Games PC NEUROMANCER User Manual

Neuromancer

PROGRAMMED By: DESIGNED By:

PRODUCED BY:

ARTWORK BY:

SOUNDTRACK By: SOUND FX BY:

TESTING By:

TROY A. MILES

BRUCE BALFOUR MIKE STACKPOLE

BRIAN FARGO

TROY A. MILES

BRIAN FARGO

CHARLES H.H. WEIDMAN III DEVO DAVE WARHOL

BILL DUGAN

BRUCE SCHLICKBERND

TOM DECKER

FASTDOS BY:

Special thanks to Timothy Leary for all his help and inspiration for making Neuromancer a reality.

BILL “BURGER” HEINEMAN

Table of Contents

Introduction ...............................................................................................

The Real World .........................................................................................

Your Purpose in Life ..................................................................................

Basic Decks and Comlink Access .............................................................

Cyberspace ICE and Icebreakers

Cyberspace Survival .................................................................................

Limitations on Cyberspace Travel ...........................................................

Cyberspace Decks

Skill Chips ..................................................................................................

Body Shop..................................................................................................

Life and Death ...........................................................................................

A Note about Taking Notes .......................................................................

Conversations ............................................................................................

Your Credit Chip.. ......................................................................................

Using the PAX System .............................................................................

Basic Deck Operation

Cyberspace Deck Operation ...................................................................

Action Examples Appendix A: List of Skill

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Chips ..............................................................

.6 .6

8 8 9 9

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Neuromancer

INTRODUCTION

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space,

hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled from random frames. faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

NOW-

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home,

his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.

scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck,

tears of release streaking his face.

now-

Inner eye opening to the stepped

-jacking into cyberspace; from the book NEUROMANCER, by William Gibson

Symbols, figures,

Expanding-

“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics

programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional

space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial

possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

receding....”

-a kid’s show describing cyberspace; from the book NEUROMANCER

Like city lights,

“Cyberspace.

Lines of light

THE

"REAL

Neuromancer is a science fiction role-playing game set in the year 2058. Your real world location is Chiba City, by Tokyo Bay in the Kanto District of south-central Honshu, Japan. Chiba is a magnet for the Sprawl’s techno-criminal subcultures, notorious for its shadowland of black medicine and Body Shops. Criminal activity in Chiba is a constant subliminal hum, and death is the punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, or the failure to heed the demands of the intricate protocol. At one end of the city is the towering hologram logo of Fuji Electric, dominating the skyline over the high-tech zone. At the other end is the Chiba Spaceport, gateway to the orbital colonies of Freeside and Zion Cluster.

Since Neuromancer is a role-playing game, you’ll start the game by maneuvering your character through the “Real World” areas of Chiba City. Skills, in the form of “skill chips” implanted

directly into your brain jack must be purchased and developed to ensure your continued survival

in this complex world. Skills will be discussed later in more detail.

In the Real World, interactions with the citizens of Chiba are important. Through dialogue, you can make friends or enemies.

you need. Others can be downright unfriendly, keeping vital information from you if you say the

wrong thing. Information is power-and you don’t have much when you start the game.

Another important source of information is the PAX, Public Access booths conveniently located

around the city, providing private citizens with the means to stay current with the rest of the world. The PAX offers a newspaper, the Night City News; a Public BBS (Bulletin-Board System) for personal messages; and friendly Banking services (yes, money is important to your survival). The Night City News is updated daily, so it’s a good idea to refer to it at least once every 24 hours. The PAX BBS will remind you that you’re not alone in this world-you have friends who

are happy to help when they can.

Some people can be very helpful, going so far as to give you things

WORLD”

YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE

And what about your friends? Curiously enough, you seem to have fewer of them these days. Is

it because of your breath? Maybe it’s because you haven’t taken a bath recently? Or in Chiba

City, is survival more valuable and less costly than friends? You’ve heard rumors that several cyberspace cowboys have disappeared-and not all of them were your friends. Where have they gone? You suspect that the answer lies in cyberspace, but you’ve fallen on hard times. You had

some

to pawn your deck for

days in a drunken stupor, wondering what to do. Now it’s time to act. The fate of your

remaining friends, and yourself, depends on your successful solution of this bizarre mystery.

cash as soon as you arrived in Chiba City. You’ve spent the last two

BASIC DECKS AND COMLINK ACCESS

The best way to get started in your quest is to locate the basic hardware-your deck-and the

software needed to jack into the public computer network. Having already spent a short time in Chiba before the game begins, you’ll find a basic deck with Comlink software waiting for you

right where you left it, wherever that is....

