3lektra’s deck ran out of her final Sword program, and the Kraken was still bearing down on her. The rest of the team fought beside her meat body, but weren’t of any help. She launched a desperate gambit and ran the Zap command. And to her relief, the Kraken de-rezzed, granting her access to the final level of the architecture. It was now time to release her custom virus into the system. But which surprise to leave? Decisions, decisions.
When running netruns in Cyberpunk Red, one of the most rewarding actions for a netrunner is to leave a rather nasty surprise for company sysops. Pyr0manc3r of the Cyberpunk Uncensored team scoured Reddit and other online sources (and added several of his own) for several custom examples. Some of these are just evil.
DVs, number of actions and the like are not included by design. Some of these have pretty far-reaching and potentially game-breaking impacts. Please use caution when setting a lower DV for your players.
Please note, I (JackRock) am the editor. I didn’t come up with these. Okay, I made up a few of the names and icons. I did change a little bit of the wording and format for readability. Now, on to the list!
- Dog Whistle – Summons the closest ICE when accessed
- Icon – An animated whistle that vibrates and sounds as if being used
- Brat – You leave it in the system and the next person who accesses the system gets shunted to a random level of the elevator.
- Icon – A little kid pushing a column of elevator buttons.
- Evaluator – Managers have their performance evaluations discreetly modified based upon their employees psych stress measurements. Hell bosses get downgraded, pleasant bosses get upgraded.
- Icon – None
- Whistleblower – Management communications involving encouraging, approving, and/or covering up abuses of power (harassment, fraud, violent crime, gross negligence, etc) would be blind copied to an external server. Could be given to reporter, info broker, etc for justice/profit/blackmail.
- Icon – None; that would sort of defeat the purpose
- Reverso – Most hated exec gets their next major buy/sell stock orders reversed in direction to turn insider trading into a big mistake (eg short sell on a competitor they’re about to black ops becomes a maxed out stock purchase).
- Can be modified for many similar purposes, not just stock tradings
- Icon – None
- Superman III – All transactions are rounded down to the nearest cent at destination but not at source. Fractional pennies are paid out regularly in cash to a series of drop boxes.
- Icon – None
- Muzako – Changes all the lobby’s music systems (and maybe the sound system of the building in general) to blast a certain Rockerboy’s hot mix tape on the hour every hour.
- Icon – A 1980’s style jukebox playing the chosen tunes
- Rolled – All files in the system look to be working as normal and unmodified (Saving video streams/audio logs etc) but when opened the data hasn’t been saving and instead the user is blasted with a video/gif or picture of your choice. Bonus points for using an ancient meme of an OG rockerboy who seems to care for you deeply, and who may or may not be named ‘Rick’.
- Icon – None
- Respawn – All black ICE in the system will instantly respawn once de-rezzed and attack. Can also give you admin access so the Black ICE won’t attack you but this makes the virus take longer to code.
- Icon(s) – The original icons of the Black ICE apply
- Clone – Adds any Black ICE that was already in the system to every floor of the architecture. If that deletes what was originally there or just places it behind the ICE is players choice.
- Icon(s) – The original icons of the Black ICE apply
- Editor’s note: you’re a dick. I like it.
- Highlighter – Any light source linked to the system will turn off unless within * meters of an entity hostile to the sysop. Leaving company goons with a lowlight modifier to their save but not the edgerunners.
- Icon – An old style yellow highlighter that follows the edgerunners’ physical location on a holographic map displayed in the air
- For a higher DV, the icon can show the wrong location, so it can’t be used against the edgerunners
- Lambchop – Forces all speakers attached to the system to play “The Song That Doesn’t End” on a loop at a reasonable volume with the highest DV possible to deactivate. Extended exposure will lead to humanity loss.
- Icon – A sheep stuffed animal, sitting on a white picket fence, singing this song.
- Editor’s Note: if one of my players installs this in a system, I’m killing your character. No luck will save you. I may even hurt you IRL.
- Backslide – All Slide attempts, if successful, return you to the top level and respawns any de-rezzed programs.
- Icon – An old 1980’s playground slide (the kind that got too hot to use in the sun) that the sysop slides up when encountered.
