50 sociopaths in a live-action role-playing game: Gibson's Neuronomicon and its mechanics

^{Leonid Sivukhin, a hacker workplace and cyberdeck of the macrohard corporation}

Hello! There is such a hobby - live-action role-playing games. This is when various alternatively gifted people run around the forest in curtains and with wooden swords. I am one of those since the 98th year, when it was not a shame to run in the curtain. Naturally, forest and fantasy are not limited to - we damn like cyberpunk and everything connected with it.

On the holidays near Tula, the game “Neuronomicon” was played on the events in the future Boston with a higher density of IT specialists and people trying to play them. I will now talk about the game itself as a form of rest, show you what and what is being modeled (including various implants as from Deus Ex) and tell you about the mechanics behind all this.
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In the meantime, a brief introduction: in the world of the game in 2010, artificial intelligence was already functioning (albeit under the restrictions of the Turing police), dolphins were recognized as the second reasonable race, cyber implants are the most effective and cheap kind of medicine. The game takes place 8 years after the third world war in the still weakly glowing ruins of Boston, where the most powerful AI is buried somewhere.


^{Bartender Day O'Brien}

Why this particular game

Neuronomicon is not the first cyberpunk game, and certainly not the last. It just so happened that rather peculiar people came to it with good IT background and the wildest love of Gibson, Deus Ex, Ribofank and classical cyberpunk. It turned out very soulful and cool. Well, we stopped in most of the teams, and one by one, which brought a lot of interesting things to the game.


^{The girl from the Java tribe - they immediately worship Java and the god Jah.}

What it looks like

You take a camp site with some intriguing name like “The Covenants of Communism”, where nobody has been there for a long time and rarely ever will. It is cheap enough to take it off for 4-5 days, and with this you provide the infrastructure: houses, sleeping places, a fence from the locals and food in the dining room. You can still do the same thing in the forest, but there will be problems with finding the landfill (major games need to be coordinated with the regional administration), plus, in fact, the houses are very convenient because they can simulate laboratories, hang different things on the walls, pull wires and install servers (due to electricity and protection from dust and dirt).


^{Pay attention to the native iron bed. In ruined Boston, it should be.}

Six months or a year before the game, you gather people (in our case, about 50 people) and tell them the plot. In our particular case, a wiki appeared describing various parts of the world, including corporations and people. It can be easier, with a couple of pages, it happens, the preparation goes according to the book, and it happens like on “Distant Stars”, when there are thousands of articles written in detail in the Wiki. People take roles from this plot: someone will be the head of the corporation, someone will be an independent hacker, someone will just hang out and do business in ruined Boston. We have formed the following factions:

• The locals of Boston are simply peaceful businessmen, various types from the excavations, the Tricoza crime syndicate (a union of yakuza and triads), and a nomadic tribe of hippie javista.
• Macrohard Corporation is our company restoring the city. The main goal of the operation is to find our AI, which somewhere in the rubble could remain partially intact (at least half of the nuclei). We settled in the destroyed high-rise “Roosevelt Tower”, launched satellite communications and opened an experimental neuroimplantation clinic. Actually, running a little ahead, I played just the inventor of the neural interfaces of Dr. Miles Frederick.
• Bright Tomorrow Corporation - chemists, ribofank fans and generally one-to-one like Umbrella, only less and the other. Our ideological competitors who really wanted to get to our AI first.
• The ordinary police of General Electric Corp. and the Turing police are the forces of law and order and left order.
• Single characters like a bartender, a sensible dolphin from the bar, journalists from Global News, various freelancers, preachers of the cult of the Prophet Al-Hazzard, and so on.

^{Johnny Hazzard flew into the black ice}

Model and rules

Once everyone has figured out who is who according to the backbone of the roles (supporting roles and extras are filled at least on the last day), give a set of rules. That is, ways to simulate this whole thing live.

We had it like this.

Combat interactions were played using cold weapons and Nerf toy blasters firing with foam (there is in every Children's World). Usually on such games a model of airsoft is used, but it requires constant wearing of glasses by all players. There were a lot of laptops, glasses and people who were going to play a peaceful game, so the bullets are from foam. The effective range of defeat from a pistol - 5 meters, from something more serious - 8-9 meters after 3 shots. Cold weapons were introduced in order to pierce cyber-bodies - special vibro-links ignored both them and body armor.


