Companero

Not sure who's meant to be offended

I mean, we could have a separate board for it, but this one seems fine.

Also, I sometimes feel that some of the stuff on the small boards gets missed and this thread really deserves to get read!

Yeah, but Cybergen wasn't a sequel and didn't invalidate CP2020. It was for GMs and players who wanted to explore a slight different take on the genre and was always an alternate timeline as far as i'm aware (Deep Space and the Corp War books both ignored it, certainly!). I might be influenced in that by the fact that I have never really paid any attention to the published setting in CP2020...

It had a neat GM section and some experiments with layout and presentation that I really liked. It also had the VirtualFront sourcebook which covered Augmented Reality in a serious way years before any other RPG. I liked the kinda shameless presentation of the kid's section and the way the game had a coherent theme suffused throughout the whole thing. The Carbon Plague wasn't my thing but even RAW there wasn't any need to include or touch it (that said - if I ever get round to running a Batman Beyond setting game or even something inspired by Akira or the Judge Dredd comic, I know where i'm going to go!).

More to the point, the Edgerunner section in 2nd edition presented a stripped down version of the "adult" CP2020 rules which might be my personal favorite version of Interlock (having always been a member of the "games need less rules" faction, especially as I mainly play over G+ Hangouts these days), which is my main reason for being a fan. For me Cyberpunk 2020 was always a toolkit for creating CP genre games and worlds and Cybergen added lots of inspiration and tools for that.

But those two paragraphs are kinda irrelevant, really. What i'm really saying is that while it might not have been your thing, there's really no need to refer to a game that a fair few people on this forum really like as a "living abortion."

EDIT: Sorry, I missed this earlier - Clowns were a gang that everyone feared in CP2020 as well. And Shadowrun. It's almost as bad as the warrior nuns that pop up in every sci fi wargame setting .

Cybergeneration was and is great. Having had the PDF for years I finally got a physical copy last week and re-read it. There's so much energy and fun and imagination there .

If you go to the Datafortress 2020 website you'll find Interlock Unlimited (or IU), which is a fan created version of Interlock designed as a universal system - it's basically an expanded version of Interlock with various additional rules and options. One of the confusing things rules discussions on this site is that it's not always possible to tell which system people are talking about

But anyway, if you see a reference to "IU" that's a reference to the Interlock Unlimited project.

Also, welcome to the site!

What happens in the Maralinga nuclear testing site stays in the Maralinga nuclear testing site!

One thing that's got lost in the lies and recriminations is just how good a job Viserael did as best man. He's a perfect gentleman in person. It was awesome to finally meet him and M8Harry in person after a decade of forum conversations!

This has come up in conversation lately. Mort hates the TECH stat.

What's the point of the TECH stat? If you were simplifying the system, would you keep it or fold it into INT? What does have a seperate TECH stat bring to the game?

(I love the TECH stat and have my own answers to all these questions but I want people's opinions...)

Yeah! Denying it is kinda insulting.

I spent £850 pounds on a return flight!

I would have to guess that skill chips are more than simply software, or there's some other reason that you couldn't download them into your system. Perhaps the kind you can pirate and download have other problems, like malware, or compulsions.

Yeah.

I've used that as a plothook before and I love it. I think the simple way to limit is simply to say that skill chips take up an enormous amount of processing power/brain functions and so you can only have 10 downloaded at anyone time, just like the chip socket. Yeah it's completely arbitrary but it works.

On the basis of it being recommended by William Gibson and Charlie Stross and Warren Ellis as being a good "cyberpunk" novel all at once I read Lauren Beukes' novel Moxyland over this afternoon.

I'm not going to recommend it as such because I think people's enjoyment of it will rest on their ability to deal with several irredeemably horrible viewpoint characters - if you're up for that its a good book with a pretty clear voice and lots of inspirational material. It reminded me a fair bit of Jeff Noon, without the magical realism and perhaps somewhat grimmer.

Also, like several recent CP-ish novels (The Windup Girl springs to mind), it's dark as fuck. A world-view in which everyone is completely co-opted whatever they do or try seems to dominate so much science fiction these days...

OK, on your recommendation I did .

Although I also brought 4 other books because I have a problem, and so between them and the 900 page bulk of this thing I expect to be done with it in maybe a year

World Wrestling International comes to Africa

The WWI has had a rough time lately. They got sued by Woman's World Enterprises, an international NGO with massive capital backing, and had to change the 'WWE' moniker. They've been undermined by indie hipster lucha libre outfits. Frankly, in recent years the American scene hasn't been looking so attractive.

