Every implant used to be polite
The bio-implant catalog was thirty-four entries of quiet, sensible augmentation. Replacement eyes. A better heart. Subdermal plating. Useful, all of it, and not one of them did anything in a fight except raise a number by one.
Nine new ones are live in the bio-implant catalog, and four of them are weapons.
The limbs
A weaponised limb puts a real weapon on your character sheet — attack bonus, damage, range, the lot. Install one and it shows up in your Weapons table alongside your blaster, marked integrated, auto-proficient because a limb is part of you.
- Retractable Hand Blade — a monomolecular blade folded along the ulna, driven out between the knuckles by a spring charge. It extends in the time it takes to make a fist. 1d6 Slashing.
- NeuroShock Hand — a cyberhand wired to dump its cell through whatever it's holding, tuned to nerve tissue rather than muscle. Less a burn than a sudden, total refusal of the body to obey. 1d4 Energy with a stun setting.
- Cyberwhip Hand — the hand splits at the wrist into a segmented alloy lash on a forearm spool. Takes real practice; an untrained user is as likely to wrap it round their own arm. 1d6 Kinetic at 10 ft reach.
- Dart-Gun Cyberfinger — a single-shot barrel in the index finger, loaded through the nail bed. 1d4 Piercing at 20 ft.
None of them out-damages a proper weapon, and that is the entire design. A vibroblade cuts deeper than a blade arm. The Wrist Blaster Mk II hits harder than all four. What a blade arm does is survive a search, a disarm, and a pair of binders — you are still armed after everyone in the room has agreed that you are not. A dart gun that does 1d4 is not a threat; a finger that can be pointed at someone across a table without anybody reaching for a blaster is worth considerably more than its damage die.
The other five
The quieter half fills gaps the catalog never covered — there was nothing for smell, nothing for tools, nothing for slicing, nothing for articulation:
| Implant | What it does |
|---|---|
| Olfactory Enhancement Array | +1 Perception. A chemoreceptor pack behind the sinus. Trackers swear by them and everyone complains about the first week. |
| Auditory Baffle Array | Damage Resistance 2 vs sonic. Micro-dampers that clamp faster than a reflex. Nothing against a blaster bolt, everything against the shriek after a breaching charge. |
| Integrated Digit Toolkit | +1 Mechanics. Probe, wirecutter and lockpick folded into the knuckles. The appeal was never the tools — it's that a search finds a hand. |
| Forearm Cybernetic Computer | +1 Use Computer. A processing core spliced into the nerve trunk. The machine answers at the speed of thought, and a datapad gets confiscated at checkpoints. |
| Extra-Twist Joint Augmentation | +1 Acrobatics. Rotational joints a natural arm doesn't have. Useful in a crawlspace, unsettling across a dinner table. |
Build your own
This is the part worth knowing about even if none of the nine suits you. The Bio-Implants tab in the Character Builder has had a homebrew form for a while, and it just got considerably more capable.
You give it a name, a category, a recommended level and a price. Then you choose how it works:
- Write the effect in plain language —
+2 to Perception checks,Advantage on Stealth checks,+1 to Strength,Damage Resistance 2 vs sonic damage. The builder reads these and applies them to your sheet automatically. The form lists the shapes it understands, so you're not guessing. - Or use the numeric fields — AC, max HP, HP per level, Initiative, speed, melee and ranged attack. Straight into the maths, no phrasing required.
- Or mount a weapon. Pick any of the 247 weapons in the catalog and your implant carries it, exactly like the four above — on your sheet, auto-proficient, impossible to disarm. A hold-out blaster in a prosthetic calf is three clicks away.
Any combination of the three works, and you need only one of them. Mutually-exclusive pairs, recommended-level warnings and the ±2 ability cap all apply to homebrew the same way they apply to the catalog, so a custom implant can't quietly outrun the rules.
The tab also has filters now — search by name or description, narrow by category, or show only what you can take at your level, only what you have installed, or only the ones that mount a weapon.
Go build something with a knife in it
The catalog is at Equipment → Bio-Implants, and the install toggles live in the Bio-Implants tab of the Character Builder. Your GM still decides what your character can actually get hold of — a blade arm is not something you pick up at a trading post.