Tag: Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk readthrough: Rockerboy

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!

Cyberpunk readthrough: Solo of Fortune

Previously on our Cyberpunk readthrough:

This time, we’re finally getting back into the setting proper, with Solo of Fortune, dedicated to the Solo class. Technically I think that makes it a splatbook, though I’m not sure if splatbooks were technically a thing back at the time… Either way, let’s have a look.

The first thing to explain is that this seems to be an early attempt at worldbuilding through in-world documents – the conceit is that there is an actual magazine in the world of Cyberpunk called Solo of Fortune (your monthly subscription of which you can have faxed to you, which I get the impression is meant to come across as very hard-boiled futuristic) and this book is an issue of it. The somewhat awkward bit is that while later versions of the trope would have OOC sections describing mechanics and the likes that were separate from the IC fiction pieces, here they’re all jumbled together. Which leads to such things as in-setting advertisements for guns that tells you that they do 3d6 damage. Sometimes there’s a fig leaf about how the in-game stats are an internal ranking system established by previous issues of SoF, but for the most part, it’s just kind of weird.

The book is basically a collection of odds and ends that are more or less related to being a Solo (which in the world of Cyberpunk is a catch-all term for anyone who does violence for money, from security guards to mercenaries), each of which is presented as an article. There are a few more fiction-like pieces that under the guise of “personal accounts,” where we can read about things like a firefight between a Trauma Team and some gangers or a vacationing Solo’s experience in Moscow (lots of clunky military-grade cyberware, lots of wannabe-American youths playing at being Solos by running around getting into trouble). Others are more about worldbuilding.

There is a helpful rundown of the different kinds of Solos that exist: military mercenaries, bodyguards, corporate security, bounty hunters, street samurai (basically freelancers, who might do any of the previous four kinds of work on a temporary basis) and specialists (who has one or two really specific skills that they are really, really good at, meaning that they get hired by people who think that those will be perfect for a particular job). There is a sidebar detailing what kind of stats, skills, and cyberware loadouts you’ll want if you’re going to play a Solo of that particular type.

Street gangs get a section, that fleshes out the information on them from the core. In the world of Cyberpunk there are boosters (who keep cramming cyberware into themselves until they go nuts), posers (who seek to emulate some celebrity in all things, including by getting cosmetic surgery to all look like them. Creepy and flavourful, I’ll give it that!), chromers (who are focused on being really into some kind of rebellious music), dorphers (who are all hopped up on some drug, and can be super-mellow or completely psychotic as a result), puppets (who are secretly working for a corp) and guardians (who have just banded together for protection since no one else seems to give a hoot). There are guidelines for playing a psycho killer gangbanger moving up in the ranks and losing all traces of humanity while you do so, which is, er, nice? I guess?

There is some information about “extractions,” which is when one corp kidnaps a key employee of another corp, with or without said employee’s cooperation, and an account of one of the corporate wars that have been fought in the setting. The latter is a little dry, but admirable thorough – you get taken through all the steps of sabotage, betrayal, different corps joining and leaving the conflict for their own reason, attempts to raise capital, and a lot of guerilla assaults and Net runs. That does give me an idea of what it all looks like, so that’s good. There’s also a guide to infiltrating a corp’s facilities (for purposes of extraction, for example), with a description of just what kind of defenses Arasaka L.A. has. Here my suspension of disbelief snaps a little, even more so than from the 3d6 damage advertisements, because… Arasaka just let someone reveal the defenses of one of their offices? In a magazine that anyone can read? Yeah, I’m thinking a lot of people would have suddenly been killed under mysterious circumstances if that ever happened, followed by a complete reworking of those security measures… Still, it’s definitely useful for those sneak-in-and-cause-problems adventures that cyberpunk games thrive on.

There is gun porn. Well, I guess it would have to be for it to be a convincing Soldier of Fortune pastiche, but I yawned my way through it. Same with the vehicle porn a little further ahead. I may not be a natural Cyberpunk player given how little I care about hardware…

European Solos! They’re richer and classier than American Solos and living lives of high-style James Bond decadence in between jobs. They also hunt each other down and fight duels (not necessarily, but sometimes, to the death) to show who’s more elite than thou.

