However, now I can look to Tome to iron some shit out with this concept. Even if I have to muck with things. The idea is to treat magic items like technology, like Frank talks about here. One issue is that the eight item limit seems a bit limiting for a cyberpunk-esque game where people are assumed to be grafted-up. There's a desire for a person to have, at least, eight slots just for grafts (two eyes, two arms, two legs, a face/head, and a body) and still be able to use magic crossbows and swords and shit.
On the other hand, grafts could be re-written to work more like the Bad-Touched feats and less like magic items, in which case a system for gaining such feat-style grafts needs to be worked out to better fit the narrative, and a way to limit that as well.
And then there's the idea of wetware and skills... So I guess that could be a magic item. You get an Illithid Brain Link, and it has a small jar attached, in which you can put stuff harvested from creatures and specially enchanted to give you bonuses to skills and shit. So instead of a generic "+Disguise" item, you put a Doppelganger Mimicry Gland in your Illithid Brain Link and that gives you your +Class Level Disguise bonus. That would be a good fit for reattuning items with 15 minutes, and expository fluff is easy enough to write for that. I could see having something that allowed you to do similar with PHB feats if i could figure out a good cost for use of a feat. Then again, I need to figure out a cost for feats if I'm going to make Bad-Touched feats represent grafting, so it's in the neighbourhood.
So, yeah. That's a good track, I think. Grafts being items is weird anyway, and if you're buying inherent body upgrades you want WBL to be less of a thing, I think. Not gone, but definitely not as important.
One of the other tweaks I foresee being important is in cosmology. Cyberpunk often comes with distopian shitholes, and if there were other planes to escape to then at least the powerful people would, and the PCs might once they had that power. This could be mitigated by saying all the planes descended into distopian shithole-ness, but I think that might be a bit much for believability.
I'm looking at Dean's D&D Default Setting thread and I think one thing I want to do is sort of keep the idea of elemental planes--so that you have a realm of (possibly only seemingly) endless fire, except no one would live there. It's not The Elemental Plane of Fire From Which Elementals and Efreet Hail, it's "a realm of the platonic ideal of flame, which will never die for want of fuel" and similar for the other elements. No one goes to the elemental planes, but tapping into these "physical" realms with complicated technomagic is something that can be done if you need endless water/fire/fresh air/sand. So that eliminates sixish planes from the Cosmological Clusterfuck. I mean, the Ice and Wood planes aren't official, but I could at least see a use for "The platonic realm of cold." Makes sterling engines easier, at least. There's definitely no need for five fucking Heaven planes, or whatever, so I'm all in favour of collapsing those into a single plane. This also brings up the question of alignment. Cyberpunk seems to be mired in moral ambiguity, and Alignment kind of shits all over that. So Alignment probably shouldn't be a thing in Graftpunk, and Heavenly forces should be fighting a losing battle against Hellish and other forces. I'd kind of like to have multiple Hell planes to reinforce this hopelessness shtick where Good is losing and maybe doing not-so-Good things to try to fight Evil. Because hypocritical Good amuses me, and is almost a feature of D&D, intended or no. Given that I do want to take some things from Monte Cook's Chaositech (at least in concept), I think the other Hellish plane could just be a plane of Chaos. I know I want to keep Mechanus, or something like it, to go with the magitech/cyberpunk idea.
So... here's what I have going on in my mind for this, partially fueled by my love of belief-influenced-reality bullshit in fiction-
will post more later. Thoughts so far?Powerful wizards and artificers refined the process of magic item creation to the point where it was just expensive technology. Then they found something which made it cheaper. Magically potent crystals led to a greater abundance of magical items, which made it easier to kill what used to be population-threatening monsters, and drove a second renaissance in component-based item creation. Manticores can still threaten towns, but they've learned that the humanoid races can be very dangerous, and it's not just adventurers running around with the power to drop them anymore, now there are Harvestmen, people paid by the guilds to hunt down monsters and bring back mass production quantities of their important bits. Magic item use exploded in this Magindustrial Revolution, and magic became less a thing weird powerful people did and more a reliable fact of life. There may be only one Teleorb in a village, but people know what they are, and particularly bright people might even know the basic metaphysics they run on. Slowly, but not as slowly as you might think, as more people went out to fight dangerous monster and returned with missing limbs and organs and more artificers were being trained to make more affordable magical items, it even became perfectly normal for people to incorporate magic items into their own bodies. It started with a few gleaming metal arms and legs, but with so many items based on monster anatomy, it wasn't long before even the people who used to be considered inhuman monsters after run-ins with Infernal Graft Machines were now only looked at askance because their tentacle was dripping on the rug.
As more and more sapients came to interact with magic items in their day to day lives, and rely on them, acceptance turned to a weird belief in applied magical technology. The learned knew how Teleorbs and ScryCells worked, but the common rabble just knew they did, and believed they would. For a time, Mechanus thrived as people started to associate these tireless items with clockwork. But when these items started to incorporate more organic parts, and even look organic themselves, that belief was shunted into bio-magi-tech as a force of its own. And thus a planar cancer came into being, creeping over hellish wastelands and placid celestial meadows alike. Its roiling, all-consuming nature made one think of chaos, and assume that it came from the use of raw chaos to make some items. Appropriately enough, no spokesthing of chaos has stepped forth to authenticate such beliefs, but the activity of chaotic forces, along with their seeming exuberance to make use of grafts and implants--or appearance of--does imply a truth to the fears. The wide use of these body modifications amongst the demons and devils and their mortal servitors might imply a similar responsibility, but many say, when they deign to say anything of them at all, that they merely find them useful like the mortals do, just even more accessible with the large population of magically powerful creatures in the forces of the Abyss.
The forces of Celestia don't like the idea of using grafts and implants that seem to correlate to the rise of the planar cancer slowly consuming their home, but they cannot deny the usefulness of such things, and many celestial soldiers and generals have at least one, often to replace an eye or limb taken by the abyssal hordes.
Mechanus, for its part, is oddly quiet about grafts and implants, and has, in fact, not been heard from for quite some time, if one does not count apparently rogue inevitables.