However, there's a place which continues to idolise giant Americans in leotards squatting on each other as much as it did in the 1990s, and that's Egypt. It's on television relentlessly (there are basically two types of TV in Egypt: men in suits talking at the screen for hours, and American wrestling). Now that Somalia's economy is recovering, that craze is moving south. And the WWI means to cash in.

WWI has booked an exhibition match at the newly completed Mohamed Siad Barre Memorial Stadium in Mogadishu. Among the stars attending will be Jared "The Mountain" Small, Conan Sinai and Zone.

There are a few problems with this.

The first is that Egyptian hackers, desperate for gossip, hacked into the WWI's planning department and discovered that Zone is going to make a face-heel turn, to heel. This is unacceptable to two different groups of people:

1. MogaMedia, an incredibly skeevy corporation who had been planning on releasing a new line of totally unlicensed "Zone: Hero" personality chips based on his South Central LA ghetto schtick.

2. the Mogadishu police department, who fear a riot (they don't understand that its all theater and that the crowd understands that too. This is kinda new to them).

MogaMedia's executives have watched too many episodes of Edgerunners of Night City, and assume that some kind of murder or theft will force WWI to change their plans. The police have watched too many episodes of Mullah Jameel gives Moral Instruction and will try to convince the WWI executives to change their plan through legal threats and angry letters. In the process they may spoil the plotline and cause an actual riot.

Zone's manager, Suge Michaels, is a bit paranoid. This is good for Edgerunners, because that means they'll get hired to bodyguard and troubleshoot Zone's media blitz in Mogadishu. They'll have to deal with MogaMedia's incompetent freelance assassins, somehow misdirect the police, and deal with lots of fans. Not least the Red 9x9 guys who want backstage passes...

Zone, naturally, is a self important prick. So is his girlfriend. So is his dog.

========================================

D Company - the return!

Bollywood's terrifying D Company Islamist drug mafia have been planning their return to the Berbera scene since their defeat at the hands of the Red 9x9 Triad a few years back (see Berbera Triads, above). Thing is, Red 9x9 and their allies control the smuggling routes and the airports. There are a lot of corrupt cops, businessmen and politicians who turned on D Company's allies during the last gang war for Berbera and none of those people want them back and settling scores. So Red 9x9 has carte blanche in their operations: those D Company men who manage to actually get past customs get whacked on their way out of the airport. The burning taxis make great footage for youtube!

So D Company have to try something else. They've hired an American public relations firm called Mesaline to bring the city to its knees and get revenge on the traitors.

They see the problem like this:

Berbera's political establishment is fractious and crazy, right up until it experiences an outside threat - whether that's D Company or the central government in Mogadishu. It has a sophisticated local media establishment, a powerful political party called Kulmiye Nabad, Midnimo iyo horumar (Peace, Unity and Development or PUD, a remnant of the old Somaliland secessionist government) and several people who know a hell of a lot about memetic warfare. What's worse, they're presiding over an economic boom, and...

...well, lets put it this way. These people are corrupt as fuck, but not in the city. Berbera's city database accurately tracks the movement of taxpayer money and its going where the PUD claims it is. Their dirty cash is coming from the port smuggling operations.

Simple tactics aren't going to work against a well funded, popular media establishment with the backing of lots of amoral gangsters. Simply provoking racial tensions like they did in Fort Worth last year won't last long enough. The PUD establishment has to be discredited.

Micky O'Rourke, Boston Irish public relations black magic fuck, is operating out of the Emirates Hotel with a mandate to uncover every affair, STD and breach of Islamic propriety he can find. He's got 20 years of photographing celebrities with drones to draw on (much harder to get a crotch shot when the target's wearing a burka). Meanwhile, Jen McGathy has brought political software with her; she's compiling data. As the PUD reels from the memetic assault, she's going to put it to use.

The PUD has a nasty history with the local Islamists; specifically, they've spent most of the last decade paying Cantonese gangsters to murder them and dump the bodies in the Red Sea. Their last political operation in the city is a small anti-corruption political party called Truth and Justice. With McGathy's political expertise and database software, they'll be able to exploit the moral scandals and build a new party base. The database allows TaJ activists to directly canvas voters, adapt their policies to match according to rapidly compiled surveys, and compile enormous lists of potential supporters. It allows them to react enormously fast to evolving scandals. This is new technology in Somalia and the authoritarian PUD isn't ready to deal with it.

