The Cyberpunk Collective

Not much time to update, it's been a little crazy round here. I do have one link of note, however.

The Cyberpunk Collective

It's a livejournal community centered around cyberpunk, and a lot of neat entries and threads have been made. If you have a livejournal, I'd recommend joining, and if you don't, look around anyway. Many of the threads are worth a read.

New Campaign Setting

I've started writing a new campaign setting. The city, Nuevo Praha, is a European-founded city on the Nuclear pock-marked East Coast of the United States. I'm writing up several new corporations, but since the setting is for 203x (and consequently happens 15 years after 2020 is set), it incorporates Night City (merely its existence) and uses the old corps as trademark properties, so I don't have to rewrite every item available. I will rebrand them, eventually.
I've mapped some basic stuff, including rudimentary public transit. It's going, so I expect to put more work into it over the summer. It should be playable when I go to Pittsburgh, but that may depend on the premier of 203x. I'm waiting eagerly, to be sure.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Maps

This is really for any roleplayer anywhere out there in the blogosphere. Do you like maps? I do.

When I played D&D, I made maps for everything. As I detailed earlier, I used street maps for CP, but detail maps I didn't really have many of. And from the few times I have used them, I know they are a big help for organization and for your players.

Right now, I'm in the brainstorming stage for a new campaign that I want to have semi-playable when I move to Pittsburgh for college in about five weeks. I have some ideas and some inspiration (see: Batman Begins and Divine Inspiration), but I want to put them down on paper now.

Here's a GM's boon: quadrille notebooks. I bought a bright orange quadrille book in France the summer after eighth grade, and it's been a GM primary for me for the past five years. I now need to get another one and start drafting.

Any brilliant ideas for a new and completely original campaign? I have a lot of corporations and mobs and gangs to write up, so any advice is appreciated.

Batman Begins and Divine Inspiration

I saw Batman Begins tonight.

And, being the GM I am, I started thinking. Thinking about inner-city dystopia, thinking about Gibson...thinking about Cyberpunk in film.

Cyberpunk and the Original Batman

Gotham's new interpretation has not strayed from its dystopian nature, rather, it has embraced it. Instead of the glossed-over Gotham, this new Gotham has an underworld, has shantytowns, has ugliness. And the key thing is that ugliness is really the reality.
There is one scene in the movie where a kid is outside his corrugated aluminum "house". Inside, it's clear that some form of domestic situation is ensuing. Batman shows up, and the kid looks up in awe. A light in a desolate world.

It is very difficult for many people, especially people such as myself who come from relatively comfortable backgrounds, to understand what it means to truly struggle against the world. Liberal idealists can claim to fight for those struggling, but when they do not have to struggle for themselves, it is truly a useless rallying cry.

Gotham is a world, that like the Chiba of Gibson, the Tampa of Williams, or the burbclaves of Stephenson, is modeled on reality. A reality that the powers-that-be try to mask, and a world that we can choose to ignore.

The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. The way that the government combats this is with anemic and useless subsidies which pretend to be doing something, and continual spoon-feeding of "patriotic" propaganda, as well as television: the ultimate alternative to action. Nowhere in history has a more compelling argument to sit on our asses and do nothing been written.

This is my new scary campaign idea. The world outside has become a cruel dystopia. 2% owns 90% of everything, and the other 98% can only comply or starve. So, while 95% get contracted, 3% choose to grab life on their own terms. Only about .2%, in total, succeed. Everyone else either starves, gets capped, or submits, and does nothing but watch TV or threevee every single fucking day after getting home from work.

The .2% in question are the edgerunners. A combination of idealists and jaded cynics who run a rigged black market created by the higher-ups. Things are under such tight control, that even the black market is corporate controlled. Crime is simulated in suburban communities by professional anarchists with political science degrees because the real crime in the slums and at ground level almost always goes uninvestigated.

This campaign would start in some corporate suburb. The PCs are here for some reason, be it legitimate or otherwise. The big thing is that somebody wants to mix things up. It's nothing new, making money rarely follows the rules. But, it's an opportunity. A big what if: can someone catch an opportunity, or will it turn into a cyclical mess of raping the masses for personal gain? I'm sure we'll learn the hard way that people don't tend to be very moral when they have more to gain and less to lose by being heartless.

It'll be interesting. In the meanwhile, I have writing to get to.

Book Review: Hardwired

Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams

This book is beach-reading cyberpunk. The orbital corporations control the world, and a panzerboy and a street assassin are the only ones who can...yada yada. You know how it goes.
I'm almost done with the book, and I've liked it. The characters are solid, the story is fun, and Williams takes you through each page in a high-action, run and gun style. I will say it's nothing revolutionary, and the one weakness I've noticed is the dialogue, which turns into standard action movie writing, for better or worse. Despite this, Williams manages the emotional tensions (which run high) very well, and creates some killer characters out of it.
The one thing I've noticed is that the slang seems to have been borrowed for CP 2020. Panzerboy, screamsheet, the body lotto, even calling the speedware Sandevistan (though the spellings are slightly different). It seems that Hardwired inspired the type of mood that Pondsmith wanted to create with Cyberpunk, and as a result, borrows from it. The game does well here, because the hard-edged, weapon heavy world Williams creates is exactly what you'd want Night City to be on a night when the body count is high and the PCs have full clips. If you like high-action, high-violence games, and even if you don't, Hardwired is a great example of how Cyberpunk writing can turn into action scenes and a great high-stakes game session.