Deck hardware and software can be upgraded at several locations in the city. Money is the key

factor. Better equipment means better reliability and the capability to carry and use more

software-but the price goes up accordingly. Most people in Chiba end up buying their equipment from the used equipment stores, such as Crazy Edo’s Used Hardware Emporium. But Edo has a limited stock, so serious cyberspace cowboys buy from Asano Computing, the only local dealer who carries full-blown matrix simulators called “cyberspace decks”.

Normal Comlink access requires the use of one of the cyberspace jacks scattered around the city. With a basic deck and Comlink software, you can use these jacks to access computer systems (“bases”) all over the world. If you know the Comlink access code for a particular base, you can reach it with the proper level of Comlink software. Low security bases require only Comlink 1.0 for access, but the corporate and government bases with the highest security require Comlink 6.0 to make a connection. Keep in mind that the cyberspace jacks are used for both Comlink and cyberspace access. passwords. most passwords must be located by you. requiring the use of the Cryptology skill chip to decipher them before they can be used for entry to a base.

Certain bases will give you a visitor’s password in their introductory message, but

Comlink software can get you there, but most bases are protected by

Some passwords that you come across will be coded,

As rumors have it, bases can often be penetrated at the lower levels with a new kind of software that allows you to bypass the simpler password systems.

Once you’ve been admitted to a base at a given level, you have access to everything contained in that level of the base. Many bases have multiple levels of access, each level requiring a different password. If you can log onto a database at a higher level after finding its password, you will have access to more of the contents of the database-including secret information. Valuable

software can also be downloaded from some of these bases.

You will be automatically charged for your Comlink access time, so use your time wisely because

it will be limited by the amount of money you have on your credit chip. When you are logged onto a database, time passes at the same rate that it does in the “real world”.

CYBERSPACE

Once you get a cyberspace deck, you’ll want to access the “matrix” itself, also known as

cyberspace. Hidden from the common citizen who is limited to accessing bases through the

Comlink system, the cyberspace grid represents information in its pure form. All of the private, corporate, government, and military bases can be reached in cyberspace. Many of these bases can be reached only from cyberspace because they are isolated computers with the highest levels of protection. Visually, cyberspace is a three-dimensional representation of all the bases, which look like geometric shapes. These bases are laid out in specific zones of the horizontal cyberspace grid. In actuality, cyberspace is just an image generated in your brain by your cyberspace deck. Without the deck, cyberspace would just be a complex sea of information that humans would never be able to understand.

In operation, you might represented by the lines of the grid. The buildings are the geometric shapes of the bases. Your car is your cyberspace deck. As with moving around a city, you can keep driving past the

buildings or stop and enter them (if you can get past the security guard).

Speaking of security guards, you may have guessed that you can’t just waltz right into a base, even though you’re entering from cyberspace. to keep unauthorized users from accessing the private information contained in the base.

compare

travel in cyberspace to driving around in a city. The streets are

Each base is protected by ICE, which is designed

ICE AND ICEBREAKERS

Bases are protected by ICE-Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics-which acts as an independent, semi-intelligent barrier, keeping cowboys like you from getting inside the base.

However, cowboys do manage to break in with their specialized icebreaking softwarez. The trick is finding the appropriate versions and types of softwarez to break through the ICE before it can

adapt its defenses to the attack. There are subtle, slow-acting viruses that sneak up on an ICE layer and destroy it gradually, as well as brute force icebreakers that can crush an ICE layer all

some

at once. There are many different kinds of icebreaking programs-some good and

You’ll also notice that icebreakers vary in their effectiveness, but you’ll have to experiment on

your own to learn more about each one.

You’ll find that the low-security bases are protected by the weakest ICE. By breaking into these,

you can develop your abilities, test your softwarez, and generally prepare for stronger and deadlier combat with medium and high security ICE.

And there’s one more minor point you need to know.

back. In fact, it can kill you.

ICE has an annoying tendency to fight

bad.

+ 11 hidden pages