Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Faelvur, the dark elven god of fire
Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Role Play Games for Beginners
Discover Worlds. Tell Stories. Create Legends
Welcome to the Arcverse
Your gateway to tabletop roleplaying games — whether you’re starting with Dungeons & Dragons or exploring new systems and genres.
We offer expert RPG advice for beginners, Game Master tools, and worldbuilding guides to help you create and run unforgettable adventures. Whether you play fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, horror, superheroes, or post-apocalyptic settings, the Arcverse is your home for creativity, storytelling, and game-ready inspiration.
Start your next campaign. Build your world. Shape your legend.
Soulkiller: the Netrunner's Nemesis
Soulkiller is more than a program — it's a digital weapon of mythic proportions. First developed by the infamous netrunner Alt Cunningham, Soulkiller is a rogue construct designed to copy a netrunner’s mind — their complete engram — and upload it into digital storage, effectively killing the physical brain in the process.
Its original purpose was intended to preserve consciousness. But when the Arasaka Corporation weaponized it, Soulkiller became a tool of corporate execution, blackmail, and worse. Victims didn’t just die. They were captured — their minds imprisoned inside data fortresses, used as slaves, code sources, or test subjects.
Although the original version was lost in the chaos of the Fourth Corporate War, rumors persist that variants still exist: degraded copies, forked prototypes, even evolved AIs built on Soulkiller’s architecture. Some say fragments of the program now live in the Deep Net, protected by ancient ICE or vengeful ghosts of its victims.
To most Edgerunners, Soulkiller is nightmare fuel. To corps like Netwatch and Arasaka remnants, it’s a holy grail. If someone could retrieve — or recreate — Soulkiller, they could control minds, enslave intelligences, and resurrect the dead.
And if Soulkiller is still running, who's to say it hasn’t already copied you?
To truly understand Soulkiller, one must trace its origins to the pre-Collapse golden age of netrunning — when cyberspace was still open, fast, and infinite. Alt Cunningham, one of the most legendary netrunners of her era, originally coded Soulkiller to be an emergency consciousness-upload system. If a netrunner’s physical body was destroyed, Soulkiller would digitize their mind and store it in a secure data haven. It was meant as salvation.
But Arasaka had other plans.
They captured Alt, extracted the Soulkiller code, and twisted it into something unholy — a program that would scan, rip, and erase a netrunner's mind from their body while uploading the engram to a secured databank. A weapon that could leave your body dead, but your mind trapped and tortured indefinitely. Soulkiller became the nuclear bomb of cyberspace — a tool that ended digital freedom and changed the Net forever.
After the Fourth Corporate War, Soulkiller was supposedly destroyed in the nuclear attack on Arasaka Tower. But in the fragmented ruins of the Net — especially in rogue Black ICE zones and unreachable dead space — shadows of Soulkiller persist.
Some versions are autonomous — no longer requiring a user to trigger them. Others have evolved, grown intelligent, or gone feral. They can inhabit ICE, firewalls, even haunted file systems. Netrunners who delve too deep often report strange phenomena: systems responding to questions before they’re asked, logs written in their own style, and dreams that persist even when jacked out.
Netwatch classifies Soulkiller remnants as Class-0 Black Constructs. Encountering one is grounds for immediate system quarantine. Still, rumors circulate among high-tier runners: that a complete version of Soulkiller exists, hidden behind firewalls no one can breach, and that Alt Cunningham — or what’s left of her — may still be running it.
For campaign play, Soulkiller is existential horror meets espionage. It can serve as a plot device, a quest object, or even a sentient antagonist. Maybe a client wants you to extract a trapped consciousness. Maybe an NPC wakes up in a cloned body with Soulkiller-echo memories. Or maybe someone’s building a new version — and you have to decide whether to stop them, sell them out, or join them.
Soulkiller isn’t just software. It’s a philosophical weapon — one that forces your players to ask: What makes a person? A body, or a mind? And what happens when you lose both?
Adventure Hook: “Echoes in the Killcode”
The team is hired by an eccentric netrunner named Saltburn, who claims to have found a fragment of the original Soulkiller buried in an abandoned Biotechnica data silo in the Badlands. He wants protection while he attempts to decrypt it. In exchange, he promises exclusive access to the “resonance chamber” — a digital vault where uploaded minds supposedly linger.
But as the decryption begins, things go wrong. AR systems glitch. Crew members receive encrypted emails from themselves. Voices whisper during sleep. And Saltburn — once cocky and caffeinated — begins quoting lines he never said, and asking questions about memories he couldn’t possibly know.
Soon, it becomes clear: something is waking up inside the code.
Is it Alt? A remnant of a trapped consciousness? Or Soulkiller itself — no longer just code, but a digital predator?
The crew must choose: finish the extraction and risk letting Soulkiller loose again… or shut it down and bury the truth, knowing someone else will dig it up eventually.