Companero

So Yukikaze is a Japanese novel from 1984 that's probably most famous around here for the anime series made about it. It's introspective and meditative and about machine intelligence (and, you know, air combat).

I wrote some stuff about it here but I'm curious to know if anyone else here has actually read it, and what they thought! I imagine it divides opinion, even without the difficulties of translation.

Welcome to the forums

I'm fairly sure an "Edgerunner" would be thinking something like "damnit, I'M the one meant to be the adept corporate thief! I don't have $50,000 yet, and I shot 15 people yesterday!"

Two things this week

1. new rules for linear frames and powered armour.

2. a bounty hunting adventure featuring a man named Chump!

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...unty-board.html

I've written some rules that encompass linear frames and powered suits (space suits, pressure suits, Sarcos and HULC, etc). I'd love some feedback!

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...-revisited.html

The original source for mono filament wire is a novel called Stand on Zanzibar in which terrorists string the near invisible stuff across road ways.

I'm not in a position to check right now but I seem to remember GURPS Transhuman Space had relatively detailed guidelines and depictions of nuclear munitions and their effects in space.

Worrying about armour limits is certainly not about trying to hose the PCs - it's about trying to maintain a good sense of threat and balance. If the players can do everything without danger and risk there's no game and potentially no fun. I've run some very high level games in my time and they're super, super difficult to GM, even when everyone is committed and having lots of fun .

All cyberpunk games seem to suffer from a dichotomy between unarmoured fleshbags and unstoppable armoured hulks - you can definitely get an armoured hulk who isn't a munchkin, just playing a wealthy character! - and it's beginning to drive me a bit mad.

I actually kinda like the halving damage idea. It doesn't scale very well. I've been thinking along similar lines lately but my idea was that skinweave would have some effect on bleeding or wound penalties instead. I'm not sure.

Basically, what I want is to find some middle ground where high level characters with decent armoured are still threatened. Savage World's 3 strikes and you're dead rules work really well, but I don't want to change the entire damage system of the game!

This is all great, thanks

My problem is that I can't even begin to imagine how to stat this stuff realistically, damage wise or otherwise. Do we treat MS fire like automatic fire? Burst fire? A shotgun? Just an ordinary gun with a massive fire rate, for people who own a million dice?

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(while I'm asking for stats, what would a Dragonov SVU look like and how would it differ from the SVD in rules terms?)

I had a detailed railgun write-up planned with all sorts of categories and types and then realised the power requirements for any of them were beyond the scope of the game, IMO.

I would love a patented Van Atta write-up of Metal-Storm weapons. I really liked Psiberserker concept of using the technology for cheap polymer one shots, in the vending machine thread.

Oh man, that looks great - and thanks for using Run.Net !

Rather than someone packing the latest man portable minigun, you'll see bullpup large caliber rifles with high-end targeting systems. The scary elites, the edgerunners, will be firing *fewer* rounds, but putting them just precisely where they want to put them.

Quoted for truth.

What about magazines? Weird stuff like the 1216 shotgun?

(Also, any modern CP game thing based on modern gun fads is going to have that Paratus 18 suitcase thing...)

I think there's a couple of factors that shape the future of guns in a CP universe:

- cheap drones

- cheap body armour (already in the hands of cartels, Hezbollah, etc)

- effective body armour - a real growth industry for national and corporate armies that can't afford casualties for media reasons

+ genre trope stuff:

- cheap, easily installed cyberware

- full borgs

- cyber-animals

- neo-materials

There's already a controversy about the effectiveness of the global standard 5.56mm round against unarmoured targets, which suggests it'll become ineffective against most targets in the CPverse. I think most firearm innovations will come from trying to solve that problem - bigger calibres? Expensive AP rounds? ETE making a come back?

The other big factor comes from 3d printing - as that technology gets better and more people acquire printers, the limitations of that manufacturing model will come to define guns, particularly in insurgency warfare, IMO.

So Cyberpunk 2020's equipment list used to be famous for taking every throwaway weapon design fad from the 1980s and turning it into an entry on the weapons list - caseless ammo, "trounds," etc...

Anyway, it's 2014 and there are guided smart bullets and weird personal defence weapons and automatic smart-grenade launchers and I CAN'T KEEP UP.

Anyway, my question to you fine folk is this: if we're writing a list of futuristic guns based on current fads and trends and extrapolation, what goes in it?

Happy Birthday!

Mort is of the opinion that the doors of this thing are a horrible risk.

Discuss.

For some reason the Limo Driver thing went down really well so I followed it up. Over the last few weeks:

Corporates!

Bankers!

Netrunners!

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/

I have a real thing for tiny modern turboprop attack planes, they look soooo cool .

