[OSSR]Nexus: the Infinite City

[Ancient History]

1994. Ontario, Canada.

I emerged from a maze of alleys to see a city unlike anything I'd seen before. Crystal pyramids, hovering citadels, and gothic skyscrapers towered over brownstone tenements and festering shanty towns. Faceless rickshaw pullers ferried chrome-skinned aristocrats; reptillian gangsters bullied Aztec cyberpunks.

My home was gone, a reality away.

I now had a new home. Nexus. The Infinite City.

Few remember Daedalus Games, and even then mostly for Shadowfist. Nexus: the Infinite City was designed by Jose Garcia and written by a bunch of people you've mostly never heard of except Robin Laws - and that might click with a few people, because a couple years later Daedalus Games became Daedalus Entertainment and a more refined version of the system for Nexus because the engine for Feng Shui.

Nexus was a fun idea that never really took off. The idea was a sort of mega-setting, where your characters from different RPGs would have an excuse to interact - literally, it suggests and has conversions for GURPS, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk 2020, CORPS, Hero, Murphy's World, Over the Edge, Storyteller (White Wolf), Talislanta, and Underground. But it wasn't quite as insane as RIFTS or Synnibar or fuck, GURPS Time Travel, so it didn't exactly set the world on fire. It managed one thin supplement in 1995 (Nexus Life), and aside from a couple scattered articles in the gaming 'zines, that was it.

I admit, I enjoyed Nexus when I discovered it, but I haven't cracked the book open in years. So let's take a look and see how it holds up!

Physically, it's a 208-page paperback, illustrated in black and white with a combination of art that looks stolen from other RPGs and the occasional black-and-white photo which I can only imagine was taken from the blighted urban hellscape that is Ontario.


Goddammit, again?

Preface: What is Roleplaying
<sigh> 1994 and we're still getting these. This one is more pretentious than most.

Roleplaying is the assumption of the role of another person.

This involves trying to think, talk and make decisions from this other person[s perspective. Anyone who has played Cowboys and Indians, House or any other Let's Pretend game has engaged in roleplay.

<checks date>1994. Wow. We're still doing Cowboys & Indians. Okay. Carry on.

There are several ways to roleplay. Some players assume character roles that are extensions of themselves. Others enjoy taking roles very differing from themselves. Some players are more interested in action than character depth, and use their characters as playing pieces in adventures. Other players are more interested in character development, focusing on their character's personality and interactions with other characters. As a rule, your roleplaying will be more enjoyable if you play with others who share your tastes, but no approach is intrinsically "better" than another.

Disagree.

In Nexan speak, Mister Cavern is called the "Game Moderator," and NPCs are "Game Moderator Characters" or GMCs.

In movie terms, PCs are the stars and GMCs are the extras, supporting cast and villains. Except for the PCs all the characters in a roleplaying game are GMCs.

Chapter 1: Nexus Overview
This is an out-of-character look at the setting, although pretty much every page has an in-character snippet stuck into the header or footer or side margin - general annotation style. A typical example:

Carthage? Fifth right on the I-666 after the Statue of Liberty that's missing it's head. Los Angeles International? Never heard of it.
- Shawmen in Radical Anne's: Breaking Mr. Goodbar 3

So, here's the gist: there are a bazillion alternate realities, from parallel dimensions, pocket universes, and alt-timelines to magical netherworlds and alien cosmos. Nexus is a multiversal convergence point, sort of, where a bunch of cities from different dimensions intersect. Sometimes this means the St. Louis Arch becomes a portal to Asgard, sometimes it means you're walking down the street and Milwaukee segues ungently into a world where Aztec dinosaurs roam the Urth. Most of these cityscapes are still tied into their home dimension, but others are known as a "bleeding chunk" - the interface with Nexus goes all the way around the city-chunk, cutting the inhabitants off from their home dimension. These semi-permanent sections of Nexus become the crux of the city and its culture, as other dimensions come in and out of phase with it all the time.

Each of the dimensions retains its own physics and metaphysics - so, for example, you might cross the street and find out that magic suddenly works, or cross over to Stoneville and find out that all technology translates into Flintstone-type biostonetech. Some of these transitions are predictable, others are not.

Urban legends concerning bizarre translations abound in Nexus; any cabbie or rickshaw driver can rattle on about the reality wher MSG is translated into plutonium, but don't expect them to be able to find the place.

If this all sounds familiar...well, it should.

In 1993, a section of the city of Los Angeles became disconnected from reality, the city government collapsed, and the residents started calling it Angel City, and basically make the best of living there. Most Nexans speak a creole called Lingua, and the city prospers on interdimensional trade. Most of this is carried out by Jackers, and the Great Houses, which are sort of de facto merchant guilds; the city itself is nominally governed by a coalition of Great Houses called the Mallrachen, though most neighborhoods have their individual arrangements for private policing, internet (yes, we'll get to that), and whatnot. Technically they describe it "an anarchy that's reached a state of equilibrium."

There are also the United States of Nexus, a quirky take on the USA which markets itself as a freelance government to interested citizens.

In return for paying taxes, member states get police protection, government services, and a sense of stability.

I don't know how that's supposed to work.

A word on Religion:

It is difficult for rigid orthodoxies who claim to have the Exclusive Truth about the One True Nature of God to maintain hold here. Monotheists take an especially hard knock when they arrive in Nexus, because there are gods aplenty here, and few are shy about providing concrete evidence of their existence to believer and infidel alike. In fact, one notably high-profile god, Tleaqutul the Decapitator, is fond of saying that the problem with Nexus is that there are "Too many gods, not enough sacrifices."

[...]The aforementioned Tleaqutul, for example, not only appears on his own holovision program - The Decapitator Hour, Thursdays at 1 AM on MegaChannel 27 - but regularly appears as a guest on other talk-shows.

The supernatural is fairly common in the city, as might be expected when a demon is a regular at your diner and just looks for a good cup of coffee or a Saurian necromancer's tower might show up unexpectedly on your street one day, although there's a few skeptics that think it's all just technology that hasn't been mastered yet or something. Speaking of tech, there are hundreds of alien technologies circulating through the city, and the people who keep the internet and utilities more-or-less patched together are called Riggers.

Transportation through the city happens a lot of ways, but since mapping is pretty much a lost cause most people rely on a kind of sixth-sense and familiarity with the shifting patterns of the city - hence, the most popular transports are rickshaws and taxis; rickshaws tend to find their way better and survive the translation to different realities easier.

Angel City, inhabited by Angelenos, is one of the hubs of Nexus. Local year is 2004, 11 years since the city was cut off form its home reality. It's experienced an inundation of alien immigrants, city government has collapsed, and you basically get the protection, utilities, and lifestyle you can pay for.

Like most areas in Nexus, a variety of languages are spoken here. Commonly spoken languages are Lingua (a Nexus patois), English, Spanish, Ih (a Skrill tongue), Japanese, and Korean. Most Angelenos understand a few key words and phrases in all these languages, and some are conversant in them all.

[...]

Architecturally, Angel City is a surreal contrast of crumbling indigenous buildings and newer construction of high tech, often alien, design. Real estate developers like to imitate famous buildings from this world's past. An exact duplicate of the Empire State Building rises downtown, near a shopping mall that looks like the Louvre, and a mosque that is actually a fashionable nanotech clinic.

[...]

Steetpunks pack lasers, aircars buzz overhead, and lawyers enforce contracts with mystic seals. Just about anything can be found in the city for those who know where to find it...and who are willing to pay the price.

That's chapter one. Just a survey of the setting, to get players and gamemasters acquainted with it; plenty more setting material is provided further in, because that's basically the appeal of the game - Nexus itself, the weird different components, how things interact. I mean hell, we haven't even talked about money yet, but you can already sort of get the vibe it's going for - the chaotic interdimensional metropolis, something like a mix between Top Ten and Grimjack.



And yes, while I know that there are literary antecedents like Michael Moorcock's Tanelorn, I really think this whole thing is inspired more by comic books than either weird fiction or existing RPGs.

[Username17]

I used to talk to Jose Garcia from time to time back during the Shadowfist days. He used to play those light gun games in arcades by putting in coins for both players and then go through the game dual wielding like a boss.