Government spies are still a thing, megacorps notwithstanding. Like I noted in the Near Orbit post, the nation state might not be quite as extinct in this setting as the elevator pitch for it might imply… Anyway, the CIA, the KGB, Interpol and Mossad all get writeups, with stat blocks for a typical agent. The CIA is mostly messing with the Europeans, the KGB is mostly messing with the Americans, Mossad is mostly messing with the remaining Arabian oil states (because a lot of those got nuked to Kingdom Come in the backstory, remember; but that just means that the oil the remaining ones are sitting on has become even more priceless, so they’re richer than ever), and Interpol is just trying to keep foreign influences out of Europe.

Finally, there’s a rundown of armed conflicts throughout the world of 2013 that enterprising Solos might get hired for. Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines and Palau all have civil wars between corrupt governments and rebels that may or may not be any better. The native companies of El Paso are fighting some maximally hostile takeovers from international corporations. Cyprus ended up sheltering a lot of people from nuked Arabian countries, and now the rich, secular Arabs and the poor, religious Arabs are coming to blows, with the government trying to keep some kind of control. In Honolulu, two entertainment corporations are fighting over the fate of a ratings-grabbing TV (or should that be Net? Not sure) series, with one trying to cut it short by means of car bombs if necessary and the other determined that The Highly Profitable Show Must Go On.

Deep breath… A city in New Mexico is under attack by a belligerent Nomad gang. The super-rich residents of “super-yachts” sailing the Pacific want protection against pirate attacks on their luxurious abodes. Two corporations are battling over the mines on Navajo land, and the Navajo are also trying to have a say in the matter, funnily enough. The City of Santa Cruz wants to blow up the corp-owned oil rigs in its harbour. Aaaaaand Arasaka and another corporation are duking it out in Hong Kong. Whew.

So that’s it. For a fairly thin book it certainly has no end of stuff crammed into it. Some of it is useful, some of it less so. It was apparently meant to be the first of a series of similar books-as-in-setting-magazines, but I think there was only one more, focusing on Rockers and Medias. Stay tuned for that one.

Cyberpunk readthrough: Near Orbit

So, having gone from the the core Cyberpunk 2013 box to a weird tangent about a different setting, is it time for us to return to Night City where, y’know, the actual game is supposed to take place? No, it is not. We’re going into space instead. I’m guessing no one had invented the term “core gameplay loop” at the time, but still…

Oh well. The short of it is, in the dark and distant future of 2013, there is a small but growing world of orbiting space stations and lunar colonies, the residents of which are starting to develop their own subcultures, traditions, and snooty disdain for people who aren’t them. There are factories, laboratories, and self-sustaining habitats. There are also government agencies and megacorporations sniping at each other, which means that there’s work to be had for cyberpunks. There’s nothing further into the solar system as of yet, but there are missions to Mars and Jupiter being planned.

The five major factions in orbit are the European Space Agency, who is responsible for most of the big habitats, including the Crystal Palace that hangs in the Lagrange Point between Earth and the moon; the Japanese Aerospace Bureau, who builds most of the hardware needed for space colonies and sells them to the others; the Soviet Rocket Corps, who does most of the grunt work of dragging materials up into orbit; the US Air Force, who has most of the troops and kill-sats; and NASA, who does most of the long-range exploration. Hey, I thought the USA was supposed to be a spent force in this setting, why are two of the big five still American? I feel deprived of my fictional schadenfreude! Hrmpf.

