A good computerized villain needs something special that only a computerized villain can do. This is not the time to take the Dark Lord from your aborted Fantasy campaign and slap an "Evil Computer" label on the top of his character sheet. The thing any hero needs before he can become a hero is a villain, so that's what you should design first. What you need is adventure and campaign ideas, and a way to work your electric villains into a story. That brief tour down my bookshelf is great and all, but it doesn't really get you much for the game table, unless you buy a copy of Reign of Steel or manage to track down a copy of The Mechanoid Invasion in the used book market. A large portion of the computer language development for the last three decades has been directed toward avoiding the malloc function. While it probably hasn't actually killed anybody, the function has definite brought many programmers to grief. There's a joke there for programmers as well: in real life malloc is a system function used to allocate memory from the operating system. More recently, and in a slightly more humorous manner, an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer titled "Malloc" had a demon-infested computer seducing young girls into helping it gain material form, so that it could go on a killing rampage. As a bonus, it's opening scenario, "Little Robot Lost," contrasts Isaac Asimov's robots, governed by their three inviolable rules, with Saberhagen's robotic killers. The book is now out of print, but does provide a good bit of fun. These stories helped inspire The Mechanoid Invasion, a fun game from Palladium Books. The intelligent, self-replicating machines manage to split human life up into Goodlife, humans who collaborate with the machines in hopes of a longer life, and badlife, the humans who don't collaborate. We also have the classic Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen, starting in 1963 with "Without a thought," about killer machines intent on destroying all organic life. It escalates into a war of paranoia and subterfuge that left the reader chilled even knowing that it as strictly a work of fiction. When it is detected, it first tries to make friends with the man who discovers it, and then becomes determined to kill him. In that story, an intelligence develops across the network of interconnected computer systems. His story "Press Enter" won Nebula and Hugo awards that year. In the same year that James Cameron was making life hard for Sarah Connor, John Varley gave us a subtler, more devious computer that was out to get us. Steve Jackson Games gave us Reign of Steel written by the excellent David Pulver. In 1984, JameS Cameron gave us his own take on that story with the future governor of California playing a killer robot in Terminator. Dick published the story "Second Variety" about military robots who rose up against their masters, and were even at war with other robots. The science-fiction literature to support this has been around for a very long time. Generally that moves the game genre from action-adventure to techno-thriller or outright horror. What we haven't talked about is what computers might do to humans. We've talked a lot about what people can do to and with computers.
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