Welcome to RED, Choomba (Cyberpunk)

 

Source: Movieclips (Kino)

Source: Filmviewed (Rintaro)

I've been a Cyberpunk fan for a very long time. Back in the day I had most of the books and picked up the ones I didn't have second-hand at UK conventions. My collection's pretty complete now, but I haven't played in years. When they announced a new, revised edition (with Mike Pondsmith as a leading light, no less) I was all for it.

Cyberpunk 2020, for those who haven't played, can broadly be described as Metropolis plus Metropolis plus post-apocalypse, with a dash of William Gibson. Everything was shiny and new until it wasn't. Now you have to survive in a world where survival is the lesser of two evils. There are all kinds of fancy toys to make survival bearable - or at least achievable. Ultimately the larger question is, will you strive to make the world better, or bring the temple crashing down?

The game's credo could be boiled down to three sentences: style over substance, attitude is everything, and live on the edge. Cyberpunk wasn't about its mechanics. It was about its setting and its players, which made it significantly different from its peers. Its first edition was published in 1988; there was no Vampire then, nor was there a White Wolf, the big boy on the block was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and every other game system peeped about under its huge legs looking for dishonorable graves. Games then were all about stats, mechanics, dice; if you didn't have at least twenty complicated charts in the opening chapter, you couldn't call yourself an RPG.

Mechanically the old Cyberpunk was Skill plus Stat plus 1D10 versus a Difficulty number, and that Difficulty went up or down depending on circumstance and bonuses. Because of the sheer number of variables calculating that Difficulty could be tricky, particularly since you, as Referee, had to put it all together on the fly most of the time. However it wasn't a million miles away from the systems we use now in Gumshoe, where pool points plus 1D6 versus a Difficulty number means the vampires get you, or they don't. You can also have opposing rolls, where the enemy's die roll provides the Difficulty you have to beat, and if you don't you get smacked round the noggin. Or something along those lines.

The biggest difference, mechanically speaking, between Cyberpunk and the games that were published alongside it was this mechanic didn't really change, ever. No complicated tables. No feature creep. Whereas AD&D and Vampire made it their business to stuff in tables every other page and creep that feature with every new supplement; it was Dr. Strangelove on steroids, with new rules, new roles, new toys parachuted in all the time, everyone chasing the mineshaft gap.

If you bought a Cyberpunk supplement, on the other hand, you were getting about ten pages of setting and inspiration for every two pages of rules. Nor were these new character archetypes, new feats, new Disciplines. They were add-ons to the existing, changing little. You never had the Unearthed Arcana Cavalier problem, where some ill-thought-out idea dumped ten tons of heavily armed and armored horseshit into your campaign. If you pick up Home of the Brave, the US setting book, and start at the beginning there are about sixteen pages of text before you get to the first rules entry, and even that's just stats for an NPC - not new stats or new cyberware, just the basic stats everyone gets.

Artwise the old books - particularly the first ones - were pretty cheap. The cover was new color art, but the interior was, at best, pencil. Scattered among the pages were black & white photos meant to convey the setting through character portraits - i.e. the writers' buddies with shades on, or an old phone cord draped over their neck to look as if they were jacked into the network. 

Now CD Projekt RED's working on a video game release due to arrive at some point in the next X decades, and while it does look cool I've no real desire to play it. When it comes to RPGs I prefer tabletop, or at least Discord chat.

However the tabletop version came out on PDF yesterday ...

Setting-wise the game is pretty much as it was before. Details have changed, but broadly speaking the world went to hell in a handbasket back in the 1990s, the Middle East gets nuked flat in 1997-ish, and corporations begin asserting their authority through armed conflict. This all comes to a head in the early 2020s with what the setting calls the Time of the Red, where thanks to a combination of unfortunate circumstances the skies go crimson for two years. Things trot merrily along from that neo-Biblical event, and by the time the game's present day rolls around the corporations aren't as powerful as they were, Europe's licking its wounds, the Highriders up in space have declared themselves an independent territory and backed up this claim with lethal force, and the (dis)United States are pulling themselves out of the rubble. More or less. The rest of the planet is just trying to catch a breath, thank you very much. 

Yes, there are Artificial Intelligences. They don't like you. Move along, citizen.

Mechanically the game is very much as it was before. Skill plus Stat plus 1D10 versus a Difficulty number. This should make it easier to convert the old material to the new game, if you (like me) have a dozen or so of the old sourcebooks taking up space on your game shelf. 

