New on Desk #2 — Year of Cyberpunk

I’ll be visiting Oulu for a game development meeting this weekend; in fact, I’m probably on the way back home when this newsletter posts. In strange synchronicity of calendar my Year of Cyberpunk begins with a hopefully final development conference for Subsection M3, possibly the best cyberpunk roleplaying game ever created. I’ll be endorsing the game in a more verbose manner a bit later in the letter, but first I’ll explain why this is the “year of Cyberpunk” in case that’s the part of my cold open that mystifies you.

C2020, where it all began

Cyberpunk is a science fiction subgenre from the late ’70s and early ’80s. In Finland it hit big in the early ’90s, and here’s what a Gen Y kid of the time took as the main points of the exercise:

• Ruthlessly cynical critique of the direction of western civilization: the revolution — French, American, Russian, no matter — was dead, our corporate overlords were free to do what the conservative order never could, overwriting the modernity to their own design. History ends in a postmodern crash of devolving education and world awareness as the new serf class is molded to best conform to the expectations of consumer culture. Cyberpunk is not even revolutionary, for the class consciousness is thoroughly dead.
• The standards of the genre were two: Gibson and Pondsmith. The latter’s magnum opus was strangely a roleplaying game instead of a novel, but in the Finnish cultural context this didn’t really mean much; it was just as real, not lessened but rather elevated by its hyper-modern format compared to a staid novel.

People make a big deal of the cybernetics and future technology stuff, too, but for me that was more of a stylistic language; the real meat was in treating the urban jungle as a survival violence environment in a world where civilization was eroding fast. The fact that our middle school gaming gang were total murder hoboes at the time no doubt played a part in that: it was rare for our cyberpunks to be capable of going a full session without a petty whim turning into an over-armed amok run. Cyberpsychosis hoy!

Anyway, Cyberpunk 2020, in case you couldn’t guess, is set in the distant future world of 2020. Which is now, whence the “Year of Cyberpunk”. As you no doubt know from reading the newsfaxes, after the collapse of the cold war superpowers and the unification of Europe (driven by the wide adoption of the new currency Eurodollar), the world has gotten stuck into a political stasis that slowly grinds down the hopes and dreams of third-world countries that become victims of American and Japanese corporate resource warfare. Not that the homeland fares any better, as the federal government grows ever weaker in the hands of a corrupt political class and ever more aggressive corporate lobby. Rule of law has become completely contextual when the rules are applied ever more openly on the basis of caste and patronage.

Admittedly I had momentary difficulties pinpointing how C2020 is “science fiction” at all, but then I remembered that there’s been a limited nuclear war in the Middle-East, and genetically grafted cat ears are available in day surgery. Also, Japan is a economic world superpower and wearing shades indoors is cool. So yeah, totally a fictional setting for now.

C2020 Redux?

With the moment of truth quickly approaching, the gentlemen at the Agora have over the last months been speculating about possibly playing C2020 this year in our respective circles. I understand that for most this is a strictly nostalgic affair; C2020 was big in Finland in its time, but most gamers I know consider it badly dated. A core example of what “traditional tabletop rpg” even means.

My personal back-monkey in this regard has been the idea of revisiting C2020 with my hammer and chisel and fixing it for current-day use. My gaming this decade has featured a lot of what might in the lack of better terms be called revisionistic editing: a serious critical look at the game’s purpose and charm points, followed up by an in-depth redesign. Aside from D&D in its various editions (I mean, who doesn’t revise that one to make it playable) I’ve got my own little special edition tucked away for Paranoia, Praedor, Ars Magica, Amber, Call of Cthulhu, some off-hand notes on WFRPG… it’s a disease, really, a form of hubris that has me play-as-written only when the game is genuinely good as is — a surprisingly uncommon case with rpgs, all told.

The Agora has been very enthusiastic about the idea of a C2020 critical review, but I’ve had other gaming projects grabbing my attentions over the last few months, so nothing substantial has happened yet. I did reread the core C2020 game text, and I’ve formed an opinion on what the game is about (the creative agenda, as we used to say), but that’s it so far.

