Political corruption is rampant. Wealthy and soulless corporations pull the strings from the shadows. Society has surrendered its sense of morality to high-finance businesses, trading autonomy for entertainment and control for cash, while technological advancements and biological experimentation threaten to upend everything we thought we knew about the human spirit.
Do you have what it takes to resist?
From the mind of Alexander Vigna, entrepreneurial founder of Spellbook Gaming Inc., Bite The Hand is a new and genre-specific roleplaying system about a world (unfortunately) not too different from our own. Players take on the role of resistance fighters hell-bent on taking down the corrupt organizations that have harmed so many in the pursuit of profits, using a wide variety of high-tech weapons and gadgets to sneak, hack, and shoot their way through a dystopian cyberpunk landscape.
First off, a word about the system upon which Bite The Hand is based – Mothership, published by Tuesday Knight Games Inc. Mothership immediately captivated me with its elegant-yet-simple character creation and no-nonsense combat rules. (This neat and tidy package of instructions has been dubbed the Panic Engine, and forms the backbone of Bite The Hand’s ruleset). This parent system is clearly built on the back of genre-defining space horror films where the most any protagonist can hope for is escaping alive and (mostly) intact, both physically and mentally.
Bite The Hand embraces and builds on this tense gameplay loop, dragging players from a space-bound nightmare scenario down to a gritty and futuristic urban environment, inspired by media such as Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077, where the bad guys (unaffectionately known in this universe as “corpos”) all wear fancy suits and everyone’s got at least a little bit of circuitry built into their brains.
Stats
Bite The Hand has as streamlined a character creation process as I’ve ever seen, mostly matching the simple six-step process laid out in Mothership. Core PC stats are limited to three broad categories:
- Intellect, which dictates hacking and tech-related ability;
- Strength, for anything remotely athletic;
- Skill, which acts as a catch-all for any other endeavor not covered by the previous two stats, such as lockpicking and throwing objects.
Alongside these stats are an equally simple system of Save values, which are called into play when PCs find themselves under attack from threats like enemy hackers (“Firewall”), airborne toxins (“Body”), or mental intrusion (“Mind”).
Every action taken by your character, or hazard to be hopefully avoided, is determined with a quick and easy d100 roll-under one of these six double-digit numbers. Even Mothership, which is already a pretty boiled-down system, bottoms out at eight.
Health
Health management in Bite The Hand has been given an extra dimension with the inclusion of Wounds – points at which the damage incurred (or dealt out to enemy drones or corporate agents) creates lasting status effects. Hacked a remote flamethrower to barbeque that crazed cyborg? He’s now Burning and takes ongoing damage every round. Dropped a Shock Grenade into the hand of a killer robot? He might end up paralyzed – plus, electricity damage is multiplied for robots AND bypasses their armor rating which is just *chef’s kiss*.
Stress & Panic
The hallmark of the Panic Engine is, as you may have guessed from the name, its harrowing Stress & Panic mechanic. As a reflection of the PCs overall mental state, your character’s Stress levels play a direct role in how likely they are to suffer debilitating effects at the worst possible moment.
Stress rises in response to a number of situations, mostly when players royally screw up or get mind-flayed, but also when “anything really fucking insane happens, at the Warden’s discretion,” to quote the rulebook directly. As a nascent Warden myself, I must admit that this caveat delights me to no end.
Eventually it all becomes just a bit too much to handle. Enter the Panic Table, used to determine the exact nature of your Panic effect at random via a d20 roll. And Panicking is no picnic – core stats can get nerfed, cybernetics can malfunction, and hearts can give out entirely.
(To be clear, Bite The Hand is NOT shy about insta-mashing your PC’s tragic life out of existence. You’ve been warned.)
Heat & Debt
Rounding out the sparse stats, Bite The Hand introduces two new elements to add tension and drama: Heat and Debt.
These two values really only come into play over the course of multi-session games, acting as a legacy feature that will affect gameplay later on based on actions taken much earlier in the story. That being said, they can be safely ignored for quick one-shots.
Heat
In a totalitarian society, not much goes unnoticed, and especially not the disruptive actions of a rogue cell intent on taking down The Man from the inside. The more chaos your PCs cause, the more negative attention they’ll attract from progressively bigger and bigger fish in the industrial pond.
Each mission undertaken brings more Heat, sometimes dramatically so if a big-league corpo was killed or a building was blown up in the process. This can come back to bite the players later on in the form of dispatched hit squads or other nasty surprises, often attacking right when the PCs finally reach a state of relative safety. I personally encourage all future Wardens to use this feature to remind the players that, in the world of Bite The Hand, they’re never truly safe.