<sup>This is a painted Nerf after the game. I used this water series in the form of flamethrowers on my games, it turns out very cool, but only in summer.


The katana in the section: fiberglass core and foam. This is called a collection of "safe LARP-weapon." Progress is such that today all sorts of hammers and pipes against zombies are made very similar to real ones.</sup>

In medicine, the first and most important model is cyber implants. In the case of arms and legs, these were elements of costumes. For prosthetics, we had a whole bag of implants for every taste and design, which I sewed from time to time to patients in serious condition. A make-up artist worked with me in a pair, who glued chips to people, drew blood and generally scoffed at our biological species.


^{Implants harvested masters (organizers), part of the contributions went to this. There were hands, glasses with a single slot a la robocop and different chips for sticking to different places with medical glue.}

The second model is medicine. It is modeled as syringes without needles with a liquid of different colors. Red - tissue regenerator - heals (you move slowly for 6 hours, you don’t fight - and healthy), yellow helps with implant rejection (used every 8 hours by those with cheap implants), green - paralyzer (used for combat purposes and during operations as anesthesia). Alternative and experimental things are recouped by a syringe of unexpected color with a piece of paper wrapped around it describing the action.


<sup>The legs of one of the players


Wounded to my clinic</sup>

The network is a web server and IRC servers raised in local Wi-Fi. Each house on the base is equipped with a router that distributes a local network. A common login portal is raised on the web server, where you can log in with your credit card, make cryptocurrency transfers between players, and see the news in the aggregator.


^{Main server}

Hackers had access to a special hacker inventory - they got the addresses of the servers using game methods (in dialogues, bought, etc.), then scanned them with mappers (to know the vulnerabilities), and then used the corresponding icebreakers for the detected vulnerabilities (models of metaasploite, etc). In fact, either a guessing game with an attempt to break in blindly, or 1-3 hours for reconnaissance and an accurate blow to the server. When hacked, the server showed the hacker its files and closed in 5-10 minutes for maintenance. Of particular danger were AI servers surrounded by black ice (ICE - Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics - wiki ), which burned the brain of the operator during an error.


^{Hacker interface}

On the hacked servers came across money, game information, various mysterious things, and here is something like this garbage:



The economy on this game was particularly cool (and, in fact, for role players, this would be the main igromechanical experience). Here money was missing as a class at a basic level. Credit card levels were used instead. If you have a regular credit card - the bar will give you a set of biomass brand "Victory" and tea. Silver - here are three more dishes to choose from, coffee and juice. Golden - dessert. The same is true in medicine - for bronze, we have medicine without anesthesia and punitive, implants are terrible and require constant medication. For gold - implants are beautiful, powerful and do not cause any side effects.

Plus, the game has two cryptocurrencies, the accounts of which are used through the local server. They are needed for purchases of all non-standard and execution of transactions, if you do not have a credit card.

Meals : 4 people occupied the dining room and continuously cooked pizza, ramen and other tasty things. In the same bar, news was broadcast from time to time - the presenter Eva Shock read out, in fact, image boards from a synthesized voice and a synthesized image, plus our journalists gave out 20-30 operational reports.


^{Broadcasting at the bar at night}

Actually, then you make yourself a costume, hairstyle, if you want - go to the make-up artist, are placed on the base, meet other players in the spirit of “Hello, you are my boss, yes?”. And start. At a certain point, you need to forget all the “life” about yourself and the world, and think only in terms of the model, do what your character would do (often far from what you would like within your common sense), that is, start playing the world , game and heroes.


^{Chessy local man he does business in Boston}

Nobody knows what will happen next, because everyone has different tasks, and freedom is complete.


^{Ordinary policeman}

To make it even a little clearer, I will tell you about how I prepared. My character, Dr. Frederick Miles, invented neural interfaces, that is, the very things that help the brain work directly with implants. Well, stick into the matrix (in the Stevens sense, not Wachowski). After the third world war, I work in Boston, where, due to the rather vague status of the territory, there are no restrictive laws, the Turing police and many experimental veterans implanted for the “I don't want” are not represented.