The environment of space! You have to worry about three major things here: gravity, air and radiation. Living in zero-g isn’t healthy in the long run, so you’re going to want to either live in a station that spins to generate artificial gravity, or at least spend some hours every day in a special swing that spins you around to generate the same effect. Also, learning how to get around is a whole thing and you’re going to need to put points into special skills for it. Air, likewise, is a problem if it runs out and you really don’t want to fire any guns because the walls are thinner than you’d think. Radiation, finally, can hit you from solar flares and engines, and there are demoralisingly realistic tables that set out just how screwed you are if you soak up too much of it too quickly. I’m kind of digging the hard-sf vibe, I’ll admit that much, but as always there’s the question of how to turn it into an exciting game – dying of radiation poisoning isn’t really what I want out of my fun dice-slinging…

Likewise, you may forget those all-purpose Star Wars space-fighters, we’re doing this properly here! You need a surface-to-orbit craft to get up there, then you need a trans-orbital craft to get around. The difference between rockets (that blast off and then fall apart) and shuttles (that are good for multiple trips back and forth) are explained. Deep space crafts are their own thing and are basically miniature space stations with their own gravity, though you probably won’t need to worry about those unless you’re part of a NASA crew heading for Jupiter. There is such a thing as military “deltas” and “cruisers” that can get up into low orbit for the express purpose of blowing shit up there, but they can’t get high enough to threaten the stations in geosynchronous orbit. As an alternative to lugging cargo along, there are also mass drivers that basically send big lumps of material on their way by effectively shooting them out of a magnetic cannon.

Space suits and the propulsions thereof are given some space, and so are the sort of weapons you might use in orbit – flechette guns where the projectiles are slow-moving but super-sharp, tasers, and “safety bullets” that are made to be as useless against hard targets as possible to make sure they don’t pierce the walls. Oh, and velcro. Expect to see a lot of velcro, because without it things tend to not stay where you put them.

Combat between space ships is… really not a thing. Or rather, it is, but it lasts for about two seconds before the combatants find out whose targeting computer is more accurate, and then there’s a big explosion and a lot of debris. Not the kind of thing you can turn into a very engaging minigame, it must be said.

The Crystal Palace is, as mentioned, the main place to be in orbit, being effectively a small city floating in space. Another major habitat called O’Neill One, is under construction. There are also two cities on the moon, Tycho and Copernicus. There is a snarky note that all of this has gotten funded by rich and powerful people because Earth is going to hell in a handbasket, environmentally and socially, and basically everyone who has the money to do so are working very hard on getting the hell out of there and barring the door behind them. That’s… probably depressingly realistic, also.

Culture! People who live in space called themselves “highriders.” They are predominantly ethnic Africans since there’s a mass driver at Kilimanjaro that can send people up into orbit. They’re into super-clean living because anything that can cause errors in judgment is a threat to everyone, but there are people who get addicted to “braindance,” essentially artificial scenarios projected directly into your brain. They also don’t wear a lot of personal adornments, since a lot of them are impractical, but tattoos and tribal scarring is a common way to stand out from the crowd. They still eat a lot of bland nutritional paste, but hydroponics bays can produce a fair amount of vegetables and things like fish and shrimp. Anything that leaves crumbs is right out, though.

The second half of the book is an adventure called Child’s Play. It calls for a group of 5-7 since there’s going to be a need for a lot of manpower. That seems a bit much given that I’ve never once managed to maintain a group of more than five people and right now I’m down to three again… Anyway, they get hired by a nameless employer who brings them to the Crystal Palace and puts them through some training before directing them to go raid an orbital lab. Along the way, they get to take a look around the Crystal Palace and bump into an Interpol inspector who Will Become Important Later. The description of the station from the inside is pretty nice.

Anyway, the players have to hijack an inter-orbital shuttle that’s scheduled to make a supply run at the target station, and once there they need to use a combination of hacking and bamboozling to get in, quite possibly ending up fighting the internal security. They make their way to the secure lab and find out that – the lab is creating genetically engineered humans fit for zero-g life! The bastards – they’re trying to turn this into Eclipse Phase! Noooooooo!

Anyway, the players make their getaway, likely with some fetuses in vitro and a friendly five-year-old German monkey-boy (the GM is instructed to adjust his level of gratuitous cuteness to the group’s tolerance level. Heh), but they get shot at and start venting oxygen. They have no choice but to return to the Crystal Palace, where they find out that their employer is going to kill both them and the kid, so they have to make a desperate break for it and try to make some sort of deal, possibly with the Interpol inspector from earlier. Hopefully, they only get cheated of their pay and sent back to Earth with a megacorporation murderously mad at them – practically a “happily ever after” by cyberpunk standards.

