Companero

A follow-up to the old Wage Slave posts, with 30 more futuristic shitty jobs for your players to avoid at all costs:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2016...redundancy.html

Some locations for meeting your contacts:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2016...ur-johnson.html

Specificity is the soul of narrative. I think you could stand to be more specific about the types of licensed vice - if the GM doesn't like the roll they can always ignore. If it doesn't fit into their world, they can always just change that entry on the table.

On the subject of store fronts, I got inspired and wrote this:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2016...ur-johnson.html

I guess that would add Insect Farms (which can be pretty small and gourmet...), Stack Farms (an increasingly real thing) and various types of AR enhanced social hub to the world.

It amazes me how quickly new tech springs up on main street - it took a year for E-Cig stores to be everywhere.

Interrupt just gave me his collection of Interface Magazine issues

There are 4 of them.

I know very little about the magazine, so questions:

How many issues were there? I've only ever seen 4.

What's the basic history of the magazine? I've noticed my copy has an update at the end converting content to CP2020 from CP2013. Is this something that was sold in multiple publications by R Tal?

One problem with dropping out of the internet for a week is there's too much to keep up with when you get back

(I did get to go for a few drinks with Interrupt tho...)

There's so much wonderful stuff here. Those table designs are looking better than I imagined they could.

One point that stands up - a lot of these street location ideas are places you can already find in any town. Keep it science fictional, guys

Yeah

As a side-note, Corporates are so far outside my normal PC or even PC team experience that I have no idea if any of those characters are even remotely workable. I think they are...

I can't wait to get to comprehensible characters like Fixers and Medias

Only a little late:

CORPORATES

I thought it was intended as a Cyberpunk 2020 resource, but from what Companero writes, he intends to make it a general cyberpunk (perhaps even transhuman?) role-playing resource...

Ignore the bit about uplifted Persian cats. I just meant it as an example to say... what Geist and Gomiville said in the posts that followed, much better than I did.

And if you want these list to contain events like I think you've mentioned, better have these lists really long (like, 100 entries per table is something I think I would consider optimal).

Yeah, absolutely.

Just some way of quickly rolling up a basic street or mall or multi-purpose office building or whatever. Obviously, as a GM, you'll custom make the important ones (like maybe the office building I used as an example above), but sometimes you just need to suddenly create a new one.

I was thinking about that. Why not have a square grid with big (like 3" across or something) squares with the centre point marked in red ink?

Grab a scoop of multi-coloured dice of different sizes, the more random the better, and roll them across the grid.

The centre point is whatever building the characters are casing/targeting/running away from.

The dice land on the grid determining the rough location of buildings surrounding the target. The colour of the dice indicates type, while the number on the dice might be an indication of size? Height? Something like that .

I definitely support all the stuff about environment generators, because it'll help me do parkour rooftop chases the way I always wanted to.

Plus, maybe we could crowd source something regarding the five senses; hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. Sense & The City table anyone?

I LOVE THIS <3

One of the most inspirational lines I ever read in a cyberpunk novel was in Ken Macleod's Cosmonaut Keep, where it has the following paragraph (italics are mine):

Our stuff... I can smell it on the wind. New tech, wet tech: bioelectronic manufacture, with its whiff of acetone and alcohol, Edinburgh's familiar technology of brewery and distillery and refinery expanded to produce a whole new range of hardware kit, as cheap and disposable and recyclable as paper.

I adore the way that sentence provides a visceral sense of the setting's biotechnology while linking it to the history of the city, making it seem like a lived in continuation of something old and street level.

A Sense and the City table would be perfect for doing the same thing.

I'm personally poorly qualified to write it, though - i'll leave it to you guys

I had plans on my to do list to do this and get the tables into excel so that could have a simplified front end where you'd select the zone, freeway, shopping, industrial or whatever and with a few dropdown choices would spout out a random encounter or location at the other end. No dice rolling and just a tablet next to me while GM'ing. The future..

That sounds great, and also something Malek77 could help with (he's a great exponent of the "GM's support tablet"). And not just because when I told him about this project he said:

We need cellular infrastructure interpolation algorithms.

and I said "wot?"

