The Words

What people actually say, and what they mean by it. Type to filter — it works mid-session.

The one rule underneath all of it

Nobody says magic. Not out of superstition — because the word stopped being useful. They say signal, leak, aperture, load. A thing that would once have been cast is now a thing that is run, on hardware, that somebody owns.

If you want to sound like you live here, describe the plumbing and skip the wonder.

eddies €$: Money. Short for eurodollars, a name nobody alive can explain and everybody still uses. A Role Mark costs Mark × 1,000 of them.
chrome: Cyberware, collectively. Also a verb — to chrome up. Nobody says “augmentation” unless they are selling it or licensing it.
meat: Flesh that hasn't been replaced. Descriptive, not an insult: a chromed right arm and a meat left one is the most recognisable silhouette in the city.
borged · borged out: Carrying so much chrome you stop reading as a person at a glance. Somewhere past this point people start addressing your hardware instead of you.
ripperdoc: The surgeon who installs. Licence optional, anaesthetic negotiable. Charges to remove as well as to fit, which is the part people forget when they buy.
the Yard: Kessel's Yard specifically, and by extension any unlicensed clinic working off salvage. Sells what the corps discard, without a label.
yard work: The third provenance tier: salvage of salvage. Often reclaimed from a corpse, and honest about it — which is more than the Quiet Market manages.
gig: A job, brokered. The word survives from the first one — a contract collected out of the Yawning Portal four hundred years ago — and work still starts in that room.
street cred: The currency that isn't eddies. Buys access to restricted hardware and to people who don't advertise. Measured, unofficially, by whether you're on the board.
the board: The drinks list at the Yawning Portal, each one named for somebody who went down the well. You don't order one. You're served one, when you've earned the name. Four centuries deep and mostly full of the dead.
went down the well: Dead. The city's oldest euphemism, still in daily use four hundred years after anybody actually did it.
the Zone: Dock Ward. The Combat Zone — poorest, loudest, most alive, and the only ward where the Mox will show up for you for free.
warren rat: Raised in a megastructure, in corridors rather than streets. A Lifepath, and a thing people hear in your vowels for the rest of your life.
corpo: Anyone salaried by a lienholder. Said with the full range, from envy to contempt, depending on which ward you're standing in.
choom: Friend. Worn, affectionate, slightly dated — the sort of word an older Solo uses and a Sea Ward exec would never.
gonk: An idiot. Specifically the kind whose stupidity is about to cost somebody else something.
flatline: To die, or to kill. Clinical on purpose. The Mercy Grid uses it on paperwork, which is how it got into the street.
Role: Your class. One implant with twenty Marks. All twelve ›
Mark: Your level, and the model number of your implant. Mark 7 grants exactly what level 7 grants. You don't earn one — you buy it, and somebody installs it.
Firmware: Your subclass, specced at Mk3 by whoever owns the implant. One per Role, unswappable. Wanting a different one is a commission, which is to say a story.
lienholder: Whoever made your Role implant, licenses it, and can take it back. Not a mechanic. The reason “where did you get that arm” has an answer.
Load: What you carry: every Role Mark, plus every piece of installed chrome.
Capacity: What your body tolerates: your CON plus your highest Mark. Never the total.
Overload: Load minus Capacity. Above zero you make a CON save at DC 8 + Overload at the start of every combat. Legal, tempting, and the only genuinely new rule in the game. Detail ›
Episode: What a failed Overload save buys you. A scene event, always survivable. They're meant to happen — they're the texture of running hot, not a countdown.
Fracture: The countdown. Two failures in a day, or a natural 1. Three Fractures and the character is lost — and what they become depends on what they were carrying.
Chrome Psychosis: The Episode table for Roles with no aperture — Solo, Fixer, Cyberpsycho, Ascetic. The body stops accepting instruction from the person inside it.
Wall Bleed: The Episode table for everyone carrying a containment vessel. You don't lose control; the contained thing takes some. Its priorities are deliberate and legible, which is what makes it worse.
Program: A spell wearing this world's name. Same level, same text, same dice — but Acid Arrow is Corrosive Round, Haste is Sandevistan and Counterspell is I.C.E. Every program cites the spell it really is at the bottom of its card, so anything can still be looked up in the Handbook. What changed is that it runs on hardware somebody financed.
Routine: A cantrip. At-will, costs no slot, and the rig never runs out of them.
Family: What a program is for, replacing the school of magic: Attacker, Defender, Anti-Program, Booster, Trauma, Drone, Utility. Evocation was a word about the Weave; this is a word about what happens when you run it.
I.C.E.: Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. As a program it is the interrupt that breaks somebody else's software mid-execution — Counterspell. As a noun it is any static countermeasure sitting on a door, a system or a skull.
Skill Shard: A skill proficiency, as a physical item. Socketed, so it can be found, bought, traded and lost. Your Lifepath's two came pre-installed.
Lifepath: Your background. Three abilities, two Skill Shards, a tool, an origin feat — and it never gates which Role you can take.
Fixer's Favour: Why your first Mark was free. It was free to you. Somebody paid, and they have not forgotten.