Mesaline's aims is to break the PUD monopoly in the city, remove their opponents from power and cause enough chaos to get a foothold in the port. If TaJ can win the next set of municipal elections, they'll replace the port authority and airport security bosses. There's no way Red 9x9 can allow that to happen, which will spark a gang war of enormous proportions which D Company can then exploit.

Meanwhile, the first scandals have broken. This is where the Edgerunners come in. Everyone is looking to find out who said what to who, or clean up their messes. A lot of former mistresses are going to die, a lot of people are going to be paying for revenge, and a lot of people are going to do all sorts of paranoid things, all of which will work to the Islamist advantage. Mesaline will pay to uncover scandals. Meanwhile, both sides will be hiring freelancers for memetic ops. Berbera hasn't been subjected to the full scale bombardment of subliminal politics, AR canvassing, and generalised meme war that cities with a longer media history have to put up with.

Meanwhile, McGathy has set out to misdirect the PUD's memetic specialists (specifically a London-born and trained operative called Abdullahi Askar and his class at the local university). They've spread a rumour that a Bollywood film called ROBOTSPY is loaded with subliminal anti-Chinese messages. This isn't actually true, but Abdullahi Askar has become obsessed with blunting the impact of the film. He's actively trying to undermine the popularity of Bollywood in Berbera, and he plans to do this by creating a new craze for Egyptian light comedy. He'll employ the Edgerunners to make moustaches and leather jackets seem uncool while he should be dealing with the bigger threat.

O'Rourke is operating through cut-outs and fixers, and McGathy has no intention of leaving Boston. If O'Rourke is discovered to be complicit he'll probably die within a couple of hours, and there won't be much connection to Mesaline there to find (although a good netrunner will!). However, Mesaline will continue the campaign. Frankly, if the Islamists start to become a real threat to the PUD, they might become desperate enough to hire the runners to fly to Boston and carry out a classic CP2020 corporate murdersplosion against Mesaline's offices in the John Hancock building.

"Yes, I'm a professional football player. So I can also play every other sport at the same level of skill."

Well, that's a common RPG thing to keep the GM sane and character creation down under an hour long.

But being CP2020 its schizophrenic. Most RPGs would have Athletics as one skill and then maybe Life Sciences as another. Instead, CP2020 has a combined Athletics skill, and then about a dozen different life science skills. Nerdiest world view ever

Has anyone read Neal Stephenson's latest? It seems to be part of that wonderful subgenre of "modern day thrillers which would have been called 'cyberpunk' science fiction if released 20 years ago" that's producing so much fun stuff these days, but...

...it's also, like, 900 pages long. Which is off-putting (my unread book pile is already far too large to contemplate).

Has anyone read it to recommend it to me?

Thanks I thought I was the only one who noticed, or I was missing some glaringly obvious rule!

I say this with love, because CP2020 is by far my favorite rule system, but it is really funny how many giant gaps there are in the rules/areas totally lacking in clarity or even just plain missing. Going back and re-reading the book lately i've basically realised that half of what I thought were basic rules of the game were basically just things I'd either misread or made up on the fly to cover a hole .

I've been wondering that for the last 10 years and I'm pretty sure there's no sane RAW answer .

Also the linear frame you'd need to carry all those guns.

What are you, a CP2020 solo?

The AR-15 got the best post-punk, genre defining screech of a song and so wins by default:

That last session sounds wonderfully insane!

I thought for a moment before re-reading it that you'd attacked the PCs with 150 gangers, and my brain started to hurt!

When I was a teenager I had a fancy bb gun calling itself the "laserhawk" or something equally stupid (although it had a lovely looking weird sight thing that could look just right for a smartgun rig, so that was cool).

I like the way that those guns Hanns posted looked like they were made by the same weird sci-fi toy gun company .

I think you made the right decision!

(Every time i've sold an RPG book i've ended up regretting it a few months later )

I've been playing a lot of Savage Worlds lately (not Cyberpunk) and it's a good, very fast, very user friendly system. Great for my group of players who would never have RP'd without me cajoling them into it.

Something about it makes me feel vaguely dirty, tho. Maybe it's disloyalty to CP2020 .

Mike Pondsmith talking about the game, basically saying all the things that attracted me to my first and favourite RPG in the first place:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/18...alks-cyberpunk/

Malek77's next challenge: Metal Storm Hero

"Find a legitimate excuse to roll 80,000 dice in one encounter involving one normally sized PC team."

That was a lot of fun - and I love the maps! That said: Randy, ouch.

I can't wait to see what you guys do with Rio.