Actually, something interesting he wrote in that conversation had implications for this project:

I've been analysing why I find DND maps so easy to create.

It's their complexity scale - everything is human scaled, objects are fixed, expectations are simple, travel is limited.

In Cyberpunk, the players might try to hack a smart fridge microphone by clamping a signal altering device to an unsecured power line a block away in a cluster of mega apartment blocks.

Worse, you have both legacy systems and future systems overlaid.

They can use the old 1970's subway to get under the net node.

That's a... thing. A thing to think about and reckon with.

Holy crap, the GM Resources section of Stars Without Number is amazing! Person names, place names, both in multiple languages. Corporation creation, sure, but also religion and political party creation! There's even a random architecture table! This could be a fun resource for any kind of world building. Thanks for the tip.

Everything that guy puts out is useful or inspiring, even the fantasy stuff. The location tag generators in the modern day Silent Legions game, the tech-cults and spy network generators in Darkness Visible, the military mission generators in Starvation Cheap are especially great.

Speaking of defensible places, there was an article awhile back about discrimination in urban planning in a number of US cities.

 

Not sure if it's directly translatable to a city kit like this, but it might spur some ideas for how deeply unequal and corrupt future city might look like.

Yeah. Or, like, London or LA today .

(I discovered all this stuff originally reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis, a book I first found out about in the acknowledgements of Gibson's Virtual Light. It's dense and pulls no punches for the casual reader, but there's no better source of information on how corporate and political capital flows are reflected in the physical layout of a city, how gang territories expand and interact, how architecture and security effect the society around them, etc)

Say,

Table 1: Climate

polar, continental, dry, moderate, tropical...

 

Table 2: Dominant landscape

mountains, hills, plains, desert, river valley, lakeside, seaside, marshes...

 

Table 3: dominant industry (while all these industry types might - and probably should - be present in a major city, some would be more, and others less influential).

What made Vornheim so good was the focus on immediate gameplay. The goal of the book isn't to generate the overall setting. You already know you're in Tokyo or Night City or the Forgotten Realms or wherever. It's for that immediate moment in the game when the players go into town for shopping or investigation or something and you need to rapidly generate detail you hadn't expected to need.

It's entirely focused on generating events and people that occur in the game. It's for when there's a chase and you need to know what buildings you're running through, or you need to break up a shopping trip with some encounters, or you want to generate some weird carnival events on the fly. You've probably already got the climate of the city generated, because you described it during the adventures you actually had time to plan.

There's a big chance the district will turn out fitting the dominant culture.

But there's also a chance it will turn to be a foreign quarter of some kind - Little China, Little Tokyo, Little Russia, Little Italy, whatever ethnic district we can think of (here comes a table). I'd break it down into rough cultural / geographical groups, and then maybe into subgroups (roll result: European, roll again to determine: Portugese, Spanish, French, Italian, Swiss, Dutch, Belgain, Danish, German, Austrian...). A quarter can be just as well general European as well as specifically French, for example. That's GM's choice.

I think we should beware of anything too setting specific - the idea is to build a cyberpunk city, but the genre is really wide. What if the setting is Firefly? Or, like, Poland? We should avoid tables based on specific places but abstract it -

- for instance:

The GM rolls on the neighbourhood generator.

He gets "besieged minority ghetto."

Depending on his setting that might be Tibetans surrounded by Han Chinese, Samoans surrounded by uplifted Persian cats, or baseline humans besieged by androids. Whatever fits the setting.

Stars Without Number (and the modern world version called Silent Legions) does this very well. You take a planet or neighbourhood and you generate a tag for it.

The tag isn't "40% Persian Cats, 20% E-Ghosts, 8% Scots" or something like that, but "Corrupt Police" or "Poisoned Ground" or "Suborned Media". That's the big hook for shit happening in this neighbourhood. Then there's a list of inspiration character ideas. Kevin Crawford uses the same format for Factions, and I used it here (less effectively, of course):

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...k-factions.html

Everything should be there to create immediate inspiration on the table, when you don't have time to sit down and think about it.

