Datarunning Basics
The Mesh runs everything now — cars, grids, weapons, the chrome in your arm. Which means everything is a door. Datarunning is the art of opening those doors, and in Chrome & Covenant it isn’t a solo mini-game. It happens in the room, in real time, right beside the gunfire.
After the Fracture, survival meant rebuilding on the decentralized Mesh — so now every electric vehicle, power grid, security camera, drone, and cyberware implant is a node on the same network. That universal connection keeps the world running. It also means anyone with the right skill can reach through it.
Almost anyone can handle the surface: pull an AR overlay, ping a public node, spoof a cheap lock — that’s Mesh Navigation, and most operatives have a little. Going deeper — real intrusion, data theft, turning a building’s own systems against it — takes Hacking, and the datarunner who’s built for it.
No more waiting room. In most cyberpunk games the hacker vanishes into cyberspace for twenty minutes while the table checks their phones. Chrome & Covenant throws that out. The datarunner is a digital spell-caster in the scene — gestures and voice commands shaping firewalls and data-bolts that the whole team sees in AR, on the same initiative count as everyone else. The crew fights across both arenas at once.
Datarunning isn’t one thing. It runs along four channels, each with its own feel and its own danger:
Echo Diving reaches into the Wake, the memory-layer of the Mesh — where datarunning stops being theft and starts being something closer to a séance.
A run uses the same dice and the same Action Points as everything else, woven right into combat time. The loop is short:
Four Things You Can Do
Going deep is never free. ICE — Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics — are the active defenses: programs that counterattack the moment you trip them, striking at your mind through your own interface and forcing you to resist or take neural damage. The deeper the system, the meaner the ICE.
And every move you make accumulates a Signature — a digital trail that climbs through escalation stages: passive monitoring, active scans, countermeasures, lockout. Corporate systems loose their ICE; military networks try to trace your body for a response team. The skilled datarunner is always weighing one more action against the noise it makes.
It all spills into the real world. This is the payoff of the dual-arena design: a successful run isn’t abstract. Crash the grid and the lights die. Crack the building’s controls and the doors unlock, the cameras loop, the air goes cold. Hijack a pursuing vehicle, or reach through the Mesh and seize the cyberware of the guard shooting at your crew. Digital action, physical consequence — every single time.
Programs are the datarunner’s spellbook — software constructs that sharpen each part of a run. They don’t replace your skill; they amplify it, lowering Target Numbers, adding muscle, automating the tedious. You can only hold so many running at once before the bandwidth — your Signal Load — overflows and security starts noticing the strain, so loadout is a real choice. Four broad families: Utility, Stealth, Combat, and Data.
Programs are learned, not bought as objects — picked up through corporate training, street education, or pried out of the systems and ICE you defeat. A datarunner starts with a handful and builds the library over a career.
This is enough to run the Mesh in your next session — the loop, the modes, ICE, and a working program loadout. The Core Rulebook and Ghost Protocol supplement carry the rest: the full program catalog across every category, Net Architecture and multi-layer ICE in depth, the complete escalation and IoT-exploitation tables, and the deeper arts of Echo Diving the Wake.
The Mesh is half the battlefield. Here’s who runs it — and what waits beneath.
The Computer Geek The Mesh & Its Layers Programs vs Protocols Combat