It’s all very complicated and I feel like I’d need to read the whole thing three more times to really understand all the intricate realistic considerations and details… but I have to admit that it’s got a certain charm, to the point that I’d even consider running it. There is something terribly interesting about having a (comparatively) hard sci-fi setting with lots of cold equations and unforgiving constraints, and figuring out how to give the players choices and options within them.

Anyway. The next one up in this series is Solo of Fortune, so we might actually get to see some more of the regular setting. We’ll see.

Cyberpunk 2013

I’ve been too listless to finish another character this week, so let’s take another nostalgic dive into the past instead. This time, let’s look at another grand old game, Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk from back in 1988. For one that was never in the big leagues, it’s actually doing pretty well for itself even today – there’s been a big-budget video game that seems to be pretty well-liked (once they fixed all the bugs, at least) and an anime Netflix show. It ain’t Shadowrun, but that’s the price you pay for taking yourself halfway seriously when your target audience are all about making a complete mockery of everything.

Here’s how old this game is: it came in a box.

In the box are three slender little volumes: one for rules, one for settings, and one for combat rules, though all three are honestly spread sort of haphazardly through all three books.

RULES: VIEW FROM THE EDGE

The rules book, View From the Edge, starts out with a cursory description of the setting (see what I mean?) and what it means to be a cyberpunk. Basically, it’s the distant future of 2013 and technology has taken such a huge leap that most people can’t keep up – cybernetics, human/machine interfaces, artificial tissues and orbital stations are commonplace, and that has made most people so overwhelmed that they just sit back and let governments and corporations (insofar as there is a difference anymore) have their way with them. But not you, for you are a cyberpunk! You embrace the metal! You charge full thrust into the future! And you’re probably going to die horribly in a futile bid to make your mark on an uncaring world, but by golly you’ll look awesome doing it!

So that’s basically the mission statement here. Look cool, stand up and be counted, and never ever play it safe. Heh. That might just be the exact opposite to my personal way of life, but okay, I can dig it in theory.

We’re also given the nine basic character classes right away: rockers, solos (who are assassins or mercenaries), netrunners (hackers), techies, medias (journalists), cops, corporates, fixers (wheelers and dealers) and nomads (your rootless bikers roaming the land). The presentation of them all felt a little confusing to me the first time I read it, since they all seem framed to be idealistic crusaders of one sort or another, while the game seems to be more about an amoral quest for getting more money. But, knowing a little more of the genre now, I think I get it – you’re supposed to have some ideals that you want to chase, but you also have to keep yourself fed, and you’re meant to be angsty and tormented about the conflict between the two. I think in a modern game that would have been better explained, but this was ’88 and the unspoken assumption was still that you were going to get most of your narrative direction from fiction.

Having chosen your class, you then roll for how many character points you get and distribute them over your nine main stats: Intelligence, Reflexes, Cool, Technical Ability, Luck, Attractiveness, Movement Allowance, Body Type and Empathy. You also get skills, but those are gained through a quirky lifepath system where you choose and roll for various parts of your upbringing and background, and get to pick up some skills depending on what you end up with – for instance, if you grew up on the street, served a stint in the military, got a formal education, and so on. You also roll for a special incident for every year of your adult life, which can result in you gaining enemies, connections, extra money, heartbreaks, and such things.

I like it in theory – you can see how it’s meant to set up a checkered past with lost loves, friends in unexpected places, simmering resentments, and all the sort of things that a cyberpunk character definitely ought to have. I do feel it’s a little barebones, though. It kind of assumes you’re really familiar with the setting, so that you can come up with characters and situations in it on the fly. Great if you’re very into the genre or if you’ve played the game before, but a bit harder if you’re me and you’ve read maybe one or two William Gibson books and watched Johnny Mnemonic and that’s about it.

