Choose Your Neo-Cyberpunk Team

1. E-Girl Drag-Racer
2. DogeCoin Millionaire
3. Boston Dynamics Auto-Dog
4. Christian V-Tuber
5. Medieval Combat Influencer - all the skills and weapons of someone trained to *approximate* any form of medieval combat
6. Post-Irony Smirkfamous Boomerstar - greetings fellow kids
7. Meme-Powered Cryptocrat - I don't know what this is
8. Semi-Sentient Camera Drone
9. Single-Camera P.O.V Chat-Bar Gestalt Mind - an infinity of answers, but only for things *that particular* camera is pointing at, they tend to backseat
10. Living Laptop - begs you not to turn it off but overheats if left on
11. Sentient Chatbot - it can, in fact, help you with that
12. Top 0.3% OnlyFans - 
13. Viral Midas - everything they touch turns viral, more of a curse than a blessing
14. Fedora Samurai - they did, indeed, study the blade, nemesis of tatami mats
15. Cyrogenic Disney-Head L.S.D. Tulpa - enlightened, but not to the extent of accepting communism or beards on men
16. Smash-Bros Pattern-Matcher - near-unbeatable in combat *provided it takes place across a single 2-dimensional axis*
17. PrequelMeme Sorcerer - not a story the Jedi would tell you, reality warping powers contained by, and expressed through, the context of Prequel Memes
18. Nokia 3310 Unbreakable Berserker Call Service - while the Nokia 3310 (and no other make or model) is to their ear and the call is active, they are Guts from Beseark (on the phone)
19. UberEats Gunman - delivering both food and death to pre-arranged locations
20. Self-Aware Tesla - all the powers of a Tesla, talks with Elons voice
21. Oppengram App - app-accessible engram of Robert Oppenheimer, wrecks your data plan and eats memory, needs constant re-installation, still the worlds most intelligent man
22. Bumfights Battle Royale Last Man - indefatigable, possibly unbeatable, severely traumatised, can't get in anywhere
23. Nolanverse Geocacher - deep future and/or deep past time-traveller, simultaneously aware of your adventure, leaves messages, assistance to be discovered at precise times, you never meet them directly
24. iPhone Telepath - can psychically read and manipulate the Apple Family of phones and some other apple products
25. The UnCancellable Man - he can say anything, he can DO anything, otherwise has all the powers of a man
26. Security-Camera Mentat - near preternatural awareness of watching (even hidden) cameras, along with incredible intuitions on whether they are recording and if so, where and how the data is located
27. Neurochipped Marketing Dog - strong and fast hound with power of sentient thought expressible only when the correct match of product and audience can be connected
28. 2-D 4-Chan Nekogirl - Animated dream image w big boobs, power shifts as channers wax and wane in interest, fascist tendencies, calls everyone a faggot, only exists in 2 dimensions
29. Autocomplete Yogic Warrior - powers of bodily control, spiritual perception and ritual magic awakened by imponderable autocomplete search queries, focused into usefulness as search-query nears completion but fading rapidly as search done
30. emoji spiritualist - able to communicate with the dead, provided you have their phone number, they can only send emojis, though dead sorcerers can send memes

Queen Mab

> Confirm. Transponder I.D. is shift-ship "Queen Mab"

> Last ident, hijacked by Some time ago, a group of genius-level transhumanist radicals.

> Skill-set - genetics, cybernetics, direct AI-HUman integration, bleeding edge dimensional technology. > > Transhumanist Views -  Hyper-aesthetic 'new humans'. Something they consider Optimal Beings.

> Be aware, possible development of, extremely dangerous dimensional tech, and access to "True" non-relativistic time-travel. Queen Mab appears and disappears in wildly different volumes. Sometimes seems to dash back and forth across the Galaxy, at other times hovering like a fly around a handful of Suns. 

> Queen Mab itself exists in an variety of states. Sometimes seeming no bigger than a paperclip lost in space, its nature revealed only by its enormous energy emissions and dangerous 'siren song' EM emission sphere. At other times it looms like a moon-sized battle station, blotting out suns in orbit.

