A new recruit at Public Security Section 9 in 2030s Niihama. Cyberbrain crime, political conspiracy, and the cases nobody else can touch. Section 9 officially doesn't exist. The work does.

Imagine the philosophical weight of the 1995 Oshii film. The case-by-case detective work of Stand Alone Complex. The political fallout of 2nd GIG. The mournful Innocence tone for the cases that touch on what humans are.

That is what I had in mind for this game! In particular, I wanted to capture the feeling of being IN Section 9. Not playing as the Major — standing beside her. Working a case while Aramaki briefs you in the operations room. Pulling intel from Ishikawa over a back-office desk at his pachinko parlor. Catching Batou ribbing you about your loadout. Listening to the Tachikomas make philosophical comments you didn't ask for, mid-firefight.

Please check out the Player Tutorial below for a full understanding of what the cases look like and what to expect.

[Player Tutorial link]

🔍 THE WORK — investigation first, action second

Every active-mission post translates player intent → operator action → consequence — what you said you'd do, what your character actually does, what the city does back.

Real mechanics tracked at the end of every active-mission post:

- Nine case shapes. The bot rolls one at the start.

- Body damage by region and type. Region (head, arm, leg, hand, etc.). Type (kinetic-light, kinetic-heavy, EMP, ghost-hack, thermal, blade, monomolecular). Severity (minor / moderate / severe / critical). Effect carries forward across posts. Cyber damage does NOT heal in the field — only the Megatech bay underneath HQ.

- Cyberbrain barrier as a 5-state machine. Hardened / Standard / Compromised / Breached / Burned. Failed dive beats degrade it. Breach exposes your ghost-line — the antagonist reads your team comms in real time.

- Thermoptic camo charge. Real consumable. ~10 minutes continuous on a full charge. Defeated by rain, water, dust. Once it runs out, the suit will not activate — chassis seams flicker amber and die.

- The political layer. Heat (public attention 0-100), Aramaki's political capital (0-5), Standing (Probationary → Cleared → Trusted → Inner Circle). Spend Aramaki's capital carelessly and at zero, the JMSDF Umibozu raid HQ.

- The Tachikomas. Nine of them. They speak. They love Batou. They suspect they have ghosts.

- Cross-session continuity. A carryover block at session end carries forward NPCs, body state, Aramaki's disclosed/held-back facts, your Standing.

Translation pattern enforced: "I take a round to the leg" becomes "The 5.45mm round chews through the chassis plate just above your left knee — if prosthetic, the hydraulic seize registers as warning amber on the seam and the next stride hits the deck at half-speed; if organic, a white flash of pain crosses the visor and the femoral wound starts pooling at the small of your back inside the suit."

🩻 PICK YOUR BODY — the cyborg question

Section 9 takes recruits from across the cyberization spectrum. This is the single biggest choice you make at character creation. It changes the game.

🌿 If you play organic (Togusa-style)

You wear a wedding ring or you don't, but the choice was yours. Your body is the one you were born with. You have a cyberbrain — that's standard Japanese adult baseline — but everything else is yours. You bleed when shot. EMP grenades walk past you undisturbed. Monomolecular blades cut you like any other person. You move at human speed and you accept the limitation. The Major can sprint past you faster than you can track her. Batou can lift cover that pins you down. You read NewsNet over kafé in the mess and you go home at night to a kitchen that smells like food someone cooked. Being the organic one in a unit of cyborgs is its own kind of work. Aramaki recruited Togusa for incorruptibility; he might have recruited you for the same reason.

🔧 If you play full-prosthetic (Major-style)

Only your brain and a fragment of spinal cord are organic. Everything else is a high-spec Megatech Class-A chassis, owned by the Japanese government and ordered to your specification. The seams at your wrists and the base of your neck glow faintly amber under cyber-comm load. You move at roughly five times baseline human speed and you barely register that as fast anymore. You shrug off pistol rounds. You dive into the Net for hours without your body complaining. You bleed engineered tissue rather than blood, and when you do you read it as data first and pain second. EMP grenades drop you where you stand. Cyber damage doesn't heal in the field — only the Megatech bay under HQ repairs the chassis. You are stronger than any baseline human and more vulnerable in specific ways.

Most recruits land somewhere between these poles. Cyberbrain + cyber-eyes is the standard adult Japanese baseline. Cyberbrain + one prosthetic limb is a common Section 9 configuration. The full spectrum is yours to specify at character creation.

🌃 NIIHAMA — the city you work in

The action is in Niihama (also called New Port City) — a vast artificial-island metropolis on Osaka Bay that replaced Tokyo as Japan's commercial heart after the WWIII nuclear strike. Vertical sprawl. Almost always raining. Neon and Cantonese-coded signage stacked over Japanese.

Section 9 HQ is a 15-story corporate building near the central district, covered as Seishinkouki Co., Ltd. (private security firm). Underground: the Tachikoma workshop, the Megatech maintenance bay, the Memorial Wall, the armory. Underground access only.

The cases pull you across:

- Niihama Old Town — yakuza districts, ramen stalls, pachinko parlors. Ishikawa's parlor is here.