In the interest of not leaving the topic hanging, a summary:

• The creative agenda of C2020 should, to my mind, be about low-stakes (Simulationist, if you prefer, you dirty Forgite) urban SimPunk: establish living situations, track expenses, manage living schedules, a bit of date sim play logic, and thrust cinematic blood opera scenarios into these neat little SimPunk circles like a bag of nails down your throat. No adventuring party, no “mission”; just a well-established character routine disrupted by the dramatized uncertainty of living on the edge, like you get in a cyberpunk novel. For some the disruption becomes a salvation, for others a ruination. Rinse and repeat until satisfied. A single session a movie; a grim, possibly rather un-Aristotelian one. It’s exactly the way I would play WFRP, except with more guns and drugs.
• C2020 is dragged down by its point-buy character creation system; the game would benefit greatly from a semi-randomized life-path thing, perhaps something similar to Traveller. The skill point distribution stuff is all a vapid waste of time, sorry to say; better leave that shit to the ’80s even if you insist on keeping the mirror-shade monokatana motorcycles.
• The character archetypes — classes — are the golden goose. You definitely want your character creation processes to end up with one player playing a reporter, another a cop, a third a paramedic. That’s all core Cyberpunk. The design logic of the aforementioned bag of nails springs directly from the character creation in this regard: whatever the social positions of the player characters, that’s what determines their entry vector into the scenario. Play a corp suit, enter the scenario from above; play a hobo fixer, enter from below. An unified redesign probably ensures that the character’s job inputs heavily into the SimPunk thing I mentioned above, too: this way you have the three important parts of the game working in unison as the Role determines the nature of the immediate SimPunk concerns and the entry vector of the bag of nails into your guts. Above or below, as I just said.
• I’m luke-warm on the resolution systems of the game; they’re fine enough for government work, assuming you get something actually interesting going with the Attributes and Skills themselves. I’ll no doubt do some streamlining, but the Attribute + Skill + d10 thing is good enough. A quicker combat system and less equipment micromanagement, of course.

Subsection M3, the Postmodern Gospel

Speaking of cyberpunk roleplaying games, one reason for my not having time for C2020 is, of course, Subsection M3. It’s a game with a pretty interesting history, if you’re into game producing. Here’s the low-down on the story so far:

1. Years ago, I want to say in 2012, Tuomas Kortelainen, a Finnish game designer, showed me this game he’d recently put together. It was alpha draft, I’m not sure if Tuomas had played it before. Regardless, the game was brilliantly novel; we talked about it for the weekend and I encouraged Tuomas to write down a playtest manuscript for us to try out.
2. I was managing a playtest crew in Helsinki at the time, so in 2013 we played and revised the game over a mid-size campaign. It was excellent. I reported on the proceedings to Tuomas and did basic development cleanups on the game as we went.
3. To my surprise Tuomas, a successful professional and newly minted father, left this excellent game by the roadside instead of finishing up. Weird priorities. Years pass, with me occasionally making idle threats about finishing it myself and Tuomas telling me to do it if I want to.
4. I do house cons occasionally to lure distant friends to visit, and in the spring of 2018 this meant dusting up the Subsection materials and demonstrating it to a distinguished crew of master roleplayers. The magic was still there, and one of the participants, Antti Luukkonen, was bitten by cyber-Jesus. I was obligated to do a cleaned up draft of the game’s rules and procedures so the Jyväskylä people could establish a full campaign.
5. Over 2018 and 2019 Antti has been running an independent playtest, two campaigns so far. Very minor issues, it seems; my understanding is that the game has been performing to expectations. It was quite entertaining to hear how the game’s higher-level elements seemed to be working for an independent group as well.
6. I’d kept Tuomas abreast of the developments, as I was apparently running an independent game development project here for a game that was not actually mine. It seems that Tuomas has been happy with the developments, as he’s recently played some Subsection himself as well, and talked about producing a real manuscript for the game.
7. Following Antti’s example I decided to start my own new campaign of Subsection this winter. At this writing we’ve played 8 sessions, and the game seems rather finished. I’ve also promised to bring the campaign online as a Discord text chat version, which’ll happen this spring for sure.
8. The most recent development with Subsection is that I’ve arranged to meet up with Tuomas face to face for the first time since 2012; I’ll visit him in Oulu next weekend. The ambitious plan is to upload everything I’ve learned of Subsection through the development cycle so Tuomas has all the information in his fingertips as he moves on to productize the game.

The remarkable thing, to me, is that it’s pretty weird for a roleplaying game to feature a distinct design phase and development cycle, with separate people in charge. Now that the game is finished it essentially changes hands a second time as I polish my conclusions and hand them off to Tuomas so he can use them to write the actual end product. It’ll be quite interesting to see how the development meeting goes!

As you can see from the above, I consider the game’s development to be pretty much finished, and we’ve been playing it to great success for years at this point. I intend to tell you more about what Subsection M3 is like, but perhaps I’ll save the rest of the details for next week — let’s see how the development conference goes, first. I hope I’ll be able to inspire Tuomas with the infinite grace of cyber-Jesus; it would be so appropriate if Subsection got out of development hell and was finished in the Year of Cyberpunk!