When Daedalus went under, he had a number of creditors coming after him, and he went off the grid.

-Username17

[silva]

Im anxiously waiting for more. The setting is awesome so far. Hope its actual execution is better than Planescape.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 2: Character Creation

Nexus is a place where anything goes. Almost any character imaginable can walk this city's streets. As a player you have an almost completely free hand in creating characters from all kinds of backgrounds. Your character can come from almost any reality, world, or historical period you wish. You ca use one of the realities included in this book as your character's "home reality," you can create a new reality to suit your character, or you can create a character that grew up within Nexus.

As mentioned, Nexus both uses the precursor to the Feng Shui engine and was supposed to be super-easy for you to convert your existing characters from other games into. The resulting mishmash is ultimately pretty simple, open-ended, and ridiculously unbalanced because quite literally everything of interest is left up in the air...but I digress.

Nothing is True.
Anything is Possible.
Everything is Permitted.
- William S. Burroughs

This is actually on page 2 of this chapter.

The first page-and-three-quarters roughly deals with coming up with your character concept, thinking about how they came to Nexus, what they do, and what their name is. Then your GM tells you how many Character Points (CPs) you have and you spend them. This is pretty much exactly like GURPS - your CPs run from "Mundane" (25 CPs) and "Competent" (50 CPs) to "Heroic/Outstanding" (200 CPs) and "Superhuman" (300 CPs). You spend these CPs on attributes, skills, and advantages, and gain CPs by lowering your attributes and taking disadvantages. Like I said, very GURPS-ish.



You have three Primary Attributes: Body (Bod), Mind (Mnd), and Reflexes (Ref). Base value for each is 5, but the range is 2-15. Where 15 Bod is equivalent to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Normal human maximums cap out at 10, and you're supposed to either come up with a good story or pay extra CP for any points over that.

This maximum and minimum values in the attribute chart apply to the normal human range of traits. It is possible to possess an attribute higher than the human maximum, but the GM must approve this. In order to get your GM to approve it, you will have to come up with a valid justification in game world terms.

Secondary Attributes are based off the primaries and default to those values. So at Bod 5, you get Strength (Str) 5, Constitution (Con) 5, Toughness (Tgh) 5, and Move (Mov) 5. Mind second attibutes are Charisma, Perception, Intelligence, and Will; Reflexes secondaries are Agility, Manual Dexterity, and Speed.

I can kind of empathize with the direction they were going with the secondary attributes, but when you're differentiating Constitution and Toughness or Move and Speed, things may be a bit needlessly complicated, and we haven't even gotten into it yet.

Anyway, the general cost to increase a Primary attribute is 10 CP per point, and 3 or 5 for a secondary attribute. The math works out so improving all of the secondary attributes is more expensive than just improving the primary, so that's a plus. There's even a chart. If you're starting below average...



...thank you, you get those points back. To prevent really needless munchkinism, you can only reduce one secondary attribute in each group, and you only get 3 CP per secondary point lowered. Even if it costs 5 CP to raise it. Because some secondary attributes are better than others.

There are also "Paired Attributes." The idea being that if you can come up with a good reason why two secondary attributes can be paired, you can upgrade both for only 5 CP. So for example, Bravado is Charisma & Will, Physique is Strength & Toughness, and Quickness is Speed & Move. Honestly, this feels like an afterthought to the rules, but it has a certain useful flexibility.

Anyway, the basic system is that Secondary Attribute + Skill levels = Acting Value (AV), which determines how good you are at something. Skills are, again, lifted almost directly from GURPS, except with a side of Unknown Armies or Shadowrun First Edition-style choose-your-own skills. So you have Trivial skills at 0.5 CP/level (Basketball, Computer Usage, Dance), Specific skills at 1 CP/level (Bargaining, Brawling, Language, Stealth, etc.), and Package skills at 2 CP/level (Actor, Computer Freak, Criminal, Gun Combat, Martial Arts, Mystic Scene, Streetwise, etc.)

So, the more specific a skill is, the less it costs. The more broad, the more expensive. Every skill has a Primary:Secondary attribute associated with it - sometimes more than one! So for example if you're a Nexan sorcerer and want to know what's down with the ward-sigils tattooed on somebody's arm, that would be Mystic Scene + Mind:Int; but if you wanted to hubbub with the local crack shamans and scope out some gossip, that would be Mystic Scene + Mind:Cha. It is suggested but not mandated that skills be restricted to 5 levels.

So, that's pretty straight forward, right? But wait, there's more!

A familiarity is a skill with a level of zero. A character with a familiarity in a skill receives no AV bonus but suffers no non-familiarity penalties when performing the activities pertinent to the familiarity. The character's AV defaults to the familiarities's base attribute. Familiarities cost 1 CP less than the cost of full a level in a skill. Familiarities with 1 point skills costs 1/2 points. Familiarities for skills the cost 1/2 CP per level are free.

...I'm going to go out on a limb and guess Garcia added that rather late in the game, without proofreading, unless Mister Tequila counts.


I think the intention was that you might pay 1/2 a CP so your character doesn't accidentally shoot themselves in the head when they encounter their first boomstick or raygun, but honestly I have no fucking idea.

Advantages and Disadvantages are about what you would expect, and range from social (Contacts, Enemies, etc.) and personal abilities (Ambidextrous, Attractive, Courage, Gullible, Pacifism), to more exotic stuff like Doesn't Need to Breathe, Extra Limbs, Invulnerability (cost varies on what you're invulnerable to; 'Everything' costs 90 CP; you can also get a limited form called Unkillable), Magic Resistance, Wealth, Vulnerability, etc. There are also Balanced Traits, which are sort of package deals - like Berserk, you can go into a frenzy that makes you stronger and likely to ignore damage and fear, but it also makes you careless and unperceptive in general. Nocturnal gives bonuses to operating at night, but disadvantages acting during the day. Etc.

The City is of Night: perchance of Death. But certainly of Night.
- T. S. Eliot

Just to make it clear, the character generation system isn't necessarily gearing you towards being Alien Batman.



It's not a supers setting, it's a setting in which you can be super. Or a vampire or whatever. Or a private detective or a Jacker or a cyborg. Theoretically you could be anything; practically speaking the given options in the book are a bit limited and oriented toward street-level characters.

There's a thing called Tags. There are zero-point minor details that fill out your character. Examples include: facial mole, French accent, wears trenchcoats, film buff, tells war stories, talks to himself, celibate, and gun collector.

There is an example of character generation, but it's kind of sad and amazingly compact: Percy Maguire, a freelancer pest exterminator. He has a handful of friends and an enemy in Hemmingway the silver mage.

I resell corpses, but I don't manufacture.
- Anabelle Spontaneo, Bone Merchant

Anabelle actually shows up in this hard-to-read sidebar-cum-shortfiction on the opposite page. She buys and sells corpses, and in this case was hired to break into an old family crypt belonging to some corporate clan...

So I eyeball the crypt, and I sees electric eyes, I sees pressure plates, I sees a motion detector and a heat sensor and a Keloidian sigil of warding. Talk about overkill. Whoever installed this junk - it looks like a Integrated Security job - sure sold the grieving relatives a way overboard package. And they installed it for crap, too: half of the stuff's orient backwards, like to catch me on the way out. Hell, I'm gone by then, boys! Quality workmanship these days, I tells ya.

Thirty-one minutes it takes me to take down the whole kit. And another two livers. Finally I slip in and turn on the flashlight. Wanna make sure I get the right Tagomil. I slide the polymer slab off the top of old Brian's coffin, and shine the beam in. Damn, He ain't even half decomposed yet.

His eyes open. He smiles.

"I've been waiting for you, Annabelle Spontaneo."

I hate it when that happens.

There is a section called "Freeform Character Generation." This is intended for the ADHD crowd who can't be bothered to actually keep track of points, and they just assign skill levels and things as they want according to a loose agreed-upon guideline like "no attributes over 9, no skill AVs over 13."

There's a brief section on "participating in a series" (read: a group of related games using the same characters) and then it goes on into Archetypes.