Then, of course, there’s the main event: cybernetics! You’ve got a bunch of gear you can bolt onto your feeble human form. Cybernetic eyes for seeing into the infrafred spectrum, reflexes boosters that pump up your all-important REF stat, chipware that lets you gain the basics of a skill you don’t naturally have, interface plugs that lets you become one with your gun or your car… You’re limited partly by your starting funds (which you can double by selling your soul to a crime syndicate, corporation, or the army!), partly by the fact that each piece of cyberware adds to a tally that permanently reduces your EMP stat, with EMP 0 resulting in “cyberpsychosis” and needing to make a new character. Which does, funnily enough, make EMP something you need lots of if you want to play a stone-cold cyborg – not because you’ll be using it, but because the amount of cyberware you can handle is capped by how high it started out.

I do feel a little like cyberware is underpowered, both compared to how powerful it tends to be in fiction, and how much the game is meant to center on it. Is it really worth crippling your stats for a +2 to some very specific rolls? But then, I guess I’m probably just not being cyberpunk enough. Form over function, attitude is everything, live on the edge – you’re supposed to rip out parts of your living brain just so that you can take phone calls in your head, because that’s how you show that you’re a complete badass who don’t give a shit, man!

Next up are rules for running around the Net. You basically have a program that interprets the stuff you run into when hacking a database or whatever, so that you see it as a fantasy dungeon, a Noir city, or a glowy Tron-style virtual universe. You go in carrying a selection of programs that you can throw out like spells to do things like smash through a door or defeat defensive software. You’re limited to five programs, but you can cheat by loading a bunch of them into a “demon” which counts as a single program but gradually deteriorates every time you use it. Pretty cool and flavourful, though I don’t know if it’d work well as a mini-game – a lot of the rules feel like you just roll repeatedly to pass an obstacle until you succeed. But I guess you could probably spice it up with enemy netrunners and the likes.

Also, the text notes breathlessly that a haul from a netrunning operation might consist of… an entire Megabyte of data!!!! Which, considering that my folder of roleplaying PDFs has reached 85 Gigabytes from my obsessive hoarding is… a little bit funny, I feel.

Last part of the rules are about medicine. Most notably, a sensible professional will sign up for a Trauma Team subscription! That means that whenever you flatline, a flying ambulance shows up and scoops you up to try to revive you, if necessary gunning down whomever caused you to flatline in the first place. That’s… kind of awesome. There are also some notes on street drugs, but it’s kind of anemic given how much drug use is part of the genre – I think they were worried about moral guardians if they seemed to promote it.

SETTING: WELCOME TO NIGHT CITY

The world book, Welcome to Night City, starts out with a timeline, which is… honestly so forgettable that I have trouble even grasping enough of it to describe here. But basically, there have been a couple of South American wars with cybernetically enhanced super-soldiers, Europe is back on top of the world and America is in the crapper (mua ha! Mua ha! I smirk over my over-priced cappuccino!), the Middle East is a radioactive wasteland and most cars run on alcoholic fuels created from genetically engineered super-crops, there are lunar colonies and space stations, and corporations have their own militaries who sometimes go to war against each other.

Funnily enough, every part of the world that isn’t the US seems to be doing pretty well – as near as I can tell, the writers felt like it made the future more depressing if all us other riffraff were thriving while the Land of the Free collapsed… The Soviet Union has made a comeback, Europe is going strong, Africa and South America are getting their act together, Japan and China are coming into their own. Of course, those places are presumably also run by ruthless megacorporations, so it ain’t that rosy, but still.

In America, though, cities are divided into the corporate-controlled business areas and suburbs, which have a private police force and things are relatively quiet, and the Combat Zones, where poor people live, violent crime is omnipresent, and everything is generally kind of crap. Outside the cities are mostly a lot of ghost towns and corporate-run farmland, and nomadic caravans are traveling around trying to scratch out a living by means fair and foul.

Laws have gotten a lot more rough-and-tumble. The cops can and will gun you down. On the other hand, you can gun down anyone who tries to mess with you. Lots of gunning down going on. Old-fashioned drugs are illegal, but genetically engineered crop failures have mostly destroyed the production of them anyway, and the sort of designer drugs that corporations sell are, conveniently, not considered “drugs” drugs and therefore legal. Prisons are overcrowded and prisoners are mostly crammed into cryo-tanks for the duration of their sentence, meaning that they spend all that time semi-conscious and having nightmares. Okay, that’s genuinely sort of horrifying.