So, if there's a Foreign Quarter, we should be generating plot hooks associated with it rather than the specifics of who lives there, etc.

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The other thing that Vornheim does so well is be specifically problem focused. It's why it comes across as so immediately useful.

It was written because the publisher always had a problem when his players went back into town to sell the dungeon loot and all the towns felt the same, so he commissioned some dungeon tools.

I'm thinking what urban problems I have in games and I've got a few big ones.

- Generating contacts for fixers and faces.

- Generating interesting vendors.

- Generating contacts for fixers and faces.

- Generating an interesting electronic environment for hackers.

- Generating contacts for fixers and faces.

- Generating interesting obstacles for chases on foot or vehicle.

- Generating contacts for fixers and faces.

Bit of a theme developing there...

Best way to generate a contents page would be for everyone to write down the problems they have when running urban environments which could be solved with a neat tool, and then we put them into a list

I think any mention of Night City should be purged from this thread, just because Vornheim is intentionally a very different beast - it was intentionally written to be very different from the "describe every street in detail" model of city sourcebook (I have nothing against the Night City book, but...).

I've been thinking about it for ages - the Electronic Encounter tables on my blog a couple of months back were a kind of experiment in tone - and been trying to pare down what a CP book would have to deal with.

One of my favourite things about CP - and frankly, one of the things it needs to have a little escapism - is the way it makes the present weird again. It's like an Augmented reality overlay on the real world - taking things you know and adding layers of science fictional strangeness to make it new and exciting again.

In a way, I think the goals of a CP city kit shouldn't be to generate cities whole the way Vornheim does - you've already got Google Maps for that. It should be to add cyberpunk to the world as it is.

I think the old "entry level jobs" thread might be a key starting point. Use that as a basis to think of new buildings and spaces that might not already exist in the real world - not the Tyrell arcology so much as 3d printers and stack farms and online-troll caves and whatever - and generate them quickly.

I think it also needs to deal with Defensible Space - a phrase that came into being in LA in the 1980s and has come to dominate cities in the era of gated communities. That is: the way architecture is increasingly designed to actively exclude certain demographics from certain areas of the city. The most obvious way is a wall, but there are lots of ways - removing park benches to get rid of the homeless, designing streets to alienate people below certain income brackets, ensuring certain areas can only be reached by car, etc.

(Seriously, if you ever go to a con in London at the Excel Centre, try getting off at Canning Town station and entering the convention centre on foot...)

The other key feature of cyberpunk cities seems to be augmented reality - how the internet and the internet of things interacts with certain features. There should be tables to generate a whole galaxy of things for hackers to fuck with on the street.

The content of a book/PDF like this is key; every aspect needs to be eminently useful, during a game, with a minimum of rolling. But what to include?

One thing that always amazes me about Vornheim is the economy of language - every phrase tells a story. No wasted encounters. Hardly any wasted names. It's what the Shadowrun hack fails at, I think. It doesn't have the sheer sensory fun of reading down a table full of decadent baroque weirdness.

Dat "medieval trials" table...

I like the idea of things like a "city block generator" or some quick and dirty NPC background/motivation generator. Maybe a side-mission, "jobs on the dataterm" kind of generator.

Stars Without Number is great inspiration for this. You can pick up a free version of the rulebook which i'm 95% sure includes the GM tools section full of "quick corporation" generators and such like. In some ways that might be better immediate inspiration for a CP project tonally than Vornheim itself, although Vornheim is generally more fun to read .

That quote in the Hardwired sourcebook about how Cowboy's hovertank was inspired by Dutch butter smugglers always interested me, so I went looking for pictures.

AND FOUND SOME

Also included, some pictures Malek77 found of Chinese stealth boats for smuggling luxury cars.

...gone in 60 knots would be such a great game...

I forgot how vicious that frame failure table was. No wonder he's cautious!