Sidenote: They don't talk about getting any equipment in this chapter, which feels like an oversight, but FYI the generic accepted currency in Angel City is the megabuck. Just for reference.

There aren't classes, they're more like Shadowrun archetypes...in fact, I'm pretty sure that's where they're stolen from...and the basic rundowns give you an idea of some different character concepts you can play, their place in Nexus, and some suggested skills and attributes. A random selection:

Jackers "aka Jacks, Warp Merchants" - these are characters who make a living moving stuff from one dimension to another, selling or bartering it away, and hoping to make a profit. Example barter goods:

Gold, Nintendo Gameboy, digital wristwatch, flashlight, magical potion, fine cheese, etc.

Thirds "aka Dealers, Middlemen, Marrowsuckers" - In Shadowrun parlance these are fixers, the people that put two parties together and get a cut of the action going both ways. Most specialize: 'marrowsuckers' finance jacker operations and help move the goods, 'contractors' deal with security, 'candymen' deal in "drugs, psychoactive enchantments, neural interface software or anything else that caters to tastes normally considered a 'vice.'", slavers sell sentient people, 'shadows' trade information, 'blackbeards' pirated software, 'fences' stolen goods...etc.

Mage "aka manapunk, sorcerer, wiz, streetmage" - more Shadowrun street mage than D&D sorcerer, though you see a mix of both.

Nexus is home to all kinds of magic. Thousands of different forms of magic from as many realities are practised in the city. Nexan magi tend to mix and match spellcasting techniques from several different schools of magic. Much like the cities creole of languages, a mage's repertoire of spells is a mishmash of different techniques, incantations and rituals of wildly different origin. Nevertheless many magi specialize in a particular class of magic, such as necromancy, fire magic or personal enchantment magics.

Nexan magi don't fit the popular image of the scholarly wizard. They're Nexans from all walks of life, with an aptitude and interest in magical forces. Many of them are gutsy and young, relying more on talent and instint than practice and scholarship to shape magical forces.

[...]

The synergies of the forces employed by a Nexan mage are a powerful and often volatile mix. What with miscast spells, variable magical laws in different realities, aspected mana zones and demonic pacts which turn ugly, a mage's life in Nexus is rarely simply.

Magic stuff is covered in more detail in Chapter 4, we're toldd, but it turns out that Sorcery is just a skill and Magesight is just a 2 CP advantage.

And that's Chapter 2. Honestly, if the system feels half-assed as I present it, well...it is. I don't think this was ever intended to be a hard ruleset. Like I said, the push for this product was bringing in characters from other games to interact with each other. I like to think that if it had taken off, gotten a couple more supplements under its belt, maybe gotten Robin Laws to scrape it over the coals for another edition there might be something here. As it is, it's a system so flexible that there's barely any bones to hang a character on, and just enough fiddly bits to get players' munchkin senses tingling. On the other hand, a more solid system would probably fall apart trying to cover the range of stuff that Nexus tries to cover...or else just morph into GURPS. The thing is, I think, that if there were ever any games of Nexus, they were all wildly different from each other even down to the character level, just incredibly idiosyncratic. If you had a good group, it could work and work well, but I don't think you could take your character sheet and be able to sit down with another group very easily. Hell, I'm not even sure what the mechanics look like at this point. What the fuck does an AV of 13 mean in the grand scheme of things? Find out in Chapter 3...

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: Roleplaying Mechanics

In Nexus, there's an exception to every rule, including this one.
- Natasha Dublink, Writer

Okay, so the core mechanic requires two dice.



You have your Action Value (AV) and you add the results of the Roll. This gives you your Action Result. Then you subtract the Difficulty of the task from the Action Result to get your Outcome.

AV + Roll - Difficulty = Outcome

If there's no roll involved, it's just a straight AV - Difficulty = Outcome. Not quite simple as simple could be, and it gets weirder, because there are three types of roll.

Closed Roll
The dice are rolled; one die is positive, the other is negative. To get the result of the roll, you subtract the value of the negative die from the positive die.

The result will be a random number between positive five and negative five.

Open Roll
As above, except sixes explode. So if you roll really well on the negative die, you are fuxxored.

And not in the fun way.

Xd6 Roll
I'll just let them explain:

The third die rolling method involves adding the values of one or more dice together. This is represented by the notation "Xd6" where "X" is the number of dice rolled. For example 2d6 signifies that two six sided dice are rolled, and the results added together.

Nominally Closed Rolls are used for limiting the range of results to something sane, Open Rolls are used for "Q Rolls" (qualitative assessment of how well you did), and Xd6 rolls are for when Mister Cavern breaks out the sliovice and forgets which game he's playing.

Xena, Warrior Pornstar? Sure, sounds like a fun character.

To make things more interesting, there are optional rules for "special things" to happen if you roll boxcars or using n-sided polyhedrons, but honestly the RNG for this game is already kinda fucked to begin with. Your base attributes are 2-15, you have up to a +5 adjustment from skill levels, and then you're looking at +/- 5 on the roll itself - that gives a range of -3 to +25 without factoring in difficulties, exploding dice, or Xd6 drunk rolls.


Wait, let me roll to see how many dice I roll.

Flip the page, and you see that Difficulty numbers range from -5 (routine, everyday activities) to +25 (nearly impossible). Which you might recognize as the entire range of the RNG. So on a closed roll, even if you've got superhuman attributes and the full skill levels they suggest, you're never going to get greater than an outcome of 0 - which counts as a borderline win, according to the section on outcomes, which grades them from -15 (catastrophic failure) to 15 (incredible success). Which then brings us to the Rule of 15.

Rule of 15
A character who obtains an Outcome of 15 on a Check, succeeds utterly in the action they are performing. Whatever the character was trying to do happens, within reason. For example a character trying to knock someone unconscious wit a punch succeeds. Someone can kill a bear with a single shot from a small pistol. A character trying to persuade someone gains their absolute trust. A character shooting a tank with a pistol obviously can't destroy it, but they may destroy something vulnerable like a communications antenna.

Really, the quote at the top of page 48 says it best:

Why settle for the best and worst of one world when you can have the best and worst of them all.
- Munir Zafar, interdimensionaly acclaimed author

There's also a thing called Complementary Skill Checks, where if you have a related skill, you can make a check with that skill and add half the Outcome to the main skill check.

There's a couple charts relevant to Time, Mass, Speed, Outcomes, and Attributes - basically helping you to measure success. For example, you would consult this chart to see how much your character can lift - if you have Bod:Str 7, for example, you can lift 180 kilograms. If you score a 17 on your enchantment roll, the enchantment lasts 10 years. That sort of thing.

Then there are some sample difficulties for standard tasks like computer hacking, intimidation, navigating your way around Nexus, perception checks <ugh>, rigging, and finally combat.

Copyright disputes between Paradigm Studios and FullFisted productions ended today. Both parties agreed to enter into a partnership on the production and distribution of the Terminal Frank's Megaverse series. The dispute had lasted eight months and claimed the lives of 2 FullFisted employees.

<sigh> Combat looks like it took a page from 1st edition Shadowrun. There is an initiative system, and combat phases that are 3 seconds long, and each action has an initiative cost. There are rules for reactive actions and dodging, parrying and wrestling (and I mean proper wrestling, with holds and throws), called shots and cover, increasing difficulty for automatic weapons and bonuses for using longer weapons, with optional rules for mass attacks. It is, I will grant, somewhat shorter than SR1 combat section en toto, but the system is somewhat less regimented and incredibly fiddly.

Make sure you're in the right reality before you draw a gun. Nothing's worse than facing a charging swordsman and having your gun go click.
- Zoe Chaney, Jacker

What it boils down to of course is AV + Roll - Difficulty = whether or not you hit the other fucker. Each weapon has a Damage and a Penetration value, which are given in chapter 7. Armor also is divided into Penetration Resistance (PR) and Impact Resistance (IR), because again they lifted a lot of this from Shadowrun, but the thing is you compare the values and if your penetration is higher the condom bursts and...er, you go through the armor and do damage to the target. There's a bunch of stuff about partial armor, glancing blows, impact damage, etc., but that's all fiddly bits.

