The universe is full of trash. There's evidence to suggest life is ten billion years old young in the galaxy at large, with a four billion plus history on Earth. The lifetime of a person or even an interstellar civilisation is nothing. A million cultures could have emerged in that time, expanded across dozens of systems, destroyed themselves with decadence or plague or murderbots or relativistic kill vehicles or trans-sapient speciation or simple ennui (or an ascent transcendence), been forgotten.
Ruins on Earth, battered by the wind and pollution and microorganisms and looters, can last thousands of years. Here's the thing - on an airless world, or in airless space, or even on atmosphere'd worlds abandoned and lifeless for many centuries - ruins and litter will stand for eons. Neil Armstrong's footprints will last forever (if they aren't disturbed by tourists, which they will be soon). The Voyager probe will continue to drift for an eternity, lost between systems (until it collides with a Sirian generation ark and kills twenty trillion electronic personalities stored within its transport pods).
The kind of evidence space-faring civilisations leave behind need not be as grandiose as any stark black rectangle or space ark. Any culture embracing regular spaceflight is going to leave behind footprints, mining camps, abandoned machines... even if "regular spaceflight" meant a few atomic rockets burning around a single solar system.
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...!
This is the third part of my Cyberpunk gaming Appendix N series. It was going to be about Leggy Starlitz and Bruce Sterling, buuut... look, I never made any claims to consistency! I'll get around to him.
Anyway:
Part 1 was all about Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy and the 1950s noir that influenced it.
Part 2 deals with cyberpunk inflected spy stories - Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, Don Delilo, John Le Carre...
Part 3 will be all about novels about work. About employment or professional life, as something other than a spy or soldier or criminal. Or, for that matter, an artist (or a journalist). Novels where work forms the basis of the plot.
Given how much time the average person spends at work, you'd think more literature would cover the subject. And yes, I meant literature, not just "genre fiction". There's Revolutionary Road and...
There are clear hurdles to writing this kind of novel. Every profession comes with its own metalanguage, which can be opaque for the reader as well as the researching writer. There are difficulties in plotting - no padding the novel out with gun battles and meteor impacts (probably)! There are even difficulties in finding a readership - escapism is half the reason for reading fiction, and people don't necessarily want to read a novel that sounds like it might be about work. I'm sure genre publishers are scared of it. So the arrival of a novel like this ought to be treasured.
In the swirling world of post-cyberpunk Cory Doctorow is the writer most associated with novels about labour, so we'll start with him!
There are good reasons why cyberpunk gaming is less popular than fantasy (and why I can't play CP2020 with my regular "RL" group). Not least of which is "it's too close to reality".
Running a game set in the near future (ostensibly based on reality) means researching stuff. Games tend to be about criminals, for better or worse.
These two facts combine to mean that my search history must flag up every single iteration of ECHELON or Optic Nerve or or or. If the news is to be believed the NSA have everything, even the dirty web camera footage that ... well, I've never actually sent naked pictures of myself to anybody, over a webcam or otherwise, because i'm not that cruel. But if I had, they'd have it!
In my search history: the Pirate Party! Automatic weapons! Every terrorist organisation to ever come up with a stupid acronym! Japanese criminals! Futuristic body armour! Hacking drones! Uranium smuggling! Detailed maps of the Pacific Northwest! "How to illegally enter Belize!"
Between that and being a member of Stop the War! GCHQ must think i'm an enemy of the state, if not an actual terrorist. "Socially awkward nerd! Apparent interest in firearms! Delusions - thinks "drone hacking is a game!" Was once so unexpectedly polite to a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that the Ikhwan member ran into a shop and brought him four bars of milk chocolate!"
I've decided to embrace this issue. If they want to spy on my ludicrous hobby, i'm going to put it all into the open. The following post will contain a miscellany of suspicious material.
One problem: in my normal life i'm a mild mannered geek who cares about machine guns about as far as I can throw them (which isn't very far, because i'm a mild mannered geek). So this may not live up to the promise above. I'M SORRY, readers!
This post contains:
- Futuristic mortars!
- Japanese terror manuals!
- A guest post about hiding your knife!
Ruralpunk returns!
I've already had some great feedback in about 8 different places about Alienation. In a few days i'll put up a summary post with changes and ideas for change. Until then...
We've had places. We've had antagonists. What we don't have is an entire post about checkpoints (just because you didn't know you wanted one, doesn't mean you didn't...). Pictures from Far Cry 2, a game which was 20% about fun and 90% about checkpoints. I stand by the maths in that sentence.
Ten encounters at the checkpoint
1. Antisocial behaviour stop. The police are looking for speeding cars, drunk drivers, personafix racers, and so on. A real risk to the PC's carefully constructed, expensive, fake identities...
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.
Datafortress 2020 is one of the oldest cyberpunk websites, a survivor from the days when the UK cyberpunk project could have a "top 100" list of CP2020 websites. Quite aside from the massive compilation of rules - the Miracle Mile vehicle lists are legendary - sysop Wisdom000 also took it upon himself to save the output of the CP2020 fan community as it declined. The File Project includes 90% of everything ever posted to the web by CP2020 fandom. It's a central resource for any Cyberpunk GM (so is the blog).
The file project contains hundreds of documents, which is a tad intimidating. Moreover, it's had some hosting problems over the years and is often down, leaving people reliant on emailing Wisdom000 to get specific documents. To help the uninitiated, I thought i'd make a list of my own personal favorites from that giant archive, here below:
