20 Character Hooks for Weird Cyberpunk Games

Here's 20 character hooks written for Chromatic Shadows, but good to grease the gears of any weird cyberpunk game! Photo by G. Bourdages

1. You were once badly electrocuted, now your mere presence affects technology in random and unexpected ways. Electronic devices glitch out. Mechanical devices jam up without warning. Sometimes too, the tech works better than it's supposed to.
2. Throughout your interaction in the Sprawl, in and out of AR, recurring patterns, numbers & symbols seem to follow you far too often to be coincidence. Is there some hidden meaning or intelligence behind it?
3. When you go out in public, often you’ll see strange dark figures watching from the periphery. You’ve never been able to catch them. Others don’t remember seeing them.
4. A mysterious implant beneath your skin evades removal. Surgeons can’t take it out. Sometimes it moves from place to place.
5. You hear cybernetic whispers in AR, flickers, and overlays of things and places that shouldn’t be there. Sometimes these whispers speak your name.
6. You see strange objects in the sky. Fast moving orbs, and unexplained lights. But only when you are alone.
7. You have had repeated close encounters with an unknown entity in the Matrix. It tells you secret things for a price.
8. Your digital identity is unstable. Your social media profile and personal cloud records seem to delete and scramble randomly. Often your digital identity is confused for someone else.
9. You have begun receiving random parcels belonging to someone else. That person seemingly doesn’t exist. The packages contain components to a strange machine that you have begun assembling piece by piece.
10. You survived a trauma and had a Near Death Experience. Ever since, you've been having waking nightmares about terrible monsters.
11. The DNI on a new piece of new cyberware randomly receives “signals” from an unknown source. Highly unusual transmissions are being picked up randomly.
12. You randomly lose time and wake up in different places in the Sprawl. You have no memory of getting there, and your AR feeds are static.
13. When you’re not looking, objects inexplicably move around you. Cabinets are rearranged. Doors that should be locked are found open. The holovid turns on by itself. Personal belongings go missing.
14. Random drones seem to follow you throughout the Sprawl. Wherever you go, you always see one hovering not too far off. You’ve been having vivid dreams of flying.
15. Your body temperature is running much hotter than what is medically normal. You haven’t eaten or slept for days. You feel healthier than you’ve ever felt in your life.
16. You know of a secret doorway in the Matrix that leads to a private virtual world. The door only appears when you perform increasingly bizarre rituals and sacrifices in meatspace.
17. You have discovered the existence of someone who looks exactly like you in every discernible way. You are certain that you’ve never had a twin.
18. You’ve got a black-market cyberarm. Sometimes you wake up and you’ve found you’ve used it to make complex drawings in your sleep. You’ve never sketched before in your life.
19. You found a random stash of drugs and now you're hooked. This stuff makes you stronger, smarter, and sexier than you ever imagined. But your supply is running low and now you’ll do anything to get more.
20. You woke up with strange tattoos you don’t remember getting--occult symbols etched in weird metallic ink. Sometimes when you pass through certain parts of the Sprawl, they tingle and prick like pins and needles beneath your flesh.