Vile Traveller

Fria Ligan is releasing a Blade Runner RPG in 2022:

https://freeleaguepublishing.com/en/games/blade-runner/

It's kind of appropriate and inevitable that it's happening now.

On 08/11/2020 at 03:26, Cybernetic Jesus said:

Which city is that?

On 08/11/2020 at 07:18, senior officer Mikael van Atta said:

Hong Kong, I guess.

Yeah, taken on my last night there (after 20 years, on-and-off). It wouldn't be a good basis for Ghost In The Shell any more, nowadays.

On 12/10/2020 at 12:50, Strawberry-Cream said:

Reeves is an actor. Is it asking too much to act the role by dying his hair?

The irony is that, at his age, he probably is dyeing his hair already ...

Almost time to say my final goodbye to this dystopia, cool though it used to be ...

On 12/09/2020 at 08:33, Cybernetic Jesus said:

Also, when January, 1st, 2021 comes around, will Cyberpunk 2020 become an Alternate History Game?

It's for the best, stops the Real World from screwing up your campaign plans.

Excellent rant - social media definitely lends itself best to extreme polarisation. The increased need for virtual rather than than personal interaction is worrying in that it tends to reinforce those all-or-nothing stances, because it's easy to amplify those on one side and filter out those on the other.

It's rather horrifying, but I feel there is a lot more Cyberpunk inspiration out in the world today than in most of the speculative fiction of the 80s. Only today this was happening in broad daylight on the street outside a government building, as I was inside sorting out my final taxes before making my escape to a marginally less oppressive state. The fact that there was only token protest from members of the public is a depressing reminder of how alone the "heores" in our fiction are. Not that I would have stepped in. My rebellion is likely to take the form of writing a Cyberpunk game set in Hong Kong, with all of this grim reality underlying the chrome and neon veneer.

14 hours ago, The Leviathan said:

Welcome, Vile Traveller.  Interesting times.  I suspect Dystopia is even less alluring when you have a front-row seat.  Hoping your transition from HK is free of hassles.

Thanks, Leviathan. Indeed, it's a whole lot less fun when you're 30 years past the average netrunner age! 

On 06/08/2019 at 19:23, senior officer Mikael van Atta said:

I have read the Worldbook with, I hope, due care.

The world of RED makes no sense to me.

That's a pity, the main interest I have in RED is how the world updates Cyberpunk to deal with modern technology, society, and sensibilities. No easy task given how far we have diverged from the 80s genre predictions, which is why I was keen to see how it would be done by R.Taslorian. I am quite a fan of retro-gaming, and have no problem with alternative timeline games where starship computers take up entire rooms or the Soviet Union is still going strong in the 21st century, but I was hoping RED would go for the hard way and try to do a full reboot while remaining faithful to the core elements of 2.0.2.0.

Well, I might still pick up the book when it comes out, but I may have to kitbash my own version of the setting if it's going the way it seems from your reading of the quickstart.

There is certainly more ambitious utopian thinking in the modernist and brutalist thinking of the 60s and 70s than in the much more cynical post-modernism of the 80s. Being in the industry I had occasion to look at a lot of examples of this type of planning, which led me to conclude it wasn't so much the designs which failed but the whole concept of top-down planning - Le Corbusier is a prime example of a demonised designer whose works often failed for unforeseen (possibly unforseeable) reasons. After decades in the town planning system I am quite sure that the theory in no way is fit for the purpose of coping with the human factor.

I think that fits very well with the whole cyberpunk gaming ethos - after all, most of the bad things that happen are not done out of "evil" intentions, even if they are mostly for selfish capitalist reasons. But there is room for another layer of well-intentioned but ultimately doomed social engineering by governments, corporations, or even billionaire eccentrics.

Hullo there! A 'senior' cyberpunk fan here. My Cyberpunk gaming experience has been mostly with GURPS, though I've run quite a few homebrew games using Basic Roleplaying rules. About to relocate from my long-time home of Hong Kong as lately it's drifted too far from Cyberpunk into an altogether less fun kind of dystopia. Hoping to learn a bit more about Cyberpunk 2020, though I'll probably eventually end up writing my own RPG version of the genre.

Soleri, though trained as an architect, was more famous for his futuristic town planning ideas. He actually coined the term 'arcology', and he published quite a lot of academic works on alternative urban futures. As his proposals were intended as solutions to current problems, they do of course need a bit of adaption to the cyberpunk aesthetic. But, as with many architect-centric theories*, it doesn't take much to turn utopia into dystopia.

* That's not a slur against architects, it's just an observation based on their usual place in the built environment industry, i.e. somewhat isolated from the other professions and with limited training outside the box of building envelopes.