Abeir Toril › Chrome
Where it goes, what it weighs, and what happens the day your body stops agreeing to carry it.
Never the total. Because that Mark is on both sides of the sum it cancels, so a single-Role character has exactly CON points of room for optional chrome — at Mk1 and still at Mk20. The sheet gets bigger; the room stays honest.
Load is what you carry. Price is a different axis: Mark × 1,000 €$. An Mk10 Slab weighs 10 whether you paid 55,000 across ten visits or pulled it off a corpse.
| 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.
| # | Location | Slots | Governs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Skull / Cranial | 2 | Cognition, memory, the casting rig, program storage. INT/WIS saves, knowledge skills, spell and program capacity, hacking. |
| 2 | Eyes / Optics | 2 | Sight, targeting, scanning. Perception, Investigation, Insight, darkvision, ranged accuracy. |
| 3 | Ears / Audio | 2 | Hearing, comms, sonic. Languages, encrypted squad comms, tremorsense, sonic resistance. |
| 4 | Vocal / Jaw | 2 | Speech, projection, sonic emission. Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation, Performance, CHA saves, voice mimicry. |
| 5 | Spine / Nervous | 2 | Reflex, initiative, reaction economy. DEX saves, extra reactions, anti-paralysis, balance. |
| 6 | Torso / Core | 2 | Heart, lungs, endocrine, life support. CON saves, HP, poison and toxin, adrenal systems, surviving at 0. |
| 7 | Dermal | 2 | Skin, armour, surface sensors. AC, Stealth, thermal masking, damage resistance, regeneration. |
| 8 | Limbs | 2 per limb | Manipulation, weapon interface, locomotion. STR saves, Sleight of Hand, Medicine, tools, weapon mastery, deck ports, Athletics, speed, jump. |
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 |
Six tracked slots, 2 each — and 26 slots of shop chrome across the whole body, on top of an unlimited Role line.
| 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 | The right hand is written as the gun hand, but that is flavour, not restriction. The catalogue mirrors every limb pair — either side takes anything its partner can. |
Every piece of chrome is one slot and one capability. If you want an arm that does something, you buy the thing it does — not a chassis that then needs its own hardware to be worth anything.
The old borg-grade cyberarm cost 5,000 €$ and three Load to leave you with fewer usable slots than you started with. The capability was always in the attachment; the chassis was a tax on reaching it.
Role nodes install to a pair — both arms or both legs, one slot each. Your Role is who you are, and it grows symmetrically.
Shop chrome installs per limb. Gear is asymmetric — which is what lets you run a fully chromed right arm and a meat left one without your Role fighting you.
Not a ninth location. 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.
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.
A CON saving throw, DC 8 + your Overload, fired when you rely on the chrome rather than afterwards:
• at the start of every combat — everything spools up at once
• the first time outside combat you lean on an implant-granted ability
Once per scene, whichever comes first. Without that cap a caster would roll per spell and the mechanic would eat the session.
| 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.
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. |
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 spell 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. |
They get written down and paid off later. That is the point of Wall Bleed — an incursion is a slow accumulation of small moments where something was watching.
Shop chrome, Torso slot, grants advantage on Overload saves. It does not raise Capacity and does not reduce Overload — it steadies the hand.
It exists because the characters most tempted to Overload are exactly the ones with the worst CON saves, and the mechanic should not punish the same choice twice. It costs money instead of CON, which is the correct currency here.
| 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.