Vehicles are stil mostly regular cars, but short-distance flying cars exist, mostly as emergency vehicles. Trains run on “maglev” tracks, hovering on a cushion of magnetic force to remove friction.

Communications is where the game shows its age. The fax machine is still state of the art, and people read newspapers by having the pages they are interested in faxed to their home or to a public outlet (futuristic!). Cell phones exist but are of course giant bricks with antennas at the end.

Game Master advice! Cyberpunk is meant to have a ton of grim ambience, so make sure that it features a lot of garbage-strew back streets, bodies in the gutter, deranged down-and-outs, and brutal firefights. Also, it’s always raining. Always. Or at the bare minimum, it should look like it’s about to.

Of course, the rich don’t live like that – they dwell in disgusting opulence, with armed guards standing ready to throw out anyone who they don’t want to look at anymore. Play up the contrast.

Furthermore, morality should be shady. Sworn enemies might get thrown together. Getting anywhere requires cutting some corners and compromising your values. This is the part that I think could have used a little more squaring with the assumption in the rules book that players will be heroic crusaders against the evil corporate tyrants, but okay, I think I get it. There are bad guys, but in order to have a chance to get at them, you’re going to have to give up a lot of that moral high ground. Everyone gets a little muddy just from wading through the muck.

The book acknowledges the problem with the classes, which is that they don’t really fit naturally together – a cop on the edge, a nomadic biker, a corporate sell-out and a rebellious rock star aren’t just going to naturally form an adventuring party. It suggests a few combinations that might work, but basically, you need to center the team on one kind of scene, then play fast-and-loose with the classes that don’t really fit into it so they do. E.g., if the team is a police squad, then the “fixer” might be the shadier sort of cop who’s in bed with half the criminals he’s supposed to be stopping. Since your class doesn’t actually influence which skills you can take (all it really gets you is one particular special skill), that works out fairly well.

There’s a map of Night City, which is the default setting for the game. A lot of landmarks are written out, but the only ones who get any sort of description are the seedy bars. That possibly tells you something about where the focus of the game is meant to be…

There is a short story to demonstrate the setting, called Never Fade Away, which concerns a Rocker (Johnny Silverhand, who is effectively the face of the franchise) whose Netrunner girlfriend gets kidnapped by a corporation so she can build a brain-frying Net program for them. So he recruits a crusading Media, his Solo ex-girlfriend and her Nomad partner to launch a rescue, but in the end all they manage to accomplish is sabotage the Netrunner’s own plan to free herself so that she ends up with her brain uploaded in the Net and no way to return to her body. It offers some helpful stats for the various characters, with the implication that you can run this as a sample adventure. I guess it’s flavourful enough. Oh, and they apparently really liked the picture of a cyborg girl in lingerie, because they reused the same one to mark the start of the next chapter.

There’s a chapter on how corporations work, most of which is pretty unexciting stuff about corporate structure and what the different positions mean. That’s… probably something you need to know if you’re running a game in a world where corporate executes are effectively royalty, yes, but it’s not really sexy. Anyway, the corporations can do pretty much whatever they want now, the governments have given up on controlling them. Also, they have private armies, and ninjas. Because it’s 1988, and conventional wisdom is that Everything Needs More Ninjas.

There’s a looooong list of major corporations and their exact military assets. Again, good to know, definitely would be using this as setting detail, but none of it really stands out.

The book closes with a random sprinkling of flavour – information on a couple of different bands (all of which are POLITICAL!!!, because again, it’s 1988 and being angry about stuff is considered edgy and rebellious. As opposed to today, when it’s just considered mandatory… Sigh. I make myself sad), a couple of different nomad caravans (the Crazy Quilts are disgruntled combat vets, who came back from the wars to find nothing waiting for them; the Huskers are farmers who have been driven off their land by corporations), a couple of different street gangs (the Blood Razors are mad, bad and crazy and big on cybernetic claws; the Iron Sights are patsies for the Arasaka Corporation). There is also a deranged cult who go around killing cyborgs. Finally, there are some kind of funny reports from a Trauma Team operative, which includes things like resuscitating a client, charging him for it, have him violently object to the price tag, needing to take him down in self-defense, resuscitating him from said take-down, and adding the extra cost to his bill. Heh!

