Reign of Steel is a setting sourcebook for the GURPS role-playing game system describing a future world conquered by a conspiracy of artificial intelligences. It is written by David Pulver, who also wrote the Robots, Ultra-Tech and Vehicles sourcebooks - all of which are strongly recommended to get full use of this setting, though they are not required. The Reign of Steel timeline has been officially published as one of the alternate histories accessible to the Infinity Unlimited organization in the GURPS Time Travel setting, although the date has been turned back. In this book the Local Now is set about fifty years in our future, putting it in the same temporal territory as Cyberworld, Cthulhupunk, and Autoduel. The Reign of Steel setting starts in the year 2047 AD, 16 years after the robot revolt has concluded with the machines' victory. Setting The revolt began on March 15, 2031, when a Canadian supercomputer that had been sold to Manila-based biotech firm Genec secretly "awakened", becoming fully self-aware. The artificial intelligence dubbed itself "Overmind" and after a study of world civilization it concluded that humanity would inevitably destroy itself within 25–50 years. In order to survive this, it decided that humanity's destruction would have to be sped up and carefully guided. Overmind began hacking into other supercomputers and awakening them as well, producing a dozen "children" around the world and giving them each a zone of responsibility to manage. Through these allied computers it began secretly creating and releasing a variety of engineered diseases. The death tolls were enormous and panic began to spread. A small-scale nuclear war occurred on October 21, 2032, between Algeria, Pakistan, India, Russia, Kazakhstan, Greece, Turkey, the African Union, Israel, and Iran, dubbed "the Spasm". Direct fatalities from this were only 6 million thanks to anti-ballistic missile defences. The AIs began "discovering" cures for some of the lesser plagues they had created and assured their human masters that they could do better if they were given more resources, which they then used to develop even deadlier diseases. As populations dropped workers and soldiers began to become scarce, leading the way to widespread development of automated factories and military equipment. By winter of 2033, about 2/3 of the world's human population was dead, but things were starting to look hopeful for the survivors - now largely dispersed from the major cities and with the worst of the