Twinking

You know what twinking is, either having to GM a twinking player or having to play alongside one. It is a person who goes beyond min-maxing. A person who plays as a wargamer, simply to kill, and optimizes everything to do so. Bot only is the character useless outside combat, it has nothing to offer in any roleplay. I personally hate this. I had a player who made a series of solos, with ludicrously maxed out statistics, speedware, the works. Worse, the player thought that having all 10s in their stats block made them the best. My first strategy was to put the group against a standard cyberpsycho. This particular metalhead, through some interesting combinations of cyberware, had REF of 14, BOD of 18...you get the idea. He outmatched my player, but, as was fair, everyone else had a go too. Another player devised a brilliant plan taking advantage of the opposing gang's frat boy attitudes. I couldn't give up the chance for a brilliant RP, so we went with it, and it was brilliant. As positive as it was, our twink still felt invincible. It was getting damn annoying, to say the least, when he makes these requests that are outlandish, and then complains when you won't give in. I wasn't about to let this guy get some heavy weapon at face value, for instance. Fortunately, he and his character's hubris got the best of him. It was a standard situation, where the team was driving a van filled with surveillance equipment down the Mass Pike, chased by an AV with two PA units ready for insertion. The wheelman crashed the van trying to take an offramp at 80mph (a great use of Maximum Metal vehicle combat rules), and several team members ran for cover as the PAs descended from the AV. Not our twink. He takes out his racegun and says to me, "I'm going to hit his visor with my pistol. I mean, I do have +3 million or so in pistol." Whatever the stat was, it wasn't really going to help. -6 for tiny target, -4 for aimed shot...if I recall, he actually hit, but he never bothered to ask if the visor was armored. And besides...there were two of them. He got hit with 6 .30 caliber slugs, argued for a while about BTM and armor, and after finally shutting up, got essentially killed. Felt a little less invincible after that. A few other things happened, resulting from similarly stupid ideas (I use Aikido to disarm the cyberpsycho!), and I'm still not quite sure if he's entirely reformed. Oh well.

I'd say do everything in your power to encourage roleplay and character development from the get-go. And remind the players (gently) that their characters are not superhuman. This isn't D&D, where by level 10, a sword can't really touch you. In Cyberpunk, fatality is around the same no matter what the character level is. And big guns are cheap. Especially for your enemies.

This guy may have been a hopeless case. His only experience before CP was Warhammer 40k.

Character Profile: Nori Takahashi

Nori Takahashi was my brother's first character, and for the year while I GMed my brother and his friends, the only one I could remember for the life of me. And that was only two years ago. This guy was the epitome of "Style over Substance". He was a Yakuza fixer with the Oddjob style suit and Bowler Hat (no hat blade, unfortunately), and a katana concealed in a cane. He was all about the style, the negotiations, the epithets before the gunfight...so much fun. He made the other party members come together, which helped a lot, considering how disjointed they were. In a kind of funny twist (only because my brother agreed to let me do it), Nori was made into nori in a drive by shooting at a sushi bar, done by the PCs trying to resuce him. Despite his death, I have resurrected Nori for bits of fiction. He may not have been the most well-developed character, but he was COOL. And that is what Cyberpunk is all about.

Character Profile: Lars Blackpool

Everyone has that one PC or NPC, that they loved, for some reason. If it was an NPC, you knew it, because you'd never let him die...even if he became the central villain. That was my problem with Lars Blackpool, my only PC and the namesake for this blog. He had become such the character, that I couldn't let him go.
I rolled up Lars' sheet as a PC for a campaign my brother was running. He was cast as a solo, so there was the usual min-maxing, but his character points roll was very high (75 or so) so it didn't really matter. He was initially a big-gun solo, with the muscle shirt, the mohawk, the shotgun...you know...the usual. My brother's campaign lasted all of two sessions, but I kept the character. He showed up as an NPC in a solo hired by the next campaign team, and I kept winding him in.
As I incorporated him into my latest campaign, he had grown up. The mohawk had toned down, and for the most part, he left the big shotgun at home. I power-matched him to my now powerful PCs, giving him a few toys, and a very interesting personality. He may have been a solo, but he had the demeanor of a hedonistic corp, one who drinks hard and sleeps little. Before he turned on the party, he tried seducing one member, and offered them all hallucinogens. That was the kind of guy he was.
His background was also one I particularly liked. His brother was an anarchist, and his last attack was on the building of a corp Lars was contracted to. Lars and several other solos were held for days. His brother lectured about the evils of corporate America, angering Lars (only 19 at the time). When the SWAT team broke in, Lars shot his brother in the head and left the building before he could get fingerprinted. The conflict that made him abandon personal attachment was a few days later, when he realized his brother was right. Torn by guilt, he returned to the building, and after being congratulated by his supervisor, he stole two large pistols (an inventory item from when he was a PC) and shot the supervisor, as well as his secretary, several staffers, and the building's top level executive.
The problem that my players discovered about Lars is that he reconciled his brother's death by reconciling that he did it. As a result, human life doesn't have as much value to him anymore. He's turned the players three times, but only the third was big enough to get them to try and kill him. Which they can't do. I will admit that Lars was a bit twinkish, but since I played the campaign with high-schoolers, there was a lot of that. I had one particularly annoying player who twinked his characters every time, so I pulled the copy trick, copying all of his stats, skills, and inventory, and boosting them all by 2. This cybered Hulk and Lars went in, shot up a pot party, taking down two PCs with it. Neither died, but both got very pissed, especially when they argued that I "couldn't do that". It was quite unfortunate that the one player who understood my logic had been hit by a sniper early in the battle. But, admittedly, I really didn't want Lars to die. The Max Payne swagger and armament, combined with an outlook so bleak his only alternative was to laugh. Life was a big joke to him, and his only goal was not to be part of the punchline. I always bring him back.