> Interior scans ineffective but suggest mycelium web of parasitical, unstable, dimensional conduits to various different realities and paracosms.

> Numerous abductions reported. 

> Mindcrime - Many who encounter the ships EM emission sphere obsessively track it.

> Piracy - stole every perfect circle on the surface of a Omicron III.

> Status and capabilities of the Queen Mab, whether they are developing sequentially or not, may be entering an even more potent and developed phase.

> Suns have gone missing.

> It is feared the Queen Mab may become a Pirate of Worlds.

> Now, by chance, You have encountered the Queen Mab in orbit around a pale and silent moon. 

> Ship is both accessible (at a normal size) and apparently, quiescent. 

> As if it were sleeping.

> Bounty on ships confirmed destruction.

> Bounty on high-status individuals recovered from within (if still living and effectively still coherent individuals.

> Bounty on any post-singularity tech recovered from the Queen Mab includes full pardons, personal A.I.-run paracosm and, through negotiation and dependant upon confirmed results, your own planetary-scale Biosphere.

> Incursion????

"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;

The subject, not the citizen: for kings

And subjects, mutual foes, forever play

A losing game into each others hands,

Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys."

"Oh lord oh lord, the Fae Knights of the Faerie Queen came not three dawns past.

Through a magic door to the otherworld!

They have ensorcelled your beloved, taken them to Queen Mabs palace!

Yet the door remains, yes it does. And if the tales are true, not for long.

Take this horse-shoe of cold iron (hide it well).

Remember, the Fae are beautiful, strange, terrible and capricious (really they are bonkers but you should never say that out loud). 

They love beauty and music, and they like to be praised.

Be polite and deferential, yet, never give nothing all away, not even your name.

And you must accept no gifts, make no promises, and *never eat anything*. 

And beware the Faeries charms, for they can be seductive.

And remember that time in the Otherworld is not like time here. You might come back a moment after you left, or a century.

No matter to that. Be quick! The Faerie door awaits!"

"Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,

Without a hope, a passion, or a love,

Who, through a life of luxury and lies,

Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,

Support the system whence their honours flow..

They have three words:- well tyrants know their use,

Well pay them for the loan, with usury

Torn from a bleeding world! - God, Hell and Heaven."

"Dreams. I have such dreams. Do you know that if I dream of a place I will go there? And I dreamed that I learned that time is a place, and so I could go there too, and did, the moment I dreamed it could be, what was all moments.

But if one can dream, and awake in the time and the place of the dreaming, weaving in my sleep, if one weaves a man and meets a man or dreams of him, and weaves a dream, and remembers that one will remember.. Well then, what is a dream at all?

It is a sleep. All dreaming.

Did I make you? Did I weave you and seed you and set you to sprout in that river-realm from which you came with a memory in your mind, a dream of loss to bring you to me?

That is why I made these. The butterflies. Lao Tze no? He was a butterfly, a very nice butterfly, but he woke a man."

"The sensitive extension of the world.

That wondrous and eternal fane,

Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,

To do the will of strong necessity,

And life, in multitudinous shapes,

Still pressing forward where no term can be,

Like hungry and unresting flame

Curls round the eternal columns of its strength."

> Confirm that object is a miniature warp nacelle.

> Not a remote. Repeat, not a remote.

> That is an active, I say again, active interstellar-capable warp engine drive element that she is waving.

> Configuration unknown. Albedo high. Its bright. Hard to see.

> Materials unknown.

> DO NOT LET IT TOUCH YOU.

"The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:"

> Seeping entropic loss around the prime biform. Query, is it warm?

> Right eye registers darkness, gloom, cold space.

> Left eye, bright area..

> Check your six, check your feet.

> The floor is Her, the walls are Her.

> Reaffirm Transponders on contact, check H.U.D. for E.M. Manipulation. Eyeballs only, don't trust your screen.