There are no hit points as such in Nexus, but there is a formula:

Task Check Outcome + Damage - Bod:Tgh = Damage Check Outcome

The higher the outcome, the more Wound Points you suffer. WP are just an abstract measurement of how badly you're hit; once you've accumulated 5 Wps you start marking Death Checks periodically until you heal up or die. There are some optional rules for knock out, random hit location, fatigue, lethal damage, bleeding, etc.

My other wand is a Mitsubishi.
- Astral Singer, Professional Mage

No one cares about healing or automatic fire, especially not me, so moving on...ah, yes, there's a section on explosions, collision damage, falling damage, objects and damage, vehicle piloting, maneuvers...


Thank you.

...vehicle mounted weapons ("Vehicle mounted weapons use the same rules as other weapons."), and that's the chapter. Up next: Magic!

[Ancient History]

Chapter 4: Supernatural Powers & Magic

When I first got here I didn't have any idea what was going on. I still don't but I'm enjoying the ride.
- Five minute Jaffy, rickshaw puller

I know how you feel.

Okay, the writers come clean and admit they can't cover everything they can think of, much less everything the players can think of. So like the rest of the system, they go for a very flexible, broad approach that players can modify to suit their needs.

Mechanically, a Power consists of two things: a straightforward description of what the Power does (its effects and restrictions) and a numeric value which denotes the magnitude of what the Power can accomplish (low numbers for weak Powers, high numbers for formidable ones).

So, this is sort of like skills, but more expensive. There are three groups of powers, based on how broad the powerset is: Specific Powers (one or two specific effects, like conjuring magical flame or braodcasting and receiving telepathic messages; 5 CPs per level), Broad Powers (fire magic, telepathy, etc.; 7 CPs per level), and Package Powers (sorcery, psychic powers, etc.; 10 CPs per level).

There's quite a few guidelines - not really many hard rules - on how to create power effects and your own package powers, increasing your level of effect, etc. I can't help but think this whole process owes a lot to the spell-creation rules in Shadowrun first edition's Grimoire, but maybe there's a bit of GURPS Magic in there as well - the basic idea being that you have a bunch of different effects within some familiar and relatively well-defined categories like Alter, Attack, Conjure/Summon, Illusion, Negate, Telekinesis, Teleport, etc., to which can be added some pros and cons like "requires incantations and gestures to work"

Nothing special about this place. Just a dog's breakfast of crap.
- Angry Tom

There are three ready-made "Sample Power Systems": Nexan Sorcery, Rhyming Magic, and Psychic Powers.

Nexan Sorcery is a hodge-podge of spells and spellcasting techniques from dozens of different realities. Much like the city's patois, Lingua, Nexan Sorcery draws from dozens of different dimensions. Nexan Sorcery is a voltatile and eclectic mix of spells that hail from dozens of different cultures.

Nexan Sorcery is pretty much the default for the NPCs that use magic in the book. To cast a spell requires incantations and gestures, a skill-check with a difficulty equal to the power level of the spell, a fatigue check equal to the power level of the spell, and you can use the Outcome to reduce the fatigue or improve the power. On the other hand, that means Nexan sorcery spells are pretty easy to cast (-3 Difficulty).

Rhyming magic is old-school Dr. Strange doggerel.


Dr. Seuss, Master of the Mystic Arts...fuck, I'd play that.

Psychic powers are actually a collection of broad and specific powers - Pyrokinesis is specific, Telepathy is broad. Clever people with a stack of comic books or bad science fiction novels could do a lot with this.

For assistance to players and Mister Cavern, they provide a bunch of sample spells. These aren't quite typical spells...no straight-up fireballs. Much more eclectic. For example, there's a teleport spell called Darkslip that doesn't work in anything brighter than candlelight, a spell that summons a Demon Avenger to protect one designated person, an attack spell called Firesink that "pumps raw, chaotic, elemental fire energy into an object" - which can either supercharge an engine or burn a person alive from the inside out; if you cast it at another mage, they can even use the energy to cast a fire spell or upgrade a fire elemental. Glamour of the Silver Pines originated in a faerie forest, and alters an environment so everyone within reveals some aspect of their inner nature. Magical OS alters a computer's operating system to make it easier for the caster to use. Power Circles are your basic wards. Sangre Nostrum is a one-shot healing spell triggered when when you bleed. Zombie animates a corpse. Things like that.

Now I know why Stevie and the others stopped. They're waiting, grinning as the jeep zooms across the interface. The portal translates it down a few tech levels, into a donkey cart. Now there's some serious fear on the YD'ers faces as the confused donkey stops on a dime.

I leave the violence to the specialists.
- BigWheel Tim, Autophreak

A short chapter, but a merry one. Next up: The Realities of Nexus.

[Blicero]

The magic and stuff from this sort of remind me of that old Unknown Armies rpg. That seemed like a really weird game when I read it.

[Ancient History]

Ooh, Unknown Armies. That's a good one for an OSSR.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 5: The Realities of Nexus
Originally I was going to say that this book stole the format for GURPS Alternate Earths, but I just checked the copyrights and that book came out in 1996, a full two years after Nexus: The Infinite City was in print. So instead, I'm going to say it stole the format from GURPS Time Travel (1991).

The theft from GURPS is fairly blatant, even as RPG stuff goes. Here's the sample profile:

Arthos
Native power words allow speakers to evoke magical effects regardless of whether they have magical abilities or skills.

Low Tech High Magic

The plane of Arthos is a reality governed by supernatural forces and gods. It's a flat world with edges and a dome of stars overhead. magic is a powerful force here and can be wielded quite easily. As a matter of fact there are words with magical connotations which when spoken evoke magical powers regardless of whether or not the speaker has any magical ability or skill. Conversely, technology is very limited in function, nothing more sophisticated than a crossbow will function here. If passive forms of high technology are brought into this reality (Hi-Tech armor or materials) they're liable to be translated into local equivalents.

The "Low Tech High Magic" thing is key - the 'reality profile' for any given dimension is basically a rip off on GURPS alt-Earths, with a Magic spectrum (No Magic, Low Magic, Mod Magic, High Magic) and a Tech Level spectrum that pretty much apes GURPS techlevels...it's not a direct copy and pace, but pretty damn close. Basic frame of reference: TL1 is Stone Age, TL6/7 is now, TL9/10 is Star Trek FTL travel and artificial gravity. This brings me to a weird point: what the hell is a technology level?

In GURPS, a TL represents the general level of development of a given world - sort of a cross-cultural measure for the highest technological advancements. Think for a moment how you'd measure the global TL in a game of Sid Meier's Civilization and you can appreciate why this might seem a bit of an inadequate number to some people - some civs are going to be farther down the tech-tree than others, and nobody's going to have all the advancements on every level of the tech-tree.

This gets more (or maybe less?) complicated in Nexus because of the idea of translation. The idea being that in certain realities, the tech level isn't just a raw measurement, it's some sort of universal constant so that fuck physics, nothing more complicated than a crossbow will work, and if you take a flak jacket into the reality its purpose somehow translates over into a breastplate or something - no idea where the mass went or came from, or what happens when you cross back over. You might be stuck with your shiny new breastplate, you might get your flak jacket back. Totally up to Mister Cavern. But it's indicative of a weird conceit that you sometimes see where certain realities are determined by cosmic fiat to be medieval hellscapes with no advancement as we understand it. It's weird to think about, because realistically if you can't get gunpowder to work, there's a shitload of other chemical reactions that shouldn't work either.

However, it isn't unprecedented. Indeed, there are two very important and books on the subject.




Guns of the South isn't quite the alt-history book of all time, but only because The Man in the High Castle exists. White supremacists go back in time and give automatic weapons to the Confederacy, which although they did not develop the technology, they can easily copy it. It's a straight aversion of the past-stuck-as-is principle, and shows what a game changer importing technology can be.

Guns of Avalon plays it straight - there are no guns in the reality of Amber because nobody can figure out a working gunpowder - but then somebody does find something that combusts in Amber, they make some guns and damn near take the place over. This is a case where the physics are handwaved but the core concept remains, which is that guns are a gamechanger. This is true of history, and by most measures is true of literary alt-history. It's questionable how much of that kind of thinking actually goes into the creation and use of these different realities, but it's the kind of speculation that I have always loved about the genre, and for representative roleplaying games like GURPS Infinite Worlds.

