Expanded Races: The Cityborn

Expanded Races: The Cityborn
A Micro-Sourcebook for the Psi-Watch Campaign Setting.

“My prime cover’s an architectural futurist from Vancouver. It’s more than a simple cover, though. I know the talk, know the current, know the math. I know it better than I know my Colt. I’ve raised three skyscrapers in Otemachi, buried a geothermal tap in Iceland, and last week I helped Doctors Without Borders hook up a desalination plant on the Somali coast. And right now, I’m going out the door to toetag a cell of Blooded Ghost genescrapers that’s infested the Castro. Two sides of my life and they both serve The City. I love my job.”

- Personal datastacks: Ariel Atlanta,Puzzle Ops executive cadre. January 9, 2014

The Cityborn are the next evolution of humanity- homo sapiens urbis- a creature uniquely adapted for life in cities. The Cityborn are a reaction to an increasingly polluted and industrialized world, an adaptive, post-human species designed to thrive on crowds, chaos and noise, who breathe diesel fumes and bleed liquid silicon. The first Cityborn were recorded during the early 1950s, their evolution likely sparked by the first atomic tests.

The Cityborn are a variant strain of humanity, a natural mutagenic response to an increasingly mechanized and urbanized planet. The first Cityborn mutates emerged during the late 1950s, oddities that quickly became an accepted, if disturbing part of life in mega-cities like London and Tokyo. Over the years, Cityborn births have occurred around the globe, with a massive concentration of these strange mutants emerging in overcrowded, heavily polluted India.

These Cityborn children are the first citizens of a coming Earth where there is nothing but city, where industrialization and urban sprawl have claimed every corner of the globe. When Cityborn sleep, they dream of a fully mechanized planet, a chrome, glass and steel construct sheathing Earth. Among themselves, the post-humans refer it to simply as The City, and none of the cities of the modern, disconnected Earth can match the efficient majesty of The City itself. Cityborn consider themselves both harbingers and engineers of The City- their actions bring The City out of the blue prints encoded in their genes and into the present.

Cityborn mutates have found their ways into the world’s intelligence community and criminal underworlds, blending their natural gift for stealth and survival with an unmatched knowledge of the cities they are genetically bonded to.

Psi-Watch has recruited hundreds of Cityborn mutates as urban operatives, and after the Patriot Ivories, Cityborn make the up the largest percentage of Psi-Watch meta-humans. Puzzle Ops and other intelligence services have also seen the value in these urban hunters. Cityborn operatives can be found at almost every Puzzle Ops station house or field office around the globe. By fighting global superhuman terror, Cityborn agents ensure the smooth construction of The City, ensuring that when a Cityborn fights, it is with unrelenting passion.