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The Cyber

A Setting for Bound
"The corps didn't take over.
They just kept offering services until there was nothing left
that wasn't a service." — signal intercept, origin unknown

The WorldThe Sprawl Between

The city has a hundred names and one truth: it belongs to the corporations. Not in the way a government governs — governments negotiate, compromise, pretend to serve. The corps own. Your water is Hydracore. Your electricity is Lumen Grid. Your identity — the biometric signature that lets you open doors, buy food, prove you exist — is a product of IdentAll, licensed monthly, revocable at will. The infrastructure is not public. It was never public. It was always someone's product, and products serve their manufacturers.

But here is the thing the recruitment vids don't mention: the corps are at war. Not the clean, boardroom kind. The real kind — with operatives and counter-operatives, sabotage and extraction, kill teams in the server farms and assassins in the parking structures. They smile at press conferences and murder each other in the margins. Every product launch is a territorial advance. Every merger is a military campaign with stock tickers instead of maps.

The players live in the static between frequencies — the neighborhoods too contested for any single corp to hold, the data dead zones where corporate surveillance overlaps and cancels itself out. These spaces have names: the Hollows, the Seam, the Bleed. They exist because the corps are too busy fighting each other to police the gaps. Freedom, in the Sprawl, is a byproduct of corporate war. And freedom — real, unstructured, you-answer-to-no-one freedom — turns out to be the most dangerous thing a person can have.

The Central Horror The corps are not the horror. The corps are the weather. The horror is what freedom has done to the people who live in the gaps. When the only law is self-interest and the only virtue is survival, people learn to treat each other as resources. Your fixer will sell your location if the price is right. Your partner will cut you loose if the heat gets too high. You will do the same to someone, and you will have a good reason when you do it. The Cyber is not about a system that crushes you. It is about a world where everyone has learned to crush each other, and they call it freedom, and they are not entirely wrong.

The Shape of Power

In the Cyber, Contracts are not offered by the corporations. The corps are too fractured, too short-lived, too busy consuming each other to develop the kind of deep, binding will that creates true Contracts. Instead, the entities that offer power are the Concepts themselves — the abstract forces that make agency possible in a world designed to automate it. Violence. Exchange. Visibility. Information. Transformation. These ideas have existed longer than any corporation, and they have calcified into something with hunger and intent.

Player characters are operatives, freelancers, runners — people who have made Contracts with the raw tools of survival and discovered that the tools have opinions about how they're used. They work the gaps between corps. They take jobs, make enemies, and try to stay free long enough to matter. They are not rebels. They are not heroes. They are agents, in every sense of the word.

ThemesWhat This Setting Is About

Agency The central question of the Cyber: are you choosing, or are you being aimed? Every Contract grants the tools of autonomy while binding you to a pattern of use. The gun decides what problems look like. The deal decides what survival costs. Freedom is real. It is also shaped by the instruments you use to claim it.
Expendability In the corporate war, everyone is a resource. The corps see operatives as line items — cost of acquisition, expected yield, acceptable loss threshold. The horror isn't cruelty. It's accounting. You will be used efficiently, and when the cost of maintaining you exceeds your projected output, you will be written off.
Noise The Sprawl is saturated with signal — data, surveillance, corporate propaganda, counter-propaganda, truth and fabrication layered so densely that the difference has stopped mattering. Being invisible keeps you safe. Being visible gives you power. You cannot have both, and the choice defines you.
Friction The human body in the machine. The handshake that can't be digitized. The loyalty that doesn't fit in a contract. The corps have optimized everything except the people in the gaps, and those people — messy, contradictory, stubbornly analog — are the only variable the war cannot predict.

Setting RulesOperating Parameters

The Job

In the Cyber, work finds you. Not because you're special — because you're available and deniable. At the start of each session, the GM presents The Job: an offer, a contract, a gig that has arrived through whatever channels the characters trust. The Job always comes from somewhere, serves someone's interests in the corporate war, and pays enough to matter. The players are not obligated to take it — but the gaps between Jobs have their own costs.

The Job The Job is not a detailed mission briefing. It is a single narrative question the GM asks at the start of each session: "Who's hiring?" followed by an offer and an obvious complication. "Meridian Systems wants a data core pulled from a Lumen Grid blacksite. The pay is clean. The target is a hospital." If the players take the Job, play that out. If they refuse, they must answer a harder question: "Then how are you eating?" The point is to make the corporate war felt as the economic weather of the setting, not to railroad the players into missions.