Campaign Setting: Cyberpunk Boston

Well, as I start off, I'll run off things I've done in various games I've played in/ran. Hopefully, by the time I run out of stuff to say, either I'll be in another game, or somebody will actually read this. I've had successes with my games, and I've made mistakes, so hopefully my experiences provide an interesting look into how people run their games, and how you may end up running your game.

I first ran Cyberpunk in the Night City setting because it's easy. The location neither helped nor hindered the game, and I mostly focused on characters, who were of my own devising, or PCs. My last campaign I ran in my own setting, called Cyberpunk Boston, because it's Cyberpunk in Boston. What I did is good procedure for anyone interested in creating a campaign setting based on a real city. I went to the MBTA (Boston area transit) website, and downloaded the biggest map of Boston I could find, and printed it off. It was about 17 x 22, or four sheets of printer paper. Perfect. After I started writing material, creating NPCs, and so on, I marked important things on the map. Where character's lived, important locations, places where stuff happened, etc. The most important thing about the map, though, was that it had all of the subway stations and bus stops on it. The campaign was low-level, so of course, no one owned a car. Even if they did, a road map is great material for car chases. "The road is a dead end. Which way do you go?" "Left!" "And, you're...stuck at a tollbooth." So, having the information is always good, even if you don't know if you'll use it. And besides, maps are good for mapping out all sorts of things, be it gang turf, new corporate developments, what the neighborhood looks like...that is an important thing.
I wrote down descriptions of each different area/suburb of Boston. You know, Southie became a Combat Zone, the Back Bay was really corporate, Cambridge became crowded, poor living area, etc. I had basic descriptions for any place in town you would care to happen upon. The most useful thing was that since I knew where my players were, I could offer interesting bits that would connect them more to the area. That being said, not living directly in Boston, this wasn't always possible. Strangely enough, one big encounter towards the end of the campaign took place in Concord, where most of my players lived...
I liked the campaign, but it taught me that NPCs can be written for whenever. The one thing I really failed to do was broaden out the demographics to provide hooks outside the central plot. The bits about the two or three central corps were written, and I had focus on one gang, but they were too isolated. My players went right along the plot though, so I never really suffered for it. The plot was pretty non-linear, anyway...as a personal preference, I like a little room to make it up as I go along. Towards the end, I found that notecards are really useful for scratching down stuff you just made up.

I really enjoyed running that campaign, despite some shortcomings. If anyone has any experiences/tips from running campaigns or playing in them, do drop a comment.

Well, welcome to the show!

Unlike my other blog attempts, this one has a purpose. I am going to try and highlight my experiences roleplaying, be it my personal favorite game, Cyberpunk 2020, or any other. I'm sure my supply of gaming-related anecdotes is nearly limitless, but in the meanwhile, I should start the self-respecting gamer off with some self-respecting links:

Gamegrene

A site with many interesting and useful articles. Includes some interesting CP stuff, such as an interview with Mike Pondsmith on 203X.

R. Talsorian

The main page for the publisher of Cyberpunk 2020. Some good stuff, links and such, but the one thing I'm looking for is a release date for 203X.

Cyberpunk.co.uk

I "found" this forum today, and immediately liked what I read.

There are many, many more, but I can't possibly list them all, and those sites have link lists. So, go searching. If you're like me, you'll look for a character sheet, and come out with 100MB of game resources. There's a lot out there.

Oh. One more thing.

RandomFandomPress

If you're as much of a geek as I am, you'll find something there. The mods are neurotic/high schoolers, but it's interesting. I occasionally post as kabbalist_ninja, and generally, the board is very quiet. It needs new life.

As this gets a little more set up, and I know there's at least one person reading, I'll go more long-winded about that one time with the Arasaka Riot 8 that ran over the...yeah, it's weird hearing people talking about their sessions, but I've learned a lot in my three years as a Cyberpunk GM, and hope to learn more.

And hey, if you play D&D, leave one here too. Hell, if you play Champions, Vampire, Rifts...anything. Even Shadowrun.