Drugs

Drugs are usually of benefit (or detriment) only to biomorphs, but most can be replicated as narcoalgorithms (see below). When using a drug (or having one inflicted upon you), use the following move:

Drug Use

when you indulge in a drug, roll+Willpower. On a 10+, you experience the effects as normal. On 7-9, you experience the effects but with some drawbacks:

• You had a bad batch. Roll the damage move or the trauma move (your choice)
• It wasn’t very potent. The effect lasts half as long
• You feel sick. You are +glitched ongoing until the effect wears off.

On a 6-, you become addicted to the drug. You must indulge at least once a session, or otherwise roll the trauma move. If you go 3 sessions without a hit, roll+Willpower. On a hit, you are no longer addicted. On a 7-9, you are +glitched ongoing until the withdrawal wears off. On a miss, you are still hooked. If you roll snake eyes on this move, you overdose and go directly to Unconscious or Dead… your choice.

Drug List

Cognitive Drugs

Drive:

This nootropic speeds up left-right brain hemisphere communication, stimulates idea production, and improves concentration, with no usual side effects.

• Effects: +boosted to take a chance rolls using Cognition
• Addiction: +boosted on drug use rolls.

Klar

Klar boosts alertness and enhances clarity and perception. Users report a feeling of being “elevated” to a higher level.

• Effects +boosted to **take a chance** rolls using Intuition
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Neem

Neem is a mnemonic drug that works by “tagging” experiences and mental input with a set of unique sensations that contribute to the formation of state-based memories. Neem gummy chews come in a variety of fruit flavors shaped like extinct old Earth animals. The drawback to Neem is that memories they accumulate while under the drug’s influence have no emotional association. For example, a character who witnessed something horrible happening to a friend or who had a fight with a romantic partner while on Neem would feel no emotional connection whatsoever to what happened.

• Effects +eidetic memory to recall information learned while on Neem.

• Addiction As drug use.

Combat Drugs

Bringit

In some respects more a social than a combat drug, BringIt stimulates massive bursts of aggression pheromones designed to make the user the center of attention in a fight.

• Effects Enemies will tend to prioritise the drug user over other targets
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Grin

Grin is an effective opiate and pain suppressant.

• Effects May ignore +scuffed and +stunned tags. Glitched on assess the situation.
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Kick

Kick is a strong stimulant that increases the user’s response time and puts them on edge. Characters under the influence of Kick are twitchy, however, reacting in a jumpy, catlike fashion to sudden or unexpected stimuli.

• Effects +reflex booster, GM may spend hold to have them react without thinking in some detrimental way.
• Addiction As drug use.

MRDR

MRDR is a straightforward and brutal combat drug. It increases pain tolerance, speed, and strength. MRDR users are easily identifiable by the broken blood vessels in their eyes, tense posture, and visible tension in the muscles of the face, arms, and legs.

• Effects +boosted to skirmish.
• Addiction As drug use.

Phlo

Phlo increases alertness and coordination, making the user more graceful and nimble in a fray. Everything feels possible to a character on Phlo, and so they are vulnerable to being goaded into actions that might be foolish or dangerous.

• Effects +neurachem
• **_Addiction As **drug use**.

Health Drugs

Bananas Furiosas

This drug reverses some of the effects of de-ionizing radiation on the cells of the body. Although a pill form is available, it most commonly comes in large bunches of bright orange-red bananas.

• Effect Bananas reduce the severity of a radiation dosage (gamemaster determines effect).
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Comfurt

This tasty yogurt treat blocks stress hormones, stabilizes mood, and relieves anxiety. Excessive use of Comfurt can lead to chronic itchiness caused by histamine release.

• Effect May ignore +shaken and +rattled
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Recreational Drugs

Buzz

This gene-modified variant of BZ is an odorless, invisible, extremely powerful hallucinogen. Users or affected characters will undergo extremely realistic hallucinations for the duration, and may even “share” hallucinations with other affected characters.

• Effect +degraded to any tests to remember what occurred while under the influence.
• Addiction As drug use.

Mono No Aware

Taken from the Japanese term for sadness at the ephemerality of worldly things, this drug, typically ingested as a tea, is a depressant that induces a meditative state. With frequent use, Mono No Aware reacts with pigments in the skin to create a pallor with a slight bluish tinge, even in darker-skinned morphs.

• Effect +boosted on Moves or rolls to create art
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Orbital Hash Good ol’ reefer—but grown in space using powerful lighting and post-singularity hydroponics. Because space is at a premium in habitats and scum barges, blocks of hashish are the preferred mode of transport and delivery. However, for the wealthy and on planets, buds in leaf form are not uncommon. Hash users exhibit bloodshot eyes, lethargic behaviors, and the munchies.

• Effects May ignore +odd and +eccentric. +glitched on all memory related rolls.
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Social Drugs

Alpha

Alpha is a more subtle version of BringIt, popular with hypercorp execs, street thugs, and anyone else who wants to come across as a domineering asshole. The pharm designer who invented it had a retro sensibility (and maybe a sick sense of humor); Alpha is typically synthesized as a sparkling white powder designed to be snorted. Alpha stimulates production of threat pheromones, but less bluntly than BringIt. Alpha imparts confidence, a feeling of power, and alertness.

• Effects Users can function without sleep for 4 days, after which point they need to catch up with at least 4 hours of sleep. +boosted on all rolls to intimidate, persuade, or network with others within 2 meters. On the downside, alpha users are impatient, unfocused assholes. At the gamemaster’s discretion, the character is instead +glitched with certain types of people.
• Addiction +glitched on drug use rolls.

