Tag: R. Talsorian Games

Previously on our Cyberpunk readthrough:

• Cyberpunk 2013
• Hardwired
• Near Orbit

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.

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.