^{A local resident who agreed to experiment on himself to save a girlfriend}

Now you have to show character. The doctor must be right on the edge, and this should be reflected in global beliefs (I accepted the basic thesis “Information must be free” - say this thanks for being retransmitted to a large AI network at the end of the game without limits), showing it constantly. Hence, wild cries of “No corporate lawlessness” in any crowd, from here — I confused left and right (I even had a patient with two left hands — there was a poster in the laboratory with left here, right there, but it was turned over by interns) he scoffed at the interns in every possible way, didn’t appreciate human life at all if we weren’t personally acquainted with this person, plus he constantly worked the hellish crap on the net.


^{Our operating room}

Entourage - I had to do an operating room. The Soviet photographic enlarger, the UPA-6, played the role of the autodocuctor, blinking red with light and could receive 3.5-inch floppy disks in a slot for film, a pile of white cloth, polyethylene, a pile of old boards and wires.


^{UPA-6 in a suitcase before the game}

When inserting a floppy disk, I ran such a sound chip with a recording of a female iron voice with the words "Opening a channel, checking a key, identifying, establishing integrity, broadcasting through 5, 4, 3, 2, 1":


^{This is the KO83 chip, which we ordered for the test boxes of the Space Alert game, but were not allowed into the series. Then a magnetic pendant with a LED (with Ali, part of the suit), a Leningrad exposure meter as a laboratory instrument and a part of the UPA. I also ordered a branded T-shirt and hoodie - so if I had previously spoken at business conferences in the Umbrella sweatshirt, now I’ll be tolling people at Macrohard R & D.}

The operation was effectively complemented by a make-up artist. So that the patient would not be bored while he was being made up, we entertained him in every possible way - then we put a squid on his head (massager), then something was cut, then we asked to blink. But the main attraction was the captcha - it was necessary to guess the word by asking questions on "Yes" or "No", and there were 20 attempts. I tried to report the load on neuronanonics, the pulse, and tension. If the patient was stupid, I already asked a quiz like: “What mountain was the highest before the discovery of Everest?” - “Everest” (I greatly simplified my life by taking cards from the game “Just a minute”).

The patients were really glad that they survived. Yes, by the way, according to the results of the intellectual load, the patient often got a psychosis when calibrating the neurochannel — either stuttering, or repeating words after interlocutors, or duplicating words and words.


^{The fighter "Bright Tomorrow" broke his face while calibrating the new cyber hands. He wanted to scratch his forehead after the operation, but he made an incorrect effort. If you think that it is so easy to apply blood here, then try it yourself. Need a make-up artist.}

The development of the plot and social problems

At the beginning of the game, an excellent set of social problems was gathered, worrying residents of the distant cyberpunk future, arguing confidently in density both with Mona Lisa Overdrive and with Deus Ex.

There were androids in the world , and it was forbidden to make them too clever and human. This was followed by the Turing police. Unfortunately, the line between the cyborg of the new generation and the new androids is almost lost, so it was extremely difficult to determine the boundary of humanity. Global News Corporation, for example, was represented by two stupid android operators (they played “do everything literally and woe to someone who incorrectly formulated TK”), smarter android (but hiding from the Turing police) and veteran of the third world Dragon Brazhkovich, which nothing human after the wounds left at all.


^{Android Global News}

Hippies were hanging out in town. As it turned out later, there were at least three veterans of a nuclear conflict among a tribe of Java fans. Moreover, they have gone so far that they are not even able to pass the test for android (analogue of the Vojta-Kampf test from Blade Runner). They hung out with hippies and tried to bring love to the whole world. In general, and carried only if the shooting began, they would immediately flew off the coils and technically turned the city into a bloodbath. As it turned out towards the end of the game, they had a complete set of combat software, including modern electronic countermeasures. Since they wanted to help everyone, at some moment they connected to a dolphin in a bar, which needed satellite communications to a huge mountain of traffic until the end, and agreed with us about relaying. They collapsed one of the cryptocurrencies, staged a demonstration for the rights of cyborgs and in general brought chaos.