Anyway, back to the main content of the chapter at hand: this is a bunch of the realities that comprise part of the sprawling interdimensional patchwork that is Nexus. It's broken into bleeding chunk "hubs" and other realities that fade in and out. There are weird phenomenon like dimensions that fuse together ("fusion") or split off ("fission"), "viral realities" which fuse with a universe and create certain changes. Years of science fiction-esque programming should have prepared you for this.

The hubs get the most wordcount, as is appropriate for the more stable and long-lasting parts of the setting. Angel City starts us off again, with early 90s California/LA culture with an interdimensional twist; city government has collapsed and the place has devolved into enclaves reminiscent of post-Bug City Chicago in Shadowrun. For example, New California (formerly Pasadena) is part of the United States of Nexus, Hollywood is still Hollywood except with aliens and magic, Fortress America is a militant enclave for "native Americans" (i.e. people from Angel City's home reality), and thousands of mikes (microenclaves) reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Hollywood itself is a city of contrasts. The homes and playgrounds of wealthy and stylish players are clean and well policed, while much of the rest of the city is extremely decrepit. These gritty streets are home to failed actors and actresses turned prostitutes, con-men who prey on tourists who have strayed too far off the beaten path, and muggers who prey on all of the above.

Babel is a high-tech "urban jungle of super-skyscrapers and elevated highways that mesh to form a three-dimensional lattice" - somewhere between the Jetsons, the Fifth Element, and Neopolis.



Wealth pretty much equates with height; the richest live on the top tiers, above the clouds, while the street level is stuck in permanent twilight, and beneath that a bunch of centuries-old tunnels known as the Underworld.

Chimera City is the oldest and least distinct hub; so old that it's been pretty much overwritten by construction from the rest of Nexus.

It wasn't until two years later that I discovered I'd made the mistake of my life breaking up with Julian. I wanted my freedom, I said. You lose your money edge if you get too comfortable too young. Wait for me, I said. Worst decision I've ever made. Money was nothing. The edge was nothing. I needed Julian. But of course he wouldn't have me. He'd found somebody else. Married, kid on the way.

Then one day I found myself on a Blue Chair rickshaw. You know, the ones who take you where you need to be instead of where you're going? I end up in a parallel reality, one where I'd never blown Julian off. The two of us were engaged, happy, owned a house together. 'Course the problem was, it was an alternate version of me that was having all the happiness. I snuck into the house one afternoon, beat her to death with a crowbar, hid the body.

I took her place. But it just didn't work. I was a different me than the me I had killed, and JUlian could tell. We couldn't be happy. Eventually I came back here. Yeah, I left him twice. Hit me again, bartender.

I love this book for this.

The Rock AKA Rock of Ages is basically alternate Malta; a rocky Mediterranean island with a former military base.

After the hubs, there are descriptions of metaplaces within Nexus. The Canal is an interlinked connection of waterways from different realities; think of a Venice that connects London houseboats on the Thames to the riverwalk in San Antonio; the flowing water also makes it Nexus' major sewer. The Dead Zone is a collection of ruined urban areas; The Endless Building is, as you might have guessed, a phenomenon where the interiors of an unknown number of buildings from different dimensions are linked -

The Endless building has no exterior; just like Nexus, it isn't an actual structure but merely a phenomenon binding the interiors of several different places into a continuous whole. A building with rooms that are in phase with the Endless Building doesn't display any outward sings of this condition. The only tell-tale signs may be inconsistences in who enters and leaves the building and the faint cries for help of those who have become lost within it.

Houah, got it, next.

...and my personal favorite, The Infinity Highway.

...my findings have been supressed - ruthlessly supressed! They even hire disinformation agents to ridicule me on the computer networks!
- Moojibar Dorset, Sales clerk

Then there's a bunch of more non-hub but semipermanent realities. Jaffa is a high-magic/low tech reality (for native magic) that has a continent-spanning Greco-Arabic empire, Rain City is an urban space where gravity obeys M.C.Escher aesthetics, Something Street is a weird phenomenon where people following directions for "XXX and Something Street" find themselves on a literal Something Street stitching together random places; Tranquility Square is a little pinched-off neighborhood that becomes more difficult to enter the more people are in it; the Wall of Night is a barrier resembling a cross-section of deep purple ocean cutting through many realities, etc.

"Burbs" are places usually but not always in phase with Nexus. Apohoqui is a "very picturesque village in New Brunswich, Canada" which I might give a fuck about if I bothered to google it; Razortown is a postindustrial high-tech anarchist enclave set on the Indian Ocean on an alternate Earth; Inferno appears to be a noirish city but is actually an alien hell inhabited by lost souls and demonic city administrators; Mariville, the Empyrean Duchy of New Normandy, is from a magic-rich reality where William the Conqueror failed to conquer England and conquered the rest of Europe instead, and his descendants set up feudal colonies on the moon thanks to magic, the semipermanent (must be renewed yearly) enchantments of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Crafters of the Firmament are the city's main export to Nexus; Navajolands are "a cluster of realities inhabited by Navajo peoples from the North American Southwest," which is probably the best excuse for the Native American Nations I've ever seen; Twisted San Fran is a version of 1920s San Francisco inhabited by aliens...



...Yucheng (aka "Fu City") is a Chinese town (local year unknown, but call it the Taiping Rebellion era) inhabited by kung fu masters with abilities straight out of Shaw Bros. films, and so on and so forth.

"Tucked Away Places" are scarcer realities. The City of Glass is a 1930s art deco technofuture with a regimented 13-class system a la Brave New World, enforced and protected by giant robots; Gothic York is like old-fashioned Gotham or stepping into a pulp crime novel except without Batman; Hong Kong is...uh...Hong Kong? Not sure where they were going with that one. Jonestown is an experimental stereotypical 1950s community created by an alien race called the Corvanni designed as a test for exterminating humans; "Psycho Saigon" is a version of Vietnam War-era Saigon where both the US invested in creating supersoldiers via the Plymouth Program instead of nukes, and now the USA and Russia are involved in a Cold War superhuman arms race; etc.

"Places of Interest" are small scale stuff. Abbey Books is basically a bookstore doorway into L-Space; Cafe An is a "karioke bar in Angel City's Chinatown" run by "An Immortal, former Khmer Rouge guerrilla, blind musician, triad member", Lori's Used Books is nominally a bookstore but really sells high-tech surveillance equipment; the See of the Holy Entropic is a nightclub set up in the nightmarish former HQ of an evil mystical cult; the University is a conglomeration of higher learning institutions, etc.

A lot of this stuff varies from the prosaic and blah to the interesting and "...wha?" There's absolutely no standard to go by here, and the suspension for disbelief gives way to rule of what-we-thought-was-cool-in-1994. You could probably do better on your own, and arguably should. But let us move on.

The Media in Nexus
I'm not entirely sure what the impetus for his section was, but it has a cyberpunk feel to it. Interface 13 is a pirate television station in Babel; the InterNex is the interdimensional computer network that exists instead of the internet, because the world wide web doesn't cut it, In the Now is a newspaper, MegaChannel is a cable network ("offers a package of over ninety television channels, each carrying its own unique programming")

A basic InterNex account costs about 10$/month, while a high-end account chock full of extra features and net privileges might cost 25$/month or more.

Remember, those are alt-2004 metadollars!

However because this was written back in 1994, when they say "InterNex" they basically mean newsgroups. Popular newsgroups, we are reliably informed, include Arc.Misc, Arc.Curses.Remedies, Arc.Theory.Reality, News.Realities.New, Religion.Deities. Value, Talk.Politics.Misc, Sex.Xeno, and Sex.Xeno.Mating.

Sex.Xeno.Mating
A discussion on interspecies breeding. Normally this would be genetically impossible, but within Nexus there are any number of possibilities, including wholesale genetic engineering, magical ceremonies, and realities where genetics work differently and species can interbreed with no difficulty.

Okay, now I want to do an adventure where they try to get the loving couple to the interface with SCP-889.

