Flashback: Solo of Fortune

Solo of Fortune was, I believe, the first supplement for Cyberpunk. It was also one of the first gaming supplements I’ve ever seen that were packaged as media from the gaming world. It had photographs to add a layer of realism. It was pretty cool in it’s time. I’d be curious to see how something like this could be done in 2019. Would it look as dated? It’s something I might explore later, but that’d be way down the road. Maybe if I package some of my Wednesday blogs into something else.

Anyway, Solo of Fortune is definitely riffing off of one of the classic magazine Soldier of Fortune. Now, I don’t think I’ve looked at a copy of Soldier of Fortune in like 30 years, but I think I’ve seen it recently in book stores. I remember it having classified ads that sounded so freaking cool but were probably not real. Like, hiring mercenaries to topple governments and shit. Then there was historical accounts of brushfire wars along with reviews of military technology. That’s a lot of what you get with Solo of Fortune, to include some straight up shit talking in the letters page. The ads in the supplement are the beginning of the gear porn that the game would be famous for, along with the “Fully Chipped” articles. The MetalGear armor makes the armor in the boxed set obsolete, the Militech weapons outclass most of what was in Friday Night Firefight, and the cyberwear ads definitely crank up some of the specialized cinematic qualities of cyberwear.

The flavor and lore of the world is fleshed out in first person narratives like “I Was There,” discussing a shift in the life of a Trauma Team. It is definitely an interesting juxtaposition to read a detailed combat story told by people who should be EMT.  “Cyberpsychosis: It Can Happen To You” takes a deep dive into the main concept surrounding cybernetics in the game that increased cybernetics robs you of your humanity. It is an interesting conceit that I’m not sure I entirely buy. I definitely want to think more about cyberpsychosis within the concept of actual psychology and you’ll see the results of that next Wednesday. “In Focus: Corporate Extractions” explores one of the more iconic mission types in Cyberpunk. It gives a lot of ideas for GMs to structure their extraction scenarios around, as well as a slew of dirty tricks. “Love and Bullets from Moscow” takes us to Soviet Russia. I think the Cyberpunk version of Russia definitely harps on a stereotype of Eastern European bulk and brute force that feels very caricature. It’s like the spectrum of technology is Japanese on the high end and Russian on the low end—very much the mindset in the late 1980s. “Eurostyle” is the first real developed take on the differences between Europe and the United States in the game. The idea of European solos being part of something resembling a Gentleman’s Club is definitely interesting. The fact that they are all well-educated and refined makes them feel more like spies than assassins. “The State of Corporate Security, Penetration, and Defense” is something that, in 2019, might not be necessary anymore. In the thirty years since Solo of Fortune was published, we’ve had a million movies and video games to show us how to handle these things. In 1989, however, I didn’t know a damn thing about security and we didn’t have the internet yet. While filled with flavor, the “Bubba and J.T. Test the Sternmeyer M-95A2” is something I’m not sure I’ve ever finished reading. I could totally see this article in a real Solo of Fortune, and it’s very reminiscent of Soldier of Fortune, but I feel like it was a little too gratuitous with far too little gameable material. 

The “Focus on Solos” article helps players understand the range of the Solo class. I think, given the dearth of modern/near-future games at the time, we definitely needed an idea on how to make Solos unique. A similar article these days could draw on a number of examples we have seen since. The same goes for the “Modern Street Gangs” article. The categories of gangs can be absurd at times. I’m not sure what the actual implications of them are and, even though I know I bring up what seems like two of these a week, a great idea for a future Wednesday blog. “The First Corporate War” is excellent for showing how conflicts originate and escalate in the dark future. That said, it’s very much on the macro level. How to translate this to the table without necessarily making the characters the heroes of the war is something that I think contributed to the power creep that we’ll see as the product line is developed. “The World of Government Solos” provides a nice list of different high-level agencies and the conflicts and problems the face. Again, this wouldn’t have much implications on “the street,” so it starts to focus referees and players to think bigger than that.

I love the “World Situation Update” because it has a lot of potential gameable options. It has flashpoints all over the world with nice capsules of each party to the conflict. You can get an idea of the major conflicts of the world from corporate feuding to counterinsurgency. I appreciated that some of the conflicts had more than two sides and that there was rarely a “good side” against a “bad side.” Expanding on these would definitely require some research into the area and I would definitely explore how everyday life was affected by these conflicts. That is one of the things that fascinates me the most about Cyberpunk is how humans are affected by the advanced technology and conflict.

“The Open World” closes out the magazine with vehicle rules for Cyberpunk. They seem pretty decent, but without playing them out, I can’t say too much. Seeing some of the rules regarding maneuvering gave me fond memories of Car Wars, however.