Hither

Want to ooze sexy like a pleasure morph on a hot tin roof? For those desiring that slinky je-ne-sais-quoi, Hither is the tool. Hither is a clear, slippery gel, sometimes with a faint, musky, floral scent. Hither is applied to parts of the body with large concentrations of sweat glands, where the skin quickly absorbs it.

• Effects Hither is a mild euphoriant, imparting a feeling of confidence and you-know-you-want-it-ness to the user. It also stimulates abundant production of lust pheromones. The character gains +boosted against targets who are possible to seduce. At the gamemaster’s discretion, this extends to acts of deception, impersonation, and social networking.
• Addiction As per drug use.

Juice This potent anti-depressant makes it almost impossible to have bad feelings or negative thoughts. The character is unnaturally happy—often irritatingly or strangely so.

• Effects +boosted on all trauma move rolls, but is also likely to act inappropriately, like giggling over the massive amount of spilled blood or cheerfully changing the subject to inane topics when someone else is freaking out.
• Addiction As per drug use

Nanodrugs

Frequency

Frequency (or Freeq) is a nanodrug designed as a tool for scientific visualization. It releases a small swarm of nanobots into the character’s bloodstream that settle in the epidermis, where they act as sensors of electromagnetic radiation. This sensory input is then injected into the character’s visual and tactile sensoria, hitting the user with a sequence of novel stimuli, typically a light show or weird tactile sensations. Aside from its recreational uses, Frequency is good at picking up on localized field radiation

• Effects +electrical sense, +radiation sense. Similar to now-obsolete 20th-century hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin, however, a Frequency trip can be disorienting and upsetting. Roll the trauma move. Characters typically experience a period about 1/3 of the way through their trip in which sensory input is extremely intense; during this period, which usually lasts about 2 hours, they are unable to read.
• **_Addiction As per **drug use**.

Gravy

Gravy assists characters in acclimating to high gravity environments. It comes in a variety of flavors and is often added as a sauce to food. For Gravy to be 100% effective, the character must begin using it in advance.

• Effects Character does not suffer any penalty for high-gravity acclimation.
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.

Schizo

Schizo is a nanodrug that mirrors the effects of paranoid schizophrenia. It is popular in some hyperelite social circles as a truly daring and intriguing experience. A dose of schizo looks like a disposable antique razor blade. Making an incision in the skin releases a swarm of nanobots that travel to the central nervous system and induce the effects of the drug.

• Effects While in effect, the character is severely paranoid and hears voices. Effects may include irrational fears, unusual compulsions based on the instructions of the voice or voices, and a strong possibility that the character will behave in a violent or destructive fashion. +eccentric (gaining the Eccentric move as normal). Note that the character’s muse is unaffected by Schizo and can make efforts to babysit the character. Roll the trauma move.
• Addiction As per drug use.

Petals

Petals is a term for a type of narrative hallucinogen, a nanodrug that hijacks the senses and takes the user on a game-like, highly immersive trip. Known by a myriad of intriguing names—Forgotten Hand, Darkly Selving, Inquisitive Green, to name a few—Petals are post-Fall society’s heroin—the drug of choice for the desperate and fucked. Petals almost always appear as nanopharmaceutical flowers, potted or with a nutrient pack attached to the stem. Plucking and swallowing the petals from the flower triggers the effects immediately. Flowers have 5–10 petals. Multiple users may share the experience if they take the Petals within 1 minute of the first one being plucked; after this all petals remaining on the flower fade to translucent white and become inert.

• Effects Petals have widely varying “trips” from the pleasant to the terrifying. Because Petals combine custom nanobots with tailored chemical payloads and sometimes connections to mesh servers, duplicating them using fabricators is impossible, leading to an active market of crafters, dealers, and traders. Petals sometimes contain easter eggs and rewards, called “sweets” by petal users. Getting the sweets usually requires fulfilling certain conditions within the trip, such as correctly answering questions or fulfilling goals. Typical sweets include skillsofts, new clothing or product designs, and custom infomorph sleeves. On the negative side, some Petal trips go bad, inflicting **_trauma_** on the user. Perhaps worse, some Petals are loaded with malware that takes over the user’s mesh inserts and worse—some even whisper of Petals carrying strains of the exsurgent virus.
• Addiction Varies

Narcoalgorithms

Narcoalgorithms are software programs that simulate the effects of drugs on biological bodies. Almost all bio, chemical, and nano drugs can be replicated as narcoalgorithms, with corresponding effect (gamemaster discretion). Standard duration is 3 hours. Addiction to narcoalgorithms is considered mental. Narcoalgorithms may be run by infomorphs, egos encased in cyberbrains (pods and synthmorphs), simulmorphs, and even AIs.

DDR

Originally crafted by prankster hackers and distributed as a virus, DDR (for “Dance Dance Robot”) triggers impulses in the target’s motor control circuits. Primary targeting robot AIs, the effect is that targets “dance” in jerky, automated movements. Pleasure receptors are also activated so that dancing—and movement of any kind—feels good. Different software variants invoke different motions and styles.

• Effects The user is +glitched on all rolls while dancing. The dancing may, however, be briefly overridden with a take the chance roll using Willpower.
• **_Addiction +boosted on **drug use** rolls.

Linkstate

This software actually connects the user to a peer-to-peer network, where it randomly connects to other linkstate users and samples a bit of their XP feed and randomly accessed memories typically just enough to provide context, but not enough to acquire private personal details. These inputs are spliced together, their emotional inputs amplified, and then the entire package is spiked with some hormonal circuit triggers and artificial synaesthesia. The effect is a mind-blowing mixed sampling of people’s lives, mashed together in a sensory soup, that hits the mind with a euphoric rush.

• Effects Linkstate users are catatonic while under the effects (typical sessions run 3–4 hours), but afterwards they often report that they have flashbacks of events in other people’s lives. *
• Addiction +boosted on drug use rolls.