Suriel

I wouldn´t say so thinking of japanese myths as the one of Lady Asano. Women of sufficient heritage were exspected to use whatever weapon was at hand to defend their families. And female fighters were uncommon, but not unheard of.

Though it would by untypical perhaps, I don´t think the japanese would mind a woman who carried a sword and looked as if she could handle it.

As for the efficiency of bladed weapons in a Cyberpunk universe: I really don´t know! Both blades and armor are better than the standard is today.

The only thing that prevents me from taking Psychophipps point is the fact that normally armor has been invented and improved in these last few decades to stop a bullet, not a knife. It has been made thin and it has left out trajectory angles that a skilled knife fighter could penetrate.

Though I agree on the point that modern armor would stop a sword strike (with ceramic strands,etc, woven into the armor), modern armor just ain´t designed to stop that kind of weapon. (Although full-scale anti-riot gear definitely is, but I am talking about the things you are able to conceal).

I´d say that, except for aimed strikes, damage should be as for a clubbing weapon and does 1/2 stun damage. (Thus taking into account that an aimed strike does not penetrate but circumvent armor... Still a strike could break the bones under all those layers of armor,....etc.)

I don´t think it´s that hard... There is a smithy doing it here in Berlin. The steel he uses he gets from salvaging old east german Trabant motors. He makes very fine Katanas and Claymores, testing each of them before he sells them.

You can buy a real Katana, from an ancient-japanese-tradition smithy for about 5000-10000 dollars. (Ah, I think they skipped the tradition to quench the freshly made sword in human blood, though...)

And there is a swiss smithy who does it with the same steel cheaper and with as much expertise as far as I can judge. For anyone interested, I´ll look up the TV shows and articles I got this from.

Heya, folks... I was wondering about a new project, but I don´t want to start it without some support.

Cyberware as it is in the Cyberpunk2020 Rulebook and it´s supplements is a little bit out-dated and not especially well designed, either.

I was hoping to catch the interest of some of you for creating new Cyberware/Bioware based on today´s scientific approaches. It´s mostly both more horrific in description and could lead to some interesting results.

What I´m actually looking for is:

1. Cyberware that people would really use. Rippers might be cool, but I can´t imagine too many of us never using a plane again. (Use a knife instead. Deadly enough.)

2. Cyberware that´s based on an extrapolation of today´s research (I read an article of them using snail´s genes to create implants to override the nerves in the human body. To fight paralysation, for example)

3. I warn you that I plan to use the stuff you might provide here both for my own Cyberpunk online campaign and for an possible E-Book, that might result in a new Cyberpunk RPG. But we would -of course- refer to the authors of the Cyberware/Bioware used, if we did this.

Right now I´m just looking for some ideas, though. To see if there´s any interest and to see what might be possible.

So, the paradise style article at this topic would be:

A new piece of Cyber-/Bioware or equipment, coppled with an scientific article/link to an article of today...

Or just tell me this is a dumb idea...  

Well, for anyone interested: Germany has this law about two-edged blades being no longer than 13cm.

So a lot of blades are actually made razor edged on one side, the other side is designed for you to do the job.

Then again, it´s no problem to buy real combat knives , double-edged, on the flea market.  

Hey, did you know that Bruce Lee was rejected as main character Caine of the Kung Fu series? They chose David Carradine instead...

Anyway, it was great to watch it on a rainy sunday morning...

The flashback scenes to the Shaolin monastery and the first few episodes were real fun to watch, especially the test that made Caine a Shaolin...

Ah, nostalgia, sweetest of feelings...

Janus Corporation

Home office: Orbital based, Corporate owned space station Maya.03

Major Branch offices: New Delhi, Berlin, Richmond, Bogota

Description: The Janus Corporation is one of the biggest producers of personality chips in the world, as well as one of the best providers for psychological treatment.

It´s products range from recorded personalities of celebreties, personality adjustment chips for prisoners and the mentally ill, AI constructed historical personality chips, etc...

Their orbital station houses the main recording laboratories, a way to circumvent many of the copyright laws many of the countries on earth still have.