Stabilizer: Torso chrome granting advantage on Overload saves. Doesn't raise Capacity, doesn't reduce Overload — steadies the hand. Costs money instead of CON, which is the correct currency here.
the Cataclysm: Five hundred years ago. Halaster's fusion broke the Weave, the Void Veil arrived, and Eioldian came down. Everything in this glossary dates from it.
the Weave: What used to hold the world's magic in check, automatically, since there was a world. It is what broke. Every arcane attempt to patch the hole was made of the broken thing and made the hole bigger.
the Void Veil · the Veil: What came through, and what is still out there. Not a villain with a plan — a condition. Where it touches, causality stops being reliable.
the Wall · the Black Wall: A containment vessel at civic scale, wrapped around a city. It is what keeps the outside out, and it is owned. That is the whole political economy in one sentence.
containment: The founding technology and the founding idea. A vessel that holds a leak can also aim it — the moment that became true, magic became a product.
aperture: The opening in a containment vessel. Having one is what casting is. Eight of the twelve Roles carry one; the other four are hardware all the way down.
vessel · limiter · governor: The three grades of containment hardware: what holds a thing, what throttles it, and what commands it. All three words are Eioldian and none of them has a synonym.
Eioldian: A floating city-barge on the Astral Sea, crewed by humans, whose entire engineering tradition was containment. Drawn into the fusion and destroyed. Its wreckage is the only irreplaceable material in the world.
Eioldian-pattern: Genuine salvage, or a part built around a salvaged core. Irreplaceable, illegal to destroy, priced accordingly. The top of the provenance ladder; corporate reproduction is the principle without the original metal, and yard work is the bottom.
salvage: Eioldian wreckage. The principles can be reproduced; the parts cannot. Nobody can make more, which is why bodies containing them get harvested.
the Descent Era: A fifty-year salvage rush into Undermountain, with a bar on top of it. Not an age of heroes — people went down because that is where the metal was.
the Last Descent: Four people went down: Jax, Dante, Alhakir and Shadow. They found Halaster, bound him, and between them contained the Veil. Jax capped the well. Shadow never came back up.
the Four: Those four, now institutions. Every lienholder that matters descends from one of them, and the fifth thing — the Abyss — went unhandled.
Shard: A fragment of the broken Weave, carried in the blood. Eight of the fourteen species have one, and which force put it there is never random. Nobody is born carrying a god.
the Dreaming Dark: The thing the Wall's firewall function exists to keep out. It distributes no fragments and has no ancestry — it takes hosts. Which is why cyberpsychosis is a failure state and not a heritage.
Veil-touched: Changed by exposure outside the Wall, and still changing. The Wraiths are the argument for why the Wall matters.
waste-rated: Gear certified for outside the Wall. Means it fails slowly instead of suddenly, which out there is the only distinction worth paying for.
the Walking Statues: Waterdeep's colossal guardians, Eioldian-cored, holding the city's containment lattice up. Dormant, and that is the correct state for them. One waking up is a campaign.
the well: The Yawning Portal's well, dropping straight into Undermountain. Capped four hundred years with a genuine Eioldian governor plate, in plain sight under a common room, unsellable because it is doing a job.
the Lyon Compact: The legal fiction that any of this is regulated. Castle Ward, licensing offices, courts. Files a Cyberpsycho as a containment failure with a heartbeat.
Host Tower: A wizard cartel that owns the network. Descends from Alhakir, and the firewall is their inheritance. The Voodoo Boys are their heretics.
the Quiet Market: Who has Eioldian parts and what they cost. Their real trading floor is a corner of a bar. Buys from the Scavs and pretends otherwise.
Kessel’s Yard: Sells what the others discard, without a label. Supplies Maelstrom and doesn't ask questions. Files a Cyberpsycho as a customer.
Mercy Grid: The ambulances. The god of endurance, incorporated — they will absolutely save your life and they will absolutely invoice you for it.
the Second Choir: A permit office for contact with something it refuses to classify. Divinity is the one thing beyond the Wall that is administered: a god must be issued, never inherited.
Maelstrom: Chrome past what a body tolerates, worn as doctrine. Squat as close to the wound as they can get, on purpose, because proximity is part of the belief.
the Voodoo Boys: Netrunners who want to talk to what the Wall keeps out. They are not entirely wrong, and that is the problem. What answers is real, coherent, and lying.
Scavs: Harvesters. Eioldian parts are finite and bodies contain them, so taking them out of people isn't deviance — it's supply. Someone has watched the Portal continuously for longer than they've had a name.
the Mox: Protection for people nobody else protects. They help for free, which everyone else finds so implausible that the Mox are under permanent suspicion of being a front. They aren't. That's the joke.
the Animals: No chrome. None. Refusing chrome here means refusing to cast — and carrying nothing that wants out. They claim to be the only clean people alive and on the narrow technical point they're right.
the Wraiths: Ex-Nomads who went too far out and came back changed. Getting worse, and hunting the convoys they used to run.
Durnan: A title, not a name — it comes with the bar, and you take it when you take the building. The name is the job; the blood is Jax's.

The Words

Street

At the table

The world

Who’s who