Archangel

Music is an essential part of any game I run.  When I ran a major Cyberpunk Chronicle a few years back I used the Spawn Album quite extensively.  In fact it came to the point where "Trip Like I Do" became the 'opening titles' of the campaign.

'Opening titles' is a useful ref tool because it escapes the artificial feeling sometimes experienced when the Ref asks for quiet and tells people to start playing.  Instead start playing the 'opening titles' and you will find that most of your players fall quiet, allowing you to begin a brief recap of the last session's events.

Previously in Nightcity...

WinAMP was a godsend to my storytelling.

After a bit of experimentation (and one amusing cock-up) I discovered that it was possible to assemble tracklists reflecting various themes, usually:

1.  "Background": The neutral tracklist.  The list one has playing in the background, handy film scores or mood pieces.  Or perhaps pieces of music that set the theme, such as the fistful of Garbage tracks I used.

2.  "Pursuit/Combat": Whether or not the PCs are chasing or are beign chased, fast tracks.  Prodigy (Fat of the Land) was one of my old choices, along with Rammstein in more frenetic circumstances.  Also doubles as a combat list.  Something to raise the adrenalin of the players.  Some of the Quake2 tracks have proven effective in the past.

3.  "Tranquil": Music for narratives, moments of reflection, or even mourning.  I found Portishead to be quite useful, especially "Roads", which became my 'closing titles' for later Cyberpunk campaigns based of the ISA setting of Cybergen.

4.  "Fear": Sometimes you want the characters to fear the unseen and unknown.  More effective in supernatural or fantasy games, the same 'creeping horror' can be introduced into CP.  The score from Event Horizon is magnificent, especially with the odd moaning and howling that occasionally turns up, leading to a subtly hellish audio experience.  Are your players exploring a flooded, evacuated biotech lab in an undersea archology that has yet to exacuated?  Or maybe they are in a part of the Combat Zone that just seems too quiet...

5. "Decking": Now here is a chance to really go to town.  I tend to use 'narrative' netrunning as opposed to 'them damned squares'.  This leads to a smoother and more streamlined experience that even the non-deckers can appreciate out-of-character.  I have found some of the Babylon 5 sound track to be suitably dramatic, along with some of the tracks from the Startrek films.  Sometimes some of the tracks from the Crow score work well.

6. "Set Pieces": Unlike Mr. Murphy I am a great fan of set pieces, one of my flaws and strengths as a ref I assume.  Some scenes have music that is just perfect.  The score for Armageddon has some particularly appropriate pieces for drama, along with the some of the more dramatic tracks from the Crow score again, and one or two from the otherwise disapointing score of MI:2.

- m@m

The worse ref I have experienced is probably myself.  When I first began running RPGs I made many classic mistakes.  I ran a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with a 'super NPC', a pet which the entire plot was based around.  I ran a Mage game who's plot got so ludicrous I feigned being ill and left the session in the hands of a friend.  I have railroaded players onto the plot I wanted them to pursue when they were 'messing around' (i.e. roleplaying off each other).

However I have made these mistakes early on and like to think I learned from them.  'Bad' refs (much like anyone else) cannot be told their flaws normally, since such a conversation is likely to be construed as an attack by all but the most placid of individuals.  The best way to deal with a bad Ref IMO is to leave their game and to try to use the lessons learned under them in your own games.  If you find yourself performing similar heinousness then shudder back up.  Another way is to try to lead by example, to be the best ref you can be and hope others follow your example.  But perhaps the finest way of all is to be prepared to admit when you are wrong as a Ref.

- m@m

The BBC News website is one of the best UK current affairs page.  It is also useful as an external view:

news.bbc.co.uk

At the time of writing no-one has claimed responsibility, though analysts at the BBC have suggested Bin Laden or Sadam Hussein.  One key issue being raised is that this may herald a new kind of suicide bomber - one technologically advanced enough to pilot the aircraft and pass the various security procedures.

News just in: according the UK foreign office there is a "strong  chance of further attrocities".

My sympathies to the American people.

- m@m

Depends on if you go with the line in the CP2020 timeline where the DEA unleashed a biovirus (or some other plot device) to wipe out all opium plants world wide.  Frankly that seems like the sort of thing the major pharmacuticals would do.

Which brings me to another point on the 'social' side of drugs.  If some muppet on the street starts brewing up neocrack or whatever they could face several difficulties:

1.  Selling in the Corporate Areas: not a wise plan unless you want Biotechnia goons to force feed you your nose.  I imagine that the big pharmacuticals would have a vice grip on the selling of tailr made drugs. Of course if El Chef has a degree of talent he is likely to face a deal along the lines of, "Work for us or meet your new cell mate 'Bubba'."

2.  Selling in the Combat Zone or other ghetto substates:  Customer disatisfaction takes on a new meaning as "Lord Skull of the Purple Chrome Fist" decides that the lace you supplied him "makes his teeth all wiggly" and grants your face a repeated interview with the sidewalk.

3.  Selling in the suburbs:  Elements of both of the above, along with the crooked cops not fortunate enough to work as a Rentacop or score beats in the Corp Zones, "neighbourhood watch", and so forth.