Janus´s agents on earth constantly hunt the high society and corporate world for new personalities. They can be as convincing as Playboy is today, many stars actually perceive it as an honor to have their personality immortalized by Janus. And then the corporation promises that there are various levels of quality for their chips. So if you´re, lets say, Tom Cruise and you want your personality recorded but want it to be idealized a bit or don´t want to reveal your whole mindset, the Corporations AIs will fill in the rest. You´re paid by the level of accuracy you provide Janus with, though.

Working through a net of subsidiaries, Janus has also built up some of the best clinics for psychological treatment in the world, providing both very discreet and expensive service. Janus denies that their clinics and the main corporation are in any way related. Medias claiming that they are using the clinics to make illegal recordings of their patients quickly face the corporate lawyers.

Many people using personality chips do not know that their chips are produced by Janus. Selling is left to subsidiary firms.

Janus itself offers very specialized service to some other big corporations though, which they call the "Delphi branch" of their company. Their AIs are very experienced at constructing psychological profiles from various media sources, so before -for example - Microlink goes into a trade war with another corporation or plans a hostile overtake, they might pay Janus a visit to get a constructed personality chip with the recorded personality of the enemy corp CEO´s personality. Good to know the enemy.

Janus was founded by Josh Zangger and Stephen Laird and was originally a production firm for the new P-Chip medium, their first product being the XPS gaming console, that allowed you to experience various movies with you and friends as main characters. Todays Janus concept evolved from the sub-branch that was responsible for calibration of the console to the individual personality of the user (For maximum gaming experience).

That sub-branch´s leader, Dr Gabrielle Laird, founder Stephen Laird´s wife, is todays CEO of the Janus Corporation.

Many outsiders speculate though that the corporations AIs have become to good at what they do and that Laird is just a puppet.

_

I actually dreamt of this corporation tonight, so my subconscious is responsible. Complaints to: test_person0815@janus.corp

Hm. What about a mandolin? I´ve heard a five string E-mandolin in action just a few days ago. It´s very cool sound!

German Cyperpunk is hard to create... It´s a matter of slang and basically the existant CP is very much ruled by the US view of the world and the english language.

Slang in germany is also mostly silly and uneducated. Take the quarter of Berlin I live in as an example: Slang means turkish german, which consists of many "ey, alter", "krass", "korrekt, alter, mann",etc. and has been adopted by many young germans by now, too. I´m not a racist, it´s a matter of fact.

If I would use that kind of slang in stories, people would do what they do today: Laugh at it. It´s not the slang of a tough neighborhood, but the slang of a pseudo-sub-culture that wants to be tough.

I guess german sounds very harsh for foreigners, just like french sound too sweet to my ears. Comparable perhaps to Arabic or Japanese. I don´t know.

So to sum it up, I think, yes: The german industry at least will have a saying in the CP Universe. As I´m trying to revise Cyberpunk right now, that will be an issue. But I see that anglicisms become more common in our language with each passing day. So if you predict the future from the present, you would come up with some german that is sprinkled with english all over. That doesn´t sound cool but silly. I made a good german Cyberpunk story once, a long one. The only german Cyberpunk author I know of is Myra Cakzan, and she has hardly earned the title. I actually see her as a nemesis.

Hm, let me try to explain that again when I´m not quite as tired as today....

I´ve written quite a few short stories and a novel in german, but that won´t help you much, I guess.

I´ve recently started writing Cyberpunk short stories in English. The language seems more appropriate to me somehow.

You can have a look at the first results at my homepage. Go to Long Distance Links, then downloads.

Berlin, germany. And I actually like this city, sorry guys.

My characters family won´t be on board. He left everything he owned behind for his daughter, who is either very old by now or already dead, I guess.

He wouldn´t have gone in the first place if he loved her mum, which he doesn´t, or she doesn´t love him. Doesn´t matter.

Hey, nice song lyrics, Caf-fiend!

Wanna change Boomer for a Rockerboy?  

Well then, go on and add it with your next update...

I did a very nice one-shot scenario once, where the players were allowed to choose any of the DEAD characters they ever played.

