Companero

On my blog over the last week or so:

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

A 5 part series of Ruralpunk articles, including 20 locations for making countryside areas more science fictional and weird, and 2 articles full of antagonist ideas to throw at your players.

Also! The first part of a comprehensive guide to cyberpunk books to inspire games, some stuff about a campaign i'm running based on a bunch of published adventures for CP2020 and Shadowrun, and an actual play report of the SR adventure Dark Angel, which could easily be converted to CP2020.

(and a long post about why historical New Mexico is both really, really strange and a great DnD adventure location...)

I posted a bunch of stuff about this on my blog because that's apparently how I roll this week:

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

Happy Birthday!

I have a new blog, because I like to party like it's 5 years ago. Or 15 years ago, in the case of CP2020 focused blogs...

About roleplaying games in general and cyberpunk games in particular.

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

Finally started it. Page 179 out of 1041. 1041! One. Thousand. Forty. One.

179 pages is the optimal length for a novel, IMO...

(Not that i'm not enjoying it a lot, and it moves along super fast)

http://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/69878...ha-so-long-2013

2013 had more 3d Printers, more surveillance by public and private interests, less hair metal, and about the same number of prototype cyberears.

The future!

There seem to be a ton of Cyberpunk video game kickstarters about atm.

There's a Cyberpunk 2020 page with 4000 members and some people I recognize, but not being a member I don't know how active it is. There's also a relatively active G+ page.

Edgerunners and Chicago Mobsters are really different, products of completely different models of labour organisation.

It's the difference between Michael in the Godfather and Neil in Heat. Michael lives in a mid-20th century world of unionised labour and jobs-for-life, with these deep loyalties to a network/class of mobsters which provides him with a guaranteed living but is also very ordered and almost impossible to leave. He has a wife and kids and its all very traditional and nuclear-family and old school.

Neil lives in a post-oil crash, post-automation, post-deregulation, post-Neuromancer! world where the systems move so fast that he needs to be prepared to drop everything at a moment's notice just to be able to survive, rendering it almost impossible for either him or his police rival to maintain basic human relationships. The Edgerunner takes that even further - because the systems have now outpaced the ability of a normal human to keep up, s/he's taken to literally turning herself into an inhuman machine in order to have a chance.

That said, there is this whole weird underground of private spies and contractors and security consultants these days, who do keep company records as this legal protection. White hats and black hats and PMCs and think tanks and weird mercenary cadre units and and and

(and the Kromosome RPG "Microcorp" idea, wherein the characters were part of one of the millions of microcorporations that had taken control of the world economy, looking to survive on a day to day basis, was great)

I brought a copy of this as soon as it came out in paperback, like 4 years ago. And naturally, only just got around to actually reading it.

Vishnu at the Cat Circus

 

ohmy.gif

 

It was flat-out stunning. Like being hit by a Maglev train whited-out on hallucinogens...

Etc.

At least three of the best cyberpunk short stories I've ever read, if not more.

So I've had the Dervish House sitting equally unread for at least a year .

On a weird side note, Warren Spector claims Bruce Sterling was his first Dungeon Master. Which explains alot!

Old sci fi classic!

Becoming a zero has been the basis of several different novels and short stories, including Frederick Pohl's Space Merchants and PKD's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. The basic idea is "a person suddenly loses access to the entire society and has to survive!". I remember some story about a jealous sexbot doing it in order to prevent the owner buying a newer model. Some stories have places so paranoid about security that you wouldn't be able to enter a lot of private and public buildings without identification.

And given modern architectural patterns, that's increasingly plausible! Unidentified people entering privately own shopping streets get triangulated and nudged away by security forces...

Becoming a Zero - unless your budget is practically limitless, you can't. Too many records, too many archives - some records are even paper! A GM who wants to allow a person to become a Zero would need to set up a campaign to destroy, alter, or otherwise remove every single record, from birth certificate to headlines on the screamsheets - far more complicated than a false ID.

There are actually companies that claim to go through the internet and identify/remove references to you. It can be done at great expense. It's also classic stuff for netrunners to do, and also part of what Wildside "Shoemakers" would do.

Shadowrun comes at this in the other direction - assuming that for reasons of social and economic chaos and institutional racism, hundreds of millions of people don't have official records and are basically zeros in most respects, denied access to basic services because of it. Getting official records and becoming legitimate becomes a motivation for adventure in itself!