Netrunning was one of the big features of the old game, and both in terms of mechanics and style it worked a lot like those slightly ridiculous sci-fi movies did back in the day: more psychobabble than technobabble.

Source: Movieclips Classic

Which is what gave hacking its charm, really. I mean, who wouldn't want to live in a world where Toontown is a thing, and you can go there in person? Problem being, this made Netrunners all but a solo class. The Referee'd spend half an hour or so resolving the Runner's many actions while the rest of the team sat around eating cold pizza, trying not to chew their own arms off in frustration.

Well, Netrunning has changed - except not really. The NET is dead - except not really. 

Mechanically it's the same as ever, broadly speaking. Stat plus Skill plus 1D10 versus Difficulty, or an opposed roll, depending on circumstances. The better a Runner you are, the more net actions you have and therefore the more things you can do when jacked in. The old system used more fuzzy logic than mechanics to resolve this, so the change is welcome. 

Rather than enter some kind of fantasy land now the Runner puts on special glasses which allows them to see the real world's underlying technical architecture. The Runner has the choice between taking a Meat Action or as many Net Actions as her technical ability can provide. The language used, the ICE, is all much as it was before. That said, I suspect the old Netrunner solo game problem will rear its ugly head again, and the rest of the team will take a back seat while the Runner calls the play.

Without going through the whole shmear line by line, the Netrunning chapter - and most of the others - are a lot more rulesy than the old game. There are mechanics now where words were before. The rules are still pretty simple, but the ten page to two page ratio no longer applies.   

Stats are broadly the same. The original had nine stats bought and paid for with a points system. This has ten stats which can be generated several different ways. Attractiveness is no longer a thing; DEX and Willpower are. Generally as with all things in the new system this is more rulesy than before, but much better organized and probably easier for new players to understand. It feels less player-facing and more dice oriented, which may be a problem if you or your players prefer player-facing games. But that's a flavor issue, and your mileage may vary.

The Agent is your new cell phone. The old game had a lot of 1980s-era tics; the cell phone, for one thing, was still a massive brick. The new game has 2020s tics, which probably means than when 2030 rolls along we'll all be having a quiet giggle at how quaint the Cyberpunk RED tech is. Be that as it may, your Agent controls your life. It's your public face. It manages the media you watch, the social media you participate in, speaks in a voice of your choosing and has whatever face you desire. I'm sure nothing but good can come from that. 

There are still Data Terminals and Screamsheets, which means print media is still a thing in 2045. It all works a little differently than before, but fills the same function and can be accessed in broadly the same way. You can still buy kibble and guns, and they're still called kibble and guns. It's just that there are a lot more charts than there were before, so the Referee can determine most things by quick random roll. I suspect, as is the fate of most charts, once the Referee gets used to the system the charts will be ignored and the Referee will just decide on the fly what's available when. 

Cyberware! Ahh, the old reliable ...

Sourced from XGP OST.

Of course cyberware's a big thing in this game. What are you, some kind of fruit loop? Moreover it works pretty much as it always has. Buy tech toys, install tech toys, watch your Humanity melt away. Install too much and your brain goes bye-bye. But you have to install something, or you'll be at a disadvantage when the booster gangs come knocking on your coffin lid. So what's the harm? Everyone does it ...

While the list in the main book feels a little short, it is the main book. The old game had God alone knows how many supplements and Chrome books to add new Cyber. This is about the same list as before, with perhaps a few additions and subtractions. 

Since I touched on art, I should mention that the new book is (naturally) much prettier than the old one. More color inserts for one thing, and some of the new art is really gorgeous. It lacks the stylistic certain something of, say, Vampire the Masquerade; it feels a little paint-by-numbers, but that's the thing with a stylistic choice. People aren't always going to see it the same way. It's pretty, functional, and clean. So it works.

You know what I miss the most, oddly enough?

In the old book there was a bit of short fiction, Never Fade Away. It doubled as an introductory scenario, in that it provided stats for every NPC and potential PC, goons both basic and advanced, and so on. It was brief, to the point, and it did the job by conveying not only the plot but also the style and sensibility of the average game.

That's not how the new game operates. Sure, Never Fade Away is there along with other bits of fiction, like Black Dog. They don't fill the same dual function of being both a starter scenario and mouthpiece for the setting. It's a personal thing; I liked the other way, and now there's a new way. Such things are bound to happen.