I've got the Vornheim book myself, and think it's great. Both useful and atmospheric and chock full of ideas to riff off. A cyberpunk genre equivalent would be fantastic. I do have the Shadowrun City Kit PDF too, but, like you, find it lacks something. Don't get me wrong, it's useful, it's just seems weak in comparison to the original Vornheim. Could be that it is too generic? Isn't Mike the guy who did The Black Hack: Cyberhacked? (Which I bought thanks to your review… rolleyes.gif )

He is, yeah. Nice guy when I've spoken to him occasionally online.

But yeah - aside from the fact it suffers from presentation problems, it is really generic in a way that just makes it dull. And also - every table result in Vornheim tells its own little story, even the names, with a very clear identity and tone. I guess Zak knows that if the tables turn out to be too specific, the GM can just adapt the concept for his own setting in 20 minutes, so you may as well not worry about pleasing everybody and just worry about being good.

I adore the whole Stars Without Number/Other Dust stable. The books are full of brilliant concepts and setting ideas. I even considered running a trad cyberpunk game with the SWN engine, without changing anything bar ditching the high tech, but ended up going back to 2020. Some of my players prefer the crunchiness of Interlock over the more abstract D&D engine. Following your recommendation, I think I'll go back to Darkness Visible and Polychrome and see what I can lift for inspiration.

Ever since I read Dead Names I've wanted to run a game about looters from a cyberpunk future descending into the ruins of alien civilisations.

I increasingly love the idea of doing a 'punk space opera along the lines of Walter Jon William's Angel Station/ Voice of the Whirlwind or CJ Cherryh's Merchanter series or Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children. Tin can ships, radiation blasted, cyber-enhanced crews, strange archaeology, trying to survive the spreading influence of the Company...

Incidentally, one of our PCs, Hydraulic Dave, is a morbidly obese tech from South London, who uses your Elysium Pattern linear frame for mobility; he broke it picking up a rather large cortical server last session. How will ever he get to KFC now? He's got withdrawal from a lack of those eleven herbs and spices.

Out of curiosity, are you using the rules from the Elysium Pattern article? I wouldn't be remotely offended if you weren't - if you are, are they useful, readable, helpful, etc? I've never really had an opportunity to properly playtest them.

Some of my games have felt a bit like they're drifting into modern techno-thriller territory too. It's something I actively have to keep a check on. I try not to give too much of a crap about realism, concentrating more on plausibility and a healthy dose of cyberpunk genre verisimilitude. I like to throw in detail, unusual tech, subcultures, social evolution and a lot of weird. The NPCs, I find, are absolutely key to this - the more memorable, odd and scary, the better. I learned a lot from Zak S of OSR and Vornheim fame when running a Labyrinth Lord game a couple of years ago. cool.gif I'm rather enjoying the lunacy at the moment, and don't miss the competent professional edgerunner thing at all.

Vornheim is sooo good. I brought a copy when it came out and then when it was reprinted sent one to Malek77 . People have spoken a-bit about doing a version for a future city - i'm one of those people! - but I keep getting stymied by my crappy map-making skills (at least the way I want to do it).

Mike Evans made a quick (system agnostic) Shadowrun version which is quite fun, although it lacks the sheer style of the original: https://wrathofzombie.files.wordpress.com/2...un-city-kit.pdf

On the OSR front, have you seen Stars Without Number? I honestly think I've got more cyberpunk RPG inspiration and ideas out of the Darkness Visible book than any other sourcebook. The Maltech Cults tag section is practically an "evil megacorporation" generator .

Yep. The wonderful Run.Net has basically reinvigorated the entire game for us. Three of my group have various levels of Interface skill at the moment, yet none are 'pure netrunners'; the Fixer, the Techie and the sorta-not-quite Prowler. On the go, they can tackle drones, nobble cybernetics, trigger weapons, infiltrate systems, sift and search, and it works beautifully. In a previous game, a PC in South Africa was taking doses of Mockery's 'Bluebird' to ramp up her INT for increased actions, until she started pissing kidney chunks and needed them replacing with cheap Korean implants. Fun times.