Margin Commentary: Mythopoeia

My friend Sami writes a Finnish-language blog intermittently. As another example of congruity, while his posting has grown sparse over the years, he happened to post near immediately after my first newsletter last week. Interesting stuff: Sami wrote in a bit more detail about his recent pickup gaming projects in his new home town, Pori. I’ll translate a favourite bit:

The newest edition of D&D is not a particularly beginner-friendly game, so I developed a lightened version for the needs of the Pori gaming club. The skill list, character classes, feats, spells and level-ups were all coolly shaven away. Or, expressing the same in D&D slang: all player characters were 1st level Fighters. What remains are the core functions of the rules system, so as to enable us to focus on roleplaying (operating the shared imagined space) rather than rules mechanics during play. The lite D&D character creation takes 10-15 minutes, as there are not many choices and mandatory learning in the way.

If you read Finnish, give the entire piece a read, there’s all sorts of interesting things in there. I’ve heard some stray stuff about Sami’s campaign earlier, but I never realized how ambitious he’s been with it. Like, apparently he’s been running a regular campaign alongside a sequence of public pick-up sessions, with the two strains of play producing emergent adventure content for each other. Also, a particularly ambitious form of shared DMing: as the campaign went on Sami would deputize individual players and feed them with Sami-prepped microscenarios, individual scenes almost, which would then be played simultaneously with Sami’s main table, such that he would split one large table of players into three separate strains of adventure on the spot.

Sami promises more regular blogging in the near future, as he’s leaving off his editor duties with the Finnish RPG Association’s newsfeed (yeah, I’ve no clue whether “Roolipelitiedotus” has a name in English) after a ten-year shift. I’ll need to provoke him into some sort of blogosphere flame war, get us both off to a rollicking blogging restart.

Movie Club: The Rock

I discussed our movie club in the last newsletter a bit, so you know the deal: everybody brings a movie and we’ll argue about what gets shown. The club is apparently picking up steam; I wouldn’t have expected to have another showing only a week after the last one.

A visiting friend requested a rather interesting-seeming movie, Ferat Vampire, but due to scheduling issues I couldn’t get my hands on it in time for the showing. A shame, but I’ll have to see this piece of turkey at some point one way or another. A quick pitch: it’s a 1981 Czechoslovakian horror movie about a vampiric car that runs on blood. Delightful, I can only assume that it can’t be worse than Finnish movies from the same period.

The actual contestants that made it to the ring were carefully selected by the judges:

The Rock (1996)
Apocalypse Now (original cut)
Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

Interesting picks all, I’d watch any one of them and couldn’t bring myself to vote for or against any of them this time around. I think I convinced a part of the audience with my pitch for Dangerous Liaisons: I have this pet conspiracy theory about the original novel having been an influence for Anton Chekhov’s Seagull (relevant because one of the guys has been performing in that this winter). However, something I said about the matter apparently gave the impression that Dangerous Liaisons is a difficult movie (not true at all — it’s basically a sex thriller set in Ancien Régime France), so The Rock it would be. Apocalypse Now never stood a chance, too long and heavy for the occasion.

All in all, The Rock is a delightful action movie; I can respect the choice of picking it for a showing. The circumstances of the show weren’t ideal, it was one of those “the tv is smaller than my ass” type of deals, but I grasped the basics: a politically motivated supervillain, Nicholas Cage as a nerdy FBI agent over his head, and Sean Connery playing Mary Sue, the cleverest girl in school. The script is much better than one expects of an action movie, and the overall idea is very good. I’m forced to present a hung jury (a feat in itself for a one-man board) because the script’s obviously suffered from multiple rewrites, and the directing and cutting are sort of shitty, but I’m still forced to like this: the three leading men are so fun, and the basic scenario so natural that even the few questionable structural choices and the constant camera cut diarrhea (I don’t know, everybody tells me that this is what it means to have Michael Bay as your director — is it that simple?) can’t ruin it. Excellent conceptualization, bad execution, great actor chemistry.

Boardgame Capsule Review: Enchanters

Bonus feature! We had a bit of time after the movie, so it was an opportunity to try out a random boardgame. I claim no responsibility for the game choice here, it’s just something that my brother dropped off over Christmas — one of his impulsive Kickstarter buys if I’m any judge.

Enchanters is a straightforward drafting game: a half-dozen cards are revealed in a line, with cards prized in an increasing sequence up the line. Players spend points to claim cards from the line, and the line descends to fill the gap, with a new card added to the end. The game ends after all cards have been drafted. The cards of course feature a variety of effects, with the players struggling to use immediate activation effects and long-term bonuses to effectively claim victory point cards as they appear. If you don’t have the points to make a good claim, you can instead discard the first card in line and take back a couple of energy points for the future. Very straightforward, with a likeable core mechanic.