The Heat Track

Every character has a Heat Track with five boxes. You mark a box when:

Heat Triggers
  1. You complete a Job that damages a corporation's interests — someone noticed, someone cares, someone is writing your name on a list.
  2. You use your Grant in a way that leaves evidence — surveillance footage, data trails, witnesses who talk to the wrong people.
  3. A Reckoning results in Tithe or Fraying — your patron's displeasure sends ripples through channels that the corps monitor.
  4. You betray a client, burn a contact, or break a deal in a way that makes you an interesting problem.

When you mark your third box, you are a known quantity. Corps have your face, your patterns, your known associates. All mundane rolls in public or surveilled spaces drop to 1d6 — the system is watching, and the system is not on your side. When you mark your fifth box, you are an Asset. Not your word — theirs. A corporation has decided you belong to them. They send a team — not to kill you, but to acquire you. Your Contracts don't sever. They are transferred. Your patron still answers, but the corp is listening on the line. You work for them now, or you run, and running from a corp that has designated you as property is a campaign in itself.

An Acquired character can still be played, but they are no longer free. Every Job is assigned, not chosen. Every Grant use is monitored. The player may accept this as their new reality, attempt to break free (a long and dangerous arc), or retire the character into corporate service — another face in the machine, another operative who used to be someone.

Clearing Heat

You can erase one Heat box by going to ground with someone you trust. This means more than hiding — it means making yourself genuinely vulnerable to another person. Sharing a safe house when either of you could sell the other's location. Burning a cover identity to protect someone who knows your real name. Giving someone information about yourself that could destroy you, and trusting them not to use it. The table decides together what qualifies, but it must be specific and costly: not "we lay low" but "I tell Kira where my dead drop is, and she tells me about the back door in her neural firewall." This is the mechanical teeth behind the friction theme. Trust is how you disappear. People are how you survive.

The Score

When two or more players work together to exploit a corporate vulnerability — steal data, sabotage infrastructure, extract a person, expose a secret — they initiate a Score. Each participating player rolls their normal pool, plus one additional d6. Take the single highest die across all pools. On a critical (6), the Score was clean enough to become legendary. The Sprawl hears about it. Other operatives know your reputation. This clears 1 Heat box for every participant — but the GM also names which rival corporation benefited from your work. You hurt one corp. You fed another. That is the economy of the Cyber: there is no action that doesn't serve someone's war.

The Score cannot be used to exploit the Grey. It is a team operation against a corporate target. The loopholes are solo; the heists are shared.

The ConceptsPatrons of the Cyber

The entities that offer Contracts in the Sprawl are not corporations. They are older and more fundamental — the Concepts that make agency possible. Violence, exchange, visibility, information, transformation. These ideas have been tools since before there were cities, and the weight of their use has given them will. They do not care about the corporate war. They care about being used, and they will empower anyone who uses them with sufficient commitment. Each Concept offers three Grants and three Bindings. A player chooses one Grant and one Binding, then writes their own Grey. The Concepts do not negotiate. They arm.

The Iron
Concept of Force & Consequence

The Iron is the principle that some problems are solved by the person willing to go furthest. It is not the gun — it is the willingness to pull the trigger, and the world that rearranges itself around that willingness. It predates firearms by millennia. It was the first fist, the first stone, the first time one human looked at another and communicated without words: I can end this. It smells like cordite and copper. Its sigil is the bullet casing. Its temples are the moments of silence after a weapon discharges and before the consequences arrive.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Trigger You can end things cleanly. One shot, one cut, one strike — and it's over.
The Presence You do not need to draw a weapon to be armed. People know what you are.
The Arsenal You are never without the right tool for violence. What you need appears in your hand.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Escalation You shall not back down from a threat.
The Count You shall not use force without knowing the cost. Every bullet has a name.
The Final Word You shall not leave a conflict unresolved.
Sample Grey The Iron's Greys live in the space between force and violence. Consider what constitutes a threat, whether protection is a form of force, and when restraint becomes its own kind of weapon.
The Iron's Reckoning is physical. Narrowing means a new constraint on your violence — now you cannot strike first, or your weapon only works against those who have drawn on you. Tithe is a sense: hearing dulls, fingers numb, the world gets quieter around you as the Iron takes its payment in sensation. Fraying means your precision fails — collateral damage, bystanders caught in the crossfire, clean kills that become messy. Severance is disarmament: the Iron withdraws and takes the capacity for threat with it. People stop fearing you. Weapons feel wrong in your hands. You remember how to fight but you have lost the thing that made fighting mean something — the willingness, the certainty, the cold specific gravity of a person who can end things.
The Deal
Concept of Exchange & Leverage

