Companero

I've been thinking a lot about corporates in the campaign because I've rarely seen them played - used as employers and NPCs no doubt, but not actually used as a PC...

Has anyone actually played one?

I can envisage a corporate character being a good team-leader. The PC team would be the outside "consultants" they hire to further their interests. That always seems to be the problem with the role, though - it inevitably revolves around that character.

I still can't think of another way to run them.

(On a related note here is a post with 5 Corporate Mini-Adventures I wrote with some help from Malek77)

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...corporates.html

That is soooo cool.

I actually just read Ken Macleod's book Intrusion which spent time talking about "New Wood" and the way it fits into the world, it's wonderful inspirational material.

Adaptation of both rulesets to Interlock is super-easy, because Interlock is pretty simple. Although it does lack decent rules for cybershells and drones, which Transhuman Space really needs. Although V3 actually had decent modular drone rules #heresy

I had this long running fantasy of running a game which basically took in every published campaign for every major cyberpunk game ever, based around the Shadowrun metaplot. It would take in the entire metaplot - while the Shadowrun megacorps would be constant, the Cyberpunk2020 ones would exist at the beginning of the campaign and fall midway, while the Transhuman Space ones would start to emerge later on, along with Transhuman Technology.

I think the interesting thing about moving from Cyberpunk 2020 to THS in a campaign is dealing with technological change as it happens, step by step. Biotech havens, xoxing, all of it emerging. One thing you'd have to deal with is that the THS setting is generally a lot nicer than CP2020...

As for Blue Planet, a game set during the collapse on Earth would be fucking brutal. Or you could just loot it for inspiration. It's one of my favourite settings.

I think you could run Blue Planet as is, although i'm not sure how to deal with genetic modification in Cyberpunk. A few years ago I adapted large parts of Fluid Mechanics for CP2020 and then my harddrive died the same week as my external .

I'm going to be the first person here honest enough to admit to causing one of these moments myself

When I was a teenager I ran one of my first ever campaigns soon after reading Listen Up Primitive Screwheads, with it's ludicrous "murder problem PCs" advice. I got pissed off with a player for no good reason - mainly because he wasn't acting in a way I'd planned - and killed him by having a guy he hadn't seen shoot him through a toilet door.

Which naturally ended the campaign, just about.

I'd like to think I'm a much better GM these days

I can imagine that this area of Africa is still a mess. The Republic of Cabinda borders the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Currently, there are many active secession movements in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not sure if these have been resolved by 2050.

I was planning to go wildly in the opposite direction, following through on all the news items over the last few years about downtown Luanda becoming the most expensive city in the world and the Angolan government basically trying to turn it into a new Dubai based on the oil money. Combine that with biofuels, the next big cheap labour zone for manufacturing, and various energy and feedstock production, it's all going to be booming African Lion economies and all the political chaos that usually comes with rising middle classes (because I'm bored of the "Africa is an irredeemable shithole" narrative ).

Oh, I can't wait to see what you guys do with Cabinda. Partly because I've been meaning to run an Angola set game for over a year now and shame at being second might drive me to actually start the bloody thing .

In addition to the ongoing Liquid Swords thing being discussed in another post, this week the Vircades Project has some more Appendix N stuff and 5 mini adventures all about Limo Drivers. Because, like all right-thinking people, I loved Angela Bassett in Strange Days.

My understanding is that Wisdom000 (Deric's name on these forums) didn't build all those vehicles with the Max Metal creation rules, he just wrote numbers that seemed right and went with them.

And thank fuck for that - Wis might have the work ethic of a calvinist saint when it comes to producing CP2020 content, but no mere mortal could have produced that document if he'd done it by the book!

A retractable nano sword turns up in Deus Ex and i'm going to cover it, just because i've screenshots and why not. I guess you could do something similar with memory plastic, if your targets aren't massively tough or armoured...

Let's also not forget about shearing foces, a hinged blade is going to flex a lot differently than a simple solid blade, and the hinge pins may be susceptible to damage from strikes to the side of the blade, perhaps either jamming the blade into open position, or breaking the delicate hinge assemblies and snapping the blade from the parts it is more rigid then a normal blade.

Yeah - I feel like shearing forces are the critical weakness in something like that. It's what puts me off retractable blades most of all (and in the game).

Apparently the motorcycle enthusiasts are all asleep today!

Yeah. There's something similar with "real" vibroblades in use with surgeons .

I always loved the wrist crossbow in Deus Ex - and more recently in Dishonoured. It's only now that I actually got around to writing some stats for it.

Actually, I got wildly carried away, so it has 16 different ammunition types. Enjoy!

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...t-crossbow.html

I wrote an unnecessarily massive post about futuristic swords which I'd like to put to the expertise of this group. This post covered the traditional types. Part 2 is going to have a bunch of weirder stuff and hopefully some stats (although I've always had problems with the melee damage values in CP2020).

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...max-blades.html

Anyway, I'm hoping the betamax blades bit sparks some opinions

If I were going to rewrite CP2020 for my own purposes, I'd rename ATTR something like AURA and use it as a general "Charisma" stat mostly divorced from the idea of physical attractiveness, moving some skills around a little to boost the stat - if it's a more general social stat then I can move Streetwise over to it, massively boosting the importance of the stat.