Was a Planescape Campaign. I didn´t like the Planescape setting, so I tailored and freaked and warped it until something weird and nasty came out.

That was fun. Ok, I admit, I was inspired to do it by the Torment Computer Game.

First hour was spent with the players debating on where they were... (Opinions ranging from Walhalla to a holding cell in an asylum. Best was the atheist who claimed to be at home.)

A real fun round.

So there are exceptions to my general anti-attitude. And with players I personally know to be fair I probably would allow them to use their old characters. But if a new player joins our group, I would be a little bit more sceptical.

I also spend much time with each character´s prelude (About five hours solo-session for each player). So that both the player and I can get a feeling for the character in question.

I´m not a despotic GM, after all, but still I try to avoid using old characters in new campaigns. Perhaps I´m just paranoid.

No, I never even heard of them, Bookwyrm, but if possible I´d like to have a reading example from these.

Gary Gygax always was for me in RPGs what Bill Gates is with computers - a bug-producer.

And no-one to win my sympathy either, the way he treated his fellow designer and cheated him out of biz once they started to get it going.

Chromechilds has been updated in between. We´ve added some special gigs for some of the character roles and next week we´ll present you with a second city, based on the moon. (If ST Alice ain´t faster with her Oceanic Arcology, that is...).

The Moon-based city should be especially interesting for all those of you who love to play Corporates.

Oh, and I want to thank all our players again, who´ve made our site such a nice project. And my mum! And...

[THEY drag him off again]

Additional thanks to the members of this board. Main Contributors to many of the twisted ideas we breed out.

By the way, some of the bands that were new to me mentioned on this topic string are just great...

Thanks to whoever mentioned Pitchshifter and Filter first.

And various other artists, too.

A great bunch of weirdos, that´s what makes this forum so great.

I don´t own these books, but I´ll have a look at our store if I can get them somehow.

Though getting Cyberpunk books is getting harder these days.

Yeah, I agree. Some other Storyteller has already left his marks on that character and do we Storytellers like virgins, eh? No, I mean it, player characters should be tailored to a campaign.

Besides, with some players we know there might suddenly be that super-sniper mini-bazooka coming up he got during this "special run against ArmsCore Int." or something. Hehehe.

You may use it if you like the concept. Might be that I´ll use it in the Chromechilds as a minor Corporation, too.

If that´s ok with you, here we go.

If not, I´ll use Sophos and you can call the one at your site Sophoi International, ok?

Sophos International

Home Office: Cape Town

Major Branch Offices: Rome, Washington, Moscow, Shanghai

While many people think that with technological advance our knowledge is constantly increasing, those who´ve made their minds up by examining the facts, will recognize that we tend to lose the same amount of knowledge that we gain.

With the upcoming of new techniques to store data this tendency has risen to alarming levels. (Just think of all the music lost when CDs came up.) And with most books being readily available in the Net, people begin to lack the skills for real library research. Besides, many libraries are now a very exclusive club who won´t let just anybody in.

Sophos International specializes into retrieving the data of the old mediums, as well as doing field research into certain archaeological sites or art history connected work.

For the most part they use highly educated specialists, many of them leading in their field of research. Other Corporations and private people hire them, to avoid doing unnecessary research,too. Many things have already been the topic of research in a long (or not so long) gone age and Sophos fees are moderate enough to hire them before mounting their own research effort. Most of Sophos work is strictly legal, they have access (or have someone with access on their payroll) to most of the leading museums and libraries in the world.

They also do research too specialized to qualify as a project for the larger Corps (Like researching all the inscriptions of a certain time period on Garamantian ruins in Libya).

For a very exclusive Clientele, they also provide a rather "special" information retrieval service... They have some very skilled thieves and even some BlackOp Teams (specialised in breaking and entering) in their employment, so if you need some stuff from the Vatican library, you´re probably at the right address, too.

They maintain a strict pacifist policy, though. Teams will be armed with non-lethal weapons, mostly. There might have been some unavoidable accidents in the past, but they were scarce and few.

Sophos International is a small but very effective Corporation. There databanks (strictly Intranet with no access from outside) is rumored to be one of the greatest treasure islands of lost wisdom in the world.

