Wednesday 30 November 2016

Adding Cyberpunk To Your World

Over on the Views From The Edge forum (here), I put forward the idea of hive-creating a cyberpunk city kit in the vain of Zak S's seminal Vornheim, which was made for OSR D&Dalikes. In the excellent Vornheim book, Zak provides a variety of table-based resources designed to quickly add both detail and flavour to fantasy cities on the fly. While he wrote it for himself, and to give him the most utility mid-game, it has proven wildly popular and has become a benchmark of sorts for similar OSR projects.

Now, being largely based in complex urban sprawls, most cyberpunk games tend to provide city source material as standard, but are largely based on the pre-Vornheim model of a mishmash of detailed locations, leaving large voids and lacking a lot of flavour. Like with Vornheim, what we felt was needed was something more fluid, a kit rather than a sourcebook, that could be used as the game is in progress, following Zak's philosophy of  'maximum table utility'. I wanted something I could use during the game, was simple to access, sparked ideas with a sentence and basically just added to the game environment and to play. Also, system agnostic would be cool, as not everyone plays CP2020.

Companero said it best when he defined the project as "taking things you know and adding layers of science fictional strangeness to make it new and exciting" and "to add cyberpunk to the world as it is." With that firmly in mind, some pixels were wrangled and tables started to form, some of which I will be previewing on Neural Archive as the document takes shape. Please bear in mind that these tables and pages are still very much works in progress.

Click to embiggen.

Click to embiggen.

Future tables will include Alternative Businesses, Urban Sickness, Legacy Infrastructure, the Sense & The City tables (smells, sounds, sights), Infotainment, What's On The Road/In The Sky, Augmented Reality, the Cabbies table, the Instacitizen drop grid, plus street gangs, corporate aristocrats, fixers, guns for hire, media, tech, junk, freak weather and much more.

Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see included in a cyberpunk city kit.

Tuesday 29 November 2016

>> Installing Neural Archive…

Greets.

Geist's budget Neural Archive was on the fritz again. 

So, just what is Neural Archive?

Spurred into digital action by the calculating Great Mind behind the Vircades Project, this will be my little pixel-stash of the splinternet, where I get to write nonsense about things relating to cyberpunk gaming. There will be musings, characters, technology, random thoughts and more, for dark future science fiction roleplaying games.

Entertaining Geist since 1990.

Neural Archive will be focussed primarily on R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 and it's contemporaries, but also (occasionally) such games as Stars Without Number, Traveller, Star Wars D6, with perhaps a soupçon of the very best bits of the OSR fantasy gaming scene. Possibly.

And then the shooting started.