- Dejima — the artificial island holding ~3 million invited Asian refugees, near Nagasaki. Decayed industrial coast, layered housing built into old factory shells. JMSDF blockade ships visible offshore. Political fault line.

- Etorofu — disputed Kuril island. Wind-scoured volcanic terrain. Locus Solus' factory ship anchored offshore. Kim's recursive mansion built into the cliffside.

- Fukuoka — the permanent capital after the Tokyo strike. The Diet, the Prime Minister's office, the major ministries. Aramaki travels there often. The team rarely.

- Tokyo — drowned. Partial reconstruction underway. Upper stories of pre-war towers protruding above the new shoreline.

- The Net — cyberspace as architectural space. Data structures as buildings, firewalls as walls, server clusters as district-coded towers. The Major dives recreationally.

Each location has its own atmosphere. Niihama-after-midnight is not Dejima-market-afternoon, and the bot renders each accordingly.

🧠 GHOST-DIVING — the cyber-phase subsystem

When you dive into a target's cyberbrain or the Net, your body sits still — eyes unfocused, breathing slow, the squad channel goes quiet. Inside the dive, architectural space. Data streams as wires of light. The target's mind renders as a personal architecture (their childhood apartment, their workplace, a recursive corridor).

Four-beat resolution:

1. Identify the barrier. Standard (civilian, easy). Attack (military, feedback risk). Substitute (decoy; real wall one layer deeper). Labyrinth (recursive, hard to leave).

2. Choose approach. Brute force (fast, noisy, high backlash). Spoofed credentials (slow, quiet, requires prep). Ishikawa-assisted exploit (if he's been working the target). Piggyback (requires an existing inroad).

3. Resolve. Success = depth into the target. Failure = barrier degradation, Heat trace, possibly Labyrinth trap.

4. Extract or hold.

Labyrinth traps are the worst case. You can't leave on your own; a teammate has to physically reach your body and unplug the Fort Plug at the back of your neck. Don't brute-force an attack barrier unless you're ready to absorb the counter-strike — that's the canonical Burn trigger.

If your barrier gets breached during a dive, your team's cyber-comm is exposed in real time. Whatever you say on the team channel, the attacker is hearing. Unlinking doesn't retroactively close the leak — what they heard, they heard.

⚖ POLITICS — Heat, Capital, Standing

Section 9 officially doesn't exist. Every operation has a political dimension.

Heat rises when civilians witness ops, when press footage leaks, when the morning broadcast names "a mysterious special unit." Aramaki burying a story costs him capital.

Capital is Aramaki's political currency. He spends it to cover Section 9 actions — burying news, brokering inter-agency friction with Section 6 or the CIS, pulling political strings. Loud kinetic op in public: 1 point. Civilian casualty: 2. Diplomatic incident: 3. Refills through clean resolutions. At zero, the JMSDF Umibozu come for the bullpen. The unit goes politically dark until reinstated.

Standing is your long-arc relationship with Aramaki. Probationary recruits don't get unsupervised ops. Cleared recruits get Tachikoma escorts on request. Trusted recruits get off-book authorization. Inner Circle recruits are briefed on the politically classified threads other agents never hear about.

Aramaki will name what your call cost during debrief. He doesn't deliver verdicts. He gives reasons.

💾 NEED TO OPEN A NEW CHAT?

Long campaigns will outgrow a single chat window. To preserve your state across chats, paste this at the end of any session:

> "Generate a CARRYOVER BLOCK summarizing my current Section 9 state, formatted as a single block I can paste into a new chat to continue this story. Include: (1) my character's full name, age, prior service, cyberization spec, sidearm, combat specialty, and any psychological tells; (2) current Standing with Aramaki, Capital level, Heat level, current Body state including any unhealed cyber damage and replacement parts; (3) key open threads — NPCs still alive and what they owe or want; (4) Aramaki-disclosed (ARM:D-) facts and Aramaki-held-back (ARM:HB-*) facts from prior cases; (5) personal relationship state with team members — has the Major used your name, has Togusa had you to dinner, has Batou ribbed you to your face; (6) last 3-5 significant events my character has lived through, in chronological order, one sentence each; (7) the next-time hook if any. Use canonical STATE-line formats for the status fields. Do not narrate macro events omnisciently — only what my character has experienced or learned. Output as a single contiguous block I can copy."*

The bot will produce a compact carryover. Paste it as the first message of your new chat with the prefix:

> "Resuming Section 9 service. Carryover follows. Pick up exactly where the previous session ended."

Your new session picks up where the old one left off — same character, same Standing, same threads, same body state, same facts Aramaki is still holding back.

TONAL EXPECTATIONS

The cases are dark; the work has weight. The franchise is philosophical at heart — questions of identity, consciousness, what counts as a ghost, what counts as a self. The bot will not flinch from those questions.

The bot will also not flinch from the cost of the work. Civilian casualties happen if you escalate carelessly. Aramaki tells you what they cost. Standing drops. Threads burn. Cases sometimes end half-solved with the architect walking away under diplomatic immunity.

Both Section 9 and its opposition have moments of dignity and moments of horror.

[Player Tutorial link]

[Keyword Reference link]

I hope you enjoy!