Their normal services are open to public, the list of possible employers for their BlackOp teams is rather small.

The Company was founded by Dr Steffen Altekamp, a german archaeologist. The old man still is CEO and two of his sons work for the company, too. Altekamp´s family has always been rich and he invested most of the family´s fortune into the Sophos project when he saw that more and more wisdom was lost forever.

(Ok, guys, this was just a strange idea I had. Don´t know if it´s good, but I do know I must heed to bed now.)

Hmmm- If there is still room on board your ship, old Mars Dreamer Suriel would like to join.

I don´t want to play a fighter, though. More like an geologist or another scientist. But, well, counting the people on your list, I guess it´s to late by now.

Actually, I should keep track of my players weight, sometimes. In some scenario´s they´ve been eating lots and lots...Not to mention the drinking. They usually meet in a bar or a restaurant.

Yes. I think it´s because movies and books, just like RPGs, use cut-techniques and time jumps. As you said...

Reminds me of a funny incident though. Our GM had planned to have one of us ambushed and taken hostage on a toilet in a restaurant once. Was in a KULT scenario, so paranoia was high anyway. But when he looked at me with all the innocence of an angel, and told me about my characters urge to go to toilet, I grinned back at him and said: "He´s going to take a short walk outside..."

The other players immediately knew what he had planned, too. So we were all taking a little walk to the bushes, urinating happily - and for the first time -, then went to another restaurant.

Ok, I admit it wasn´t fair roleplaying, but it was a crude trap, too. He finally got me in an elevator some few scenes later.

Munckins? Yes, I can tell you some stories about munchkins.

First one is about me. Yes, I´ve been a sinner once or twice, too. Mostly as a GM. There was an NPC Spectre I used as an ally of a character in Vampire (and main evil to all the others).

So, yes, he had to be powerful as he was meant to be one of the antagonists 2000 years later...

I forgot my group couldn´t know that so first I reached my goal - they started to hate him - then I overdid - they started to hate him so much, they felt their characters were secondary,etc.

Second one is about one of the players/GMs in our group. Sometimes with his campaigns you get the feeling, he just has to show off how very smart he is. We went through a f*cked up campaign with him (ADD). It was the most harmonious group we ever played, all the characters BECOMING real good friends. We started out doing a job for some guy who was the High Inquisitor of the Kingdom we were living in. We hunted for some missing files stolen by an double agent in service of the kingdom´s enemies. Guess what, we of course couldn´t bring that illusionist down, he was far too powerful (Being about 16th level, us being 2nd)...

But he hadn´t shown off enough! We had been forced by the Inquisitor to do the job with some magical geas kinda spell.

So we joined the other empire, when the illusionist offered it to us. We slashed ourselves through some more monsters and finally tried to assassinate the evil Elf inquisitor.

Climbing through his window, we saw him arranging a bed of flowers (which was supposed to tell us he was really a nice guy... My comment later was, that Hitler loved dogs, too.).

Luck was on our side, we killed him. Then we all got arrested, our heads were cut off and yoopiii, we were supposed to be happy. Exactly three seconds after the game had ended and we managed to close our mouths again, one of my fellows summed it up: "That really was the worst you ever did. You´ve done some shitty things as a GM, but that tops it all..."

Great debacle of course, while the GM tried to explain that the Illusionist was really the bad guy. That he had pretended to be the Inquisitor. Blablabla...

But there had been so many inconsistencies in his plot, that even a babe would have known, he only did it to show off and invented that plot twist the moment he saw we could actually make it. Like us being held for days in a state prison, after we had a trial in a real court of law, etc. A Cleric healing a guy supposed to have been an illusion. Etc. The list was endless.

Now, for his munchkin attitude as a player. We were doing a Shadowrun campaign (strictly without fantasy), and had just completed a job for an armsdealer, rescuing his daughter. He said he would provide us with some gear as a bonus and we were to choose.

