33 thoughts on “Hey, everyone.”

  2. I really like it when the genre uses technology to ask questions about what it means to be human. Blade Runner asks whether humanity can be created from nothing, Deus Ex explores what happens when we control our own evolution, Dark Matter asks what remains when our memories are taken away, and so on.

    The Sprawl doesn’t present a good framework for exploring these kinds of questions, unfortunately. I think it wants to, and it doesn’t really get in the way of asking them, but the right social and introspective tools just aren’t there in the mechanics.

  3. James Etheridge I think you just perfectly summarized what my latent, simmering dissatisfaction with the sprawl stemmed from. It somehow drew on all the right source material, but ended up feeling a lot more like Shadowrun and cyberpunk pastiche rather than cyberpunk. Kudos to you.

  4. Two related things:

    1 – Brand names

    2 – Getting what you want leaves you dissatisfied and traumatized and forces you to destroy everything of genuine value you touch

  8. Chris Stevens New Rose Hotel is my favorite cyberpunk thing. It’s a very simple story. A guy falls in love with a lady. On some level he knows she’s using him; but he can’t stop himself from loving her. It destroys everything in his life.

  10. I tried to touch a little on transhumanism (transfelinism) and the darker side of how we get out cyberpunk tech in my CYBERKITTENS setting, but it was just a small little setting-ish thingy, so I didn’t really explore all that much:

    drivethrurpg.com – CyberKittens: Project Bakeneko

    James Etheridge J Stein, I think those are fair critiques, but then I think the goal was to be doing the more action-based shadowrun-y style of cyberpunk than the deep philosophical questions of cyberpunk. Have you checked out Fraser Simons’s The Veil? It might be doing the type of cyberpunk you were looking for:

    https://plus.google.com/communities/111282641132726730775

  11. You can always weave a story integrating those things into the Sprawl without the help of mechanics though! I really liked the supplement from Dana.

    The Veil aims at emergent play and characterization with each playbook, and the MC has tools for crafting a story aimed primarily at having the players walk away from the table asking themselves the kind of questions that cyberpunk media poses. Player facing materials and MC tools are all driven towards the answering of questions. All of this means that it’s less of a pickup game like The Sprawl though!

  12. The tribalism of hardcore criminal professionals living or working along the edges of society. The little eddies of equilibrium, and the moments where that shatters.

    Also, not sure what this is in broad terms, but my PCs took out a hardcore guard for some executive, and are now seeing carbon copies of him protecting less important people. They depreciated the value of this vat-grown security guy, and now there’s a fire sale.

  14. Extreme capitalism (or maybe just pure?). Things that used to be socialized are private, like government, roads, police etc. Every thing is branded, franchised, commercialized, including your nationalit, relgioin, etc.

    Desensitization to the threat of violence. Family sedans are bulletproof. Everyone is packing some kind of defensive/offensive gear. Psychopathic murdering is still punished by society but there are very clear boundaries that if crossed it’s accepted that you asked for it.

    Exploration of what humanity is. Is it just a set of neural pathways that make the actual shell irrelevant (Cyber ware/Androids/Clones, AI, etc)

  15. Dana Kubilus Oh, for sure. The Sprawl definitely accomplishes what it sets out to do, and within the Shadowrun-esque region of the genre it occupies I think it’s one of the best, it’s just that that play space doesn’t interest me as much as others.

    I’ve heard The Veil mentioned once or twice, but it’d quite slipped my mind; I think it was in development and hard to find any rules text last I looked. Will give it another look, thanks for the reminder!

  16. James Etheridge is spot on. In The Sprawl I’m not concerned with mechanically asking what it means to be human, and I’m explicitly not interested in framing the question of humanity in opposition to technology. That’s why there’s no “cyberpsychosis” or “humanity” rules.

    Rather, I’m interested in questions of ubiquitous corporate control. If I had to pick one cyberpunk story that encapsulates what I wanted to do with The Sprawl, it would be New Rose Hotel (with particular focus on the corporate machinations that lead to the loss Jason Corley highlights).

    I view transhumanism as a separate genre to cyberpunk, so The Sprawl doesn’t really go into that territory. It looks like The Veil tackles that material head on though, so I’m excited to read that eventually!

  18. If I had my way it would be a little more steeped in it, but as is with playtesting the drift from AW overwhelmed some playtesters as is, so I’m slowly easing into it. The Veil is actually the foundation and first step of an overall design goal I have.

    We are making great headway too, layout is almost done and artwork is still coming in. Dare I say we are pretty on target. I sent out a very early draft that we did just to get white space solidified for the artist. If you don’t mind typos and some formatting issues, you’re free to check it out if you like! Just be aware that it’s missing a lot, needs corrections, etc. Hope you don’t mind my posting here Hamish Cameron.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/9r2ezhxfje7zutz/The_Veil_Interior_Layout_preview_20160829.pdf?dl=0

  20. Thanks! And I don’t think a lot of the stuff I like about cyberpunk fiction needs to have mechanical means in the system either. Just playing to find out what happens and being in a cyberpunk setting should allow for whatever kind of story regardless, I think. Plus all Pbta has a that framework for crafting custom moves that you can tailor to it for whatever kind of story you like. Mechanics do tell the player what the games about buuuut I would argue that all pbta has a framework that’s malleable for telling the story you want if you understand moves.

  21. “They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.” –Neuromancer

    How can you not love that?