In Summary:

As much as it sells a game, Cyberpunk is really selling a setting and Solo of Fortune is one of the first steps in really defining that setting. I think it focuses a little too much on military activity, compared to the more shadowy clandestine world of edgerunners. I do believe that this early focus on direct action is what led to the greater macro-conflict that the game play evolved into. The book’s emulation of Soldier of Fortune is brilliant and well-executed. With the exceptions of a few of the articles, there isn’t much wasted in here and plenty of grist for your cyberpunk mill. Much of what is in Solo of Fortune has transferred into the collective unconsciousness of modern/near-future gamers, so it may not be as useful now as it was in 1989. I think it sets a pretty high bar for supplements and we’ll see how it compares to the rest of the line.

Next week, Hardwired takes us out of the traditional Cyberpunk setting and places us in the world of Walter Jon Williams’ novel series of the same name.

Flashback Friday: Cyberpunk 2013 Boxed Set, Part Three: Friday Night Firefight

“THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!!!!!!!!”

Now that I’ve got my inner Willem Defoe out, I can talk about the last book in the 1988 Cyberpunk boxed set, Friday Night Firefight. Previous to playing Cyberpunk, my exposure to RPG combat was D&D, Star Frontiers, and Marvel Super Heroes. Very abstract, very low lethality. FNFF prided itself on its deadliness, its precision, and its dedication to realism. They cite FBI statistics and other sources with plenty of warnings that guns will kill you.

The mechanics of this simple 24-page booklet are simple and pretty clearly explained. Your reflexes determine which phases you act in and you have one action per phase. Attribute plus skill over a Difficulty Chance give you success or failure. It gets a little crunchy when determining wounds and penetration but, compared to other ‘realistic’ modern combat systems, it’s a breeze. Compared to the other books, there isn’t a lot of extrapolating or rabbit holes to go down, so this is actually going to be a pretty quick conclusion to the look at the boxed set.

I decided to try out the system and see how deadly it was. I had a pair of goons try to ambush a lone solos. Within one turn (two phases), the goons were bleeding out. Granted, I didn’t armor the goons up or anything, but they didn’t lay a finger on him. Deadly indeed. Maybe there is a deep dive to be had comparing this combat system with Cyberpunk 2020 using the NPCs and situations from “Never Fade Away.”

In Summary

Looking at this original boxed set, I can see why it grabbed me and why I fell in love with the game. Even though it is dated mechanically, I can think of its contemporary context and remember how mind-blowing some of these innovations were. The source material, however, is where the money is made. The cyberpunk world of 2013 was exciting, prescient, dangerous, and stylish. The combat was gritty and unforgiving. It was a literal game-changer. I’m excited to see the world (and system expand) and I can’t wait to see where it takes me. I’ll have to do a side by side comparison of the combat systems (maybe a Wednesday entry in the future) to see really how they stack up against each other. I have a feeling I’m in a minority here, but I actually think that I prefer the architecture of the Net in 2013 over that of 2020. While I don’t particularly care for the different interface programs, I like that it’s narrower and more reminiscent of how computer networks can be. You can’t just walk until you find it, you have to know what you’re looking for. Ditto the flowchart model of networks over the crossword puzzle model of 2020. That’s probably another Wednesday post in the future.

Next week, we’ll look at the first in the series of magazine-style supplements, Solo of Fortune. 

Flashback Friday: Cyberpunk 2013 Boxed Set, Part Two: Welcome to Night City

The second book from the 1988 Cyberpunk boxed set, Welcome to Night City, A Sourcebook for 2013, might be what actually made me a lifelong fan of the game. Like View from the Edge, the book is really three different sections: an orientation to the world of 2013 and Night City in particular, a short story featuring a few iconic characters embroiled in a plot that will have far-reaching effects on the metaplot of the game, and some slice of life articles illustrating what its like to live in 2013.

The world of 2013 is one of corporate intrigue, rampant consumerism, and unchecked corruption. Yeah, I know. Our present is our past’s cyberpunk future. That’s probably a series of blog posts down the road if someone hasn’t already done it better than I have. One of the things I found interesting is the rapid optimism of technological advances. I’m sure in the 1986-88 timeframe where much of this was being designed and written, many of these technologies seemed just around the corner, but Spaceplanes, CHOOH2, Arcologies, Massdrivers, all within four years of the game’s publishing date. With the possible exception of arcologies (which I definitely plan to tackle in a future post), I don’t think we’re anywhere near any of these. I would for someone with a better skillset for it to go through science fiction and see what kind of predictions are on target or not. I wonder if there is a tendency to over or underestimate certain things and what other factors influence the predictive success rate.

Reading the snapshot of the 2013 world in Welcome to Night City, I noticed that it really feels like the U.S. is one of the few countries that are worse off than they were in the timeframe the game was written. The EU looms large as, arguably, the world’s strongest power. Japan’s predicted ascendency continued without the economic realities that would soon hit it in real life. A Pan-Africa has been created on the back of the burgeoning orbital economy. Even the Soviet Union was coming to terms with itself and a reform movement was on near-equal terms to the Cold War hardliners. Then there is the U.S. The specifics wouldn’t be defined for a few years, but it is definitely made clear that America as we know it was dead by 2013.

