Cryptomancer Thread

>>50122666
Sure, shill. Tell us about it. I know I've literally never heard of it before this moment, for example, but I'm willing to listen to your pitch.

>>50123176
Cryptomancer is a fantasy Roleplaying game made by two infosec professionals who were disappointed with the state of hacking in Roleplaying games. All the aspects of computers are are imitated by shards, pure crystals that, when broken up, can connect intended thoughts of anyone with a shard from the same crystal. There is also the shardscape, a giant meteor which because this world's Internet.
In the game, you are individuals who have upset the Risk Eaters, the illuminati like organization that controls the whole world in secret. You must hide, cheat, steal, and kill in order to survive and, hopefully, overthrow them, using the information and politics of the shardscape and more.

>>50123452
That does sound neat. Does it have any extremely satisfying mechanics, or meme-worthy images that nerds would be willing to make fanart of, or some really lewd fetish-bait? Because those are the actual ways that games establish an initial player base these days, rather than setting quality.

(cont) In other words, it is reverse Shadowrun. Mechanically, you always role 5 dice, a d10 for each bit of training, a d6 for the rest. Successes (4+ for easy, 6+ normal, 8+ or hard) are negated by botches (1s). Combat is simple, with the number of successes being damage, with some weapons adding damage or circumstances to the attacks. Armor negates enemy successes.
You have a safe house which you can upgrade with things like prisons for captives, your own secure network, or alchemy labs. You can also get spy networks, or mercenary groups to provide distractions.
The world is interesting, with dwarves becoming aristocratic after the wealth of shard sales, elves using their once sacred forest to grow a super addictive drug. The world is basically one step in the future of a fairly generic fantasy world.

This guy ( http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/binarydoubts/cryptomancer/) has an excellent, chapter by chapter review of the game, even if it isn't done yet. It's very useful for understanding how complex things work, like shardnets, shardspells, and the like. It also really makes it clear how true to real world hacking this game is.

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Here is the basics of shard communication.

But can you be a wizard or what

>>50124301
Yup. And you can do cool things like make bombs of flowers and all sorts of original stuff like that.

>>50124301
>But can you be a wizard or what
Magic is basically available to anyone who wants to learn it. It's treated more like a technique you can learn, rather than a character-defining concept.

In broader context, spells are like complex programs or hardware that can be utilized for mana.

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I really like it but my players are too dumb to get shard hacking.

Loved the cryptography 101 section.

The character gen and how it ties into the dice mechanic is clever too. I'll probably crib the safehouse rules for other games.

It does seem a bit arbitrary and inconsistent with what you can do with shardnets and spells. It disallows some things but doesn't say why, balance probably. But it should say it more about it so GMs can make their own rulings in the same vein. Similarly it doesn't offer any advice on how to adjust or homebrew stuff, which is important since everyone does it. Without advice you may end up tweaking stuff vital to the feel or balance, which would be avoided if it talked about it a bit more.

Pretty good though. First fantasy setting I've wanted to run in a long time.