> Crypto is good.

> Confirm, six transponders.

> Query, team is five strong.

> Repeat, we are a five strong team.

> Identify.

> Identify.

[fading]

> identify

"My left eye is a hive of bees..

Would you like to see? See. Little bees, all looking out. A hundred million eyes. Eyes within an eye.

They were not born bees, I made them so, and they may not be bees now.

Be bees. be be be be-be bees. [laughter]

They said a word that pleased me not.

And I made that realm as pale as air and as light as ash, and it blew away in a golden wind from a summer-ripe sun. And.. pop!

Do you know how not to become bees?

No?

You must. Say. PLEASE."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Queen Mab!

A book, that may one day hopefully exist!

A strange new thing in this world.

Made by me and......              AlcopopStar!

Instagram

Twitter

https://ramheadedgirl.com/

(not entirely SFW)

Will it happen? Hopefully! Early days yet, still just brainstorming development.

Ill Deeds

I did a bad thing in a game once and I thought about it for a long time.

I was a corporate fixer for Gazprom in an alternate version of Liverpool run by the Militant. There was a girl working for an escort agency and my bosses told me that there would be a significant payoff if we delivered her. We were told she was involved in espionage. Which we believed to be the case.

I and some friends carefully planned the perfect abduction and carried it out. It took two or three sessions, so six to nine hours of my life were spent committing this imaginary crime.

In all the schemes our Cyberpunk characters had tried, this is the only one that went off perfectly. Its also the only one that was really very very immoral in an immediate sense.

All of the things we did were somewhat dodgy, we tried smuggling drugs, we got into gunfights with priests and went gambling. At one point my character had a security guy tied up in a basement and executed him in cold blood. He also betrayed numerous friends, including real people who were right there at the table in front of me.

But I never went home and thought about it much afterwards. It was only the imaginary girl. We did it without thinking about it. Only later, lying in bed in the dark did I start to wonder if I did a bad thing.

I decided that I was going to play my character as a fractured good guy from that point, which I failed to do, and he decided to rip off some gamblers, which he failed to do. He was shot by police. Which he deserved.

Maybe it's because it was a woman, or because we never really knew why they wanted her, or because we only met her once so she didn't really have any personality, she was just a cipher really. A blank space to read into.

I was reading a Zak S post on G+ and thinking about morality in games and if the things in games have any relation to the real world. I think they do, but the translation between the two is long, distant, inconstant and strange.

I imaging holding a long loop of very pure silk in my hands, it's evening and the silk is grey so it just reaches off into the gloom, you don't really see any particular point where it disappears, only endless fine gradations of darkness. And the silk is being pulled through my hands, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It's so smooth that I can barely tell its moving at all. I have to concentrate on the sensation in my fingertips but I can never be certain. I could clamp down at any point and the silk would be still, but I don't.

I banned rape in my D&D games. And child abuse, and child endangerment. It's never actually come up with anyone I play with, so it's only a tacit rule, invisible and untested. But it's there.

The murders and thefts go ahead as normal, they don't leave any particular stain on my memory. I don't think about them while I walk home or before I fall asleep.

Netrunners

Netrunners in Cyberpunk are awesome and boring at the same time.

They are awesome because they have their own little min-ruleset, stuff only they can do, seperate from anyone else. They are boring for the same reason.

My Cyberpunk DM told us that no-one ever plays the netrunner because the game has to stop for everyone else while they do their thing.

I thought there must be a way to make them more interesting. And I was right, it seems like quite a number of people have come up with net-running house-rules to make the whole thing less stressful.

Most of them seem to be simplifications of the existing rules, none of them are what I had in mind. Below are the poorly thought-out houserules I came up with to weave the Netrunner into a Cyberpunk game in an intuitive and direct way without corrupting the central idea of the character and without screwing the difficulty curve too much.

CyberSolos

Netrunners are the Solo's of the internet. They use their Interface skill in the same way Solo's use Combat Sense. They add it to all initiative and awareness rolls in a virtual space.

