Previously on our Cyberpunk readthrough:
We have reached the end of Cyberpunk 2013‘s brief run, the point right before it reinvented itself as Cyberpunk 2020, an edition that would prove to have rather more staying power. The last installment doesn’t exactly wrap things up – rather, it seems to have been meant as only the second in a long line of splatbooks-as-in-setting-magazines, the rest of which never (to my best knowledge) were never to see the light of day. To be specific, we’re going to be looking at the Rockerboys, probably the most idiosyncratic character class of the game… and, somewhat damningly, they ended up sharing the spotlight (as it were) with the Media class.
The foreword (in the guise of an “editorial”) does admit the problem and notes that a lot of players were confused as to what you were even supposed to do with the Rockerboy class, at least in a campaign that wasn’t explicitly about a rebellious punk band roaming the world and getting into trouble in between concerts. Whether this book ends up satisfyingly answering that question is a little more dubious to me, but points for at least recognising it.
Much like Solo of Fortune, there isn’t much of an underlying narrative or even much structure to the book. It’s written to be like a magazine with each article offering a snapshot into the world of Cyberpunk, which is great and all, but it makes it a pain in the patootie to write up a coherent account of…
Starting with the letters page, we learn that an exec is mad because the magazine implied that he drove someone out of business from sheer spite, to which the magazine smugly responds that next time he wants to get his side of the story across, he should agree to talk to their reporters when they ask him to. Also, apparently certain brands of sound systems are prone to exploding when you plug them in, and loony fans kill themselves at the loss of their favourite celebrity. Okay, admittedly three very Cyberpunk things right there.
We get the story of Samurai, which is the band where Johnny Silverhand (last seen messing up the rescue of his girlfriend in the core setting book) made it big. Apparently they broke up when their keyboardist went to jail for kicking her abusive boyfriend off a balcony and another bandmate fried his brain trying out experimental cyberware. DMS – a corp we’ll learn more of later – tried to get Samurai to sign on with them by threatening to expose Johnny’s past of going AWOL from one of those South American wars in the backstory, but Johnny just made it all public on his own and showed them his shiny metal middle finger. Rock’n’roll!
There’s a looooooot of geeky music talk and tech porn that leaves me painfully bored. Again, I realise that that might make me not the target audience here, and certainly a magazine of the sort the book is meant to resemble would have articles fawning over synthesisers and looking down their noses on people who play the wrong sort of music, but snooooooooore.
There’s a section called Hitler Was A Rockerboy. Yeah, that’s what we 2020s people like to call “clickbait.” Anyway, it basically just tries to expand the definition of “rockerboy” to any sort of charismatic public figure trying to enflame the masses with a political message, and suggests that “rockerboys” might also be street poets, performance artists, activists or politician. It’s suggested that medias are kind of like rockerboys except they try to persuade with facts and logic instead of storming emotions. There’s an interview with a gay comedian who was framed for murder for making some pointed jokes about the assassination of a gay-rights politician. Also, apparently the original rockerboy was this guy named James Manson who was killed in a riot that started when some feds tried to arrest him at a concert for corrupting the youth.
Super-rich people! Well, it wouldn’t be cyberpunk without a bunch of those presiding over the dystopian mess. There are apparently four major kinds: the spoiled brats who inherited their wealth, sports and media celebrities, oil sheiks (again the reminder that most of the Middle East is glassed but the parts that remain are obscenely wealthy because they’re sitting on the last remaining oil) and banana republic dictators, and corporate CEOs and others who have worked their way up. They spend their money on private islands, enormous yachts, security systems for the above, and amazingly tacky clothing. There’s one who refuses to come out of his personal virtual paradise, another who’s had his name legally changed to “God,” a third who’s building a massive harem. Okay.
Nasty tricks that the evil corporations play on poor innocent artists! First off, the aforementioned blackmail attempts – if they have some dirt on a popular artist, then he’d better sign up with them or they’ll go public with it. Or they can just buy his contract and either force him to bring his work more in line with their preferred propaganda or just keep him from working at all. One guy they hooked on a specially engineered drug that would shut down his immune system if he stopped taking it, and he only got free because some Netrunner friends of his raided the corporate database for the recipe. And then, some people afflicted with artistic integrity just mysteriously get killed in drive-by shootings and the like.
