There are all sorts of reasons why the cyberpunk genre tends to generate complicated games, and why the most popular RPG in the genre is a byword for unnecessary, brain-smashing complexity (here's looking at you, Shadowrun!). Even Cyberpunk 2020 requires hours and hours and hours to generate characters, adding up all the finicky skill-points. What rules-lite genre games there are tend to be FATE-y things like Tech-Noir: great game, but I honestly prefer more traditional rules-systems.
Cyberpunk attracts people into technology and detailed future speculation (also people into drug literature and JG Ballard and weird intersections between fashion and art and the military industrial complex, but they're unfortunately less represented in the gaming culture...). There's a drive there towards "accurate," detailed technical simulation, with lots of dice modifiers and reliability stats and ammunition counts. I confess I like that stuff. On the other hand I hate maths and can't remember equations for shit, which ruins most cyberpunk rules systems for me.
I've been thinking about - even drafting - D&D derived rules ideas for cyberpunk for awhile now. D&D sits at an intersection between simplicity, technical detail and fast play. That last part is less because of any inherent virtue of the rules and more because everybody knows the system. Even I know the system (I can only retain 1.5 rules systems at a time. 0.75 of those systems will always be my beloved Cyberpunk 2020. Right now the other 0.75% of my rules retention capacity is taken up with D&D 5E).
So, I was genuinely excited to hear about Mike Evans' new old school D&D hack cyberpunk game, not least because I only heard about it about a week before it came out.
Fittingly, it took several attempts to actually buy the game because my bank interpreted a £1.43 payment to DrivethruRPG as evidence my account had been hacked (exactly how many purchases do I have to make from that place in one week before it realises I'm a regular customer?).
...£1.43? Yeah. The Black Hack Cyber Hacked is a complete game including bestiary and hacking rules and the Open Game License all in 21 pages, has no art except what you see on the cover above and has been testing my assumptions about exactly how much mechanical detail you need to represent the genre all evening.
When people talk about the antecedents of the Cyberpunk genre, there's another science fictional sub-genre that comes to prominence: the psychic detective story. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, PKD's Minority Report, Larry Niven's The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton... all important precursors of cyberpunk, and all books I've somehow managed not to read. The genre had a brief revival in the 1990s with Katherine Kerr's Polar City Blues and Peter Hamilton's Greg Mandel trilogy. That latter example is something I have read; in fact those stories were my introduction to cyberpunk.
So psychic-cyberpunk (psiberpunk?) story has precedent, but a surprisingly limited history in games - perhaps when faced with Shadowrun, genre purists simply decided to put aside anything that stank of magic. So Jacob Wood's Psi-Punk, successfully crowd-funded last year, is somewhat unusual. It completely escaped my notice, proving that I don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge of every cyberpunk game ever published that I like to claim (if anyone would like to send me a copy of Underground or that French game about underwater colonies, I haven't read them either...). Accessible Games was kind enough to send me a PDF copy for review.
Psi-Punk is based on Fudge, an open system best known these days as the basis of Fate. Fudge already has at least one well regarded cyberpunk conversion, and a DIY ethos which appealed to a certain sort of open-culture advocate cyberpunk fan back in the day. Back in the days when I would bore the Cyberpunk 2020 forum community complaining about complex the rules were, Fudge was the most commonly raised suggestion. As a system, it's very easy to, uh, hack (pun both unintended and unavoidable...).
Twilight 2000 is a game that I don't think I could ever play the way it was written. I simply can't keep the rules in my head, frankly. But it holds a place in my gaming heart simply because of the atmosphere, like nothing else I've ever read.
For those who haven't encountered it before, Twilight 2000 is a (very, very) 1980s RPG set in the closing stages of World War III. The nuclear exchanges happened three years ago, but the war didn't end. Days before the campaign begins, the last major American force-in-being in Europe launched a final offensive into Poland; it failed, and now the team are trapped behind enemy lines in a disintegrating world of marauders, ex-military bandits, Warsaw Pact survivors and worse.
Twilight 2000 is a post apocalyptic game, but it has very little in common with Gamma World or Atomic Highway or my personal favourite Other Dust. There are no mutants, no muscle cars (unless you count Humvees), no monsters that aren't human. In fact, you can't really call it post apocalyptic. The apocalypse is ongoing; it's present apocalyptic. When I first encountered the game I was put off by the procedural setting generation and the procedural encounter systems - now, after exposure to OSR, they fascinate me.
Years ago, someone named Quandos Vorn did something terrible to you, and you've sworn to destroy him. Since that dark day, you've prepared yourself to hunt and confront this dread individual. Now you're finally ready.
Pelgrane Press has a new RPG out, set in Jack Vance's Gaean Reach universe. I couldn't be more invested in a game, so it was difficult to write an objective review of the pre-order PDF! Luckily, I found a lot to like with only a few reservations.
Notably, i'm judging this game by how well it reflects the original stories, since they're among my favourite novels. That said: given the violent, mannered atmosphere and the simple rules, I'd be tempted to use this for a game set in 1840s Santa Fe...
Most of the potential readership of this blog probably know Jack Vance as the writer of the Dying Earth series, an enormously influential fantasy short story sequence which had a huge influence on the early development of Dungeons and Dragons.
I'm afraid to say I've never gotten around to reading the Dying Earth, although I intend to as soon as possible. For me Jack Vance means science fiction: Araminta Station, the Demon Princes sequence, Ports of Call, Showboat World, the Alastor Cluster sequence. These books bear little comparison with other fiction (maybe Fritz Leiber's dry wit, maybe Ursula Le Guin's strange cultures, maybe Cordwainer Smith's wild re-imagining of the human condition...). In the Gaean Reach, characters devote themselves to politesse, artistry and mordant wit, along with one final motivator: revenge. Revenge comes in all shapes and sizes in Vance: from Kirth Gersen's sociopathic quest against the crime lords who destroyed his village in the Demon Princes through the very personal collision between family members in Trullion: Alastor 2262, right up until Myron Tany's frankly laughable vendetta against his great aunt in Ports of Call.
In Vance's novels, to quote the RPG: "heroism unfolds within a spare, and unsparing, moral vision."
For myself, I have a vendetta against Pelgrane Press. Specifically, they keep taking my money. Night's Black Agents, Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars are all fine games - i'm an unashamed fan of the GUMSHOE system. I've never actually read or played the Dying Earth RPG, so this is my first experience with the Skulduggery system (this game combines the two).
After completing this review i'm going to locate Robin D. Laws by searching through an intricate archive of punch cards. I'll pursue him all the way to the interstellar masquerade down by Sailmaker Beach... where I'll probably die, because he's considerably more erudite than I.
EDIT: So a few times in the review I brought up formatting and proofreading errors. Chris Huth got in touch with me a few hours after I posted this and I quickly established that 80% of those problems were only happening in Nitro Pro 7 and not, say, Adobe. I didn't think to check because I've never had that kind of problem before. However! I feel I ought to state that those formatting errors might be unique to the 8 people reading this game on a weird piece of business document formatting software, and I've changed the review below to reflect that.