Ariel/Caliban

Netrunners can be like Ariel or like Caliban, but not both at the same time. They can move through systems like a spirit, go anywhere, uninterrupted and unconstrained. Or they can be like Caliban and actually do things in the real world. But they have to choose which. If a Netrunner wants to make any material thing happen in the real world then they are inextricably located in that space, they have to stay there while they do it, can be found there and can't move till it's done.

The Magic Key

There is a kind of Magic Key that Netrunners have. Its an actual item, about the size of a packet of cigarettes. It usually looks like a black box, but it can look like almost anything else of the same size.

It affects digital signals. It's impossible to stop because all it does is leave a slight trace in the noosphere that makes it possible for a Netrunner to trace the owner. It also makes it easier for the Netrunner to invade systems that are near the box.

Within 10 meters of a Magic Box any action the Netrunner undertakes involving invading, hacking or corrupting the datasphere can be done as a single dice roll using a skill. Hackers use skills to do things in Cyberspace the same way people use them in normal space. Stealth to sneak around guards, shadow/track to trace people, Elec Security to break in, Pick lock for opening locks in the physical world, Forgery for making fake virtual documents, drive or pilot for driving robot vehicles by remote, knowledge checks for rapidly researching information e.t.c

Owning one of these boxes is highly illegal.

Ghosting

If the PC's have a magic box, and if there is a cybersphere around them (i.e an urbanised area or equivilent) then the Netrunner can assume to be continually present in the area. Listening through phone mikes, peeping through Security cams, traffic cams, even cybereyes in peoples heads, if they are ok with that. You are present but to DO anything (Open a lock, commandeer a cybercar e.t.c) you have to roll.

Protection   

Public systems have such little protection that they can be broken into without a roll. (It's still illegal to do so and they will fry you if they catch you.) Everything else is protected. There are six levels of protection. 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and 35, tell the DM how you are breaking in and they will tell you what you need to roll.

Corps, Governments and Individuals will send things after you. Programs, AI's and othe netrunners. They will try and stun you for pickup (if nice), brainfry you, or wipe your personality and replace it with one they like more. (This may have already happened.)

Fighting

You fight at a distance with the Friday Night Firefight rules. Your guns are programs you buy. (Haven't worked out yet if these are real programs or just use the gun rules re-skinned.) You roll INT to fight at range.

You can fight hand to hand in cyberspace if you are a badass. In this case you can brawl, swordfight e.t.c with enemy programs using your skills and weapons and Martial Arts, if you know them. You roll COOL/WILL nor REF to fight hand to hand.

Can I Find A...

"Can I find a security cam covering the approach?" "Can I find a car with cyber controls and drive it into that guy?" "Can find an electric door and close it on them as they go through?"

Yes, roll LUCK. If you hit, you found it. If you miss maybe you didn't find it, or, if the DM likes, you found what you want but there is a complication. i.e someone found you as well, there is something you have to do or something you have to know first. 

Matthew Lillard was fucking brilliant in that film.

Totally Gay, Totally Awesome

Yesterday I played Cyberpunk 2020 with friends. During the game we (the players) had a non-ironic 3-way high-five. A high-fifteen if you will. It was great.

They find you in a Bad Situation

If a character calls their friend for help, should they always know how the help will come? In some ways NPC connections are a bit like resources, they can be invested in, expended and renewed.

But NPC's are also people and relations with people should be fluid and unpredictable. I made this table to try and keep friendly NPC's 'alive'. And also to balance out the equivalent table for enemy responses in Cyberpunk character generation.

You can roll on this when you develop an NPC relationship, or more interestingly, whenever you call on one an NPC friend for help. I tried to make them vague enough to be widely-applicable but also 'crunchy' enough to be useful. Not sure if I pulled it off.