-----------------------------------------------------if you don't do that, though:

I know that when I was a teenager running games in my REAL ROLEPLAYING GM/fuhrering phase I used to really penalise people for using ATTR as a dump stat by constantly making it into a huge issue in NPC conversations and so on. I'm not sure doing that made the game any more fun. It isn't like they were *using it* for much, it was just an ambient thing in the background.

My feeling these days is always: it's better to make something desirable by giving it more positive attributes than to penalise people for not having it. And in the game, etc.

IMO - plastic surgery should be super easy and super effective in Cyberpunk games, if only to reflect the literary sources.

In a weird inversion of normal tropes, I came to DnD/Pathfinder etc long after Cyberpunk 2020 and various equally lethal games.

I have to admit, I find the hit point totals in D20 kinda liberating. It leaves me free to run all sorts of bastardy traps and ambushes in a way i'd be worried about in CP2020 because it would kill the players in a matter of seconds.

No, my computer died and because of various other financial commitments i'm not going to be able to replace it for a little while. So I've not had the opportunity to spend hours writing 1000s of words about CP2020 lately .

I think me and Glosz basically share the same idea about how cyberware affects the user: the big difference between my proposal and what's shown here is that my table is intentionally much less specific than his - partly because I wanted it to be adaptable to different settings and partly because I'm used to players who would strongly object if I said something like "your PC's personality is like THIS now." Also - in my experience, it's much more fun for everyone IMO to replace "your character rolled a critical failure, this happens" with "your character rolled a critical failure, tell me how s/he fucked up" and that thought was behind my shorter, less specific table.

That said, the consensus on G+ was that I should increase the length of the tables or even add in specific side tables and these would be definite inspiration. Next time I put up an Alienation post (whenever that is...) i'll definitely put in a link to this!

A metric cybertonne of new stuff!

A big post about the Revolt City game ran here, and low-level campaigns!

Some more Ruralpunk stuff!

My posts from the Wage Slave thread here, rewritten and updated (and hugely popular, for some reason)!

Finding the best stuff in the Datafortress 2020 file project!

AviationPunk!

A really long post in which I manifestly failed to say anything intelligent about the relationship between Neuromancer and "transgressive culture"

And more, only in the Vircades Project!

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

Aside from Mike's post here I got feedback on G+ and elsewhere.

So here's a big feedback post. I'd love some feedback to the feedback to the feedback feedback feedback feedback fedbaeck febdbakhgj feedback!

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...gification.html

It's funny - when a campaign goes on as long as yours, it develops a mythology and also a working methodology beyond the realms of ordinary advice. I'm beginning to see that as one of my groups contemplates a "next generation" campaign to follow up on Star Wars, but its still beyond my ken!

For just rehabbing a flooded block 83 NPCs is a bit excessive so just figure out who they will need to talk to first.

Excessive NPCs is my middle name (admittedly that was for a campaign that's lasted 70+ sessions...)

It’s taking place in 2052 and I need to really rework the Deep Space rules. Wish me luck! cool.gif

I'd love it if you could do that in a public place - I really want to see how people handle that. I've recently discovered that first edition Jovian Chronicles was actually a Mekton sourcebook, which means Interlock!

But I digress here. To put these principles towards the idea of rehabilitating a flooded city block(s) I think you need to consider the residents of the area and the dynamics of the community. A group coming in to ‘fix’ the area might meet with hostility from many quarters as to their true intentions. Fine speeches (Persuasion/Fast Talk) won’t win them over, but might let them allow you (and your team) the opportunity to prove your intentions with deeds. A city will have officials that are territorial about their jobs and permits. Some will be helpful, some will not be.

Yeah - I have in mind something like your relationship map (with maybe 10-20 principles) and then a sequence of possible adventures and mini-campaigns around individuals. I know that pre-defining the relationships like you did between even 4 major NPCs created a "social sandbox" in my Star Wars game which cut the amount of prep I needed to do between sessions to a tiny minimum. It's a great way to run things .

Running the hotel is an interesting piece of what the old school dnd crowd would call Domain Level Play and i'm interested in how far you went with that side of things - or how you handled it in general. I have this recurring dream of running a game about an adhoc group of people trying to repair a city block in a flooded city and this has all been great inspiration!

I've just posted a set of alternate roleplaying-centric, setting neutral "humanity loss" rules on my blog.

I would love some feedback from you guys - mort already discovered three gaping holes and it's only been up 4 minutes

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...rpsychosis.html

On the topic of names, I'd rather have brand names for every piece of gear in an RPG, than to stick with generics on the lines of "Reflex booster +2". It's a lot more cinematic and realistic to drop a few names now and then, since in the real life, there are no "Cellphone +2's", people talk about hardware either using brand names like "My Samsung got busted because I backed over it with my car" or using generic substantives that aren't half game stats already "I'll have to get a new phone, this one took a dive into a lake.".

My opinion on that changes wildly week to week. On the one hand I like the differentiation and sense of place brand names give to a setting - it's an old Gibsonian trick to give an item a whole history and look just by naming the place it was built (an East German Cyberarm, etc etc). On the other hand it ties your equipment list to a single setting.

I know that my house ruled equipment lists aren't branded for that reason!

Over the last couple of weeks some stuff about Fiasco and Ragnarok but also a long post about a VFTE forum game which never went anywhere:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2014...evolt-city.html

Are the names Sandevistan and Kereznikov (as applied to speedware) a reference to anything?

I totally missed this post and I don't know why!

I hope the system is working well for you