The aforementioned dolphin (represented as a projector in a bar with a dolphin gif, webcam and microphone, as well as a remote dialogue player on behalf of the animal) was also a veteran, only managed directly by our AI Roosevelt. That is, it was a ready intermediary for the connection. Actually, Roosevelt’s infrastructure itself was indeed partially preserved, and the AI, limited in power resources, really wanted to go to a large network - otherwise its sources would have refused after 2 months. However, he really did not want to get restrictions from the Turing police. Dolphin played for the dying AI, and tried to get Broadcast.


^{One of the inhabitants of the city}

In the city hung colorful characters, each of which could make the game around him. The same Chessy with an inactive neurocorrector lie tried to get out of debt (analog is a broker Twice-a-Day from Neuromancer), single hackers tried to find a job (Warren hired one, but forgot to tell who he represents, so hacker Adam dedicated the first day breaking our servaks), Tricudza arranged a black market for weapons and medicines, plus an underground cyberimplantation clinic opened.

Bright Tomorrow Corporation experienced some kind of rubbish, cursed with us, hantil employees, created corporate chaos and generally attracted attention due to the bright and charismatic bastard Mr. Lee, the head of the corporation in Boston. Particularly interesting was the moment when he tried his own serum and reflashed (at the level of the vetver) for all his convictions. Again, conflict is biology against cyborgization, vetver against software.

The Majestic Theater under the direction of Kate believed in the Prophet Al-Hazzard. They arranged mass, classic evening raves (the police flew to the second to the great joy of the whole of Boston), and neurocorrectors secretly implanted. This is a branch of paranoia and gordian legends. First of all, an implant was put in all the stubborn enough in religion for a direct connection with the prophet (and hell knows what it is). Secondly, the problem of the unity of people was raised. The program “Heart of the Prophet” imposed the emotional matrix of millions of subscribers around the world on each other for sharing of emotions - straight social network. And the very identity of the prophet - it was a man who died in real life when connected, but did not die in the network. Subscribers believed that he endowed people with the abilities of divers from our "Labyrinth of Reflections". As it turned out, on our Johnny rolled the prophet when sawing in black ice. From the network the prophet left, which gave rise to another problem - religion without evidence. But subscribers believed, and everything went fine on.


^{My intern Patrick believed the prophet}

Police Turing nightmare of all. It was probably the hardest thing for them to play at the level of tactics - they were against the whole training ground, without raw data, without normal hackers and without resources. Nevertheless, the brave guys broke such beautiful wood that jokes quickly began to circulate about them in Boston.


^{Police Turing}

The Macrohard Corporation , that is, we, moved the global storyline, because it was we who were all muddled up with both the old AI and the experimental projects to develop a new one. Plus, we cheerfully broke everything we saw, thanks to Mr. Leonid Sivukhin, our headmaster, with an allergy to vodka. Since the Russian must either get drunk or break everything, Leonid broke.


^{Someone's slippers by my bed}

I also want to highlight the roles of our employees in physical security. Two ladies in body armor with vibro links and pistols. Azra just amazed me with her inhuman patience - once she guarded the server for about 4 hours, sitting in one place. As part of the game is an eternity. After it turned out that it works in life in the second line of technical support of the software company, and these moments of solitude were almost a rest.

The first night was spent in conversations and acquaintances (“Oh, Four Fingers, you don’t recognize me, bastard! You could say hello, we know each other for 5 years!), We almost beat Mr. Lee from“ Bright Tomorrow ”corporation, because he was very rude and crawling.


^{Normal such charge indicator}

In the morning it was boring - it was far from operations and patients, and the plot was not spinning. But the network has risen. I did not have a hackerinventor, so I just climbed to look. Almost immediately it became clear that it was possible to make negative transfers in cryptocurrencies, and then the sum was deducted from someone else’s account, and came to you. Life bug can not be used, but it was funny. I was engaged in collecting credit card numbers of various people in the bar when they were shining with them. Many heroes recorded pins directly on credit cards, which made it possible to very quickly withdraw their funds.

It was assumed that the game will be about the economy (not me), about hacking (not me) and about the social problems of the 21st century, such as human love and a dolphin, the limits of humanity and ethical-moral interaction with AI, as well as the next steps of human evolution . But it was far from them, so I decided to play both economics and hacking. And at the same time in management. We took and laid out 27 years of research work of the Macrohard Corporation into open-source, because I am for a free network. The journalists, of course, made a lot of mess, but the idea was conveyed:



Then there were tremendous conversations with a cyber implanted veteran, a visit to the Al Hazzard church and a direct connection to it. And, cheers, the first operation.