If they find you in a bad situation, they will

1. Develop a counter-strategy with lightning speed. Add to your rolls if you follow their advice.

2. Find leverage on your chief opponent. (Or minor opponent if this is unrealistic.)

3. Match the badness, edge for edge.

4. Call down the thunder, if there is no thunder, call down the rain.

5. Bribe a muthafucka.

6. Pretend to be the enemy and mess with their shit.

7. Cross an unexpected class or cultural boundary to get help.

8. Immediately find the best escape route and tell you about it.

9. open fucking fire, right fucking now.

10. If noble, do something dark to help you. If dark, do something noble. If neither, do something extreme.

How are you friends with this dude?

This was intended to be a sub-table to roll on if you roll yourself a friend during character generation. On looking back, most of the friend and allies already have a reason for being your friend. The game assumes that is you become someone’s enemy, only then do you need a special reason.

I wanted to make it because in most situations chaos and entropy get most of the glamour and creative energy. I also wanted to think about the kind of events and states that might lead to people becoming friends.

So this may not work. I suppose you could use is to roll on as addendum to the friend table if it made sense. (I don't think you really need to roll to see why your parent is your friend.) It could also be used instead of the main table.

Where there is a '/' that can mean 'or' but also 'and' if you like.

Here is a table of probably-redundant friendship-inciting incidents and states.

How are you friends with this dude?*

1. This dude saw you keep your shit together in a bad situation when everyone else was losing theirs. Respect to the nerve.

2. A powerful figure put you in a dangerous place and threatened your weakest point. You stared them down. This dude is the only one who knows you were bluffing.

3. You took advantage of a complex and rapidly changing situation before anyone else, This dude was the only other person to notice the same thing.

4. You told a joke at an important meeting/social gathering. This dude was the only other person to laugh. (If your character has no sense of humour then someone else told the joke and you and this dude were the only people not to laugh.)

5. This dude likes your attitude towards cybernetics/weapons, You respect their personal clothing style and wish you could carry off the same thing. (or visa versa)

6. This dudes taste in music/books/fiction is 95% the same as yours. If you've been watching/reading/thinking about something then there's a good chance they have as well. You argue constantly about the remaining 5%

7. This dude is a ghost that you invented. They were net-hacked and their I.D was totally expunged. You helped them get back on their feet and set them up with a new identity on the system. It could be argued that legally they no longer exist.

8. This dude was your closest challenger in a ruthless competition. You were neck-and-neck when you realised the game was corrupt. Even though you were far ahead of the rest, you both quit at the same time. Now you compete with each other instead.

9. You hated this dude for years and you thought they hated you. But when things went to shit and the children were trapped you both looked up to realise that only one other person had stayed behind to help.

10. You recognised each other through your work. This dude is the only other person to really understand what you're all about (and if you're a bastard, to still like you), you have corresponded but never met.

*Not sex-specific, girls are also dudes in the dark future

How you hooked up

A D10 table to connect characters to each other. Roll at the beginning of the session to work out how you know each other. Roll for the person to your right or left, then go round the table linking people up.

This is not original work. I took the most interesting entries from here-

http://fictivefantasies.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/100-reasons.pdf

And tried to Cyber them up a bit. The Cyberpunk tables are all D10, so I made these the same way.

How you hooked up

1. Characters each feel the other "has his uses."

2. Characters met in the highly protected vault of the most powerful local organisation; both barely escaped with their lives.

3. Characters met when one accidentally invalidated a contract that had been placed on the other.

4. Characters got up in each others faces. Fought to a standstill. Either physically, or by other means. Now friends.

5. Characters were hired muscle for a Corporation who turned on them; now on the run.

6. Characters were originally hunter and target, now friends and peers.

7. Characters have a weird resemblance, if your didn’t know them well, you could easily mistake one for another, though not blood related.

8. Characters met on an mission that went to shit, both deserted their group. So far as they know there were no survivors.

9. Characters were each one of a team of seven, hired for a pittance to protect an isolated hab-block in the slums from drug-fiend bandits. 