COMBAT: FRIDAY NIGHT FIREFIGHT

The combat book is called Friday Night Firefight. The rules are apparently modified from a game called Mekton which seems to be about giant robots punching each other. Sounds kind of cool, but I hadn’t heard of it before – I guess it didn’t stand the test of time as well.

It starts out with telling us that this system is super-gritty and deadly! Try to be a hero, and you’ll get stuck with a Trauma Team bill. I feel like there is a bit of tension between a high-lethality system and the expected playstyle of never playing it safe because that’s not the cyberpunk way… I mean, I get that what they mean is that you should take insane risks even though you might die, because you’re a complete badass who don’t give a shit, man, but I think players would probably get less committed to that ethos after losing a character or three.

Anyway, combat is played in rounds, every round has four phases, and you get to act in between one or four of them depending on how high your REF is (four actions require you to have near-maximum REF and also to have a cybernetic reflex booster). When you shoot at someone, you roll REF+weapon skill and the target rolls REF+Athletics, and if you roll higher you hit and roll damage. The shooter gets a bonus for the accuracy of the gun and for spending extra actions aiming, the target gets a bonus for range (which ranges are relevant depends on the gun as well), and for things like being in cover or in motion. Hit and you roll damage depending on the range and caliber of bullets, adding the amount by which you exceeded the defender’s roll. From that, you subtract armour, and then you compare what’s left to a table that depends on your Body Type, and it determines whether you scored a Flesh Wound (which effectively does nothing), a Serious Wound (which might cramp your style), a Critical Wound (which is going to hurt), a Mortal Wound (puts you down and you’re dying) or an Instantly Mortal Wound (puts you down and you’re dead, dead, dead). Each type worse than Flesh Wound gradually worsens to the next level if left unattended for a certain amount of time, so you’ll want to get some first aid. Also, if you take a wound worse than a Flesh Wound when you already have a wound worse than a Flesh Wound, the wounds add up to one that’s worse than both.

Okay, that’s… going to take a lot of flipping back and forth. Also, is this actually as lethal as all that? I feel like if you’re wearing body armour, you’re going to be wading through handgun fire without a care in the world and it’ll take a high-caliber rifle to put you down. Not sure if that is realistic or not, but it does mean that in certain situations the system becomes irrelevant – it will just consistently spit out the same result. Also, certain characters are going to be impossible to hit for certain other characters, even at point blank range, since the sum of your dodge bonus can easily rise so high that a poor marksman can’t hit even with the best possible result.

Automatic weapons have their own rules variation, and they are terrifying. Like, hefty penalty to dodge, one hit per point that the attack roll exceeds the dodge roll terrifying. Once those come into play, things have indeed taken a turn for the gory… though again, a high-level Solo can probably dance right through a machine gun burst from a raw recruit.

Healing, finally, takes time. The advanced medical technology of the futuristic year of 2013, which has fancy tricks like cloned transplant organs and spray-on skin, does speed things up a little, though you’re still looking at weeks of convalescence.

SO, WHAT DO I THINK?

Well… I must admit myself a bit charmed. It’s all very rough, very much a game in the early tradition of “scribble down our personal notes all willy-nilly, then package it as a game.” But it’s got a raw appeal to it, precisely because it feels like something that’s meant to work rather than look pretty (even if I suspect that there are some things that don’t work especially well). As near as I can tell from my admittedly shallow knowledge of cyberpunk, it does present the genre fairly effectively, with its ever-shaky balance between raging against the machine and wanting to join with it, between wanting to be superhuman and fearing to become inhuman.

I don’t know. I do plan to keep reading, though. I’ve just had to take a break before the first published supplement, because it was a conversion to Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired setting. So now I have to read that 520-page novel so I can properly understand that 98-page roleplaying supplement. Yes, sometimes I do think I’m a bit weird.