Abeir Toril › Chrome

Chrome

Where it goes, what it weighs, and what happens the day your body stops agreeing to carry it.

The three numbers

Two limits, not one

Limit	Governs	Measured in
Capacity	how much chrome your body tolerates at all	Load
Location slots	where it goes — 2 per slot	slots

Every piece must pass both: a free slot and the Load to carry it. Slots stop you stacking six implants in one forearm. Capacity stops you stacking the whole catalogue across your body.

Role implants ignore slots entirely. A Netrunner’s whole line is skull work — capping the skull would make the Role block its own progression. Where a Role sits is identity, never a limit. Shop chrome is gear, and gear caps.

The Eight, and the ninth

Limbs — six tracked sub-slots

Limbs is one category and six slots. Hands are split out from arms, because most interface hardware is hand work — a Smart Link sits in the palm and wrist, a Tool Hand is the hand.

Arm Left	Arm Right	Hand Left	Hand Right	Leg Left	Leg Right
2	2	2	2	2	2

Slots vary by location — three in the skull and the torso, two most places — for 28 slots of shop chrome across the whole body, on top of an unlimited Role line. The Epic slot is not part of that count and never will be: it holds one graft, nothing in it is for sale on the grid, and no amount of money buys a second.

Arms take	structural and forearm fittings — Popup Weapon Mount, Concealed Compartment.
Hands take	the interface — Smart Link, Charge Coupler, Combat Drivers, Tool Hand, scanners, Grip Enhancers, Grapple Hand, Quick Change Mount.
Sides	Chrome has no side. One entry in the catalogue, installed into whichever arm, hand or leg you point at — and twice if you want mantis blades on both arms. The slot carries the side; the part does not.

Grafts

The ninth slot holds one piece of hardware and it is not cyberware in the sense the rest of this page means. A graft is not fitted into a socket; it is run through you — spine, optic chain and endocrine loop rewired at once — and a body survives exactly one. Every graft bridges an ability score permanently, and does one more thing nothing else in the catalogue can do.

Money is the smaller half. Nothing here has a supplier, a price list or a shopfront. You need the cash and somebody who will do the work — which is a thing that happens in play, to a crew who earned it, and never over the counter. Assume the GM says no until the story says otherwise.

Stat augments

Not a location of their own. Each installs into its anatomically obvious home, and a Mk-line (Subdermal Armour Mk1 → Mk20) counts as one piece — the same implant upgraded, not a new one.

Stat	Goes	Stat	Goes	Stat	Goes
STR	Limbs (arms)	CON	Torso	WIS	Skull
DEX	Spine	INT	Skull	CHA	Vocal

CON chrome grows the container directly. It still carries its own Load — but it is priced under the Capacity it grants, which is the only reason anyone fits it.

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Overload

Going over Capacity is legal. It is supposed to be tempting. The Mark that finishes your build is always purchasable, and always a little unwise.

Result	Consequence
Failed save	An Episode. A scene event. Always survivable.
Two failures in a day, or a natural 1	1 Fracture
3 Fractures	The character is lost — they become an NPC, and what they become depends on what they were carrying.

Episodes are meant to happen. They are the texture of running hot, not a countdown. What kills a character is ignoring them.

Chrome Psychosis

Solo · Fixer · Cyberpsycho · Ascetic — no aperture. The body stops accepting instruction from the person in it. Roll d6.

1	Target lock. You move toward and attack the nearest creature on your next turn, ally or not.
2	Faces stop resolving. Until the end of your next turn you cannot tell allies from enemies; the GM chooses your targets.
3	Grip failure. Your hands close and will not open. You cannot drop, swap or release what you hold for 1 minute.
4	Time skip. You lose your next turn entirely and come to somewhere else on the field, GM’s choice of adjacent legal space.
5	Threat inflation. Every creature reads as hostile. Disadvantage on anything that requires trusting someone, until the scene ends.
6	Lockup. You are Incapacitated until the end of your next turn. The chrome is fine. You are not.

Wall Bleed

Every Role with a containment vessel. You do not lose control — the contained thing takes some, and its priorities are deliberate and legible, which is what makes it worse. Roll d6.

1	It speaks. One sentence, in your voice, that you did not choose. It is true and you did not want it said.
2	It spends. Your highest available slot is expended now, on nothing you can see.
3	It answers. The next question asked in your presence gets a truthful reply from you, whether or not it was addressed to you.
4	It looks. Something on the far side sees this scene through your eyes, and is not in a hurry. The GM writes it down.
5	Overreach. Your next program or implant ability resolves at maximum scale and the GM chooses its target.
6	It promises. A commitment is made in your name to an NPC present. You do not know the terms. The GM does.

Getting back under

Action	Cost
Downgrade a Role implant one Mark	half that Mark’s install price — Mk12 costs 6,000 €$ to shed
Remove a second Role implant	half the sum of its Marks
Clinic downtime — clears Fractures	1 week + 5,000 €$ per Fracture
Raise CON	an ASI Mark, or a Synth-Heart

Marks you remove are not refunded and must be repurchased at full price. Going down is cheaper than going up, and it still hurts. Downtime clears Fractures but never the Overload itself — for that you have to actually put something down.