Hello,

So we just finished up a session, where we came to the conclusion of Lessons From the Past, FaD.

At the end, a player wanted to take Eren Garais Cybernetic Brain off of his dead corpse. So I narrated that over the course of the next 10 minutes he was carving the cybernetics out of his skull, and told him that he will gain conflict for such an action.

Anyway, he took the cybernetic brain. Where should I go from here. Would I ever allow it to be installed on someone else with the skill to install it? Would it be damaged from the removal? Does it only work on the one person? Is it worth anything?

Thoughts?

Oh, perfect opportunity "infect" the new user with the original owner's personality. It can try to detriment thenplayer, get revenge or just force his own agenda. The players have to come up a way to get rid of it.

Used Headware is possibly usable, but as Rimsen said with a cybernetic brain there could be serious / interesting consequences.

The other hurdle would be: Who will install that thing? I gather is will be quite difficult to hide the fact that the cybernetic brain is used and was forcibly removed from someones skull, so getting a trustworthy and shady enough cyberneticist to make the operation would probably be a whole adventure in itself.

Is it worth anything? Probaly, but the problems above do still apply, it would definetily be a seriously reduced price, since its in used condition.

Another possibility if the players want to sell the brain: Maybe they sell it and later get ambushed by some guy who had the brain installed and got overwritten by the personality of the brain's former user, who now wants revenge?

On another note, I would have given direct Dark Side points for something so vile as carving someones cybernetic brain out of ones skull Oo

4 minutes ago, Fl1nt said:

Another possibility if the players want to sell the brain: Maybe they sell it and later get ambushed by some guy who had the brain installed and got overwritten by the personality of the brain's former user, who now wants revenge?

Love this idea.

1 hour ago, Fl1nt said:

The other hurdle would be: Who will install that thing?

You had to ask, didn't you?

*sigh*

The doctor...

...is in.

Does the character actually want to install it, or do they have in mind to get a slicer to mine the thing for data? The latter would actually be a reasonable (if somewhat distasteful) course of action considering that Garais turned out to be something much more than just an academic administrator.

There was a brilliant Twilight Zone episode "Dead Man's Shoes" and was remade in the 1985 revival as "Dead Woman's Shoes" (EGAD! Forced diversity! ).

Both were great (I preferred the first one, the original series was so much better, and this series's version of the episode had a better storyline). The general synopsis was "Person finds a corpse's shoes and puts them on, being immediately infused with the previous owner's personality. Perhaps you work it out with the player and have it that they are taken over by the implant and the other PCs have to find a way to un-hijack them.

Here is the wikipedia article on the episode: "Dead Man's Shoes" but I suggest that you watch the episode, if you can.

One interesting character idea would be to play the personality in the implant, basically allowing the player to be revived again and again until the implant is destroyed.

This basically boils down to the Replicated Man trope, which is a classic in storytelling. There are multiple ways you can take the story, depending on how things play out. A few common routes:

1. The brain gets plugged into someone new, or a robot body or whatever, and it's as if they just had a nap, and are their typical self as if nothing had happened. Usually finding out they were killed and stuck in a robot/cyborg body makes them a tad angry, and they go bad, if they weren't already bad, and become an Antagonist.

2. The brain is plugged into a host/etc, and they are a blank slate. Either given a new personality by the people who revived him, or just a Tabula Rasa. Think the movie of Alita: Battle Angel for a recent example of this one. She has no clue who she is, and the person who revived her doesn't really know much in the way of details either. Much of her early existence is spent adapting to this new life, and probably also trying to learn about their past. How this plays out once the past is learned usually branches into:

2a. The person actually, genuinely regains their previous memories, and they are fused into the new ones, making a sort of collective personality. This new personality decides to continue their previous life's....life, whether that be a good or bad one. Most stories that involve this for the protagonist, will usually set up circumstances to allow the person to fit back into their old life to some degree, with minimal hiccup. The Protag returns to loving wife and child, and they think he was just "missing in the wilds of Borneo" or whatever, cue credits. Others will have the new version of the Protag acknowledge they are not 100% the same person, but that they are important enough to the other people's lives, that they are willing to absorb them back in, with some minor adjustment periods. The Antagonist variant of this is where they decide to go bad, either because they were bad before, or due to new events altering their world view once the merger is complete.

2b. The person discovers their previous life, but it's in an academic sense. They don't regain lost memories, but they see footage of what they did before, or hear stories of them, or read historical archives depicting who they were. The KOTOR reveal (as best as I remember that game) was along this line. The MC is just simply told who they were before the events of the game transpired, without any indication they were remembering stuff. Another example is from the Starcraft 2 game series. In the Legacy of the Void expansion.

Other variations exist I'm sure, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment, and are the most common ones I can see happening.

I'm personally a fan of the 2b variant, where they become their own person, despite other outside forces. I'm personally not a fan of the concept of inherited guilt, which is often used in the other variation, to compel someone to be the same as they were before. But that's just me.