Don't tell anyone - and especially not Interrupt - but he's in London in a few weeks and I really hope to coerce him into a game. I don't know if I can manage it, but it would be great to play some Run.Net with the progenitor

EDIT: is it just me or does Militech own the Houses of Parliament according to your map?

The key to the master table is to make sure the entries reach out and grab the players, possibly literally. There has to be a really good reason for the party to stop their car and not just drive on past a randomly generated piece of scenery

That is a sweet map

In London, my players have encountered militant implant-fetishist skinheads, infosocialist media pirates, East End gangsters, jacked-up Mods, shiro-nuri go-gangers and been attacked by autonomous HGVs; they've stolen neural archiving technology from Apple, kidnapped an AI masquerading as an autistic 11 year old, had a firefight with bioroid zero-hour-contract workers in the food court of the local Consumertopia, tracked an Arasaka employee undergoing a narcotic psychosis to a Gynoid Row brothel using hijacked drones, visited the bloated tech-queen of the Central District, Moby Shaz, in her floatation tank, and they are about to perform a hit on the local Yakuza Kumicho, for a teenage girl, at a party in a Yakuza owned hotel!

I DEMAND TO HEAR EVERYTHING. (also I think I lost the link to your campaign page, which makes me very sad)

That sounds like so much fun. Like Richard Kadrey comic book or something. Actual cyberpunk instead of a paramilitary Clancy-thriller with metal arms .

-------------------------

I haven't had a chance to actually play CP2020 in ages, barring the odd session. Hell, I went to Australia to hang out with Malek77 and we ended up playing 5e D&D instead...

That said, for the last few months I've been on a real kick, read lots of new stuff and written loads, both for projected home campaigns and stuff for the blog.

I tend to run the rules as written + Run.Net, although I keep trying and failing to write a heavily simplified version I like. I next time I run it i'm going to cut out almost all the modifiers and replace them with an advantage/disadvantage system ripped shamelessly from 5e.

I've never used the canon. I like it as it's written in the corebook - all 1980s zine pretensions and style - but hated most of the setting material in the sourcebooks.

Over the years I've run games set in a high-surveillance state ruled by traffic AIs - fun to describe, really difficult to actually GM... -, besieged London occupied by rival PMCs and a fictional city that was sorta Gotham+City of God. For writing adventures and tables lately I've settled on a kind of implied setting that's part Brian Wood comics, part Paul J McCauley's Fairyland & Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net, lots of balkanisation and factionalisation and 3d printers. With resilient technology and printers, any technologically super-empowered individual or NGO could set themselves up with their own bunker utopia and I feel like the spaces between the bunkers are the best places to set games.

The thing is, I'm a much better GM now, having run hundreds of sessions of (very, very cyberpunk...) Star Wars Shadowrun and D&D5e sessions than I ever was when I used to irregularly run CP2020 back in the day. I'm really excited to run it again sometime soon. I might do something Cowboy Bebop inspired. Or try a full-on Corporate War scenario - I've been reading a lot about the French War in Indochina and the wars of the late Republican Roman oligarchy and I think I've got a much clearer idea of how corporations could cross the line into open war-fighting, how they'd go about it. Lots to explore.

AND ALSO

"tracked an Arasaka employee undergoing a narcotic psychosis to a Gynoid Row brothel using hijacked drones, visited the bloated tech-queen of the Central District, Moby Shaz, in her floatation tank, and they are about to perform a hit on the local Yakuza Kumicho"

...more like this, frankly. I'm a little concerned my games have been too Five Minutes into the Future, lately. I want more hi-tech technocolour 'punk lunacy and less BDUs in my next CP2020 campaign

I don't know - the company have been pretty clear that their priority was the Witcher 3 and CP2077 was going to kick into high gear once that was done. AFAIK the release date was slated as 2017.

Unreal Tournament gets one step closer to reality

Weirdly, I also spent the last week reading old Jovian Chronicles books - they really are great, aren't they! - for a pan-solar system campaign. Albeit a really different one, based a little on Cowboy Bebop among early terraformed worlds.