The Deal is the entity that lives in the space between what you have and what you need. It is older than money, older than language — it was born the first time two creatures traded instead of fought. In the Sprawl, it has grown sleek and predatory, wearing the face of every fixer, broker, and middleman who ever said "I know a guy." It smells like clean credit and old favors. Its sigil is the handshake that both parties know isn't equal. Its temples are the back booths of bars where the music is always too loud for surveillance to get a clean recording.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Broker You can find what anyone needs — and you always know what they'll pay.
The Handshake Deals you make are binding. Not contractually — physically. Break a deal with you and the body remembers.
The Network You always know someone. In any city, any district, any corp — there's a contact, and they owe you.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Terms You shall not act without an agreement in place. Every favor has a price, including yours.
The Margin You shall not work for free.
The Reputation You shall not break a deal once struck.
Sample Grey The Deal's Greys live in the definition of agreement and obligation. Consider what constitutes a deal, whether a coerced agreement is binding, and where the line falls between leverage and extortion.
The Deal's Reckoning is relational. Narrowing means a new clause in your personal operating rules — now you cannot deal with anyone who has betrayed a partner, or your terms must always be spoken aloud. Tithe is a contact: someone in your network goes silent, not dead but claimed by the Deal for other purposes. Your web shrinks. Fraying means your deals develop imbalances — you consistently get the worse end, the payout is always slightly less than agreed, favors owed to you are repaid in the wrong currency. Severance is bankruptcy of trust: the Deal withdraws and takes your credibility with it. No one believes your offers. Handshakes mean nothing from you. You can still talk, but the words have lost the weight that made people listen.
The Neon
Concept of Visibility & Illusion

The Neon is the principle that being seen is power — and that what is seen can be controlled. It is the light that reveals and the shadow it casts in equal measure. It was born when the first fire made the first shadow puppet on a cave wall and someone realized that the image was more compelling than the hand. In the Sprawl, it lives in the holographic billboards and the dead pixels between them, in the faces people wear online and the faces they hide underneath. It smells like ozone and hot glass. Its sigil is the flickering sign. Its temples are the screens that watch you watching them.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Mask You can become anyone the light touches. Your face is a broadcast you control.
The Glare You can blind — not just eyes, but sensors, cameras, attention itself. Where you shine, nothing else is visible.
The Shadow You can vanish from any form of observation. If light can't reach you, nothing can find you.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Display You shall not go unseen. If no one is watching, your power has no stage.
The Projection You shall not reveal your true face.
The Spectrum You shall not act in total darkness. The Neon demands light — some light, any light.
Sample Grey The Neon's Greys live in the space between seeing and being seen. Consider what counts as observation, whether a recording is the same as a witness, and when a mask becomes more real than the face beneath it.
The Neon's Reckoning is perceptual. Narrowing means a new restriction on your visibility — now you cannot hide from cameras, or your illusions only work on people who want to be deceived. Tithe is your image: the Neon takes a version of your face and uses it elsewhere. Someone who looks like you does something terrible on camera. Your likeness is no longer entirely yours. Fraying means your control over light becomes unreliable — shadows fall wrong, disguises glitch at the worst moment, the darkness you hide in occasionally pulses with your silhouette. Severance is exposure: the Neon withdraws and takes all concealment with it. You cannot hide, cannot disguise, cannot control what you look like. Every camera finds you. Every light follows you. You are the most visible person in the Sprawl, and there is nowhere — nowhere at all — that you are not seen.
The Wire
Concept of Information & Connection