Debt
Big tech isn’t the only threat to PCs’ well-being, as they’ll have to engage with the unsavoriest of underground characters, possibly in pursuit of extra gear or some shiny new cybernetics. Debt is incurred when players inevitably have to turn to shadier, less-than-legal means of securing funding for their extracurricular activities. These don’t come cheap, and borrowing money is a great way to both get into some fun toys early on AND put a target on your back until it’s all paid off. Unwilling or unable to pay? That’s too bad. Perhaps a nighttime visit from some beefed-up goons with infrared eyeballs can convince your team to come up with the money.
Cybernetics
Now we get to the exciting stuff, the REAL cyberpunk madness you’ve all been waiting for. After all, this near-future tech-ridden world wouldn’t be complete if every conceivable body part wasn’t up for grabs, ready to be replaced at will with a metallic, souped-up version. Who needs magic spells or superpowers when you can install a submachine gun into your forearm, send microcomputers swimming through your bloodstream, slide layers of flexible armor underneath your skin, or shove a fully functioning smartphone into your brainstem?
Bite The Hand invites – nay, expects the players to take full advantage of the lengthy menu of available cybernetic enhancements, a detailed list which is obviously a labor of love from the system’s creator. Each of the four starter classes available to choose from in Bite The Hand comes with starter cybernetics and gives players an additional upgrade for free!
Well…almost free.
You see, as it turns out, shoving bits of metal and wire into one’s body isn’t the most relaxing process. As such, every cybernetic implant increases the PCs default Stress level, making Panic situations even dicier. As the rulebook explains explicitly, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill enhancements to correct some organic flaw or disability; these are extra parts that push the player’s mind and body beyond its normal limits.
Combat
Combat in Bite The Hand is kept blessedly simple and straightforward. Finally, no more rolling to see if you hit an otherwise unobstructed shot. All things being equal, your attacks connect without a fuss, leaving you free to gleefully roll for damage. In less ideal fighting conditions, such as a smoky room, having a limb restrained, or against an enemy using a cloaking device, the Warden might decree that an attack roll be made with the most relevant stat, generally either Skill or Strength. Otherwise, combat flows easily and ends quickly. Just try not to slip on the bloodstains and spare parts on your way out.
Armor
Armor values are similarly easy to understand, reducing incoming physical damage by a set value, although good defensive gear isn’t the easiest to come by. After all, among the four starter classes, only “Soldier” is designed to have a background in direct combat. Most PCs will have to rely on a combination of social panache, tech skills, and hacking prowess to overcome the odds. Traditional armor can also be destroyed, although cybernetically implanted layers of protective weave are impervious to this risk.
Hacking
Thinking with tech is, to my mind, where Bite The Hand scenarios really shine. In this futuristic world, anything that CAN have an unnecessary microprocessor installed DOES have an unnecessary microprocessor installed, thus rendering it vulnerable to intrusion and remote control. Players are encouraged to take advantage of this handy feature via their hackdecks, a handheld all-purpose tool used to infiltrate and override connected systems through the electrical signals flowing all around the PCs.
Each game’s Warden is free to decide how powerful these hackdecks are allowed to be, but I like to think of it as a technology language translator through which a skilled user can communicate with nearly every piece of tech in sight. Streetlights, smartphones, drone turrets, and even implanted cybernetics can all be “spoken to” through the hackdeck, guided towards malfunction or subtly altered in, shall we say, some very useful ways. Of course, you’ll have to get past their Firewalls first…
In a modern tabletop landscape of heavy number crunching and video-gamification, Bite The Hand is another quality entry in the list of new systems that strive to simplify the player experience in favor of more immersive storytelling. This comes as a welcome sigh of relief for both new players and old hands, especially folks like myself that struggle to schedule in TTRPG time at all, let alone if I have to juggle a bunch of sheets and PC data. There are fewer details and dice to keep track of, and even the inclusion of new elements like Stress and Heat primarily serve to further the narrative dynamic, not just as raw gameplay code to be minmaxxed into bland oblivion.
The result? A system that drives an immersive and thrilling jaunt into one of today’s most popular scifi subgenres, all wrapped up in a simplified ruleset that proves to be nicely accessible for both new and experienced players. I can easily see the BTH canon expanding to include several competing factions à la Vampire: The Masquerade, developing into a full-blown universe that is more than capable of bringing to life any urban future nightmare your twisted minds can conjure.
Pick up your copy today (BITE THE HAND on Itch.io) and get ready to jack in. The uprising awaits!