...and that's chapter five! An eclectic mix of weird and awesome and more weird. It's really just a mix of stuff, but you can easily see how you can steal pretty much any of the GURPS Alternate Earth stuff for a Nexus game, and I think that was half the point. Next up: Who's Who in Nexus.

Throw these bones and call me in the morning.
- Derek Khoury, MD

[Red_Rob]

So is this one of those RPG's where the first thing the MC has to do is design the game? Because whilst making all the spells from scratch holds a certain appeal, I always end up feeling like if I wanted to design a game I could have done that without paying for a book to tell me to do it...

[Ancient History]

I think it's a game where the players and Mister Cavern need to come to a certain agreement about what the game is. You could potentially run the game using just the material in the book, but the rules that exist in the book only really covers a fraction of the things your characters could be and do in the game. It's really an excuse for sitting down with any random collection of gamebooks and using them all. It's like when you were 13 and you and your friends brought in all of your collectible card games, mixed them up, and then tried to play a game with them. So yeah, it's a bit Homebrew: the Roleplaying Game.

[Ancient History]

Chapter Six: Who's Who in Nexus

When a Saurian grins at you, start worrying.
- Zoe Chaney, Jacker

This chapter deals with the players of Nexus - races, major corporations, and other groups more than any individual NPCs. It starts out with races like the xenephobic, technologically advanced and alien Corvanni; Medleys (humans of mixed racial ancestry); Saurians (a race of humanoids descended from dinosaurs that lack any sense of nostalgia)...


Yeah, pretty much this.

...the Sayhid, a race of warlike and mystical humanoids that went insane after their astral and spiritual planes broke away when their dimension interfaced with Nexus; a race of symbiotic organisms called the Simms; a feline humanoid race called the Skrill; the Spinners, who have tech or abilities that let them "spin" objects and individuals through a cycle of some sort (i.e., they can temporarily reduce a Saurian to an egg or a fossilized skeleton); the Virtual Realists, a "race" of cybernetic humans; etc.

I had four grenades. Now I have a bandolier of Kazoos. Would you like one?
- Boudros Enchelmayer, musician

Businesses are sort of bizarre as you'd expect. Balance, Inc. provides justice to order - you can hire them to stage an interrogative trial, or a trial by combat, or a mystical mindprobing session, but they won't throw the result. Finger, Inc. specializes in finding people; GateWay Bell (GWB) is the Ma Bell clone of Nexus, and acts as the interdimensional phone company.

The most chilling aspect of GateWay Bell's operations are the infamous Mr. Blues. These operatives are all identical; apparently clones or bioengineered constructs of some sort. Mr. Blues are GWB's ultimate troubleshooters. They are brought in to deal with situations where all other methods have failed. Mr. Blues solve GWB's problems by implacably removing whatever gets in their way. Mr. Blues are dispatched to terminate techies who have hacked GWB's systems, kidnap managers in rival companies, and assassinate government officials who are obstructing GWB's operations. Mr. Blues are short, white, craggy faced men, apparently in their mid 30's.

...nah...

Pelagius is "owned by a race of eccentric aquatic creatures known only as the 'Fish,'" who can open one-way portals from their world to other realities, and provide water services. Shawki's Drive By is a traveling arms dealer; Sleepers is a chain of coffin motels, and there's my favorite: Three Doctors Clinic.

In the tradition of all the best cheap medical clinics, the Three Doctors Clinic has a very kinky past. The three middle-aged doctors who run the clinic are retired supervillains from related timelines. Each had been hideously scarred as a youth. They hid their features behind masks, donned armor and sought revenge upon the world that had wronged them.

Doctor Destruction wore an iron mask in a world of superhumans. Doctor Demon grew up in a high mana world, her armor was made of shimmerng spellstuff. Doctor Death apparently wore only a mask on a world which no longer exists.

In a mysterious turn of events each doctor regained a portion of their sanity and moved to Nexus. Doctor Destruction and Doctor Demon immediately used their scientific and medical skills to repair their scarred features. Doctor Death still wears a simple black mask - though these days he also wears clothes - and no one knows whether his face is still scarred.

Do NOT google "Nude Doctor Doom"

Under the heading of Law, Security and Justice are the Blues, an Angel City gang of former LAPD officers; the Daley Civil Court which acts as a neutral court for civil proceedings, whose parties must agree to abide by its rulings and suffer a loss of cred if they don't; the Forever Incarcerators, a group of aliens bioengineered as jailers by some ancient race who will imprison anyone for any length of time, all major credit cards accepted...

Prions are rare in Nexus as there is no real central government to maintain them. There are a sprinkling of for-profit prisons, but these are often poorly-run and corrupt. Although most Nexans would love to see a large percentage of their fellow citizens locked away, few are willing to pay the necessary expense to do so.

...and the Nar Kata, a guild of alien bodyguards armed with laser pistols.

On the criminal side of the fence are the Enforces of Riva, a mostly-Skrill gang in Angel City; Rax, a saurian gangster that acts like Al Capone and lives in a brick-by-brick reconstruction of Graceland ("he's a huge Elvis fan"), the Triads - really a melange of related criminal organizations from different realities - is a big player; the Yuppie Deathsquad of Angel City slightly less so.

Supernatural entities include the mysterious Architects, who may have created Nexus; the Farseers, a race of powerful, immaterial, inquisitive entities that dwell on various astral planes and who will answer one question for each question they ask which is answered ("What's your favorite color? Were you responsible for the death of the being known as Nathaniel Jones?"); the Immortals, which as essentially Highlanders except cutting off the head isn't the only way to kill them - complete incineration or death at the hands of another Immortal will do the trick; the vampire niche god Stleb, who is working with a PR firm to increase his market share...

Deitronics represents entities of great power who are willing to accommodate themselves to a designed image in order to gain worshipers. Its first client was Mindy, a goddess of pleasure and fun aimed at bored, rich human pre-teens. Others include Sarah Seabridge, the goddess of stay-at-home moms, and SKR, the god of business deals.

Stleb was a minor deity of dark aspect from a high-magic, low-tech reality when he first came to Deitronics looking to expand his market share. [...] A dark-aspected god, Stleb was a one-hundred meter bloodsucking maggot, worshipped in his home reality mostly by vampires and other creatures of the night.

Although Stleb is still propitiated by Nexus' small vampiric community, Blanc greatly expanded his base by marketing him to jackers and mercenaries. Stleb now provides a wide variety of spiritual and magical services geared to the needs of these professions. He provides boons that aid in combat and evasion of combat. He has also expanded his spheres of influence to include divination, especially in relation to portals and unexplored realities. Priests of Stleb sell boons that provide an edge in attempts to use knowledge skills related to these areas.

In exchange for these boons, Stleb expects cash donations - to keep his operation running, and to pay off Deitronics. He also insists that worshippers wear a piece of jewelry (typically a earring or ring) identifying themselves as worshippers, and that they provide brochures on Stleb worship to others. Most importantly, he insists on physical sacrifice to feed his insatiable hunger for blood. [///] For amulets that require large amounts of blood, worshippers can make donations in installments. Stleb temples also allow worshippers to make doantions in advance for services to be named later. Worshippers of long standing can also receive credit terms for blood offerings, subject to credit approval by Stleb's priests.

Stleb is a businesslike, quid pro quo kind of god...

I like Stleb.

Other organizations: the Chaos Brothers are a group of roving, interdimensional bikers; the COmmission of the Blue Chair are zen rickshaw pullers; GeNex is a syndicate of business interests, like an old boy's club you can buy your way into; the Hordans (aka Men in Black) are a secret human conspiracy trying to guide the Metaverse from behind the scenes with limited success; the Leage of Free Sentients (LFS) is a sentient rights watchdog organization that provides some government services to Angel city; the Mallrachen is the primary Nexan political body; the Order of Shadow are a cabal of Nexan magi that use Shadowmagic; Quantos is a megalomaniacal mastermind with versions of himself on multiple realities; the Storm Company is a cultish mercenary company from a world ravaged by chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare; the United States of Nexas (current members are 21st century Easter Island, New California, Stoney Creek [1890s all androids], Havana 2001 [USN forces overthrew Castro in 1994], and Fang Frisco [San Francisco inhabited by Saurians]); etc.

