“When you open your brain to the digital maelstrom, roll +wired…”

“When you open your brain to the digital maelstrom, roll +wired…”

“When you open your brain to the digital maelstrom, roll +wired…”

One of my players is keen to revisit Cyberpunk 2020. I want to play/run Apocalypse World… I’m thinking the answer may be to give out the AW playbooks and tell them “weird” is a typo.*

What kind of Terrible Pitfalls await?

*(Not really – I’ll at least reskin them with the CP2020 role names, &c.)

10 thoughts on ““When you open your brain to the digital maelstrom, roll +wired…””

  5. The AW Playbooks all equivocate to Cp2020 Roles on a 1-1 basis… with perhaps a few Shadowrun and Cyberspace options tossed in. (AW:Driver = Sr:Rigger, AW:Gunlugger = Cs:Killer… Aquatic Grotesque Mammalian Rodents in Power Armor = Metahumans… in power armor)

    Biggest issue might be adjusting everyone’s personal perspective of the inherent apocalyptic severity in the rather loosely defined term Apocalypse… the system’s rules and processes, have no needed changes.

    I would expect it to feel more like Hardwired, and less like Johnny Mnemonic; but the base environments of Cp2020 and the Hardwired Supplement alt-verse, are already indistinguishable... expect things to tip towards the Night’s Edge alternative setting, but the spooky-stuff there is often ambiguous tech anyway.

  6. Having said that, there is something to be said for the concept of Manipulating the Signal as well as other moves and existents described in the Lonely World apocalyptic setting AW hack.

    But, AW can be used RAW, with all the economic upheaval, governmental collapse, and the nasty bastards and warfare, that have devastated the CP2020 world outside the crystal fortresses of untouchable corporate elites enslaved by their own amoral fascist bureaucracy, and below the ever present danger of megalomaniacs with 0-g psychosis and orbiting weaponry of continental devastation… it is surely post apocalyptic enough.

  8. Weird has always felt a little like a nanotech plague to me…

    When trying to explain it via sci-fi genre rules; AW is a bit like the Revolution tv series, a generation or two after the fall, with the lights turned back on, a few less organised empires, but an ambiguously intelligent hivemind of nanotech acting like a penultima-potent and omnipresent schizophrenic orphan with no proper self motivation… or even a true sense of self.

  9. Thanks for that link, Oliver Granger – it’s already helped with some issues I was having with the Netrunner playbook (mainly a Brainer, in my reskin). A combo of Augury and Manipulate the Signal as mentioned by William Mims looks the way to go.

Comments are closed.