The book then details some of the technologies in the future. Again, it’d be easy to jump on what wasn’t predicted accurately, but I want to think more about how these predictions created a game world. The transportation advances discuss tilt-rotor vehicles, maglev trains, and vectored thrust aircraft. This tells me that ground travel is nowhere near as individual and universal as it was and that, particularly in cities, we have started moving vertically rather than horizontally. The communications section is a trip down memory lane. Reading the section on cell phones, with long-distance and local rates and not working 20 miles outside of city limits was a treat. The fax-based scream sheets replacing newspapers are also an interesting artifact of the snapshot of technology in the 80s. I know in Cyberpunk Red, they have introduced Agents which basically assume the role of the smartphone. Phones are not smart in 2013 (or 2020) and it is still possible to recreate that fantastic scene from Neuromancer where the payphones each ring as Case walks by each one individually. I would definitely consider exploring some of the implications of these predictions.

The tips on Getting Cyberpunk offer up some clues on what the world should look like and feel like. These tips would be greatly expanded in Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads in a few years, but this is one of the more extensive “how to run our game” treatises, especially for 1988. With the exception of West End Games’ d6 Star Wars license and TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes, I don’t recall many games telling you how to run from the perspective of referee thought, motive, and environment. White Wolf would take this to the next level and now it seems pretty commonplace.

Also pretty commonplace nowadays is the piece of setting fiction that helps orient you to the game. Someone with a better grasp of history might be able to answer this, but I don’t recall having this in a game before. The story “Never Fade Away”, along with Sam Liu’s artwork, formed who I thought Johnny Silverhand and Alt were (As breathtaking as Keanu is, he’s still not quite my Johnny Silverhand yet…) and what the world of Cyberpunk felt like. I enjoyed the story then and still do. It’d be interesting to see how it would realize in a movie. What was interesting to me as a teen was the statistics alongside. You could play out the events of the game. It was a nice way to show how to implement all of this lore that the book contains.

The corporate profiles set the stage for the future of the game, with many of these players showing up in the metaplot. It is interesting to see which of them get further development and which ones are simply afterthoughts. And, to my knowledge, no other corps achieve the level of prominence that these ones do.

The last section is a series of articles that illustrate the character and flavor of life in 2013 Night City. This method of conveying information will be used on a larger scale in Solo of Fortune and Rockerboy. It’s a nice way of getting a handle on how the world feels. Getting to know it in your heart and stomach, as opposed to your brain. I think it’s a nice choice.

Overall, Welcome to Night City is an amazing lore book that holds up (outside of some technology) very well and really hasn’t changed much over the years. I am very curious about how Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk Red will move things forward and what they will keep. It’s a world felt lived-in and a world I have been, in a sense, living in for well over 30 years. You could still use this book as a sourcebook today.

Next week, I’ll wrap up the original box set with Friday Night Firefight and my thoughts on the boxed set as a whole.

Flashback Friday: Cyberpunk 2013 Boxed Set, Part One: View From the Edge

The original Cyberpunk boxed set was released in 1988, which puts it right around 8th grade for me. I don’t remember if I bought it in 8th or 9th grade, but I remember it was a game that immediately and completely grabbed me in a way that few others did. The Sam Liu pseudo-Nagel art on the black box had a style that really felt fresh and modern to me at the time, despite how dated it feels now. I was growing up in Northeast PA and my only exposure to glamour was MTV. So when this box came in with these Duran Duran-looking pictures and discussions of attitude and the vibe of Cyberpunk, I knew this was something I wanted to be part of. Keeping in mind that I was a nerd whose dad brought a computer into the house years before and was active on the local bulletin board scenes, it really was a no brainer that I’d fall in love with it.

What did I fall in love with? Cyberpunk came with three black books (although these were full-sized booklets, not the tiny digests of Dungeons and Dragons or Traveller) One for overall rules and characters, one for combat, and one for the world of Cyberpunk. They were written in a sarcastic and conversational tone with plenty of under-the-hood sidebars explaining how you did things from an aesthetic standpoint as much as a mechanical one. I can’t say enough about how the style of these books seduced me. I never wanted to be a dungeon explorer or an agent for the Pan-Galactic Corporation, but I damn well wanted to be cyberpunk.