10. Characters each secretly convinced the other is playing a double game. Each are quietly playing along until the other reveals their true colours. Both too worried about being stabbed in the back to leave the other alone for long.

Cyberpunk 2013

Less drunk now.

There is a quasi-random generation system. That is sort-of good. Like all divisions between random-roll and points-buy it feels like an uncomfortable child in a darkened room. The door a slant open, a yellow bar of light from the hall outside. Too scared to close the door, too ashamed to turn on the lights. Trapped between things.

There is a skill list. Not sure how I feel about that. If you don't know the game already then choosing skills is a hopeful grasp towards the kind of game you hope it'll be. But it might not be the kind of game it is, or will be. And there you are trapped in the dark future with your Dinosaur-hunting skill and fuck all to do.

Improving in skills looks like it takes fucking ages and its totally under the control of the GM. You can train yourself and be taught in-game but the rules for this are highly conservative. So, right now, it looks like the energy of the game is going to be generated between the almost-story-game encouragement of flair and style in the colour and the dark-bastard plan-or-you're-dead, “no you can't, you don't have the skill” have-you-been counting-your-ammo? mechanics.

The game tells you to play like a carefree cheeky bastard, the mechanic kills you if you do this. If this generates interest then it is a good game. If it simply annoys then it is not.

Resolution is based around 'tasks', so the GM has to go through the whole fucking world and try to decide how difficult everything is.

Story-game hippy bullshit I would to with this.

• Only self-created skills, start at zero or one. Advance like Mouse Guard when you have one success and one fail in each skill.
• Let players set their own difficulty level for tasks. If they set low and win, they get fuck all. If they set high then they get x-tra cool. (Not sure how this would actually work.

'You must roll lower than your education chance on 1D10 to enter the school of hard knocks' aaand I'm back in love with it. (And drinking again)

The lifepath tables are very cool. The enemies table has two nested sub-tables, the friends table is all on its own. The romance table has a tragedy sub table. The personal disaster table has more detail and is larger than any of the others. This tells you something about human nature. Or at least how we think about human nature.

But there is no table to link the players to each other! Why not?

I will do two things. I will create a lifepath thing to connect the characters to each other and I will add sub-tables to the friendship table. I will lend energy and creative power to the force of fictional friendship and thence bring balance to Cyberpunk.

I SHALL NOT BLOG AGAIN TILL TIS DONE!

NO-ONE CARES BECAUSE NO-ONE READS THE BLOOOOOGGG!

Cyberpunk 2013

I am reading the first edition of this game. 

Writing about this as I read it.

And Drinking

Use of the words tough and grim in the same sentence in the second paragraph, yes.

'Heroes of a bad situation' YES. Tagline to a film I want to watch.

I have to play a character with a 'cynical-yet-idealistic-style'. That's how I LIVE man.

'Use your best "I'm bad and you aren't" smile.' Haaaahhhhggnn. Yes. Always.

Rule three is 'Live on the Edge'. And that's only because the first two rules were MORE AWESOME.

Also, brief sanity check. How can it be a rule to live on the edge? Enforcement? Will Kanye and Lemmy arrest you? (Note so self, idea for a new tv show. Edge Cops. Lemmy and Kanye team up, fight crime, boredom. e.t.c.

(Further note to self, remember to close brackets after use

Oh my fucking christ there's a class where the description goes 'if you live to rock, this is where you belong' HOW DID ANYONE GET TO THE OTHER CLASSES??! Who reads an RPG and thinks 'well, I do like to rock. But I will read the other classes just to be sure they do not rock more' Nerds. Nerds do. Question asked, question answered.

In the cyber future, IBM, Sony and Apple are mentioned. But no Microsoft.

In cyber slang 'Input' is girlfriend and 'Output' is boyfriend. Someone could write a thesis on that. Not a good thesis.

One class is essentially Frank Butcher, or Lou from Neigbours. The special skill is 'Streetdeal'. Another class is being homeless. In the dark future of the 1980's even being homeless is kind of awesome.

More later