Cyberware & Humanity
Chrome makes you faster, stronger, sharper, harder to kill. Every piece of it also takes something back — a sliver of the empathy, the connection, the self that made you worth saving. That trade isn’t a side rule in Chrome & Covenant. It’s the whole question.
Chrome is technology grown into the body — fused with flesh, bone, and nervous system. It’s not the meshware you carry or the smart gear you wear; chrome becomes you, and it doesn’t come back out easily. Once neural pathways adapt to an augmentation, removing it risks permanent damage. You live with your choices, literally.
How much chrome you can carry scales with your Body. How well you keep your head as it adds up depends on your Willpower. And what it costs you — always, every time — is measured in Humanity.
Humanity is the thread of identity, empathy, and emotional range that makes you a person rather than a platform. You start with a pool of it, and every install spends some down.
As the number falls, the world changes around you:
Humanity isn’t gone forever. You earn it back the hard way — through genuine connection, acts of compassion, moments of letting someone in. Therapy, community, a relationship that costs you something. The catch is cruel: the lower you fall, the harder those connections are to make. A point of CCP — corporate credit, the chrome-side Karma — can shave a point off an install’s cost, but no amount of it buys back what’s already gone.
Chrome climbs through tiers — from back-alley gear to artifacts no one can replicate. Higher tiers hit harder and cost more of you, with one crucial exception: Lucent Ark technology was built to enhance a person, not optimize a chassis, so it takes less Humanity for the same power.
Lucent Ark chrome is the road not taken. Where corporate designs treat your body as hardware to upgrade, Lucent Ark technology was built to keep the human in the loop. A Cognitive Matrix sharpens your mind while preserving your patterns of thought. A Harmony Interface deepens your empathy instead of dulling it — and refuses to manipulate. A Radiant Presence only works while your intentions stay honest. The corporations destroyed Lucent Ark for exactly this reason. The proof that power didn’t have to cost your soul was bad for business.
There’s a line, set by your Willpower — a threshold of 10 plus your Willpower modifier (never lower than 8). Stay above it and the chrome is just chrome. Fall below, and the slide begins: a slow severing of everything that connects you to other people. It comes in four stages.
It is not a death sentence — not at first. Through the early stages, the same things that rebuild Humanity can pull you back: therapy, connection, the deliberate work of staying human. Stage 3 demands real intervention. Stage 4 demands nothing, because there’s no one left to ask.
Chrome doesn’t install itself. A corporate clinic offers sterile rooms and skilled cybersurgeons; a street chop-doc offers anonymity and a worse survival rate. Either way it’s a Medicine check against a tier-based difficulty, and the outcome matters: a clean install can even shave a point of Humanity off the cost, while a botched one inflicts the full toll, surgical damage, and sometimes a ruined implant.
And the body doesn’t always accept the bargain. Months or years later, rejection can set in — fever, neural inflammation, chrome that has to come out whether you’re ready or not. Nothing about this technology is truly permanent except the parts you can’t undo.
What makes you human when your reflexes run on silicon and your memories live in crystal? Chrome & Covenant doesn’t answer that for you, and it doesn’t judge the choice. Some of the best operatives are walking arsenals barely holding the line. Some of the most dangerous are baseline humans who never had to. The chrome is neither salvation nor sin — it’s a mirror, and the rules just make sure you have to look.
This is the system entire — Humanity, the four categories, the tier track, cyberpsychosis, and what it takes to install. The Core Rulebook carries the full cyberware catalog across every tier, complete install and repair mechanics, the cyberpsychosis and chrome-failure tables, and the Relics that break the rules in beautiful and terrible ways.
Chrome is one half of the bargain. Here’s the rest of the character it changes.
Character Creation Combat Paths Who Was Lucent Ark?