The premier broadcast corporation is Net 54, though they are competing with another one called Diverse Media Systems. The same guy, named Howard Wong, presided over both of their rises, but he eventually got killed when Net 54 tried to forcibly extract him back from DMS. And then his DMS stock mysteriously ended up in the possession of the CEO’s son, Jonathon Houghton III, and he promptly used them to oust his father from the board and take over himself. Wheels within wheels, huh?
Moooooore tech porn, sigh. The problem with it is that much of it is trying to be hard sci-fi, which means that a lot of it is a slightly lamer version of things we actually have today, and a lot of other stuff is a slightly cooler version of things that were considered hot back in the 80s. For instance, completely computer-animated movies are a thing, and people flock to see them not because of the story but because the technology is just so cool, man! Music and video that can be downloaded straight into your cybernetic implants so you can play them in your head is, I’ll admit, something we haven’t quite reached, though.
There is a pretty funny and flavourful side story about a “slow news night” that involves the reporters first getting into a battle between booster gangs (and then interview the survivors, who are impressed with how well the news team fought), then see the assassination of a cartel leader turned federal witness (and find out that the cartel tipped them off, because even gangsters want publicity now), then intervene in a corporate extraction, gets the extract-ee to give a statement by threatening to throw him out of their hover car, then hands him back to the corporation he tried to get out of his contract with. Heh.
Some popular TV shows (so TV is still a thing, apparently, though flat screens have replaced the big bulky sets I grew up with) include CyberSoldier, which is basically a fashion show for gun nuts, showing off all the sexiest mercenary outfits; CyberSquad, where reporters ride along with the cops who take down cyberpsychos; and You Decide! Court Date, where actual criminal trials are determined by votes from the viewing audience. Apparently You Decide! Court Date is so popular that there’s a similar show called You Decide! Soap Opera in the works, where the audience at home will similarly vote on the outcome of the plot. Er… okay, one of those is a horrific dystopian concept and one of them is something that has been tried a few times in the real world and mostly didn’t catch on because no one was interested enough, and I really feel like it’d have given it more punch if the latter had been cited as inspiration for the former and not the other way around!
There is an adequately cyberpunky short story about a media who realises that he suddenly had a rage attack after seeing a movie, and starts digging into it. It turns out that the security corp Arasaka is drugging whole neighbourhoods in a way that makes the people there respond to triggers to either get homicidally furious or chill the hell out immediately. They’re going to use the former to start a few riots so they can sell their services, then use the latter to make sure that their success rate at it is startling. The media ends up going into hiding after his netrunner friend got killed by Arasaka assassins. Nicely grim.
The most interesting concept of the book is hinted at throughout but only really explained towards the end – braindance, which is a way to record someone’s every experience and then let someone else relive it. Corporations like DMS have people whose job it is to go around having interesting lives that, with some creative editing, make for quality entertainment. There is also a sample adventure where the players take on a variety of roles surrounding a self-destructing braindance star when her party gets crashed by heavily armed solos. The characters are all pregenerated and not suitable for use after this adventure since they all have distinct secrets and agendas that are meant to come into conflict, but it’s cool for what it is.
So that’s about it. Much like with Solo of Fortune, there was good stuff in there, but you really had to dig for it. I can sort of see why they apparently abandoned the format after this one, it wasn’t working particularly well. Also, I feel like the game could really have used a little more ambience and a little less exhaustive detail about technology. A lot of the time it’s easy to forget that we’re in a dark and perilous future, because everything is described in the driest possible terms.
Well, this was full first edition. I might get to the second one eventually, but for now I think I’ll take a break from this one. Since things are at once so nitpicky and so scattered, I feel like I’ll want to reread the original five books once or twice to make things stick a little better in my head. In the meantime, I have plenty of other games to work my way through. Stay tuned for some of those!