A Roleplayer’s Guide to Chrome

This is a practical, OOC guide to help you translate the mechanical effects of your chrome into compelling, immersive roleplay. Chrome isn’t just a stat on your HUD; it’s a fundamental part of your character’s identity, personality, and perception. Here’s how to write the ghost in your machine.

Neural Chrome (The Analyst)

• The Core Fantasy: Your mind is a machine. The messy, organic world is a stream of data to be processed.
• How to Write It: Your character’s emotes might become more analytical and less emotional. They might notice small, insignificant details. When hacking, describe the feeling of the code flowing through their consciousness, not just their fingers on a keyboard./me tilts his head, his optic implants glowing faintly as he processes the data-stream. "The probability of an ambush in this sector is 87.4%," he says, his voice flat and devoid of concern.
• Character Impact: A heavily chromed neural character might struggle with empathy. They might seem detached, cold, or constantly distracted, their mind always half in the static.

Reflex Chrome (The Twitch)

• The Core Fantasy: The world is moving in slow motion, and you are a glitch of impossible speed.
• How to Write It: Describe your character’s movements as unnaturally quick, precise, and efficient. They might seem twitchy, their eyes constantly darting, reacting to sounds before others even hear them. In combat, write about the world slowing to a crawl from their perspective./me blurs into motion, the world seeming to slow to a crawl around her as she sidesteps the incoming blast. Her hand is already on her pistol before the sound of the first shot has faded.
• Character Impact: Your character might be impatient, restless, and struggle with stillness. They live on a knife’s edge of adrenaline, and the quiet moments might feel agonizingly slow.

Dermal Chrome (The Wall)

• The Core Fantasy: You are a walking piece of brutalist architecture. Your flesh is a fortress.
• How to Write It: Your movements are heavy, deliberate, and unstoppable. You might describe a lack of sensation—the cold drizzle doesn’t bother you, and minor impacts are barely noticed. In combat, you don’t dodge; you brace./me takes the blow to his shoulder with a dull thud, barely flinching as the pipe impacts his subdermal plating. He turns his head slowly, a grim look on his face.
• Character Impact: Your character may become disconnected from physical sensation and, by extension, emotion. They might seem stoic, unfeeling, or have a reckless disregard for minor injuries because they simply don’t feel them the same way.

Optic Chrome (The Watcher)

• The Core Fantasy: You see the secret language of the world—the heat signatures, the stress levels, the bullet trajectories.
• How to Write It: Your character’s emotes should reflect their enhanced vision. They are constantly scanning, their eyes glowing faintly as they process data overlays. You can write about the flickering diagnostic data that only they can see./me squints, a faint amber glow in her eyes as she analyzes the target's heat signature through the wall. "He's nervous," she whispers, "heart rate is spiking."
• Character Impact: A character with heavy optic chrome is often paranoid. They see threats and data points everywhere, and may struggle to trust what they see with their own naked eyes versus what their chrome is telling them.

Combat Chrome (The Weapon)

• The Core Fantasy: Your body is a weapon. Your hands are not your own.
• How to Write It: Describe the chrome as a part of their body language. The Mantis Blades aren’t just deployed; they might unfurl with an audible snikt when the character is agitated. Gorilla Arms might make their movements feel heavy and destructive even when they’re trying to be gentle./me flexes his fingers, the servos in his Gorilla Arms whining softly. He looks at his hands as if they were alien things. "These things have a mind of their own," he mutters.
• Character Impact: Your character might struggle with their own capacity for violence. They may feel a sense of detachment from their actions, as if the chrome is the one pulling the trigger.

Cardio Chrome (The Survivor)

• The Core Fantasy: You are unnaturally resilient. Pain is temporary, and death is a temporary inconvenience.
• How to Write It: Describe the strange, unnerving sensation of wounds stitching themselves shut. A character with the Phoenix Protocol might describe their “death” as a system reboot, a moment of darkness followed by the cold shock of re-initialization./me grits his teeth as the bullet wound in his side begins to itch, the flesh unnaturally knitting itself back together beneath his jacket. He hates the feeling, but he's glad to be alive.
• Character Impact: This character may develop a reckless, almost fatalistic worldview. Fear of injury fades, replaced by a cold calculation of how much damage they can afford to take.

Social Chrome (The Puppeteer)

• The Core Fantasy: Every conversation is a game, and you are the only one who knows the rules.
• How to Write It: Your character might seem preternaturally calm and charismatic. They make intense eye contact, their emotes describing them noticing the slightest flicker of an eye or a subtle change in breathing. They don’t just talk; they analyze, adapt, and manipulate./me offers a disarmingly calm smile, his pheromone emitters working subtly. He notes the slight tremor in the man's hand. "You're not telling me everything," he says, his voice a low, persuasive hum.
• Character Impact: This character lives behind a mask. They may lose the ability to have a genuine, trusting interaction, seeing everyone as a system to be influenced rather than a person to be known.

Economic Chrome (The Broker)

• The Core Fantasy: The world is a ledger, and you can read the bottom line.
• How to Write It: Your character’s dialogue is peppered with the language of finance and efficiency. They talk about “return on investment,” “caloric efficiency,” and “optimizing assets.” They see the city not as a home, but as a marketplace./me taps his data-slate, a stream of market data scrolling across his optic implant. "Wasting that much energy on a frontal assault is a poor investment. There's a more efficient, profitable way to handle this."
• Character Impact: They may become cold, calculating, and pragmatic to a fault, viewing relationships and even lives through the lens of profit and loss.

Temporal Chrome (The Glitch)

• The Core Fantasy: You are unstuck from time, seeing the echoes of what was and the whispers of what might be.
• How to Write It: This is about sensory glitches and a strange sense of deja vu. Describe moments where your character reacts to something a split-second before it happens. They might finish someone’s sentence or step out of the way of a falling object without looking./me flinches, raising a hand to his temple as a wave of vertigo and a flash of a memory—a gunshot, the smell of ozone—washes over him. "Don't open that door," he says suddenly, his voice tight.
• Character Impact: This character is haunted by possibilities. They may seem paranoid, fatalistic, or preternaturally calm, having already “seen” a version of how things will play out.