"It's great progress to give birth by machine. It's faster and more convenient. Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory."
-- Karel Capek, 'R.U.R'.
Every Cyborg used to be Human. That's the part people forget. Not descended from Humans the way a dog is descended from a wolf -- descended from Humans the way a building is descended from blueprints. Somewhere in the last fifteen hundred years, a subset of Humanity looked at the standard-issue body and decided the warranty wasn't worth honouring. They replaced. They upgraded. They replaced the replacements. And then they kept going until the warranty voided itself and the manufacturer stopped returning calls.
The first generations were augmented Humans -- cybernetic limbs, neural interfaces, organ replacements. Standard medical procedure, if you were wealthy enough and reckless enough. The second generation replaced things that weren't broken yet. The third generation started modifying their children in the vat before they'd drawn a first breath. By the fifth generation, the DNA had drifted so far from baseline that a standard Human paternity test would return "species not recognised."
In 3752, Unicore's Biological Classification Board formally reclassified them. Not a political decision -- a genetic one. The sequencing data was unambiguous. Whatever these people were, they weren't Homo sapiens anymore. They'd edited themselves out of their own species. The vote was procedural. The Cyborg delegation already had their council acceptance speech prepared. They'd been waiting for the paperwork to catch up with the biology for two centuries.
What they gained is measurable. Higher baseline intellect. Greater physical resilience. Native tech integration that makes other species reach for a manual. What they lost is harder to quantify but impossible to miss. No Allure. No Foresight. No Harmony. No Perception beyond what their sensor arrays report. Every stat that requires intuition, instinct, or the quiet animal part of the brain that knows something is wrong before the data confirms it -- gone. Optimised out. They interact with the universe through interfaces, not gut feelings, and the interfaces are very, very good at everything except telling you why the room feels wrong.
The things they lost don't show up on a spec sheet. Cyborgs process stress through whatever's left of the organic brain, the part they couldn't fully replace without losing consciousness entirely, and that remnant has no backup systems. No spiritual framework. No instinctive resilience. No quiet voice in the back of the skull that says you'll be fine when the evidence disagrees. When the pressure builds, the machine parts don't feel it. The meat does. And the meat is alone in there.
Cyborgs don't have a homeworld. They have enclaves -- orbital stations, asteroid habitats, pressurised facilities where the environment is controlled down to the molecular level. Atmosphere composition, gravity, electromagnetic interference, ambient temperature -- all calibrated to tolerances that would make a NERD lab look sloppy. Planet-side living introduces too many variables. Cyborgs don't like variables.
The largest enclave is Crucible Station -- a massive orbital manufacturing and birthing facility in geostationary orbit above a gas giant that nobody bothered naming. Crucible is where new Cyborgs are decanted from growth vats, where their first augmentations are fitted before their eyes open, where the line between hospital and factory dissolved so long ago that nobody remembers which it was first. Growth vats line the lower decks in rows of hundreds, each one monitored by systems that track cellular development at the molecular level. When a new Cyborg opens its eyes for the first time, the first thing it sees is a calibration grid. The second thing it sees is an augmentation schedule.
Crucible's residents call it a cathedral to self-improvement. Visitors call it a production line with better lighting. Both descriptions are accurate. The difference is theological.
Cyborgs speak Galactic Standard the way someone uses a rotary phone -- technically functional, painfully slow, and only because the other party doesn't have anything better. Their actual communication runs on a high-bandwidth data-burst protocol transmitted through physical contact or short-range encrypted wireless. Two Cyborgs shaking hands exchange more information in three seconds than most species communicate in a full conversation. Context, technical schematics, emotional state (what's left of it), threat assessment, and a complete environmental scan -- all compressed, encrypted, and delivered before the handshake ends.
They find spoken language tedious. Not rude about it, usually. Just visibly waiting for your mouth to finish doing what their handshake did ten seconds ago.
Cyborgs often keep their Human birth-designation but append a version number that increments with each major augmentation cycle. The name is the constant. The number is the changelog. Kael v7, Rhea v12, Marcus v3, Sable v19. A low version number means you're new or conservative. A high version number means you've been rebuilt so many times that the name is the only original part left.
Some drop the name entirely and go by their primary function or their most significant implant: Cortex, Reactor, Splice, Lattice, Conduit. This isn't considered impersonal. To a Cyborg, your function is your identity. Asking a Cyborg named Reactor for their "real name" is like asking a surgeon why they don't go by their childhood nickname. They outgrew it. Several upgrades ago.
| Name | Cyborg |
|---|---|
| Sight | Average |
| Hearing | Average |
| Touch | Poor |
| Smell | Average |
| Taste | Poor |
| Special | Chemical |
Chemical Sense: Cyborg olfactory systems include integrated chemical analysis -- a low-level spectrometer wired into the nasal cavity that identifies airborne compounds by molecular signature. They don't smell smoke. They detect combustion byproducts and estimate the fuel source, burn temperature, and distance. Useful in hazmat situations, industrial environments, and anywhere that something is leaking something it shouldn't be. The downside is that food tastes like a periodic table. Most Cyborgs stopped caring about flavour several upgrades ago.