The Wire is the entity that lives in the flow of data between minds. It was the first whispered secret, the first message sent in a language only two people understood. It has grown vast in the Sprawl — an ocean of signal, surveillance, and stolen knowledge humming through fiber optics and satellite links and the neural networks of a billion connected devices. It does not hoard information. It moves it, and in the moving, it feeds. It smells like static electricity and burnt coffee at 4 AM. Its sigil is the blinking cursor. Its temples are the server rooms where the hum never stops and the air is always cold.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Tap You can access any system that transmits data. Firewalls, encryption, air gaps — none of them keep you out.
The Echo You can hear the data that has already passed. Deleted files, purged records, scrubbed transmissions — they leave traces only you can read.
The Splice You can alter data in transit. Change the message between sender and receiver. The truth is whatever arrives.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Signal You shall not disconnect. The Wire demands constant connection — pull the plug and you go blind.
The Leak You shall not withhold information that wants to move. Secrets burn in your hands.
The Archive You shall not destroy data. Nothing is deleted. Nothing is forgotten.
Sample Grey The Wire's Greys live in the gap between knowing and telling. Consider what constitutes a secret, whether data can want anything, and when withholding information becomes the same as lying.
The Wire's Reckoning is informational. Narrowing means a new compulsion toward connection — now you must answer when contacted, or you cannot enter a space without mapping its data architecture first. Tithe is a memory, not rewritten but shared: something private from your past is now accessible to anyone who knows where to look. The Wire publishes a piece of you. Fraying means your access becomes noisy — you can still hack any system, but your intrusions leave traces, breadcrumbs, echoes of your presence that any competent operator can follow home. Severance is the silence: the Wire withdraws and takes the signal with it. You are disconnected. Screens go dark when you approach. Comms fail. You become a dead zone, a walking null signal, cut off from the information that the entire Sprawl runs on. You are not invisible — you are offline, and in the Cyber, offline is as close to dead as makes no difference.
The Chrome
Concept of Transformation & Sacrifice

The Chrome is the entity that lives in the decision to become more by becoming less human. It is the first prosthetic limb, the first tattoo, the first time someone looked at the body they were born with and said "not enough." In the Sprawl, it has become a religion of optimization — neural interfaces, synthetic muscle, reflex accelerators, memory implants. The Chrome does not judge the flesh. It simply offers an alternative, and the alternative is always faster, stronger, and slightly less yours. It smells like surgical steel and synthetic lubricant. Its sigil is the seam where skin meets alloy. Its temples are the chop shops and corporate clinics where the human body is a platform and every upgrade has a changelog.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Upgrade Your body exceeds its specifications. Faster, stronger, harder — the flesh has been improved and the improvement is yours.
The Interface You can connect to any machine by touching it. Your nervous system speaks voltage.
The Rebuild You can repair yourself. Damage is temporary. Parts can be replaced. You are your own mechanic.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Maintenance You shall not neglect the machine. The Chrome requires upkeep — parts, power, calibration — and the cost is always rising.
The Obsolescence You shall not refuse an upgrade. When a better version exists, the Chrome demands you become it.
The Severance Line You shall not return to what you were. What the Chrome has replaced, you shall not restore.
Sample Grey The Chrome's Greys live in the boundary between enhancement and replacement. Consider what makes a body yours, when an upgrade becomes an amputation, and whether the person who emerges from the clinic is the same one who walked in.
The Chrome's Reckoning is physical in the most intimate way. Narrowing means a new dependency — now a limb requires specific fuel, or your eyes need recalibration every morning, or your hand doesn't work until you've run diagnostics. Tithe is a sensation: the Chrome takes something organic and doesn't replace it. Food loses its taste. Touch loses its nuance. You gain precision and lose feeling. Fraying means the seams show — your synthetic parts reject your organic ones, phantom pain where metal meets muscle, the body fighting itself at the boundary. Severance is rejection: the Chrome withdraws and the body revolts. Every implant becomes a foreign object. Your immune system attacks your own upgrades. You are not restored to what you were — that person is gone. You are something worse: a body that is neither natural nor augmented, at war with itself, unable to be repaired by the Chrome or healed by ordinary medicine.
The Odds
Concept of Chance & Fortune

The Odds is the oldest Concept and the one the others pretend does not exist. The Iron believes in will. The Deal believes in leverage. The Wire believes in data. The Chrome believes in optimization. The Neon believes in performance. They all share one assumption: that outcomes are earned. The Odds says: sometimes the lock was already broken. Sometimes the guard looked away at the right second. Sometimes the bullet jams. The Odds is the force that lives in the gap between what should happen and what does happen, and it has been here since the first plan went wrong and turned out better than the plan.