Still, I miss it. Mike Pondsmith makes a point of saying in the introduction that his difficulty was balancing the need to keep ' Cyberpunk Cyberpunk, while at the same time moving the timeline forward and clearing out the deadwood. I also had to make the new version fit not just a tabletop roleplaying game but a AAA videogame title too.' When I first saw this game it was new, fresh, exciting, completely different from any other tabletop title of its day. It had bold ideas, like ditching mechanics for setting and style, using its fiction as an introductory game springboard. It's still great, but it's not new. It could never have been new. New was more than thirty years ago.

Scores on the doors. Is this worth getting?

If you're new to the system and looking for a Cyber good time, sure. This does what a main book is supposed to do: provide a simple introduction to the rules, and an advanced understanding of the setting and game philosophy. It's pretty to look at and explains itself clearly. It's solid.  

If, like me, you already have a weighty chunk of the old stuff, some of this will feel like old ideas warmed over. That's inevitable; this is the core book, after all. It's going to have to cover ground you've already travelled a dozen times before. It's not talking to you. It's talking to the new player.  

The new lore, the new Net, the updated mechanics are still worth the price of admission. I'm not sure I'd buy physical, mind you. The .pdf is fine by me, and that's not just because getting things shipped anywhere is a huge problem these days. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have boosters to kill, places to be ... 

 

Have Fun Storming the Castle (RPG All)

In fantasy and in other genres the castle is something armies attack. Occasionally a band of plucky heroes sneak in before the army arrives, but as a general rule if it has crenellations and a porter its purpose in life is to be besieged and preferably beaten in some great battle.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A castle has two jobs: to exert authority, and survive. To exert authority it needs to have a minimum compliment of troops and a significant compliment of administrators. To survive it needs more castles and a bit of luck.

When William the Conqueror swept England after the great battles of 1066 one of his first priorities was to ensure motte and bailey castles went up as quickly as the Normans could build them, wherever they could build them. There wasn't a central planning bureau picking out exactly where things should be placed; put walls up, put archers on those walls, and send out the tax collectors, was the sum of the Conqueror's plan.

When Rome sent its soldiers out into the world and beat seven bells out of whoever it might be this week, its armies built fortresses or castrum as quickly as possible. Some permanent, some temporary, but all with the same purpose: plant the standard and provide a headquarters for the administrators. Possibly also a marketplace to do business with the locals, if circumstances warranted, but that wasn't its main purpose. Its reach extended further than its walls; it controlled a vast swathe of territory.

Look from culture to culture, from Sengoku Japan to the American frontier or the Aztec empire, and you'll find the same. First there is the period of conquest, where simple forts are flung up as quickly as possible. Not all of them will be built in good locations, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that they fulfil their first purpose: to exert authority. In time the castles that no longer matter or which were built in poor locations will be abandoned. Sometimes this means they'll be destroyed so someone else can't use them, and at other times or in less organized societies old forts will be left to decay. Meanwhile the better designed or situated castles will be improved upon. Each surviving castle will carry out its intended purpose: to provide a base of operations for administrators to collect taxes and organize civil operations, say a court of justice.

However survival depends not on defenses but on your neighbors, and that's why castles need more castles.

Back in the day if you were standing at the top of a decent-sized tower and looked in any direction, odds were you'd see another castle off in the distance. It might only be a speck on the horizon, but it's there. The reason why it's there is very simple: an attacker might get one, but not all.

If you're attempting to invade a country your job is to get from the entry point to the main target as quickly as possible. This is even more true in situations where your army has to move on foot through difficult terrain, as has been the case for most of human history. There are only so many months in the year. Some are rainy, some are frozen, some are too hot. Your army might only have three or four months before it has to dig in and wait out the weather. That assumes you have a cohesive, professional army that is paid and trained to fight. For much of history that simply wasn't so. Generals and Kings had to make do with what they could scrape together, but that meant conscripting farmers and other people whose absence was keenly felt at home. Farmers have a nasty habit of deserting when the harvest and planting seasons come. Sailors don't want to work in dangerous conditions for little pay when they could earn much more in the merchant marine.

Even in the present it's ruinously expensive to keep a professional army in the field for longer than a few months. Remember a while back when I talked about the Muscle in Night's Black Agents? I quoted an article posted in the Guardian which said child soldiers fresh from conflicts in Africa were being hired by mercenary companies like Aegis - formerly Sandline - to do duty in Iraq.

"You probably would have a better force if you recruited entirely from the Midlands of England," [James] Ellery, a former brigadier in the British Army [and former director of Aegis], told the Guardian. "But it can't be afforded. So you go from the Midlands of England to Nepalese etc etc, Asians, and then at some point you say I'm afraid all we can afford now is Africans."