It’s a fair enough pick for a casual gaming slot, with its greatest virtue in its simplicity. The biggest flaw, on the other hand, is the limited replayability and issues with asymmetrical experience: a player who is already familiar with a given sub-deck (the draft pool is formed at the start from a limited number of card blocks) has a major advantage in planning over players who encounter it for the first time, so even semi-serious play requires players to be equally ignorant. Expect to spend pre-play time poring over and memorizing cards to play competitively, just so you don’t end up speccing up in the exact way that makes you ineligible to benefit from dragon-slaying as the game draws towards the end.

Tales of Meandering Online

I have an on-going Tales of Entropy game that we’re playing via video calls with a mixed Euro/American group. While the game is single-scenario by nature and shouldn’t take more than four or five sessions online, it’s been taking a while as we haven’t been able to schedule sessions very regularly. Also, I to my eternal shame double-booked myself for our last session before Christmas, causing the game to cancel. Tragic stuff, except I understand the guys played In a Wicked Age instead, so I guess it was an overall positive?

We were supposed to play another session on Thursday, but as another player took their mandated break, the ol’ gaming lottery brought up the aforementioned Subsection M3 instead. Worked pretty well in video phone medium, I thought, and it was the first time ever that the game had been played in English, as far as I know. I GMed for two detectives who ended up kidnapping a foreign secretary and saving the city from a terrorist android.

Gentlemen on the Agora

Some bits of the week from the so-called Agora, my IRC cultural salon and rpg theory discussion group of choice:

• Which is better, Blogspot or WordPress? Story game bloggers have traditionally favoured the latter, while the former has been the blogging software of choice for OSR bloggers, but this is surely a coincidence of history. Legend on the agora has it that WordPress is “bloated”. Either way, a blogging fever has seized the Agora, so we might have more blogs in our future.
• The D&D Immortals rules by Frank Mentzer were reviewed in more detail. Or rather, the gentlemen had a good laugh at the task resolution rules, which are, well, rather TSR in style… Consider this: Immortal tasks are resolved with 1d100 rolls vs. ability score, except you also use a table of correction factors to ensure that the target numbers are “suitable”, and the factors themselves depend on character level, which in turn depends on the ability scores, meaning that the higher your ability score, the lower your correction factor. The interaction of character level ability limits and the correction factor table makes a hilariously complex way of saying that character stats shouldn’t matter and “medium difficulty” should be around 50% chance of success.
• Glorantha-related topics resurface regularly on the agora, as several of the gentlemen are long-time students. We’ve been discussing proper interpretation of myth (descriptions of prehistorical events or allegories of natural laws?), ingrained dragonism in Orlanthi religion, the relationship between Griffin Island and Griffin Mountain, and so on.
• And, related to the above, the interesting question of political bias in fantasy world-building classics. The worldviews of e.g. Stafford, Tolkien, Baker or Gygax inform their work very powerfully, but calling this artistic personality “bias” makes it sound like a flaw, when a considered position is the cornerstone of artistic accomplishment.
• The discussion on political bias in fantasy authors evolved into a general comparison of Catholic, Protestant and Neo-Atheist worldviews. This is something of a perennial topic at the Agora, with the gentlemen mostly distributed on an atheist continuum between “foams in the mouth, but snidely” and “cowardly spiritual agnostic”. Makes for an unusually didactic environment, as we don’t usually have any good enemy figures to foam against, leaving the less rationalistic gentlemen to school the hardline neo-atheists on their religious misconceptions.
• What is the best orientation for a hexcrawl hex — is it with the point up (vertical), or point sideways? We failed to discover a real reason for preferring either as a matter of policy. The bold notion of turning the hex 45° to turn four of its sides towards cardinal directions was considered, but it looks really wrong, so apparently that’s not it.
• Tales of Entropy discussions continued with an exegesis of what “stakes” and “scene framing” mean in a Forgite conflict resolution game. The key points were that “stakes” are pre-conflict declarations of intent, not contractual obligations, while “scene framing” is actually a process that continues throughout the scene, finalizing with closing the scene once its purpose has been served.

Let’s Try an Advisory Poll

The newsletter concept by its nature has me discuss many topics in passing and none in depth. I was thinking that it might be interesting to query the readership directly about whether anything I’ve mentioned so far merits a deeper treatment. The idea is that I could write a more in-depth essay on a single topic in a few weeks time, so it would be ideal if it was on something that you want to read. Let’s find out if a poll is a fun way to frame this discussion. I even included the option for a gentle let-down, just vote “Nada” if you think that silence is golden.