Biopunk

One of the many Cyberpunk derivatives, Biopunk does away with the limitations and predictability of mechanical or electrical technology, and instead embraces the weird and never lets go. Expect to see leech-like tentacle whips, carapace armor segments, chitinous horns, organic acids and compound eyes galore, be it based on a former human or something... else.

Biopunk is not for the faint of heart, as it strives to make things look, sound and feel disturbing, be it through the unsettling realistic visuals of body horror and gore or compromised morality at every turn. Grotesque forms are hidden beneath false skin covers, parasites that can be programmed to affect their hosts in numerous ways if they're not just spawning their young inside, and damn near every death, even senseless random death, is both violent and explicitly detailed. At the same time, forced human experimentation, weaponized viral mutations and the chattel-like raising of species only for their parts are common themes, forcing people to confront their own morality vs. the rule of cool, usually with mixed results and implications.

Often times, Biopunk is portrayed as some of the darkest variety of sci-fi, with its horrors well known to /tg/ thanks to Shadowrun, Splicers and Rifts, as well as the more widespread Zombies of Resident Evil or the Zerg of Starcraft. But even your good old granddaddy game D&D isn't exempt from dipping its big toe into the genre's style, with the fleshcrafting Drow turning sentient species into warped servants of specialized designs, often without painkillers and leaving their consciousness intact so they might experience pain and suffering while they long for death but cannot communicate. Should you so choose, you can even become a Fleshwarper, thanks to the Lords of Madness source book, so you can mould yourself - or someone else - into a living weapon.

This is somewhat ironic, due to limited and beneficial real life applications of Biopunk that already exist, such as the ancient practices of crop engineering and animal breeding- what, you thought Welsh Corgis and Pomeranians were a natural evolution of wolves?- or even how some modern medicines are created, like insulin, which is cultured from bacteria and used by about half a billion people with diabetes world wide.

But maybe we should stop short of making Jurassic Park or Planet of the Apes real. Install some ethics into the system. Just a hunch that might things might end a bit...poorly.