes. 
Spend 1 extra hold to make them do so for longer. 
Spend 1 extra hold if they're doing something complicated or dangerous.

So for instance, if you want to break into an apartment, you probably can hack the door lock for a few minutes by spending 1 hold, then jam the door open. You also need to spend 1 hold to keep the security system offline for a few minutes. You could drop 1 extra hold for a much longer period of this simple control - you find or create a backdoor into the system. 

REDACT
When you reach out to corrupt a large number of electronic recording devices in the area, roll + ghosting

10+ It's seamless, it's like your not even there.
7-9: Pick one.
        You're not identifiable, but you're definitely there.
        The records are completely fragged, which is a red flag right now for someone.

If that house you broke into was remote or in a poor area, REDACT is probably unnecessary. In a rich area dusted with info pollen? You probably can't hack your way out of being seen and identified unless you emit a shriek of EM and bend all the camera-eyes and recording dust to your will.

REMOTE VIEW
When you dream through the datastreams to glimpse somewhere far away, roll + warp

SABOTAGE?
When you destroy something beyond repair, or make it destroy itself, roll + break

Stats so far: hack, ghost, warp, break. 

It's all very tentative and hot-takey. I kind of think the 5th (and final) move should be defy danger and that this is really just a weird hack of World of Dungeons. I wouldn't want to get any more basic moves than that, really. WoD style Danger Rolls are great for picking up slack.

Shaved Bullet Mishap Table

Background

I'd been reading FUTUREPUNK lately and had a hankering to play some OSR cyberpunk stuff.

Here is Scrap Princess' original post about shadowrun. It is the greatest post on shadowrun I've ever read, and really applies well to making cyberpunk more dystopian and crazy.

Here's a Reddit post summing up Scrap Princess' awesome post on Shadowrun.

She mentioned how guns and ammo in the cyberpunk future are like electronic devices and shitty chargers / cables but a million times worse. So you can find a gun and no bullets, or a gun and like there are 10 bullets for it in the city. BUT you can probably find a street vendor who can shave some bullets and can use some of those in your gun, and there totally won't be a table of terrible things that can happen when you use them.

If stuff is in parenthesis, that's GM knowledge, don't share it with the players without a roll, or without the player asking good questions. Sometimes bullets fail in ways that are weird or not obvious.

Totally not a table of terrible things that happen when you use scrap bullets.

1. Keyholes - the bullet doesn't engage the rifling in the barrel, doesn't spin like a football, but tumbles like a dodo thrown from a cliff. Damage disadvantage, aim disadvantage.
2. Cartridge case cracks, warps, jammed in place. Shot goes off as normal, but you need metal fingers or tools and a quiet minute to pry it out. Metal fingers means you can do it in one round.
3. The casing stovepipes coming out, is in pieces. Gun fires as normal, but you have to work the gun to clear the case, turn it upside-down, shake it, etc. Low/normal dexterity characters need a whole round; high dex means you can do it as a free action. If using a revolver, ignore this!
4. Squib round. Gun barely makes a noise, has little recoil. (The bullet is lodged in the barrel.) Describe that, roll to notice / know what this is, if that's your system. If you fire the gun again without spending minutes hammering the bullet out of the barrel, the gun will explode. Hopefully the PC wasn't using auto fire or it's boom time.
5. Barrel cracks from too-hard / too-powerful round. Damage and aim disadvantage going forward. Each shot afterwards has a 1/6 chance of the gun exploding.
6. Bullet shatters as it exits the barrel. Aim advantage, damage disadvantage.
7. Misfire, gun goes 'click,' low/normal dex means 1 round to clear. Revolvers can just keep firing - you clear the misfire by pulling the trigger more.
8. Misfire, see above (actually a hang fire shhhh. Gun will shoot in some number of seconds). Low/normal dex = 1 round to clear. If cleared, 50/50 chance the gun explodes when the bullet detonates out of battery, otherwise it pops off on the ground and the brass casing flies off, pretty harmless if you're not standing directly atop it. If using a revolver, can keep firing, but gun explodes in 1d4 rounds. (The textbook / at the range thing to do is keep the gun pointing in a safe direction and wait 30 seconds, but hah, like shadow runners are gonna do that. If they did then it's like taking an aimed shot.) (PCs probably know that misfires and hangfires happen, and that they closely resemble each other for the first couple of seconds.)
9. Badly shaped. Aim disadvantage.
10. Accidentally armor-piercing. Ignores armor. (An IRL myth of bullet shaving.)
11. Accidentally hollow-point. Damage advantage, armor is stronger against this.
12. Gun goes click. Bullet jams in the magazine. Can reload to keep using the gun. Need a few minutes to fix the magazine or to get any other bullets out of it.
13. Tracer round! Can ignite gasoline, makes a bright zippy light pointing right back at you.
14. Depleted Uranium Round! Ignores armor, dust from the bullet can give birth defects or cancer.
15. Hyper Round. Super loud, huge blast, 1/6 detonates non-hyper-tech guns. Check if deafened for 1d6 hours, or explodes a silencer if attached. No damage bonus, this was a marketing gimmick.
16. Ripper Round. Delayed-fuse exploding monofilament. 50% it explodes in battery (ie in the gun) and wrecks gun and guaranteed does damage to PC, no roll to avoid like below. Otherwise damage advantage, ignores armor. They never worked the bugs out, so these never caught on.
17. Gun fires but it was shaved so much, practically a blank. At point-blank range the gun has damage disadvantage, otherwise no effect on target.
18. 911 e-phone round. Summons a very confused DocWagon in 1d20 rounds. Emits a loud screeching alarm from the wound / thing shot.
19. Curved shot. Cannot hit target, roll attack against someone else randomly to your front. 
20. Curved upward shot. Goes almost straight up. Normal attack at point blank range, otherwise you just made loud noise woo hoo.

When should you roll on this table

It depends on how shitty you want shaved bullets to be. If I was running Futurepunk I'd make every scrap bullet use roll 1d6, on a 5-6 you don't have to roll on this table. (The tradeoff is slowing down combat potentially, but, EH. Just roll an extra d6 that's a different color, or have the GM roll for mishaps and the player roll for firing.) My goal is to make an excuse for people to use swords in a cyberpunk dystopia. Or for, as someone stated in the Scrap thread, for characters to beat each other to death with their phones.

Shaved bullets should be awful; high-tech guns should roll on some kind of 'high tech malfunction' table per use or so as well. Anything good that works consistently should be some rarified high-tech that people will kill over. Or some rare modern gun which wasn't destroyed by a weapon-eater nanite cloud during the Digital Wars.

Gun Explodes Rules for Futurepunk

Roll 2d6. Roll 3d6 if you have really serious gloves, a riot helmet with a face-shield, fully enclosed armor is maybe 4d6, etc. If any die is a 5 or a 6, you're fine! Otherwise you can take damage, get disoriented, get knocked down, whatever, the GM makes a hard move kind of thing.