Cyberpunk readthrough: Hardwired

So, we’ve read through the Cyberpunk 2013 core rules, getting our first taste of the game. So what’s the first thing the R. Talsorian Games decided to release for this property, now that they’d presumably gotten people excited for this dark, edgy new setting?

A guide for how to use the rules to run a different setting.

Which is, er… a choice.

Okay, so it makes a little more sense in context, because the novel Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams is in fact the main inspiration for Cyberpunk, not the more famous works of William Gibson. And the fact that they got Williams himself to write a supplement for it might have felt too good to pass up. So let’s have a look.

First off, the novel is about a dreary future where the nations of Earth has gotten thoroughly stomped by corporations who rule from space stations in orbit and tightly control the supply of things like medicinal drugs. A special breed of smugglers called “panzerboys” have taken to make runs of contraband across America using heavily armoured hovertanks. Global warming has caused the ocean levels to rise to the point where every sea-side city has a “venice” of half-submerged ruins attached to it. People upgrade themselves with cybernetics, work convoluted stock exchange schemes using global computer systems, assassinate each other by puking mechanical snakes, and just generally live on the bleeding edge of the dark future and so on and so forth.

It’s actually pretty cool stuff, and you can see how the game is based on it – it’s got the same sense of perverse glee in just how hopeless it all is, with people really reveling in their moral compromises and gradual loss of humanity. The man is gonna get you, but you’re going down guns blazing! And a lot of the worldbuilding is similar, too – there are characters in the book that are effectively Nomads, for instance, with the mechanised agriculture that has driven traditional farms out of business being given a poignant look in both the book and games.

As such, the supplement really does help with fleshing out the feel and themes of the game, even if some of the details are different. The stomping boot of corporations, desperate people banding together to survive, criminals that are in some ways heroic but also deeply morally stained… this is very much what I think Night City is meant to feel like.

Still, there are differences. Trauma Teams aren’t a thing, so if you get shot, you just get shot. If you do make it to the hospital, though, cloned limb replacements mean that anything that’s fallen off can be replaced so that you’ll never even know the difference. Hacking is a big one – there is no cyberspace, hackers (“crystaljocks,” as they are known in this setting) function very much like hackers in real life in that they exploit human carelessness far more than they make use of super-cool firewall-breaking software. Cyberpsychosis exists here too, but the rules for it are a little more unpredictable than “you go kill-crazy at Empathy 0.”

There is also an implant called a “cybersnake.” Remember what I said about how people get assassinated? Yeah, it’s super-gross and makes very little sense and is all the more awesome for it.

Unlike the core rules, here there are rules for drugs. I may have sold Mike Pondsmith short by assuming he was just afraid of moral guardians – here he mentions that he doesn’t like glamourising drugs because he’s lost friends to overdoses. Aoch. Okay, I suppose I can see why he didn’t feel like emphasising them in his own setting, then. But, in the world of Hardwired routine drug use is a thing that people engage in, so here there are rules for both short and long term effects.

There is a system for quickly generating NPCs, complete with cyberware, which is definitely something I can see coming in handy. In fact, the way NPCs are statted up here seems like it hung around for a while.

Hacking gets a long section explaining how you do it realistically and how a hack can be run like a sort of long-distance detective story – you piece together clues about who your target is, use them to guess his passwords and to figure out where else you could look for data, and then piece together more clues from what you find. It’s pretty cool, though I still have to snicker a little at the breathless way the text describes how you can write a program that does things automatically. Ah, back when it was all shiny and new.

There is a sort of loosely described campaign set in the Hardwired universe. The characters start out going over the wreckage of a cargo shuttle that crashed at sea, find themselves in the possession of a terrifying genetically engineered super-plague, and get drawn into the fight between two different corporations that sets up the events of the novel. It’s pretty good stuff, nothing special but it gives you a good idea for what cyberpunks are supposed to get up to and what problems they’ll run into while doing it.

All in all, the book was kind of enjoyable, and it actually fleshed out a few things for the main game in the process of setting up an alternate one. Still not sure I’d use it, but it’s definitely worth mining or materials.