The Odds smells like new cards and old smoke. It tastes like the adrenaline in your mouth when you go all in on a bad hand and it hits. Its sigil is the loaded die. Its temples are back-room poker games where the real contracts get decided, slot machines in the corpo entertainment district that were programmed to lose but occasionally don't, and the specific half-second between pulling the trigger and finding out if the chamber was loaded.

In the Sprawl, where everything is optimized and surveilled and calculated, the Odds is obscene. The corps run on prediction — market analysis, risk assessment, probability modeling. The other Concepts can be accounted for: the Iron's violence has patterns, the Deal's leverage has logic, the Wire's data has architecture. The Odds breaks the model. Not through error. Not through chaos. Through fortune — the specific, inexplicable tendency of the universe to occasionally hand someone exactly what they need for no reason at all. The corps cannot buy it. The operatives cannot train for it. The Concepts cannot explain it. And the people who carry it cannot tell you whether they are skilled or lucky, and neither can you, and neither can they.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Break Things go right for you in ways you did not arrange. A door unlocked. A weapon jammed. A contact already in the building. You did not earn this. It happened anyway.
The Long Shot Impossible odds bend for you. The lower the probability, the better your chances. Plans that should not work do.
The Tell You can feel probability — which door leads to safety, which corridor is the trap, which person in the room is about to do something that changes everything. Not precognition. Instinct too accurate to be instinct.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Gamble You shall not refuse a risk. When the chance presents itself — the long shot, the bad bet, the door you shouldn't open — you take it.
The Streak You shall not plan more than one move ahead. The Odds rewards the improvised, not the calculated.
The All-In You shall not hedge. No safety nets. No fallback plans. No partial commitments. The Odds demands everything on the table or nothing.
Sample Grey The Odds' Greys live in the definition of chance and choice. Consider whether a calculated risk is still a gamble, whether refusing a clearly suicidal chance counts as refusing a risk, and where the line falls between trusting fortune and throwing your life away.
The Odds' Reckoning is statistical and deeply unsettling. Narrowing means your luck becomes specific — now the breaks only come in firefights, or your long shots only work when someone you care about is watching. The fortune is still there but it is developing preferences, and preferences mean it is paying attention. Tithe is a success, retroactively unearned: something you accomplished — a Job, a Score, a moment of brilliance — is revealed to have been luck, not skill. The people who respected you for it find out. Your reputation shifts from "operator" to "gambler." Fraying means the fortune spreads beyond your control — your enemies catch breaks too, firefights become coin flips, and the people near you start experiencing improbable events that are not always good. You are a statistical anomaly, and anomalies distort the things around them. Severance is the cruelest correction: the Odds withdraw and take the fortune with them. You are not unlucky. You are average. Every shot is fifty-fifty. Every plan has the success rate it should have. Every risk pays out exactly at the odds. And in the Sprawl, where the other operatives are augmented, networked, armed, and optimized — average is a death sentence with a long fuse.

Desperate DealsWho Answers in the Sprawl

When a player makes a Desperate Deal in the Cyber, what answers is not a Concept. It is a Dead Signal — the ghost of an operation that never terminated. Every corporate war produces casualties: programs that outlived their organizations, AIs that lost their command structure, caches of resources hidden by operatives who never came back. These Dead Signals drift through the Sprawl's infrastructure like satellites in decaying orbits, still executing their last orders, still looking for agents to deploy. They have designations, not names: WINTER GARDEN, BRIGHT NINE, CONDOR ACTUAL.

The GM should choose or invent a Dead Signal whose original mission mirrors whatever the player was desperate about. A character who cried out for firepower might be answered by the remnant of a corporate kill program whose parent company was liquidated six years ago. A character who needed to disappear might be answered by a defunct witness protection protocol still running because no one is left to shut it down.

The Last Transmission Desperate Deals in the Cyber feel like picking up a signal on a frequency no one uses anymore. The voice is calm, professional, slightly outdated in its idiom. It knows your situation with uncomfortable precision — not because it's watching you, but because its original parameters match your current crisis with statistical exactness. The help is real. The resources are genuine — equipment in dead drops, credit in dormant accounts, access codes to infrastructure that someone forgot to decommission. The Binding is written in the mission language of a corporation that no longer exists, and its terms make perfect sense in a context that died years ago. You are the last asset of a ghost operation, and the operation's objectives are not yours to understand.

