There’s been a lot going on in my life here in January, but I had allocated some time on Saturday to write more of ‘Nat Meets Donnie’ and hopefully get part 2 up today. Instead, an RPG ruleset came to me in a dream and I had to write it down.

I’m not kidding.

There’s two pieces of background that hopefully help explain why, after seeing the rules in a dream, I felt so compelled to spend a couple of hours writing them down instead of just thinking ‘huh, weird’ to myself and letting the dream go. I dreamt a distilled version of Cyberpunk 2020, with a cut down stat-line a la Into the Odd or Cairn. When I woke up, I immediately wrote it out, and was a little shaken. Thing is, I’ve tried two or three different times to write a cut-down cyberpunk game, and always got caught in the minutia. This one, after a few hours Saturday morning, is essentially a complete first draft except for netrunning and money. The whole reason I’ve tried to do this multiple times is a combination of my love of cyberpunk as an RPG genre and the interest and intrigue I feel towards a lot of the ideas in the OSR. Interest and intrigue which sits in an interesting place in my head when you consider my relative disinterest towards D&D specifically. It stands to reason, then, that taking those ideas and using them with an eye towards cyberpunk makes sense.

Now, I don’t particularly care either way about having any old-school game in the cyberpunk genre. Kevin Crawford did that, both with the Polychrome supplement for Stars Without Number and with the more recent Cities Without Number. What I actually want to do is create an equivalent of something like The Black Hack or Whitehack for Cyberpunk 2020 specifically, a distillation that clears out the statistical maximalism of the original (10 stats? Dozens of skills?) but maintains the ethos that a lucky punk with a disposable pistol can still ruin your day. At the same time, it’s Cyberpunk; it’s a game about capitalism that hits hardest when the effects of money and the seduction of money is right there on the table. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, casting your characters as heroes against a villain that happens to be a corporation isn’t cyberpunk at all, it’s closer to Star Wars. Cyberpunk as a genre is defined by showing the pernicious, dehumanizing effects of capitalism in a world where there is at least some buy-in from most people. If the decision to buy in and sell out isn’t on the table, then you aren’t in the genre, you’re just making a morality play. Thus, the decision is on the table. Corporate-backed characters can cheat in a manner of speaking. There are hard limits to how many augmentations you can implant, but corporates have anti-rejection drugs. Legal cyberware doesn’t break as much, even if it has tracking software on it. Corporate employees literally have access to more and better equipment, at the price of letting everyone know you’re licking boot. That’s the reality that cyberpunk is warning about. Technology aids the concentration of power, but it also makes selling out cheaper, easier, and more fun. It’s why William Gibson said that in order to understand The Sprawl in his novels, you had to understand that it likely made for a better life than many people on earth had access to at the time it was written.

Anyways. I always thought that Cyberpunk 2020, in the way it was written, presented the ethical ambiguity of the genre well, even if the baseline campaign essentially started you off as compromised disposable assets. There is a reason that the game spiraled out into so many weapons, vehicles, and cybernetic toys, and that is the seduction of money. Of course the society is materialistic, it’s capitalism expanded to an absurd degree. Once you got far enough down the timeline, though, the purpose of the new toys was less and less to provide a foil to the characters and more to make it more seductive (or even inevitable) to sell out. At a certain point (I’d posit it was around the release of Maximum Metal in 1993) the designers had either resigned themselves or simply became more receptive to the idea of telling stories entirely within a corporate context. You don’t provide rules to make Power Armor Trooper characters unless you plan on running a game where said characters are beholden to an organization able to field Power Armor. And if you read Maximum Metal you’ll see Power Armor is deliberately corporate-coded; the logistics necessary to run those damn things in an effective way does require the budget of a small army.

Anyways. Going back to basics in Cyberpunk 2020 has always been appealing to me, so when I suddenly came up with some ideas, I had to write them down. You’ve got random character generation with a reduced stat line, combat designed after 2020 but intended to be more chaotic and dangerous, and a cut-down role list that makes each one unique. My fantasy version would have some campaign-generating tools, halfway between The Sprawl and Electric Bastionland, which help players make their own version of Night City. I also have some ideas about what happens when you do have a combat. In our future society it is altogether too easy to instantly identify someone; that may end up being a much more important consideration than armor or the caliber of your gun. Mix those procedures in with some cassette futurism, and I think I’ve got something solid on my hands

On one hand, this is explaining why I didn’t end up writing any fiction this month. January was a lot, but I do want to finish Nat Meets Donnie this year; probably another 2-3 sections to go. At the same time, I am going to take a whack at this cyberpunk distillation. I honestly think mechanics need maybe another hour of work for two more systems (netrunning and money), and then I can show my group and get feedback. It still likely has more to it, but I’m imagining the rules might be able to fit in a 32-64 page zine format. Trying not to get ahead of myself. When a game comes to you in a dream, finish writing it before going back to the dream for layout.