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Hardwired Horizons is a science fiction tabletop role-playing game. It combines genres of cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, horror and crime fiction with transhumanist, environmentalist and anti-capitalist themes.[1] Hardwired Horizons is created and published by Cyborg Printing,[2] which is affiliated with the Cyborg Party,[3][4] and is released under a Creative Commons license.[5]
Setting
Hardwired Horizons is a posthumanist science fiction game set in 2108, a century in the future from its release in 2008. It takes place in a world in which advances in cybernetics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and cognitive sciences allowed humanity to develop whole brain emulation processes. With people's minds and memories able to be digitized, uploaded, transferred over long distances, and downloaded into new bodies (biological or synthetic), humanity began to colonize space through specialist "body-morphs" and build up an expansive set of interconnected virtual realities for uploaded minds to reside in. In parallel with these technological developments, the setting's 21st century saw the political and economic power of megacorporations eclipse that of traditional nation states, and "most aspects of social life turned into commodities to be bought and sold." Almost all emulated minds, whether "bodied" or "unembodied," were the de-facto if not explicitly legal property of the companies responsible for their uploading.
However, a mere 5 years prior to the start of the game the biosphere of Earth began to collapse at an uncontrollable and rapidly accelerating pace due to the rampant pollution and exploitation the various megacorporations subjected it to. The megacorporations attempted technological solutions to this problem failed, and in many cases made the situation worse. Most notably, they unleashed several self-replicating machines, at least two of which are confirmed to be controlled by artificial intelligences in-universe, which quickly rendered even more of the planet uninhabitable. The Earth is subsequently abandoned, and many pre-existing colonies throughout the Solar System either die off due to them no longer receiving essential supplies from Earth or shift to an economy based around pre-existing but under-utilized molecular assembly technology in order to make themselves self-sustaining long enough to establish vital resource extraction systems. In total, over 80% of humanity is said to have died as a result of this crisis.
Players are expected[6] to usually take on the role of an affinity group of impoverished and/or marginalized people in a space habitat controlled by megacorporation remnants who have turned to illegal activities in order to survive, with the potential end goal of overthrowing the habitats' rulers. The core book does have some other potential game premises however, such as a private military company sent by a megacorporation remnant to re-establish control over a lost colony, agents sent to investigate and extract potential survivors on Earth, or a hacker collective trying to break out of an isolated virtual reality simulation.
Mechanics
Hardwired Horizons uses a simple semi-skill-based, roll-under percentile dice (with results ranging from 1 to 100) system for task resolution.[7] Players roll two ten-sided dice with one of the dice representing a 10 value, subtract the amount of skill points they may have in a relevant skill, and compare the result to a target number. If the result matches or is under the target number then they succeed, while being over the target number constitutes a failure. A roll of 00, read as 100, is a 'critical failure' while a roll that is 1/6th or less of the target number is a 'critical success.' A player character's skills are determined partially by choice at character generation, and partially by what "body-morph" their mind is currently inhabiting.
For damage resolution (whether physical damage caused by injury or morale damage caused by stressful or traumatic events) players roll a designated number of ten-sided dice and add the valued together, along with any modifiers. The amount of health that a character has is determined solely by what "body-morph" they are currently using, while their morale is determined at character generation and remains consistent across bodies. Physical death is only a temporary setback for Hardwired Horizons characters so long as they have 'back up' copies of their minds available to switch to playing, but running out of morale points will typically remove a character from play permanently.[8]
