I don't think I understand retinal mods. How do they work? Can I get my image link as a retinal mod? MM, p 44 says just about any eye accessory can be offered as a retinal mod, but how would they go about doing it?

Basically fit electronics and miniscreens into your retina, I think...

Instead of replacing the whole eye, the "retinal mod" means you can have the device implanted individually.

In the case of an image link, I'll go out on a limb and suggest interweaving of translucent fibers in the iris so controlled light elements can be introduced into a user's field of vision. Maybe.

-Siege

Eh. I always thought of it as a little computer screen implanted into your retina...

It works -- I'm not trying to justify the mechanic of how retinal mods work but rather produce, off the cuff, a justification for a canon ruling.

-Siege

Ahhh.

I always saw it as a feed spliced into the optic nerve rather than an actual screen or anything light-emitting.

~J

Seems to me the easiest way would be to have a chip interface with the optic nerve just behind the retina. Then all it has to do is add its own impulses to your normal vision so you see the graphical overlays of your chosen implant(s). Of course, so much of vision takes place in the brain that the injected feed might have to be deliberately garbled so your brain will "unscramble" them as it interprets the stream of nerve impulses.

edit: Damn yous! Damn yous all to hell!

When replacing the entire eyeball, and modifying most of the inside of the eyesocket for use of the cybernetic replacement, a lot of the elements of all the modification are most likely already present in the eye, or it's bedding, and it's just a matter of adding the rest of the modication to the cybereye. Hence the free .5 essence of modifications. The cybereye is bulky enough to house some or all of the electronics for, say, an image link.

However, when taken as a retinal modification, I would definitely rule that an image link, or a camera, or vision magnification, or any other type of modification (with the possible exception of the retinal clock), would be very much visible. There's just too much electronic mass to any or all modification to just think it could easily and invisibly be implanted behind the eye in the socket, or under the eyelid or whatever.

It's then that you get the really cyberpunk-looking headware memory, with wires, lenses and such being bolted to the outside of the socket.

And which is only visible when in use, remember, as the zoom makes the lenses pop out like a camera. When you aren't zoomed in, they aren't visible. They just look like part of your iris, assuming you went for something cosmetically pleasing, anyway. You could always get cyber which WAS visible if you really wanted.

Magic seems clinical as long as the group has some idea of what's going on. Wierd rituals, wild magic backlashes, and the occasional NPC only metamagic (could be a subtle variant of a provided technique) can make the players start to grasp how little they know of magic. One encounter with a mana storm, and "clinical" will be the last adjective they use for magic for quite a while.

One villain I used had a variant of the reflecting and absorbing metamagics, he could hold a spell and release it as a simple action on his next turn. Really creeped out the mage when he did that with a lightning bolt.

Well, the problem is really in the description and terminology of magic between players. When describing what the mage does, he should refrain from things like "Well, I'm going to Astrally percieve, then project for a little bit while I look around." Because that's simply not what happens.

It's an easy mistake to make because the entire gameline refers to astral perception as sight, for lack of a better term, when what the character is really doing, is opening up his mind to a world of emotion and intent. There's nothing empiric about that sense, as opposed to all of other senses, so it's hard to play it like that. The same goes for Astral Projection. You're not traversing great distances, your mind is. But within our limited experience as players, we can't truly phantom what that's like, so we see it as a form of superfast flight in a dimension just out of synch with our own, when it's in fact the same dimension, but with everything in it, including yourself, represented in terms of emotion, intent and thought.

Ah, thanks. Sometimes it's hard not to be a native speaker.

Ehm...

<--

Yes, it does.

I'm in Amsterdam, to be more exact.