The first book, View from the Edge: The Cyberpunk Handbook, contained the rules for making characters, cybering them up, and running the net. On the sidebars, you could find a background on the cyberpunk genre and slang. SLANG. It seems so commonplace now, especially in science fiction gaming, to have a glossary of words to give the world its own feel, but I really don’t remember owning a game that had that before. The characters were diverse and did things I wasn’t used to. It leads with the Rockerboy. I’ll talk about Rockerboys in a few weeks when I go over the Rockerboy supplement and the Music Monday posts, but DUDE. I was used to shooting aliens, slashing orcs, and clobbering super-villains. The fact that I could have a viable character who struts his stuff onstage, inspiring the world to revolution, blew my mind. The Lifepath system even more so. I know Traveller had been doing lifepaths since the 70s, but this is one that had a lot more meat on it, specifying the events that happened to you. While I don’t know if it was the first real event-based lifepath generator, it was certainly my first exposure to one. And all of a sudden, there were these randomly generated backstories to go with your 28-year old character’s stats. The actual lifepaths would not change very much until some of the career/culture-specific ones are published. While I went through a phase where I wanted more meat on the lifepath tables, I’ve come to appreciate their elegance. If you are making a lot of characters, you will certainly see many of the same results over and over again, but I’d be curious how many characters someone is making in a regular gameplay setting. I have definitely DREAMED about playing Cyberpunk more than I have actually played it, so I’ve made plenty of characters, but I wonder if the table doesn’t get old as fast when you’re focused on session after session.

The cyberware and gear section is pretty basic. There’s some talk about how much gear you can carry and such, but the actual gear options are not that robust here. It’s interesting to me to look back on this thirty years later understanding just how gear-oriented Cyberpunk will become. I’ll definitely have some opinions about that when I get around to the Chromebook series. Many of the options here are basic, offering a flat bonus to an ability or skill. With the exception of cyberweapons and options for the audio-visual replacements, there is usually just one type of replacement, with little nuance. I don’t think I’ll ever have the time to do it, but it might be interesting to trace the evolution of gear in Cyberpunk over the years, looking at how detailed and specialized the different replacements are.

The last key section in here is the Netrunning rules. These didn’t last too long, quickly replaced by a dramatically new system in Cyberpunk 2020 (which, itself, was replaced in the Cyberpunk Red Jumpstart Kit). The theory behind this is very firmly rooted in the computer communications architecture of the 1980s. In many ways, that architecture is still there but is much more robust and diverse and the front end and back end look very different. As someone who was an avid participant in BBS culture, back then you had much more exposure to the back end, so this doesn’t seem as wonky to me as it might look to someone who didn’t have that context. There are clear nodes and connections that need to be traversed to operate in the Net. Only certain cities were connected to each other, meaning you had to be somewhere near the action to take part in it. It’s interesting to see the U.S. Net Architecture and what cities were included and which ones weren’t. I’m sure part of it had to do with how ARPANET-focused the Internet was back then, with Fairbanks and Albuquerque as major nodes, but Denver and Atlanta are absent.

Unique to the 2013 era is the concept of Interface Software—how you perceive the Net when you’re jacked in. The ‘Tronnic interface most closely resembles the cyberspace of The Sprawl Trilogy or Tron and would be the last man standing after the major Net upgrades in the next edition of the game. The other two almost make me think that the best way to conceptualize Interface Programs are as holodeck scenarios from Star Trek that are actually interfacing with the real world. Dungeon lets you experience the net through the lens of a fantasy role-playing game (I’m sure it’s photorealistic, but part of me kind of wants it to look like Ultima or Bard’s Tale) and Mega City dresses up like a 1920s pulp detective novel. It was really easy for me to dismiss these other two programs at the time and to think of them pretty derisively when Cyberpunk 2020 was released, but I think there could have been more room for these concepts if the cyberpunk genre didn’t crystallize certain aspects so quickly. The actual hacking takes place in data architectures set up as pointcrawls. The maps of the systems reminded me of the different text-based games I played growing up, from the Scott Adams cartridges I played on my VIC-20 through the Infocom games like Zork. Again, I’m curious what the different context someone 10-20 years younger than me would think of these. There are a lot of different software options, with several strengths within multiple categories. It is all very basic and, like cyberwear and weapons, would bloat considerably as the game got older.

Cyberpunk, in all of its iterations, has had a complicated relationship with netrunning. The netrunner is almost playing a completely different game than the rest of the party. I understand many referees made netrunners an NPC-only role and I can understand why. I am sure as I continue my deep dive into the game, I’ll start to develop more thoughts on netrunning and maybe explore some of the fan-based solutions.

Rereading View from the Edge, I can definitely say it’s a very rough game. Unlike Cyberpunk 2020, I’m not sure I would whip it out and play it out of nostalgia. I would say that about most games of that era, to be honest. With the exception of D&D, Traveller, or maybe Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I’m not sure there are many games where I’d willingly go back to earlier editions. The things that really appeal to me were retained in future editions of the game, while the things I dislike were pretty much all abandoned.

Next week, I will discuss the second book in the boxed set, Welcome to Night City, the book of lore that immersed me into a world like no other game did before.