PERSONALITY COMPLEX

Personality complex is an invasive group of neural augmentations implanted in the recipient’s brain.  This malware attempts to repress the recipient’s psyche and replace it with recorded memories, ideologies, and behavior (“identity”) of another individual.  This is a crude illegal form of mnemonic transfer designed to erase a person’s subconscious and personality without destroying their body.

Each personality complex is imprinted with the personality of a high level “donor” prior to implantation.  The donor may or may not be a volunteer. Recording the donor’s identity requires a mnemonic transfer pod and purchasing the process nanites for transferring an identity to a clone.  However, in this case the identity is imprinted to one or more personality complexes and the donor doesn’t die when the process completes.

For the first ten days, the recipient’s identity is slowing being replaced by the imprinted identity of the personality complex and must make a Will save (DC = 10 + item level).  Three consecutive failures results in the recipient losing the battle against the invasive identity.  When this happens the recipient’s identity is lost forever and cannot be restored even if the malware is removed.  Any recipient that successfully maintains their identity for ten days but fails their saving throw on two consecutive days gains cyber psychosis.  Recipients who survive the personality complex identity intact cannot be affected by additional uses of this cybernetic malware. 

When a recipient succumbs to a donor’s identity they gain the same character class, theme, memories, ideologies, and behavior as the donor, but the recipient’s character level is eight levels lower than the donor’s (minimum of 1st).  All recipients of the same identity imprint act exactly the same in the beginning but their personalities will eventually diverge as they are exposed to new experiences.  The imprinted identity uses the Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores of the donor but maintains the Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution of the recipient’s body.  Once the imprinted identity completely consumes the recipient’s identity it gains a completely new soul and psyche separate from that of the donor or recipient.  Anyone successfully imprinted with a donor’s identity gains cyber psychosis.

For additional information on the cyber psychosis see CYBER PSYCHOSIS .

PESONALITY COMPLEX USE CASES

There are no benign uses for personality complex since it utterly destroys the recipient’s identity and replaces it with an imprint of the donor’s. Its quite common for the recipient to be kept on impaired on drugs lowering their ability to resist the imprinted personality.

  By far the most common use is creating a loyal army from commoners and criminals.   There simply isn’t always the time or credits to create a clone army or battalion of klankers.  Normally, the down trodden of a remote outpost are conscripted into service and the identity of a solder most loyal to the cause is used to imprint the new army, but there are remote backwater stars where conscription is determined by lottery or even completely voluntary.

In the most extreme case, the personality matrix is used to produce a star empire’s line of succession.  Over a millennium ago a star emperor without a heir implemented the “One Person One Identity” line of succession.  When an emperor dies a member of each noble house “volunteers” to receive the emperor’s personality matrix.  Following the procedure each noble house has one year to train their “emperor initiate”.  On the anniversary of the star emperor’s death the emperor initiates fight to the death until a new star emperor is crowned.  The noble house responsible for training the new star emperor gains favored status.  This cycle passes down the experiences of the previous star emperor to the next but also guarantees their leader has cyber psychosis.