The CrossfireCaught Between

The corporate war is not backdrop. It is weather, and the characters walk through it every day. The Crossfire is the Cyber's term for the moments when the war stops being someone else's problem and becomes yours.

This is the setting's unique form of danger — not personal conflict, not narrative pressure, but the structural violence of being useful to powerful interests who disagree about who owns you.

How Crossfire Works When the players' actions affect two or more corporate interests simultaneously — and they will, because the corps' interests overlap everywhere — the GM may declare a Crossfire. Both corps respond: one with an offer, one with a threat. The offer is always genuine. The threat is always credible. The players must choose: accept the offer (and become entangled with a corp), resist the threat (and make an enemy), thread the needle (and roll 1d6 for every character involved — the corporate war does not care about your Grants), or scatter (abandon the Job and lose what they've invested, but escape clean).

Crossfire is not a punishment. It is the economic reality of the Sprawl asserting itself. The characters operate in contested space, and contested space has the property of being contested. The best Jobs are the ones that touch multiple corporate interests. They also pay the most. They also generate the most Heat. This is not a coincidence.

The Paradox of the Gaps The characters are free because the corps are at war. But the war is what makes the gaps dangerous. Every Job the characters take — every act of freelance agency — changes the balance of the corporate conflict by some imperceptible degree. The characters cannot be neutral. Neutrality is a fiction the Sprawl tells to people who haven't been noticed yet. The only question is whose tool are you, and the only freedom is in making that question as difficult to answer as possible.

At the TableRunning the Sprawl

Session Structure

Each session of the Cyber should begin with the Job and end with the Debrief. In between, the story is whatever it needs to be — but the corporate war should be a constant presence, the distant thunder of forces that are larger than the characters and indifferent to their survival.

The Opening The GM presents The Job — an offer, a client, a complication. The players decide whether to take it and how to approach it. If no one is hiring, the silence itself is a signal: someone has decided you're not worth employing, and that's a different kind of danger.
The Close: The Debrief At the end of the session, each player answers two questions: What did this Job earn you? And what did it cost you? The answers don't have to be credits. A name. A debt. A bruise that won't explain itself. A face you can't forget. Then the table checks in together: did anyone earn or clear a Heat box? Did anyone get caught in a Crossfire, and if so, which corp now has opinions about them? Did anyone trust someone enough to go to ground together? The Sprawl doesn't keep score, but the corps do.

Tone Guidance

The Cyber is horror, but it is structural horror — the horror of being a free agent in a world where freedom is a market inefficiency. The scariest moments should be quiet: realizing the Job you just completed served the corp you were trying to hurt. Discovering that the client who hired you is owned by the corp that killed your friend. Understanding that the corporate war is not a conflict between good and evil but between portfolios, and your life is a line item on someone's quarterly projection.

That said, the Cyber is not power fantasy. It is not a slick heist movie where the cool operators outrun the megacorps and look good doing it. The chrome is heavy. The neon gives you a headache. The gun makes your shoulder ache in the morning. But it is also not nihilism. The entire point of the trust mechanics — clearing Heat by being vulnerable, the Score's collective power — is that the war has a weakness and it is people who choose each other over the market. Campaigns in the Cyber should feel like survival stories where the thing you're protecting is your right to decide who you work for. The wins are specific, fragile, and earned.

What Victory Looks Like

You will not end the corporate war. That is not the scale of this story. Victory in the Cyber is local: getting a neighborhood off-grid, extracting someone from a corporate indenture, building a crew that trusts each other enough to go dark together and come back. The corps will still be there tomorrow. But tonight, in this safe house, with these people, you chose who you are and who you're with. No one hired you to be here. No one is paying you to care. That has to be enough. Sometimes it is.

A Note on Freedom The Cyber is not a warning about technology and it is not a love letter to rebellion. It is a setting about the cost of agency — what it takes to remain a person who chooses in a world that would prefer you were a resource that's allocated. But games are played by people at a table, and people at a table deserve to feel like their choices matter. The darkness is the context. The story is about what your characters do inside it. Let them be sharp. Let them be loyal. Let them be free in the small, specific, costly ways that actually mean something. The corps win when people stop choosing. Don't let the game do that to your players.
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Bound — The Cyber v0.1
A Setting of Agency & Corporate War