Various religious groups come next, most of which are too boring to really deal with. The Saboteurs of Bel-Khaa are dedicated to the destruction of knowledge; The Surgeons, The Shepherds, and the Firstborn are rival sects claiming to the true heirs of a religious visionary yadda yadda yadda; the Telvin Vho are "obstructionist" skrill...don't ask.

CALLING ALL WOMYN OF SCALES!

Too long have saurian sisters been denied a voice in the mainstream feminist movement! The time to rally and flex our tails is long overdue! Announcing the creation of the Greater Nexus Saurian Womyn's Front: our voices shall be herd! All sisters of scales (and scale-positive womyn) are urgently urged to attend an informational/organizational meeting at The Activist Union (located at the intersection of Slauson and Street of the Mummified Gods) on March 19th at 8 p.m. Come for coffee and rodent and help up plan our campaign of joy and anger.

I do love parts of this book.

[Prak]

This involves trying to think, talk and make decisions from this other person[s perspective. Anyone who has played Cowboys and Indians, House or any other Let's Pretend game has engaged in roleplay.

Given that House is basically code for "preschoolers 'sexually' experimenting with one another"... either they played much more boring games of House than I ever heard about, or they play much different RPGs than I ever have.

Do NOT google "Nude Doctor Doom"

...
meh.

---

This is honestly a pretty awesome sounding setting.

[hogarth]

So, that's pretty straight forward, right? But wait, there's more!

A familiarity is a skill with a level of zero. A character with a familiarity in a skill receives no AV bonus but suffers no non-familiarity penalties when performing the activities pertinent to the familiarity. The character's AV defaults to the familiarities's base attribute. Familiarities cost 1 CP less than the cost of full a level in a skill. Familiarities with 1 point skills costs 1/2 points. Familiarities for skills the cost 1/2 CP per level are free.

...I'm going to go out on a limb and guess Garcia added that rather late in the game, without proofreading, unless Mister Tequila counts.

I think the intention was that you might pay 1/2 a CP so your character doesn't accidentally shoot themselves in the head when they encounter their first boomstick or raygun, but honestly I have no fucking idea.

Skill familiarities are borrowed from Champions/HERO it looks like, although there a familiarity gives you a flat chance to succeed (8 or less on 3d6) rather than being based on an attribute.

I'm not sure what is confusing you about that paragraph other than the mildly clunky language (did you add the typoes, or are they quoted verbatim from the original text?). It's saying that:

(a) a familiarity with a skill that usually costs 4 CP/level (say) would cost 3 CP, a familiarity with a skill that usually costs 1 CP/level would cost 1 CP, and a familiarity with a skill that usually costs 1/2 CP/level is free.

(b) if you have a skill familiarity, you resolve a skill check by adding your stat modifier to the roll instead of (stat modifier) + (skill modifier); effectively you have zero ranks in the skill.

[TheFlatline]

Traveler also had Skill 0, which was professionally trained, at no modifier. A +1 meant you were pretty good.

And I remember Guns of the South. Way back in the early 90's it was a gift a penpal I had in Arkansas sent me. I'm not sure if she sent it to me because it was alternate history or if it was because the south kicked ass, but I still have that book.

It... felt like it dragged. Turtledove spent way too much time describing shooting an AK-47 and reloading it. Page after page after page. It's like he's Anne Rice, only instead of dwelling on vampire spunk it's assault rifle magazines.

[Prak]

I personally like Grunts by Mary Gentle, where an army of orcs loot earth weapons from a dragon's hoard. Weapons which are cursed to turn thieves into the original owners, so the orcs start acting like military action archetypes.

It also features the line "Hand me another elf, sergeant, this one's split!"

[Ancient History]

Given that House is basically code for "preschoolers 'sexually' experimenting with one another"... either they played much more boring games of House than I ever heard about, or they play much different RPGs than I ever have.

You're thinking of "Doctor."

[Prak]

That makes much more sense then.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 7: Goods, Services and Equipment

I aim to please.
Terminal Mark, professional sniper

This is your typical equipment section. More or less.

There are no standard costs for goods and services in Nexus. The costs, terms of sale and currency used in transactions are as uique as the individuals involved. Costs llisted in this section are typical prices and are subject to change based on supply and demand. Take these figures with a grain of salt; prices vary.

[...]

For transactions that are resolved through barter the dollar values listed below are an extremely rough approximation of value. A particular seller may be willing to part with an item for 200$ worth of gold or a 2$ wristwatch.

The part of this that I like is that there is a sense of exploration and old-timey horse-trading that you don't get in the practical modern world, but which was quite typical back in the day and should be a characteristic of many D&D worlds. But I digress.

There are thousands of currencies in Nexus, and the moment your reality phases in you're lucky if yours isn't immediately worthless. Some common Nexan currencies that hold their value are the Metabuck (paper bills with holograms and barcodes printed by the MetaBank; all prices are given in metabucks); the Raskita Ulitri (aka Money Supreme) is an electronic credit with origins in a Saurian money laundering operation, one Supreme credit is roughly equal to one metabuck; and Gold Stars, a common gold coin currency with values from one metabuck to a couple thousand based on mass.

General cost of living stuff is pushed out of the way in a couple tables, then they get to armor & weapons. These are pretty slim and geared from chainmail to today's kevlar to high-tech "commando suits" and "smart helms." Pretty typical stuff, except maybe the disintegrator guns; since there's no unified law enforcement there's no legality code either, which is a plus. Most of these are prices for typical weapons, so they also include a handful of more specific weapons - The Apocalypser is a 30mm grenade launcher, the Havoc Pack is a flamer unit powered by a backpack-sized fucion plant to create superheated plasma, the Metripolitan is a concealable SMG "popular with Affluent Nexans for self defense" and when folded up is "slightly larger than a VHS cassette," the Truncator shoots out an ultrafine lenght of wire at high frequencies, the Death Blossom is a plasma explosive, Doom Boxes ("aka Mr. Boom") are artificially intelligent explosives...



...and runge spewers, which is sort of like a tangelfoot bag mated to a grenade.

Then there's a bunch of drugs, and on into Electronics! You can tell that was written in the 90s because holy shit cellphones are 200$ and laptops apparently don't exist, but you can buy a Datacard that fits into your wallet and holds 3-300 gigabytes of data for 2-50$.

Walkman 75$
Digital walkmans play capable of storing several hours worth of music (typical price is 5$).

I'll give you two Allurian mind stones and a keg of Guiness for a OmegaQuakr motherboard.
- Nigel Dorset, Jacker

Couple of vehicles, heavy on the Mad Max theme, and then we get into SpinTech! Created by spinners, these are usually several items phased together and placed along the same "spin axis." So for example, the FailSafe Firearms consists of six identical guns merged together - when you run out of ammo in one, the next gun in the cycle phases in. Six times the ammo capacity. Other options in this line are the Spin Army Knife, Spin Caddy (six clubs in one!), and SpinBeer.

SuperTechnology is fairly short, because most of them rely on specific physical laws to function; just three examples, the most generic of which is a force field generator (50,000$) - "These have 2 hours worth of charge and work in over 80% of all high-tech realities (1-5 on a d6)."

Magic is widely available, and many mages will cast spells for metabucks; cantrips are about 10$, while day-long difficult rituals can get into the tens of thousands of metabucks. Most of the sample enchantments are magical tattoos available in "mana parlors." A favorite is the Kael du Maer, which "causes all biological material (blood, skin secretions, semeon, etc.) that leaves the subject's body to turn to fine ash." Originally used as male birth control and protection against vampires, in Nexus it gained popularity for not leaving incriminating DNA evidence behind.

In addition to spells there are "articles of magic" - basic magical items. These range from "astral lenses" that let you see magic to Christine, a magical automobile.

I'm ready for my closeup.

Some fun items include the Finger of Stleb; it's a one-shot item that makes the user superhumanly strong and fierce for a couple of days, but then drains their lifeforce into Stleb and they die. Administered for free, but only after the full effects are explained and the priest of Stleb have to watch you swallow it. Mercy bullets are silver bullets that hurt but never kill; Metal T are black cotton t-shirts made by the Black Voodoo Posse that act as armor when struck by metal.