Mindshard Degraded Compatibility. Remaining organic brain tissue can be captured, but synthetic architecture does not transfer. Restores with memory gaps, personality drift, and a recalibration period. See Mindshard for details.
As a Cyborg, you can select from these extra Origin Feats when choosing from the Origin Feats List.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Your biological and synthetic systems cooperate to repair damage over time. You can spend one hour tending to your injuries and remove one Wound. The process involves nano-repair suites reknitting tissue while diagnostic routines reroute around damaged components. It's not comfortable. It is efficient.
Requires: Regeneration.
Effect: Once per Mission Tier per combat, you can spend 2 Actions to regenerate 1 HIT. Your internal repair systems perform an emergency patch -- rerouting power, sealing breaches, and flooding the damage site with repair nanites. The fix is temporary and ugly. It keeps you standing.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Your electronic composition is supported by your remaining biological functions, making you far more resilient to radiation than your fully-synthetic counterparts. You gain Resistance to Radiation. The organic tissue absorbs what the circuits can't handle. It's not a design feature -- it's a happy accident that the engineers retroactively claimed credit for.
Renamed. This feat was previously called "Wet-ware"; the name has been freed up for the universal Wet-ware Adept feat that interacts with installed Wetware augments.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Your synthetic components are sealed against corrosive agents and your biological tissue has been hardened through chemical exposure therapy. You gain Resistance to Chemical. Acid still hurts. It just hurts less than it should.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Your body accepts cybernetic hardware the way other species accept food -- readily, efficiently, and without complaint. Cybernetic implant installation costs are reduced by 20%. You can support 1 additional implant slot beyond your normal maximum. Glitch Checks on your implants gain Boon(1). Your immune system doesn't fight the metal. It learned to stop arguing a long time ago.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Push your augmentations past their rated operational limits. Once per encounter, gain +1 Action this round. At the end of the round, take 1 Hit (Electrical) to yourself as your systems protest the power spike -- capacitors vent, servos seize momentarily, and something behind your left ear makes a sound it shouldn't. You can take this feat a second time to allow 2 uses per encounter. The Hit cannot be reduced by DR. Your hardware was not built for this.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Your Metaphysical stats are zero and your emotional processing is minimal -- not absent, but buried under layers of synthetic architecture that don't forward the memo. You are immune to the Shaken condition at level 1 -- Shaken(1) has no effect on you. Shaken(2+) still affects you normally. You can suppress the surface noise, not the deep stuff. Gain Bane(1) to all Espionage - Social checks involving empathy, charm, or emotional reading. You traded the soft skills for the hard ones. Nobody's argued with the exchange rate yet.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Replace a biological sense with a superior synthetic equivalent. Choose one sense, it improves by two steps (e.g., Poor → Good, Average → Excellent). You can take this feat multiple times; each time it applies to a different sense. The upgrade is surgical, permanent, and immediately obvious, synthetic eyes glow faintly, augmented ears have visible receiver housings, and an upgraded nose looks less like a nose and more like a vent. Nobody mistakes an augmented Cyborg for baseline.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: Your facial recognition suite, voice stress analysis, micro-expression cataloguer, and pupil-dilation tracker run constantly in your visual cortex. You don't feel empathy; you measure it. Heart rate, breathing pattern, sweat composition, blink rate, posture shifts, vocal fundamental frequency. The data tells you what the meat won't.
You gain a RankedBoon to Espionage - Social checks involving reading intentions, detecting deception, or assessing emotional state. This Boon cancels the Bane(1) from Dead Inside for these specific applications; you can't charm someone, but you can read them like a spreadsheet.
You still cannot perform Espionage - Social checks involving genuine charm, seduction, or emotional connection. You'd need actual feelings for that, and you traded those in. The biometric data is, however, very accurate.
Requires: Any Cyborg.
Effect: A network of integrated sensors, motion detection, EM analysis, thermal imaging, sub-audible frequency monitoring, particulate sampling, and a low-grade ground radar, feeds constant environmental data into your processing core. You don't notice things. Your sensors do, and they tell you about it.
You gain a RankedBoon to Espionage - Search checks for finding hidden objects, concealed compartments, surveillance devices, traps, or anomalies in an environment. This Boon also applies to Initiative rolls to detect ambushes; your sensors flag the threat before your conscious mind processes it.
This feat does not improve your raw Sight, Hearing, or other base senses (see Sensory Augmentation for that). It compensates for the lack of biological intuition by routing decision-making through hardware. The two feats stack; augmented eyes give you better data; sensors tell you what to do with it.