Balkanise North America Now!

If there's one aspect of the Shadowrun setting that provokes endless debate, it's the Native American Nations that inherited the American west after the return of magic. Shadowrun draws much of its setting texture from the patchwork of independent, distinctive nations it superimposes over the familiar American continent.

This post isn't going to be a defence of the Native American Nations specifically (believe me, I could write that post, at length, to the benefit of nobody...). Rather, it's going to be a rallying cry for the balkanised Cyberpunk setting. It's going to say "if the NAN did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it." 

What do I mean by a balkanised setting? I mean chaos. I mean a setting where established modern nations have collapsed into successor states, micro-states or failed states, or even a mess of autonomous communities, burbclaves and survivalist isolates.

Cyberpunk settings - especially cyberpunk gaming settings - tend to go in one of two directions when inventing their North American setting. Either, they embrace balkanization (Shadowrun, Interface Zero, the ruined Earth of Jovian Chronicles, Cyberpunk 2020 ...sorta...) or they expand the United States into a gigantic superstate, through international treaties or conquest (GURPS Cyberworld, Underground, Psipunk, Trinity). ICE Cyberspace presents governments as obsolete and emphasises this by devoting little more than a paragraph to the subject in an otherwise extensive world guide. The various innovative settings in Ex Machina explores both ideas taken to their extremes. Kromosome, as ever, has a unique take: a setting completely atomised at a national, economic, even street level, where a few giant regional economic organisations serve mainly as cultural signifiers. 

Because novels aren't required to (and frankly shouldn't!) provide RPG style world guides, it isn't quite so easy to split the literary genre up into such easy categories. This is particularly true of cyberpunk, a genre noted for "show the minimum you need to, tell nothing" storytelling. It's unclear whether the United States still exists in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy; we know the Pentagon and the CIA have been "Balkanized" and little else. The Bridge Trilogy explicitly describes a world of splintering nation states. According to the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook, When Gravity Fails describes a world of dizzying complexity and fractal borders. Islands in the Net is about a world where nation states have been superseded by NGOs and supra-state global institutions. Snow Crash atomises the world on a neighbourhood level. And so on.

If this post is arguing for the "balkanisation" setting style, it is also arguing against the fascistic mega-state model. I'm not saying it's always a bad idea; Ex Machina's "Daedalus" setting provides a wonderful counter-example. It is, however, one with a very specific and very limiting story model. I'm more interested in more generic settings, settings designed to host a variety of different characters and campaigns.

If this post focuses mostly on North America, that's because most cyberpunk game settings do. I suspect many of these Balkanised Americas are inspired by the novel Hardwired. This seems especially true of Shadowrun, given how much earlier editions of the game emphasised "T-bird" GEV smuggling. 

So that's reason number one: every setting should have borders and tariff barriers, so that cyber-linked smugglers in hover-tanks can smash through them at enormous speed. If that somehow isn't reason enough...

Archetypal Adventures: the Medtech

The Medtech is a classic cyberpunk role which presents a number of difficulties for the players and GMs who deal with them. I didn't want to talkabout those problems in this post, but five abortive attempts at writing this introduction have proved I can't do that.

If you want to skip the stuff about theory and go straight to the adventure hooks and the "10 Medical Emergencies" table, scroll down below the jump!

Neuromancer's amphetamine snare

"It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo." - Neuromancer

"[When I was a teenager] there was a kind of literary war underway between the British New Wave people and the very conservative American science-fiction writers—who probably wouldn’t even have thought of themselves as very conservative—saying, That’s no good, you can’t do that, you don’t know how to tell a story, and besides you’re a communist. I remember being frightened by that rhetoric. It was the first time I ever saw an art movement, I suppose." - William Gibson

William Gibson's Neuromancer was a wildly influential novel by any standard, arguably the most significant science fiction novel of the late twentieth century. Published in 1984, it determined the language people would use to describe and define the internet over the following two decades. It established so many tropes that a reader coming to it context free, after The Matrix and Inception and a thousand other blunt emulators, might be forgiven for thinking it was just a particularly well written list of clichés. Fans of the novel in the media like to wear their influence on their sleeve - look in the credits of any science fiction film and you're bound to discover that thug#4 just happened to be named Corto...