For those who don't have half the cyberpunk blogs on the internet scrolling down an RSS feed on their website, Wisdom000 posted a life update on the Datafortress2020 blog, including this:

I also can't post on any of the forums I used to frequent, notable View From The Edge and the Cyberpunk 20777 Forum. If you are a poster there, pass on the message that I miss those guys. Anyway, wish me luck. Stay safe, and thank you everyone for being fans of the site.

http://datafortress2020.blogspot.co.uk/201...till-alive.html

So there it is. Wisdom000! Man, I was so happy to see that come up in my feed

@Companero - Hey man what's up? Glad to see you at least SURVIVED the trip, lol. *I was reading your post and eating chili and laughed so hard I think a half chewed chili bean tried to make it through my nose...) I honestly can say though, I can not Imagine a "leveled" base Cyberpunk game system. The best system imo that I have found was the house rules my friend came up with and posted here in Too live and die in Nightcity. Point based system with disads and advantages. I think I tweaked it a little bit a year or two ago and got rid of the variable points value system for the disads and advantages and gave them a static value. I also incorporated form of Contacts buy system much like what is in WildSide.

I'm good thanks, it's great to hear from you again. This place has been so quiet!

I used to love points-buy systems so much until I spent some time running Shadowrun

1st level characters are made of tissue paper in 5E... sort of like another game system i was fond of back in the day wink.gif hell remember the first session i ran i dropped 3 of the 4 players using a trio of kobolds armed with slings. not magic slings, not tactical "assault" slings, just plain old D4 damage David and Goliath slings.

Yeah, it's so easy to insta-kill low level characters in 5e. I've done it as the GM a few times. I've done it to Mort's characters. Malek77 did it to my character when I went to Australia to play a session run by him, and I was third level.

...I went to Australia and stayed with Malek77 for two weeks and we only actually played one game session. Fucking mountains and beaches and all that getting in the way.

(places we had conversations about Malek's D&D setting while in Oz

- up several different mountains

- on the steepest railway in the world

- in a dark room full of flying squirrels

- in the largest mall in the southern hemisphere

- in a live-drawing class with naked models and some bloke playing a mandolin

- on a boat in the Pacific

We seriously considered hiring a sea-plane just to have a conversation about D&D in the sky.

Best of all was "in the high surf at a Sydney beach."

"I think the void krill should be the source of the...

(wave, FWOOOM SPLASH SPLASH DROWN DROWN SPLASH SPLASH DROWN COUGH)

...void pearls that fuel the skyships used by the...

(wave, FWOOOM SPLASH SPLASH DROWN DROWN SPLASH SPLASH DROWN COUGH)

...Empire along the rim of the world..."

(wave, FWOOOM SPLASH SPLASH DROWN DROWN SPLASH SPLASH DROWN COUGH)

...and so on.)

Comapnero is thinking about creating a cyberpunk RPG of his own, and as for now he's strongly considering a hacked D&D 5.0 as the mechanics for it.

That's true. I really am thinking of building an OSR or 5e Cyberpunk hack (much to Mike's evident disgust and sense of betrayal!) and maybe even trying to publish it. Decouple hit points from level and keep it as lethal as low level CP2020, make sneak attack a universal rule, add vehicle and hacking rules, etc. Levels are a problem but not an insurmountable one - keep it more about the proficiency bonus and making a character more rounded, not more "powerful" per se. Make it so it's compatible with the FLAILSNAILS thing, Stars Without Number (the big inspiration here) and other stuff going on, have a massive DM's toolbox.

..."profit."

Well, no profit. But a fun game!

And the follow-up:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2016...al-hazards.html

Me and Malek77 have both been messing around a bit with random encounter tables lately, and this is one result:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2016...al-hazards.html

I want to follow this up with a lot more - the idea of a messy city crawl full of random electronic crap makes me very happy. It helps to make the future weird again

Very fast character character creation (>10 minutes), simple atmospheric rules, lots and lots of quick GM tools and adventure generators...

Right now my rules brainstorm seems to be an unholy kludge of 1st edition Traveller, CP2020 and the videogame Pillars of Eternity