I'm waiting for the time when we hear about someone digging up the floor of a church, 17th century style, to get at that precious precious saltpetre...

Christ, i'm sorry to hear that.

...also, was there a single VFTE regular who wasn't hospitalised at some point over the summer?

I know I chose to forget the specific rules about dying in order to avoid killing a newbie player last night. I'm not sure how to feel about that.

I think I got scared off killing characters a little by the way I destroyed my first (teenage) CP2020 campaign by murdering the PCs in a "Listen Up Primitive Screwheads" way.

Don't get me wrong, I like to hurt my players, I like to make them bleed, I'm just quite keen they get up again so I can make them hurt some more.

I think that's where I am as well. Badly injuring a PC means plot and tension. Killing one means disrupting the session. And fuck the attitude that killing PCs "teaches" players anything .

The exception would be in battles with Big Bad types. There are lots of PCs who seem to have a heroic death built into their character concept and I almost feel like deciding when the PC dies ought to be a collaborative process between player and GM.

Somehow missed this post first time around .

Those podcasts were fun - also, the first round got some of my friends back into gaming which means I've had a group for the last two years, soooo

That is pretty sweet. Garbage plants just reek of story ideas .

Shadowrun Returns has a scriptable map editor. It doesn't look especially complicated - there were good scenarios going up within a day of it coming out.

Imagine.

 

GMing as setting up the environment, the characters, the scripts. PCs join the map as an online game. The GM oversees, filling in gaps, providing interactive chat with in-game characters.

Did anyone ever do a D20 Modern/Cyberpunk mod for Neverwinter Nights?

The mere fact of an in-print P&P Cyberpunk game with comprehensible, simple rules (unlike, say, Shadowrun), would be a victory. Having Mike introduce it in that wonderful radio-voice of his would be better .

Interactive games where the computer handles the mundane tasks of character tracking, rules arbitration, chaos generation, not to mention visual effects, have a distinct advantage for new and old audiences alike.

Yeahbut... people! People! In a room! With other people! Better chaos generation than anything!

Paper might not be making any kind of permanent comeback but i'm finding it easier than any time before to get people to actually play P&P games (Community and IT Crowd episodes really helped).

I'm sorta lucky in that my games regularly get hosted by this guy who happens to be a great cook, but still .

Yeah - kudos to the writing there for making that combat come across so tense and ...uh, grounded in geography (that's the only way I can put it).

I'm going to put some high odds on the team getting attacked by a posse of angry off duty cops/edgerunners hired by the Alabama police/vengeance crazed family members at some point in the very near future!

Robert Ludlum, described by RPG writer Ken Hite as reading like "Perry Rhodan, the Reagan Years".

As part of my plan to read two books by every writer who ever existed I actually do have one of his novels sitting on the to-read pile, but i'm not sure i'll ever get to it!

Yeah, that really doesn't sound like a Le Carre character or plot! Le Carre is famous for quiet, claustophobic cold war stories, quite often about old men diligently pursuing other old men for reasons which become increasingly unclear and morally clouded as the plot goes on, using the super power of "listening to people."

So one thing that's funny is that the older he gets, the more honest William Gibson gets about his influences, and these days he basically claims he learnt how to write from early Len Deighton novels...

Aside from John Le Carre and Graham Greene (who I've liked for awhile), I've only really discovered this stuff lately. I actually read and enjoyed a Frederick Forsyth novel the other day, and I wasn't even in an airport. Len Deighton turns out to be great (and the Charlie Stross pastiche of him called the Atrocity Archives isn't bad either). Eric Ambler's novels about international finance and terrorism written in the 1930s turn out to be super cool and considerably less dated and half the stuff i've read written in the 1980s...

Also - Don Delillo's novel Running Dog is really, really good, if you're looking for a follow up to Gibson's last few novels.

Anyway, is anyone else into this stuff? The TV version of the genre gets brought up a lot as good inspiration, but i'm curious about the books .

The DGSE famously did light up a Greenpeace ship in 1985 - typically they called the whole thing "Operation Satanic" and chose to blow it up in a New Zealand harbour pour encourager les autres. And Sea Shepherd has been attacked a few times in Canada by various hunters and tribal groups.

On a related note, news article from May: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/...irate-hijacking