The point being that if your job is to get to and conquer the main target, anything that delays this advance is a threat to your economy as well as your campaign. If there are twenty castles in your way then there are twenty threats, and there are only so many options open to you.

You can attack. Congratulations, you just lost the war. A siege takes weeks, perhaps months, and may require specialized equipment you don't have. One siege is doable, maybe, if you're lucky. Twenty is not an option. Even if you capture one or two by quick movement and surprise attack, the others will be waiting for you.

You can ignore them. Congratulations, you just lost the war. Each of those castles has a defensive force and now that defensive force is free to attack your supply lines, your stragglers, and anything else it can get its grubby little hands on.

You can devote a small portion of your force to keep each castle's defenders under siege while moving your main force to the primary objective. Congratulations, you just made things much, much harder for yourself and may have lost the war. Your army is only so large. There's only so much it can do, and if you send one force off here and another off there and a third to God alone knows where, by the time you get to the thing you actually want to attack you may not have enough troops to knock it over.

This is why some of the most successful military escapades in medieval history were hit-and-run raids. The Hundred Years War and Omar's relentless attacks on Marlo Stansfield have this in common: it's not about territory, it's about making the other side bleed. Send the Black Prince and a band of thugs on Chevauchee, pillage everything in sight and run away before the enemy can get an army together. Do that often enough and you put the enemy on the defensive, forcing them to meet you on terms of your choosing.

This is also why when castles fall it typically isn't to an attacking enemy. When castles fall, it's because someone betrayed them. It might be that the defenders reached an accommodation with the attackers before the fight even began, or it might be that one or two people inside the castle let the enemy in. There's many a ballad and ghost story about a foolish lover who let her paramour into the castle, only to be stabbed and left in the ruins as the besiegers take the fortress.

All that said, what does this mean to your RPG campaign?

It means that when you design a castle in your game you need to think about its jobs. It has to exert authority and survive.  Authority doesn't mean knights and heroes, it means soldiers and administrators. Someone has to collect the taxes, administer justice, and do all the pesky things that need doing if the country's going to run smoothly.

It's great if the guy in charge is a hero, but it's not about the heroism nor is it about the noble lineage. When William divided up England he didn't give out manors to the most blue-blooded Normans he could find - he was William the Bastard, after all. He gave out manors to successful soldiers, and if, as time went on, those soldiers proved unworthy or died childless the manor would be handed out to someone else. Manors change hands all the time. That's what makes them so useful; the more manors you have in your gift, the more loyalty you can purchase from would-be manor holders.

In a fantasy setting, or in any setting where mundane power - swords, guns - can be outclassed by magical or supernatural power, this does not change the castle's first job. Its first job is still to exert authority. However it does change the castle's second job, because survival in a magical world is tricky business.

The point behind having a lot of castles is that it eats up an attacker's time. An army can't afford to lose even a day, never mind several weeks or months. However if an army has a dragon on its side then a castle might fall in a day. In fact, a dragon might fly ahead of an army and take castles by surprise, forcing their immediate capitulation. An undead army might march more quickly than a living one - no need to worry about fatigue - and doesn't care whether it's winter or summer. The list goes on.

So castles will need some form of defense against the threats that face it, and that may change the way castles are designed. When the threat was that someone might mine under the square corner of a wall to cause it to collapse, castle builders started using round towers which were much less vulnerable to that technique. When cannons made tall walls obsolete forts lowered their profile, eschewing tall walls for long, low palisades with interlocking fields of fire, to keep the enemy from getting too close.

If the castle designers know that dragons are going to be a threat, they'll start putting in anti-dragon measures. If they know undead armies are a thing, they'll start putting out anti-undead measures. Exactly what those are will depend on the enemies' characteristics and power set.

Say this is the typical kind of undead we're talking about, that can be defeated by holy power. In that case every castle has a picket line of shrines, each with its own minor holy relic - something blessed by a high-ranking official, a saint's finger-bone, what-have-you. The point being to keep the undead from getting too close, as well as providing a kind of early warning system. There will be at least one person at the castle whose sensitivity to the ebbs and flows of magic warns them when one of those shrines is interfered with. Equally it will be someone's job to make sure all those shrines are well maintained.

Moreover it will be someone else's job to steal the holy relics, because every castle needs them and there aren't enough to go around. There will be a secondary market in relics, many fake, because when demand is high and supply low, or restricted, black markets spring up like mushrooms. So it will be someone else's job to detect fakes, and prosecute the people stealing holy relics. Or just kill them. Whichever works.