Other cyberpunk classics like Hardwired and Schismatrix have largely disappeared into obscurity, with only two real exceptions - Pat Cadigan's Synners still has a literary reputation which will keep it in (limited) print for years to come, while Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) was taken as a kind of ideological manifesto by the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian crowd (they're literally still trying to build the Metaverse). So my question is this - if astonishing novels like Islands in the Net and Vacuum Flowers are destined to little more than a forgotten half life in my memory, why has Neuromancer lived on?

I could natter about the prose, or the simple timing of a hacker novel about 20 seconds before computer hacking became a thing people had heard of, or the revolutionary way it treated the "infodump." I could spend even more time talking about cyberpunk's genre swagger; how it had an incredible propagandist in the form of 'my intellectual and literary hero' Bruce Sterling, how he managed to propagate the patently false idea that all science fiction in the early 1980s was crap and Neuromancer had come to save it...

Instead i'm mainly going to make a case about narcotics. Also teenagers. Teenagers on narcotics, in some cases. Nerdy teenagers being accidentally exposed to the whole wide world of transgressive fiction...

AviationPunk 1 (A brainstorm)

It isn't like I've got time to run a new campaign at the moment. Shadowrun takes far too long to prep as it is. After a period of abeyance, my DnD campaign looks to be starting up again - and in order to avoid another long halt, I need to set things up so we can easily run games without the entire group about. My solution is move the campaign into an urban sandbox, which needs to be constructed. I probably ought to put the time I've spent writing this post into creating a follow-up to the Alienation discussion (but I'd like to leave it another day to compile everything).

So the following post (and series) is really about constructing a fantasy, for now. 

THE SQUADRON CAMPAIGN

I want to run a game about fighter pilots and dogfights. About squadrons of aircraft clashing over familiar battlefields or far flung colonial vistas. About internal squadron interpersonal politics and character conflicts. About the fusion of pilot and machine into an indivisible whole. About casualties and heroes.

About beautiful fucking aircraft...!

Alienation - alternative "humanity loss" rules for Cyberpunk 2020

Humanity Loss needs to go!

The following post contains an alternative system for Cyberpunk 2020 cyberware, designed to reflect the psychological effects of cyberware without the hard, arbitrary limits of the humanity loss system. It's designed to be flexible and player facing - presenting the possibility of significant psychological costs while giving the player the choice of determining exactly how they manifest in her PC. 

In addition, these rules don't come with a major setting assumption. This could slot into a game set in the early years of Transhuman Space or Cyberpunk 2020 or even Traveller 2300. It reflects any world where the pace of technological change is determined by corporate competition, where people are filling themselves with prototype gear before the psychological implications are understood or where 'runners find themselves loading up on heavy metal simply to survive. It doesn't force the GM into assuming cyberware has any one effect on people. The negative consequences are based on universal addiction and body image narratives that everyone is familiar with, even if they've been lucky enough not to experience them for themselves.

This post contains the rules - with a link to a googledoc for easier access - and then some designer's notes and philosophical nonsense. I'd love some feedback!

EDIT: A follow-up post full of people's feedback is here.

Running Gaean Reach, playing Fiasco!

It was inevitable really - as soon as I start regularly blogging, all sorts of stuff happens to keep me busy and away from the thing for three weeks!

However! This isn't to say I didn't get any gaming in. I had my first games of Gaean Reach and Fiasco (not to mention two Shadowrun sessions and a game of D&D Next).

You destroyed my punch-cards!

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to run a game for a good friend of mine I rarely get to game with, and we chose Gaean Reach - it was going to be that or Night's Black Agents, but Gaean Reach seemed easier to set up on the fly. Also, we're both a little obsessed with the 1950s Space Princesses on Rocket Ships aesthetic!

We corralled an extra player and I improvised a plot - far be it for me to actually prepare a session! Neither player was familiar with Jack Vance's work, but the character creation system and basic pitch combined to create the right atmosphere straight away. The mostly-random character creation system served up a jaunty aristocratic type and a deranged bureaucrat, who proceeded to shoot and manipulate their way through a dozen sleazy gangsters and salesmen.

Quite aside from being a wonderful game in its own right, Gaean Reach also served as a great "lite" intro to the GUMSHOE system. I feel a lot more confident about running Night's Black Agents than I did before - I can't wait to add all the extra details, the "cherries" and additional skills, to the experience of playing a GUMSHOE game. In fact, my only criticism of Gaean Reach after actual play is that it lacks interesting mechanical options for players to aspire to as they advance through a campaign.

"I needed a drink… I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." – Raymond Chandler