  22. If we’re talking about ubiquitous corporate control and throwing out relevant fiction then I have to mention Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

    It’s not really cyberpunk at all but it’s a fantastic imagining of a dystopic corporation controlled future – as seen from colonists on Mars. I’m definitely using it as flavour for the corporations in my games. The corporations are ever present yet ultimately distant. They can do what the hell they want but stopping them (from Mars, from the streets, from the gutter) is nigh on impossible.

  23. James Etheridge​ I think if you MC’ed The Sprawl, you could incorporate all of that easily if you wanted to. Is it designed for that? According to the designer…. no, lol.

    But I’m slowly weaving in various futuristic/cyberpunk themes into my game via the corporations, interest groups, and threats. We chat on hangouts often, so you can hmu if you wanted to chat more about it.

  25. In terms of what I really enjoy about cyberpunk…is that even though technology advances have been entirely mind-blowing and great, that life is still relatively awful. The saying, I believe, is “High tech, low life.” There’s a wonderfully delicious grime attached to everything. Because everything is much more expensive, items are re-purposed over and over and when you come up across bleeding-edge tech, it makes a huge difference.

    To me, Elysium did a really good job of showcasing it.

    The idea that criminal acts in a cyberpunk future are so common place (so much it has become its own occupation), is fascinating to me. I think you see a lot of that in dystopian futures and that’s something that really resonates with me.

  26. Daniel Lugo I’m sure you could bring those things into The Sprawl, but if that’s what I want the primary focus to be on, then I think it would be a disservice to do so. Taking the lens off of the mission-based badass action core of the game means you’re not getting the most out of the system, and if you’re focusing on elements that aren’t backed up in any way by mechanics then you may as well be doing systemless improv. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but my point is that I’d rather the system be relevant to the fiction.

    I guess what I’m saying is that there’s kind of  a spectrum that systems can be on with relation to themes, and it goes from supporting the theme to not really caring about it to actively interfering with it. I’d rather the core themes that I care about be as high on that spectrum as possible, and with the variety of games out there I don’t see much reason to settle for a system that’s just kind of okay at supporting the experience I want instead of going for one that’s a better fit.

    Though, if you’re managing to bring more introspective elements into The Sprawl while you’re GMing, I applaud your efforts! 🙂

  27. Some people have been to English Lit class! I defer to those.

    I was much influenced by the movie Blade Runner (my favourite movie! The 5-DVD set has a “making of” feature longer than any of the movie versions!) The theme there of course was about what it means to be human.

    I always simply summarized cyberpunk as “High-Tech, Low Morals”. Fabulous technology is talked about, but those who exploit it become the Haves and those who don’t are the Have-Nots. Big opposite of the 1950s or all that JETSONS jive where you’d think everyone would benefit. Well, it didn’t happen. Big corporations monopolize high technology and will let it go at a high price, and you may afford it if you are a corporate wage-slave yourself. But a tiny band of rebels with cobbled-together technology is there to fight the Man…they don’t have Corp connections but try to leverage the power of the Streets…fight for the People. That’s another possible theme. Yet another theme is to turn your backs on the People and make lots and lots of money!

  28. I like that it’s now/not now or, to put it another way ’20 minutes into the future’.

    It’s the world we have right now, driven to it’s illogical end days. The haves with shininess and the have nots with the cruddy roach infested rental. The climate change headlines in the paper now made immediate on the scream sheets, NY Central park under water.

    I like the people trying to do something about it because they need to and the pressure from on top to ignore it. I like that this gives you a battle between right and wrong and then muddies it with the melodrama of greed and corruption.

    I also love the speculative tech and the sudden impact it has on society where every day is a potential game changer. An exciting day to be a human/post human.

  29. I think you can still get in big themes by making the missions about rescuing some NPC caught in one of those big themes.

    I did a “cyberpunk” game once about a blind girl (there are fewer irreparably blind people in the future but she was one) who suddenly took to Virtual Reality and worked in it with faster reaction because she could “see” it as its own thing rather than waste time trying to interpret it to past things she had seen, since until then she had not actually SEEN anything. Anyway, her urge to get better speed, better resolution, got her involved selling her services to a Corporation to get access to the best gear but now they have trapped her and are pumping her full of drugs to be docile. In cyberspace she is in the corporate mainframe as an alabaster statue which chains extending in all directions. She apparently controls things but does not move herself. When the players traced her and rescued her from her real-life hospital bed, they got her off the drip-feed only to realize, when she got conscious, that she didn’t WANT to be rescued and started making a ruckus just as they were trying to leave the building. The themes there were addiction and the obligatory twist that makes a mission go wrong.

  31. Uneven distribution – a junk-shop aesthetic juxtaposed against bleeding-edge milspec gear, grinding squalid poverty and addiction against glittering near-posthuman .0001%ers, vast fractally-complex megastructures of code and wage-slaves against kitbashed exploits and fragile relationships.

    Another thing, pulled from Swords Without Master: in a world of masters and slaves (and make no mistake, the hypercapitalism of the setting is nothing but) the player characters are neither. Their tangental alignment to the world’s expectations are what make them sexy, dangerous, useful, doomed.

  32. Charles Moore Aw, thanks!!!! I’ve never written a game-y thing before, so it means a lot to hear people say nice things about it! I’m also nearly finished with CYBERKITTENS part two Operation: PewPew which is a campy anthropomorphized badass cyberpunk cat meme setting. Stay tuned!

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