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| Picture from Brian Wood's The Massive, just about my favourite ongoing comic |
Lately I've been building sandboxes: it's been far too long since I've run Cyberpunk 2020 and both me and some old friends are jonesing for it. Worldbuilding has always been one of my favourite parts of the hobby, and I'm always exploring new methodologies for creating a diverse and "alive" gaming environment. I'll probably have to write about them sometime!
The book which has held my attention lately has been the astonishing Darkness Visible espionage supplement for Stars Without Number. I'm a huge fan of what Sine Nomine publishing does, in just about any format and genre - Kevin Crawford's work has been a huge inspiration for what I've tried to do with this blog. Right now I'm especially besotted by the "maltech cult" generator in Darkness Visible - replace "cult" with "corporation" and it's been a perfect cyberpunk tool.
I really like the format SWN uses to provide sample factions, providing a brief paragraph and then brief hooks below - friends to help the party fight the faction, enemies to bedevil them when they launch their war, complications and things and places to centre the story. It's just the right level of detail for my purposes. I really like them as a framework to inspire the imagination.One of my players has expressed a desire to head out to sea, so I've put some ideas together for expanding that world. It isn't a setting I've thought much about, except half my favourite sourcebooks seem to be set there: CP2020: Stormfront, Shadowrun's Cyberpirates, Blue Planet's Fluid Mechanics... even Transhuman Space's Under Pressure. It's an evocative environment which really takes the PCs out of their depths... zing. I want privateers, salvagers, radar seeking missiles, rusted ship wrecks, re-purposed military ships. I want to cover the big themes of oceanic stories in science fiction: environmental politics, claustrophobia, offshore freedom and strange underwater discoveries in the last Earthly frontier.
Presented below is the result of my faction brainstorming. Rather than just writing them out in a long list, I thought I'd experiment with the SWN faction format. Next time I do this I'll probably use Cyberpunk V3's "metacharacter" idea, and after that a completely different methodology...