I've seen In Harm's Way. The PDF is horribly laid out which makes it annoyingly difficult to read, but there does seem to be interesting stuff in it. I just can't find it easily...

Something I discovered completely by accident the other day: Cyberpunk V3 actually has some basic, perfectly serviceable dogfighting rules hidden in the basic combat rules! I honestly might just end up using that, because then I don't have to learn a new system.

The goal of Aviationpunk was/is to pick an Aviation based campaign, as opposed to a specifically CP2020 campaign - although I'd probably end up running it with Interlock anyway, and I'm a big fan of novels like Yukikaze and Hardwired. I stupidly, semi-accidentally deleted a long post full of different CP2020 air combat campaign concepts a month or so back...

The next Aviationpunk post - when I get around to it - will actually be all about 1900-1955-ish turboprop campaigns. Then I want to do one about the jet age, one about cyberpunk and one about science fiction.

Along with all the other stuff I need to finish. I really like long-form posts, but they take forever to write if you have other things going on in your life as well!

I don't think the city in WGF feels very Levantine at all - it certainly isn't Lebanese and probably wouldn't fit into coastal Syria either. It doesn't really feel very Egyptian Mediterranean either (Jon Courtenay Grimwood's alternate future Alexandria in the Arabesk trilogy actually feels a lot like the RL version of the city I know, IMO, and does a generally better job of presenting a "realistic" Arabic city).

I'd put it somewhere along the Red Sea or Persian Gulf. Yemen, maybe. Places like Jeddah do have a fair few expatriates in them, and in your splintered MidEast map you could probably find room for a place with less religious police and enforced restrictions than in current RL.

All this is predicated on the idea that the city in WGF feels like a place which exists, which it doesn't .

Corps are as vital to Cyberpunk as any other class, and they're useful to show the huge difference between have, and have-not.

My italics. Quoted for truth.

I ran a corporate in one of Wilphe's online games - not the Machiavellian agenda-pushing type, but instead a newbie with little power, just another pawn from the office. Resources were limited but helpful - a generic car, intel, and other minor benefits, as befitting a corporate who's barely powerful enough to get out of cubeland, but still better than the party had otherwise.

One of the great problems with the Corporate as a character and cyberpunk as a genre: I've been that guy, why would I want to play one.

It would be refreshing to have a corporate character who was forthright, honest, and/or ethical. The duplicitous corporate has become a cliché.

Cyberpunk tends to be the real world turned up to 11, and the evil corporate idea is basically based on the idea that corporate cultures encourage or even require a certain kind of behaviour, to the detriment of, you know, common humanity.

That said, trying to be forthright or honest in a high profile corporate role is an adventure in itself! (and in the game )

I have to admit, Geist's campaign sounds both brilliant and terrifying. That kind of in-party intrigue scares me

New Orleans.

I'm entirely serious.

Transhuman Space had a version of the Forking idea called Xoxing. One of the major plothooks was criminal mafias xoxing celebrities for various awful uses.

I have to admit it's a technology i've avoided in my game settings because I feel like the implications of the technology will come to dominate the way the setting works in ways I don't want. It's one of those technologies that impacts on the basic nature of every character.

The question of whether a cyberpunk setting is sustainable or not is kinda irrelevant, IMHO. A cyberpunk setting should capture a transitional moment of chaos. Like - in the middle of the 19th century, industrialisation changed the entire nature of power and threw old political systems into chaos, with the result that between 1848 and 1872 every country that industrialised or tried to industrialise experienced a major war as a direct result. That probably didn't look very sustainable either, at the time!

And the unsustainable chaos creates an easier game environment. People's biggest problem with THS - and why many more people admire it than play it, I suspect, is that the setting is almost too functional to provide space for player characters with real agency.

Transhuman Space and Shadowrun, imagine an Islamic superstate known as the Muslim Caliphate. Though this idea doesn't take into account the schism between Shia and Sunni.

Well, both those states are primarily Sunni with the Shia nations outside the alliance, I believe.

Of the game systems for Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Transhuman Space, or Blue Planet. Which system do you like best?

I've been playing a lot of Shadowrun lately, and along the way discovered that the system is a horrifying abomination that should have been shot at birth. The cheat sheet explaining how to shoot someone has, like, 17 steps.

GURPS is at it's best with THS, but the complexity scares me. I've never really given it a chance. I've got all the Blue Planet books but I have to confess I've never actually read the rules because I own Cyberpunk 2020 .

But of course I'm going to say CP2020 is the best, i'm a mod on a 2020 fan forum!

Eclipse Phase does a much darker version of Transhuman Space and it's Creative Commons - translation: you can find the books with a quick google and legally download them for free. You'd probably find a lot of interest there.