Him being an armsdealer, but not Rockefeller, I decided for a new bow for my character. The rest did likewise. Then our munchkin chose an enzephalo-- Whatever, some peace of Cyberware that increased his INT by 4 and costs exactly 1000000 Nuyen. Well, the budget for the whole job had been 200000. Our GM, not knowing every #### piece of Cyberware said yes, ok.

His latest trick was in our online campaign. Due to it´s nature, it´s possible for characters to describe their surroundings. But the whole city is run by the syndicates and the syndicates territories are made clear by the Monorails, running far above the city. His fixer is searching for a base of operations. And what does he "find"?

An ex-train station, settled exactly below the Monorails, contaminated by some virus attack made by a terrorist group some 70 years back, totally empty, the virus still active, government and corporates chose not to de-contaminate it, cause it would have been too expensive, but he can do so, yes, with some cleaning stuff (used to clean ships,he bought it for 300EDs) and besides the virus ain´t that bad after all, you can just wear a simple face mask and are immune.

I gave him the BIG NONO sign then and added some trouble for him, too. It´s really a base used by the Miners today, etc. And the Cops began an investigation, cause one of their folks was killed by the Armor Piercing bullets he sold all over the city. Bad for him he tried to sell them to the cops,too.

He ain´t always a bad roleplayer, he has done some really great characters. But he thinks such stuff as that described above is cool, while it is nothing but smart-a*sing really. Showing off. The thing is, he is rather smart. But he can´t handle emotional roleplaying that good, so perhaps that´s his way to get even or something. He´s also the one who reads the whole rulebook, evaluating the skills and advantages, until the perfect character comes out.

"No, my character owns this level 6 (Shadowrun) Martial Artist skill chip for training only. He wants to keep in shape."

Yes, the bureaucrat that fights better than any Solo, eh, Street Samurai.

Well, to end this: I hate munchkins and I hate to recognize me powerplaying,too. And I´m happy to be with a group with only one of them around. The rest critizising him. Damn, Munchkins must feel VERY lonely, sometimes.

Well, my apologies, Halo. Perhaps needed to get rid of some stress. Anyway, yes... I´ve managed through strainous efforts and deep hypnosis to remember the first sex scenes we played back when we were...less experienced.

So, yes, there probably are groups in this world shouldn´t play out sex scenes... (I LOVE TO PLAY OUT FOREPLAY,THOUGH! I AM ADAMANT AT IT!)

I think it´s the TVs fault, they only showed the real soft porn things back then, so we had to have some place to carry our rising hormone levels.

Anyway, I´m about to start a new NPC at Chromechilds, a female firefighter, so I guess I´ll hook out of this for now and try to calm my red-faced shame with a cigarette.

Damn, Halo... You´re lucky my computer sabotaged me yesterday and passed out the moment I had finished my posting. Or I am lucky. Or whatever.

Really, having difficulties to play sex scenes? No.

That sex theme thing was about the dumbest advice about character role-playing I ever heard.

The way a character behaves having sex is one of the most important events. Tells so much about the character.

Think about the near-to-Cyberpsychosis girl/boy, who feels the urge for some sex. Or the shy romantic Solo, who lives in a world that consists of fast sex, not romance.

Blitzkrieg: Great love story. My most interesting love story in CP was when my character and another one found out they were gay. They were in love with each other... I never played a homosexual before that. It was both scary and fun. Especially the sex scenes.

So, no, approaching the thirties in full assault I don´t care to play out sex scenes, even if I would play a female (I played some in the past, my decision not to play female characters was not reached over night.)

AND the other thing about the Mother Theresa female characters was soooo stereotypical.

Now, my problem playing female characters always was, I wasn´t sure if I played a stereotype. And there are certain axioms (meant in the philosophical sense, things you can´t think about. The fundaments of your personality, you can´t grasp them as you have no words for them.), that I integrate into my male characters. But I can´t reach them playing a female.

I try to give my character soul. With female characters I seldom or never reach that state. It´s not a question about deep roleplaying. It´s a question of feeling certain about a character.

Now, to end this gender debate, I think that women can be as intelligent, dumb, cruel, ... etc. as men. They are not aliens. Men are probably, hailing from the planet Skat, where they spend their time drinking beer, playing cards, watching TV sports.