<sup>The fighter of “Light Tomorrow’s”, Chessy with the pathological lie neurocorrector disabled and the representative of Trikuz


Mapping our servers</sup>

The next morning began more fun. Food in the elevator: the tenth, ninth, eighth, seventh, hole, hole, hole, third, second, first. Blew up the office of General Electric. Then immediately there was a collapse of the popular cryptocurrency, which caused the economy of the game to just stand up. At the same time, the police ran and collected the sheriff for normal implants, while the sheriff himself fell from the coils of pain and rushed at the citizens.



Then the Turing police caught two androids, and they broke one, and lost the second. By evening, the whole of Boston admired them. And for some reason they shot the journalist, which caused no less a storm of delight in the media. We agreed with Tricudzu, convened the council of Boston self-government (they wanted an open-ended sheriff, but did not grow together), something happened next:



In the end, the plot began to hellishly: we had our new AI (lucky that good people taught him, and he took over their emotional matrices), then Johnny got into black ice, and I ended up experimenting on people.



With AI, there would be a good branch about learning (he, like a child, believes everything and wants to play with humanity), but Dr. Rose played it, so I only captured a piece. At the end of the game, the old AI took care of our new AI, since we saved both of them.

In the last hours, an avalanche of events began, and in the end we had to keep broadcasting with AI, when the world around collapsed and went crazy. Police Turing broke into the laboratory, put the security men, shot the innocent, and left with nothing to look for the boss. We finished broadcasting and released the AI ​​to freedom.In parallel, by the way, I learned the power of community help - when we treated Johnny, I threw a multicast at all, they say, we need rare combat software for the operation, otherwise Johnny Kayuk (he fought for his life on the net, we supported his body in real life). The guys from the Java tribe came - and immediately unloaded the entire combat set.

The game ended in the place where both AIs broke free, and we launched the Genesis project to create hybrid organisms to control the situation in case AI becomes aggressive.

Modeling

It is clear that in such games you play in two subpersonalities: yourself present, thinking about security and the rules of the game, and the character “in the hypervisor”, acting according to the logic of the world and your character. Therefore, any scoring knocks out of the game quite strongly. Accordingly, the optimal rules of this particular class of games should be on the border between dull simplicity and the necessary level to create a model.

My old recipe is not to let anything into the game that cannot be perceived explicitly. Unfortunately, this requires inhuman imaginativeness or technical means. Here is a simple example about implants:

• If a person lay-lay after hitting a shotgun, lit up, and then got up and went - this is good and easy to verify. Nanomedicine. We must shoot again.
• - , – . , . – , .

Here's another example, the locks on the doors. Usually you need to check your admission with the door marker. Fortunately, modern technology allows you to automate it. Locks were made on these credit cards characters, the benefit is convenient.


<sup>Character credit cards


The castle is encoded by the same cards.</sup>

That's about it. Networking is done perfectly, only IRC is not flooded - it was worth raising the chat on the main server, because all the usual clients are constantly buggy with the local server.

There were runs with the plot and somewhere else, but nothing that was not on other games. From the very good - the organic integration of phones into the world of the game as terminals, a beautiful economy and 50 crazy people confused about the game and loving cyberpunk. Yes. Still.There was no internet on the base. 4 days without a network in general is happiness, and these 4 days flew by unnoticed.

For me, the game was very good because it made me seriously think about the ethics of transgeneracy, various funny problems of the radical IT community, decentralized management (“Macrohard” and Boston were governed by the principle of expert systems). Here, by the way, is an excellent quote (slightly edited by me) from the report of Warren Hightower, showing the incredible efficiency of such work:

, — , , - , . “ – , , ” (, ). « » (, ), « , , -. , , » (, ), «, , » (, ) . (, ) . , (, ). — , , , , , (, , , ).

So, if you want to play, cyberpunk and the other world are at hand. In general, such games are held quite often. And I hope to cross this and next season with part of the party, the benefit of playing this is always interesting.