Building a Cyberpunk Game
Our regular group of fantasy-playing friends just finished the Tomb of Horrors. We beat the odds by only having an 80% death rate in the party, four out of five of us made it to the demi-lich’s lair only to have our souls sucked out of our bodies. Suffice it to say, we all had a glorious death.
We’re on a gaming break till the new year because the holidays are coming up fast. On the drive home (we carpooled), we discussed playing a #cyberpunk style game like #Shadowrun. I’m hesitant about weaving magic into a cyberpunk game but I did learn about GURPS and generic #rpg game systems that can apply not just to the fantasy world but to other game worlds.
My search down the rabbit hole led me to the FUDGE System, which I found overwhelming at the beginning but have come to appreciate as a good foundational system for any game.
I told my son and daughter my idea to build a cyberpunk game, and they liked it. My son suggested that I set the game 30 years into the future from now and build off existing and plausible future technology.
For example, neural links are close to being in the future much like a digital currency was a decade ago (i.e. Bitcoin). We have lasers but not as handheld laser guns, we do have stun guns and directed energy weapons now. It doesn’t require a lot of hard thinking to imagine what we’ll have 30 years from now.
Also, we are racing toward a massive climate change upheaval and likely the destabilization of many nations and the deaths of millions of people.
Building a dark dystopian future game is plausible and it’s not too far of a stretch to create various characters and synthetic AI people to populate a world that’s owned by mega multinational corporations.
The setting will be our world, 30 years into the future. I’ll extrapolate events to set up various games but this part is the easiest.
The hardest part is figuring out what kind of player characters there are. Using this as a guide I can modify them as I need. The question is which ones will be NPCs and which ones will be the PCs? Below is my initial thought and subject to change:
- Powerdealers - NPC
- Corpzoners - NPC
- Movers - PC
- Netrunners - PC
- Mallplexers - NPC
- Beavers - NPC
- Streetscum - PC/NPC
- Medtechies - PC
- Media - PC
- Techies - PC
- Nomads - PC
- Rockerboys/Rockergirls - PC
- Solos - PC
- Cops - NPC/PC
- Fixers - PC
- Soldiers - NPC/PC
- SyntheticAI - PC/NPC