Author: Hamish Cameron

I’ll be writing a cyberpunk setting about New Zealand as a stretch goal for Mark Richardson’s shared consciousness cyberpunk game Headspace (he pitches it as Sense8 meets Blade Runner… I haven’t watched Sense8 yet).

Headspace is a fun game with a quite different take on cyberpunk than The Sprawl. It really zeros in on the possibilities of shared consciousness technology. I recommend checking out the QuickStart document.

Headspace handles Corporations in a slightly different way that The Sprawl does, but all the setting material for Headspace should be compatible for The Sprawl.

Originally shared by Mark Richardson

Headspace RPG – shared consciousness cyberpunk – (Sense8 meets Blade Runner) has just funded it’s second stretch goal and now has over 300 backers and has raised $10,430 CAD!

Our third goal is for Hamish Cameron to write a cyberpunk setting in New Zealand 2070!

$13,000 CAD – 100% Pure by Hamish Cameron

New Zealand 2070

They used to say you’re always prepared for the last disaster. That’s bullshit. When Christchurch got flattened in ‘11, quakes were on everyone’s mind, but the idea of disaster preparation vanished faster than the Civil Defense budget to feed the offshore accounts of the smiling corporate assassins. Short term profit ruled: buy low, sell the guts, discard the carcass.

 

So when the Alpine cracked in ‘50 and set off just about every fault in the Shaky Isles, no one was ready. The tidal waves and liquefaction sunk the Hutt and half of Wellington and slid most of the rest into the harbour. After sixty years of corporate globalisation, the government could do nothing but relocate to Auckland and sell what little of the country they still owned.

A spreading halo of industrial wasteland encloses Auckland. Everyone with money and contacts fled to Nelson and the Coromandel. The corps took everything flat and green for their agri-factories and everything near the harbours for industrial sprawl and slum housing. Freedom lives in the bush with the cluster bombs and chemical agents, or in the cracks of the cities with the gangs and the ghosts and the Net.

100% Pure? Yeah, right.

 

About the author:

Hamish Cameron has been playing, designing and tweaking roleplaying games, settings, boardgames and wargames since he discovered Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in the mid-80s. In 2014, he ran a successful kickstarter campaign for The Sprawl, his own take on apocalypse-powered cyberpunk, which will be completed later this year. He tweets primarily as @peregrinekiwi

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1991378332/headspace-rpg?utm_source=Google%2B&utm_medium=Announcement&utm_campaign=Headspace+Kickstarter

I’m sad to report that due to illness, I won’t be at Big Bad Con this weekend.

David Gallo has kindly agreed to run my session of The Sprawl.

I’m particularly sad that I won’t get to play in Jesse Burneko’s Necropolis setting.

As we edge steadily by painfully slowly towards completion, you can here me talk to Jim McClure about the game, its development, and gaming generally on Talking Tabletop: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talking-tabletop/id1033744751?mt=2&i=354149997

“Legal scholars have already investigated similar claims covering robotic weapons, for example, with one law clerk, Dan Terzian, suggesting in a 2012 paper “The Right to Bear (Robotic) Arms” that there is a “very real possibility of robots being [defined as] arms under current Second Amendment doctrine.” Presumably the same interpretation might also cover drones.”

Small, +fragile, +loud, +armed (Semi-auto pistol–2-harm close/near loud quick)

https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/16/8976337/drones-quadcopters-handguns-legal

These three photos are the sheets I had in front of me by the end of the SeaTacPorCouver run of The Bogatyrev Jam at Origins.

The notes I take during Step 0 (Corp creation) are in the middle of the table: https://mobile.twitter.com/peregrinekiwi/status/607433822590914560

The first image below comprises the notes I take on the characters as I ask the players questions while they make characters. It includes chapter name, playbook, what cyberware they have, what tags they have from getting their cyberware, descriptive notes, and their personal directives. (Incidentally, this is pretty much what my notes look like for every game I run, especially Dungeon World).

The second image shows my notes from the Links phase. I condense each mission description into a sentence beginning with the protagonist’s name and mentioning the target corp, then each character that was involved gets and indented line describing their involvement. Each character’s mission ends with the state of that corp clock.

The third image show my general notes from the game. Usually this comprises cool tech or setting notes and the name of people and places that the character encounter or create during the game.

Depending on the mission and how well I know it, I sometimes have the mission description in front of me too. There’s an example of that in the rulebook (The Kurosawa Extraction, pp.204-6).