- m@m

An easy way to stop players from creating lethal cocktails of carcinogenic battle Viagra [tm] is to require a character to have the 'Medtech', ignoring pharmacuticals.  Whoops, that is only generally available to Medtechs.  Why not evaluate proposed drugs in a case-by-case basis, remembering that even a remotely safe drug is going to require pure ingredients, a sterilised 'kitchen' and high quality equipment?

On a related note it strikes me that pharmacutical narcotics could be falling out of fashion in CP2020.  The only generally available products are going to be synthetic, likely to be engineered for high psychological dependancy - much harder to regulate than physiological dependancies.  A different way to explore the concept of narcotics could be with 'digital drugs', such as CP2020's Braindance or Red Dwarf's "Better Than Life" (from the novels).  David Kronenberg's "Videodrome" also explore the concepts of manipulation and control via addiction to a digital medium.

Long live the New Flesh.

Fear.  A heavily augmented individual, or Uberaug in some ways has more to fear than most.  Obvious cybernetics (limbware, external armour, radical fashionware) sets apart an individual from society and potentially makes them a target for anything from bigotry to outright violence.  

A combat Uberaug must be particularly well behaved around the police, especially the twitchy C-SWAT.  One wrong move and they may find two AVs worth of heavily armed boredline psychotics armed with wide calibre weaponry and license to cause collateral damage dropped on their forehead.

The fear can be promoted in other ways, however.  An Uberaug may take much longer to be served in a bar than other patrons.  They may find that they are refused accomodation in more select establishments.  Of course people are unlikely to ask a mostly metallic Uberaug to give up their place on the bus.

On the technical side it is useful to remember that whilst limbware can be EMP shielded, neuralware, opticware and audioware cannot be in the 'standard' Cyberpunk setting.  Of course experimental cyberware could potentially overcome these restrictions, but not without other costs (higher humanity loss, 'kinks', etc).  It follows that a well placed EMP grenade can still reduce the seven-foot tall armoured linebacker into a pile of twitching servos and spasming flesh.

Edgerunners of a 'morally ambiguous' nature might also want to take note of the scene in Robocop 2 where Murphy is "stripped".  Any unmodified human would have died in less than a minute under the brutal caress of sledgehammers, jackhammers, circular saws and so on.  Another little-advertised fact is that stripping a power lead to bare wires and connecting a captive's interface plugs to a wall socket is a most conductive -sorry, conducive- way in which to make the victim more forthcoming with virtually no genetic evidence.

An Uberaug may not fear bullets and knives, but there is always something out there than can strike fear into anyone with a shred of humanity left.

Paranoia can be a useful tool in a game but it can easily take events in the wrong direction.

Repeated use of redherrings for instance may bog down play as the PCs decide they really will check virtually any situation or area they engage in.  Warey Cyberpunk PCs are excellent, but the next step from paranoia is cowardice.  Characters whom see danger at every turn may cease to be effective when their caution outweights their sense of adventure.

Breaking convention is an excellent tool to stop PCs being too set in their ways or assuming too much about the world around them.  However do it too often and one may soon find they lose the trust of the players, or that the players stop following up 'mundane' avenues of investigation and begin looking for Hidden Meanings or Greater Conspiracies simply because two dataterms in a row at a tube station are out of order when a PC tries to access them.

The use of 'random dice rolls' and 'looking up something in the book' seems to me to be unnecessary deceptions used to give the players false out-of-character impressions.  These in particular are devices I would not use, though perhaps I am too lazy to make blatently artificial dice rolls or randomly leaf through the books lying around my feet.

Probably the most effective way to make the players paranoid is to know exactly WHEN to employ the many quality in-character devices already suggested.  

If every contract a PC group takes up results in them somehow getting shafted then they might soon lose hope in ever making any in-character achievements, for instances.  However burning them on an essential contract related to development in the world around them would function to raise paranoia.  Did a previous employer sell them out?  Did a previous target decide to seek revenge?  Is their current customer trying to frame them inorder to remove the team from the arena?

If every journey into the Net involves running into strange and mysterious entities then the Netrunner loses perspect of what a "normal" (hah) run is supposed to be like, again lessening the effect of said 'oddness'.  Yet if the Netrunner sees a strange piece of ICE that has no apparent effect starting turning up only at the EBM contracted dataforts in Paris then they might start to wonder what's happening in the Eurotheatre.

And finally - music.  Music is probably one of the greatest supporting props a storyteller has at their disposal, especially if they are lucky enough to have handy access to a PC and a large collection of MP3s (i.e. the Internet).  Background music is quite handy, especially if players only notice it after it has been playing for a while.  Generally music without lyrics is good for setting the 'theme' of a scene (stealth, violence, fleeing, extreme drama, etc), whilst music with words seems to be more effective as 'location' music (the streets, bars, nightclubs, Meeting Mr Smith, etc).  Film scores (not soundtracks) are good pieces to track down for use in games, particularly useful for evoking a 'theme' as mentioned above.  For Paranoia I would point to 'sinister' tracks such as the film score for "Event Horizon", some of the tracks done by Reznor for Quake1, and some of the more haunting tracks from the Crow Score as examples; or incongruent tracks such as "Mr. Sandman" and other 'twee' fifties classics.  These last in particular are great for setting up a feeling of definite 'wrongness', especially if you remember to fade the tune into a sinister track at an appropriate moment (such as having two WinAMP playlists set up with the appropriate tracklists).  The aforementioned types of tracks are also effective in a horror context.