Scritch Bullet 400$ apiece, or more
Scritch Bullets are made by magi gunsmiths called Scrithsmiths. Scritch bullets have magical runes carved into them; each rune signifies a particular person, place or thing. A Scrith bullet does additional damage when fired at its intended target. [...] Target categories of Scrith bullets can be extremely weird (Overweight Lawyers) or very broad (Humans). [...] If the intended target is a specific person, the Scrithsmith will require an object owned by that person to carve the rune properly. Many Scrithsmiths refuse to create bullets targeted against individuals, and those who do craft such bullets charge as much as they think they can get.

Psychic countermeasures are anti-psionics tech.I honestly don't care about these enough to go into any of them in detail.

Who had put the djinn in the network? The bank had a printout of possible suspects long as an Algosian's arm. Finding out who'd done the deed wasn't our gig. Our gig was to get the djinn out of the network. The problem was, it manifested only sporadically.

Sometimes it spooked the cleaning staff; sometimes it came out during the day and played hell with the customers. It had already wiped the database twice. And impregnated two of the tellers. Damned hard to get trained workers after something like that.

A basic mana sweep didn't do us much good. Pantalon detected low-level juju at both the mainframe and at each workstation. The djinn had circulated itself through the system. So I told Watergte and Shanelle to keep the drainer wands on standby as I tried to access the operating system from the terminal closest to the door. My suspicion is that the djinn had translated itself into code. Hacking in high-mana zones is definitely a canine of the female persuasion.

That's when the spectral hands came out of the monitor and closes tight around my throat. It was gonna be one of those frigging days.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 8: Game Moderator's Section

If you encounter winged, fire-breathing demons you've gone too far. Make a left and book it out of there.
- Excerpt from 'On the Loose in Nexus'

I'm pretty sure Robin Laws wrote this chapter. Reads like his kind of thing. Generic, fast-paced, focus on the player characters, think in terms of television or comic books, gloss over the stuff that isn't important, keep things moving, cooperate and let the players build some of the world too, etc. There's some ideas for running a Nexus "series" - several pages of what amount to extended adventure hooks - and then some prewritten scenarios.

Alinear Extraction has the PCs hired to rescue a child kidnapped in a custody dispute; dad did the kidnapping and is a Nexan arcaheologist holed up in the Dead Zone with couple punks acting as guards and a supertech artifact - a literal plot device that figures out what physical laws a character depends on then tweaks them. By my reading that should have everybody blowing up in short order, but in this case what it means is that if you're a gun-based character then gunpowder stops working, mages find themselves in a dead mana zone, etc. "...in order to defeat them, the PCs will have to get lucky with their own worst abilities."

Astral Turf War is slightly less bullshit; weird supernatural stuff is happening on the Sunset Strip and the PCs are asked to look into it. Turns out there's a ley line running under the street and two rival gangs/covens are at war over it. They're fairly developed scenarios - well, as much as you can get without maps.

Sometimes it pays not to be the first person to check out a new reality. Sangois and I caught word of this reality where magical berries grew on tres. So we pop through into a bad trip. The portal translated us along some kind of spychic lines, adapting us to the world's karmic paradigms or mystic whatever. Poor Sangois got turned into a pile of maggots, I got turned into a reptilian pit bull. I tucked my tail between my legs and book it out of there. We got a buddhist monk to go back and collect Sangois, he brought him back in a wheelbarrow, missed a few pieces though.

Appendix A: Using Nexus with Other Game Systems
This is a series of suggested guidelines - rules is too harsh a word - for converting characters from a bunch of different systems over to Nexus' system. This...kinda sorta works, as long as you don't think too hard about it. Mostly it's concerned with attributes and skills more than specific power sets, but it covers Call of Cthulhu, CORPS, Cyberpunk 2020, GURPS (I think this was 3rd edition), Hero, Murphy's World Over the Edge, Storyteller (with several notes "This is not an attribute in Nexus"), Talislanta, Torg, and Underground.

Last but not least, we got George Herbert Walker Bush. Yeah, I know what you're thinking, but this version of George is a gadget man extraordinaire, not only knows how to pilot pretty much any vehicles he's spent an hour with, but comes up with these great impromptu tech items that have retained our bum integrity more times than I'd care to count. And before the experiment that transported him to Nexus, he was a lifelong Democrat. Go figure.

Appendix B: Player Reference
These are quick-reference handouts for players, tables, and a character sheet you can all photocopy out.

After that, it's just the Sources of Inspiration (Necrom, Roadmarks, Cast a Deadly Spell, Imajica, Grimjack...typical stuff) and the Index. And that's the book.

I've learned to be nervous going through doors in Nexus. You never know what you'll find on the other side. So I pause for a moment to collect myself before I give the big shoulder to the door to this warehouse. I take a deep breath. My hand goes to my Stleb pin. I pray to him for strength and courage. My hand brushes under my coat for my medal of St. Beauregard, patron of fighters. Give me wisdom, Beau. I tap the yin-yang symbol on my belt buckle; give me balance. The evil ye on my boot I don't touch, but I ask it to shine balefully on those who would harm me. My ankh necklace, that I touch - preserve me, o principle of Life. I lightly brush the handkerchief tied to my left leg. Papa Hoodoo put a John the Conqueror root inside the kerchief. Give me luck, John the Conqueror, and if I meet the devil in there, may I tear off his arm and beat him with it just like you did. Finally I run my fingers back under my coat, to my Star of David and my lucky Pez dispenser. Around here, you gotta cover all the bases.

I like Nexus. Always have. It is, to me, the great conceit of the setting - the terrific melting pot of ideas. Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted, if you're willing to take the time and stat it out. The mechanics are nothing special, and maybe flimsier than some. Trying to expand on the game would be a bit of a nightmare - what could you do, except add more realities, more groups, more STUFF? You wouldn't have any real place to start, history and metaplot would be a disaster. They did put out one supplement - I'll give it a quick review if y'all are interested - but honestly, once you have the idea of Nexus, it's just a question of how much you're going to steal and where you're going to steal it from. It's a lot like GURPS Infinite Worlds in a lot of ways, and that became the default GURPS setting for 4th edition...because it works. You want to have an excuse to use all the random gamebooks you collect. I'd love to see what you could come up with after trawling the bargain bins and deciding "Okay, we're using this pile, let's go have fun."

But the mechanics...the mechanics would be a nightmare. You'll notice AD&D isn't on the list of translated games, or Shadowrun, and I think there's a reason for that. It's not a game that deals in levels and specifics very much, there's a lot that might get lost in translation. Hell, it's a game that specifically tells you things will get lost in translation. Like Planescape, it's not so much a game you want to play as an inspiration for designing your better game; you read Sigil but you plan Finality.

But it's stuck with me in the back of my head for quite some time, and I've gotten a bit of use out of it now and again, so that's something.

[Prak]

Like I said, it sounds like a really awesome setting, but there are better systems for anything more than a "pick your favourite character you've played in the past, any game, doesn't matter, and bring a six pack. We're not going to worry about serious gaming on fucking Christmas, but I want to see you fuckers and have an idea."

[codeGlaze]

Holy shit, I can't believe this got finished in one page.
Thanks, AH, it was definitely a fun review to read.

[Ancient History]

Something pointed out to me that I completely forgot to mention: Nexus actually lacks any rules whatsoever to advance your character. I don't know if they forgot or if they were saving it for later, but uh...yeah. No Experience Points, no Training Times, nada.

[Josh_Kablack]

It's really an excuse for sitting down with any random collection of gamebooks and using them all. It's like when you were 13 and you and your friends brought in all of your collectible card games, mixed them up, and then tried to play a game with them.

Whippersnapper.
Back when I was 13, collecting cards for games meant asking "do you have any threes?"

[RadiantPhoenix]

It's really an excuse for sitting down with any random collection of gamebooks and using them all. It's like when you were 13 and you and your friends brought in all of your collectible card games, mixed them up, and then tried to play a game with them.

Whippersnapper.
Back when I was 13, collecting cards meant asking "do you have any threes?"

So, you're older than baseball cards?