This applies across the board. Castles aren't just for fantasy systems after all; every setting, from science fiction to gritty noir, has its equivalent.

Say we weren't talking about castles. Say we were talking about Facilities in a modern day game. Does anything change?

Not really. Whether a Facility is dedicated to Manufacture, Collection, Distribution, or Analysis, it still has those two basic functions. It has to exert authority and it has to survive. Exactly how it goes about those two functions will change depending on the setting.

Let's say this is an extra-legal facility in a setting like Night's Black Agents. Lets say that its job is to distribute McGuffins, and that it has to do that job within a developed, moderately policed environment. Anywhere in Europe, really; somewhere there's plenty of communication links, transport links, free movement, and enough cops to keep the peace. Not where movement is restricted or there's a significant number of secret police or armed forces checking everyone's papers.

So here is your castle: it's one distribution facility. It has to exert authority, and it has to survive. It has to do those things in an environment that is innately hostile: if the cops knew it existed, they'd shut it down, because it's an extra-legal facility.

So how does it exert authority and survive?

Castles exert authority by providing a base for administrators and tax collectors. The same applies here. The collection authority is a base for, say, vampire Conspiracy types. Since it's a distribution facility it probably doesn't have troops and bosses; it has trucks, drivers, and a bunch of goons. As D'Angelo points out in the Wire, the drug stash never moves without soldiers to protect it.

The exact nature of that authority will depend on the nature of the facility. A low-level, unimportant facility probably doesn't have powerful soldiers, and so on. But powerful or not, someone at that facility is in charge of making sure everything works smoothly, that the McGuffins get to where they need to go when they need to get there, and that the police or whoever is nominally in charge doesn't interfere with the facility's operation. Those are the administrators.

It also has to survive. Castles survive because there are lots of castles. The more of them there are, the less likely it is that any attacker will be able to take them all on. Sure, one or two may fall, but there are always other castles. The sheer number of them may be enough to persuade enemies not to attack at all.

Facilities can use the same trick. There's never just one distribution facility. There are dozens, hundreds. The larger the organization, or Conspiracy, the more likely it is that it will have many facilities at its disposal, some more important than others. If one gets destroyed, move operations to another.

There can be alternate means of survival depending on the nature of the threat, just as the best defense against an undead army isn't necessarily a large number of castles. If the threat comes from a bunch of unaligned burnt spies, then one way to ensure survival is to turn the Heat up as soon as the agents show their faces. Squeal loudly and often; let the cops know that crazy gun-toting madmen are on the prowl. Or, if the facility can't afford to get the authorities involved, tell other criminals. The agents aren't the only one with the Yojimbo option. "You know that shipment you were supposed to get, but which was intercepted by the cops? Yeah, it was these guys." For 'intercepted by the cops' read 'we deliberately didn't sent it' or 'we set it up to look like an ambush.' Whichever best suits the situation.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

One Tiny Teaser (Fiction)

As I've said before, I'm running a Patreon, and every so often when I get new members I like to post new fiction. My original intent was to post this particular piece on the Patreon for free, but as it relates to a Pelgrane IP, I've agreed with Simon that it should go up on the Pelgrane site instead. You'll note that no actual IP terms are used, but you'll probably guess which IP it is.

With all that in mind, I'm posting a teaser here, so you'll know what to look forward to later. Not sure exactly when this is going up, but by the end of the month for definite.

Enjoy!

**


       Dorcas wondered, not for the first time, what her West African mother would have said, if she knew her Cambridge graduate daughter was cleaning offices at Canary Wharf, the very job she had done for fifty years so Dorcas wouldn’t have to. Dorcas didn’t think the Glock hidden in her cleaning equipment would matter much to Mum. She was a straightforward woman. She wouldn’t have had time or patience for Dorcas’ specialized position.


      It was time for check-in. Dorcas took out her cheap mobile and typed in, hey baby. It was script three, and just as they’d practiced, Roy’s reply was hey, you. :) Simon, the loaner from Special Reconnaissance Regiment, was the one who’d designed it. He’d pointed out that blending in was key, and nobody looked twice at someone texting. There was always a risk that the messages would be intercepted, so the textspeak was bland. The key was in the timing. Once every half hour, on the half hour. So long as you stuck to script, the chance that someone was impersonating the sender was reduced to nil, or as close to nil as Simon could manage it. So long as the texts kept coming in, all was well. If the texts stopped coming, or Dorcas sent want coffee? then it was time to send in the cavalry.