OSSR: GURPS CyberWorld

[Ancient History]

OSSR: GURPS

CYBERWORLD

AncientH

So, we did GURPS Cyberpunk and we did GURPS CthulhuPunk, but we kind of skipped a step. In between those books, they released GURPS Cyberworld, which was a setting book for GURPS that expanded on the material in GURPS Cyberpunk, and was at least the nominal basis for the setting in GURPS CthulhuPunk. It was also effectively the third-most prominent Cyberpunk setting in RPGs after Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 20XX.

...and, quite honestly, it takes some of the best talents from Shadowrun to make that happen.

Frank

This book is written by Paul Hume (of Shadowrun fame) with additional material by Chris McCubbin (who we went into more detail of in the review of CthulhuPunk). I actually find the fact that McCubbin contributed to this book to be deeply weird, since one of our recurring complaints in the CthulhuPunk review was how little Chris McCubbin referenced Cyberpunk in general or CYBERWORLD in particular in that book. It's possible that there's some untold story of petty author squabbles or something, I genuinely don't know.

Paul Hume was at the end of his career, his first RPG credits (Spacequest) are in the 1970s, this book came out in 1993, and I think Paul Hume stopped writing RPG materials in 1995. I've never met him or even spoken to him online. His Shadowrun work ended before FASA broke up and I didn't start writing Shadowrun until near the end of the FanPro days. While certainly best known for having written Cyberpunk with Magic in the late 80s and early 90s, he did a lot of reasonably straightforward science fiction, and CYBERWORLD is an example of that.

In any case, this is a GURPS book with everything that entails. It's 126 pages, and takes place fifty years in the future in 2043 under the totalitarian regime of the Provisional Government. So it's different from Shadowrun in that the future is 11 years closer, there's no magic (barring CthulhuPunk crossovers), and we're dealing with superstate dystopia instead of Balkanized state dystopia.

AncientH

It's important to emphasize that GURPS didn't do a lot of straight settings. Most of their stuff was much more generic, the ingredients for a setting or campaign instead of a ready-made meal. Settings looked like GURPS Fantasy with the magical world of Yrth and GURPS Time Traveller which was a platform for a Sliders-style planet-of-the-week campaign.

What you notice about these settings is that the GURPS adherence to Tech Level (TL) tends to fall apart on close inspection. This is because real life, unlike games, doesn't have set tech levels. An axe made in 4000 BCE or 2000 CE is still going to do the job of cutting shit; one might be sturdier or more ergonomically designed or hold an edge better, but it's still an axe and does an axe job. It only becomes cyberpunk when it's a laser axe or is a vibroaxe or something.

What this boils down to, in the opening paragraphs of the introduction, is that GURPS Cyberworld is not the full-blown TL 8 dystopia of GURPS Cyberpunk, but rather a late TL 7/early TL 8 dystopia. So cyberware exists, but not everybody has it; guns still commonly bullets. Idiots use 12345 as their password.

Which is fine. You don't need much high tech to keep the low life aesthetic. And this is a setting all about the aesthetic.

Frank

Cyberpunk as a genre is more about feel than it is about setting. Bladerunner never tells you what a C-Beam is. Snowcrash never tells you what corporations have chartered areas of Nevada. Neuromancer never tells you how much information can be stored on a data chip. This is bad news for a cooperative storytelling game in general because it is the concrete realities of a setting that anchor our disparate declarations into a combined narrative. But it's also the dead fucking opposite of the GURPS philosophy. We ran into this in our review of GURPS: Cyberpunk, that a lot of the things you'd need to define in order to do cooperative storytelling games really aren't defined in a lot of classic Cyberpunk properties.

If you want to set role playing games in a Cyberpunk world, you therefore probably have to make our own world, you can't just dig up Zodiac or Max Headroom and say “Kinda like that.” Which was super frustrating when trying to parse GURPS: Cyberpunk, because the book kept trying to make itself Cyberpunk generic, which isn't actually a thing. So perhaps it was inevitable that Steve Jackson would eventually break down and commission a specific Cyberpunk world you could actually play in. And that's this book.

The One-and-Twenty, a Cyberpunk setting that is specific enough you could play in it, but distinct enough from other Cyberpunk works as to not have to pay royalties. A CYBERWORLD, if you will.

AncientH

I should also point out that GURPS had a very different vision of the technological future than, say, Shadowrun did. Shadowrun had laser weapons, but they started out obscenely expensive and impractical in the Street Samurai Catalog and which got progressively more available as the editions advanced, but it was never to the point that a proper laser gun cost less than a car. GURPS, trying to capture the aesthetic of Star Wars and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, had more of a tendency for laser weapons, and also handheld gauss rifles and suchlike. We already pointed out the bizarre battery situation that GURPS tech tended to have too.

Which is a long way to say: there are some quirks, and the tech level is bizarrely higher and lower than in other comparable cyberpunk settings.

Frank

There are 13 playtesters and literally all of them are dudes. Women work on this project, but in editing and artistic roles. All the writing and playtesting of this book was done by men.

Introduction

AncientH

Being GURPS, GURPS Cyberworld is actually very good about referring to other GURPS books. In this case, since they're leaning so heavily on GURPS Basic Set, GURPS High Tech, GURPS Ultra-Tech, and GURPS Cyberpunk, they actually use letter-codes in the citations so you know which book to pluck off the shelf when you want some piece of TL7/8 gear or which netrunning rules to reference or whatever. It's...nice? I mean, that's a level of consideration and integrity you don't normally see in RPGs.

Frank

This book starts with an italicized story that is in heavy future speak lingo. This lingo is fairly hard to parse. Some of it is that the story is pretty short, so there isn't a lot of context for you to figure out what the made up words mean.

This paryen with the steel eye was holdin' forth onhow the proles get drigged by ProGov, when the nerks joined the party.

Yeeeeah. I don't know either.

The Introduction is just one page long, The book wants us to call the 21st Century the “One-and-Twenty” and fucking no one ever does that because what the actual fuck? The points here are so fast and furious it might as well be a bullet pointed list. There's no real prose other than the future-slang inserts. This might literally be just the design specifications. It bluntly tells you how this book is different from the assumptions of GURPS: Cyberpunk (mostly that here is less Techlevel 8 shit lying around), and there's some rapidfire stream-of-consciousness facts established about this cyberworld that make it different from other cyberworlds.

So like Japan stays relevant because they went into union with the successor states of the Soviet Union for some reason. But imagine if that fact was relayed sandwiched between two other equally difficult to swallow factoids trying to explain the setting of their future dystopia game in twenty seconds.

AncientH

As top-level introductions to the world go, the idea that Australia is a depopulated wasteland is...less unbelievable than it was a little while ago.

Frank

An issue that GURPS has that we touched on lightly in GURPS: Cyberpunk is that the game has the past, present, and future all mapped out into technology levels and none of them correspond to any form of Cyberpunk (except maybe Battle Angel Alita). The tech levels jump straight from Star Trek 4: Whales in Space to Star Trek 4: Whales in Space.



The idea of a grungy future that had recognizably science fiction devices like flat screen video phones but also was still grounded in decidedly 20th century fare like guns and cars (rather than lasers and rocketships) was simply not part of the GURPS concept of the universe in 1993. They've since revamped the techlevels such that there's more gradations around computers, but there's still a pretty gaping hole around the Cyberpunk milieu. And it was definitely worse back when CYBERWORLD was written.

AncientH

Since this is GURPS, I should probably mention how this interacts with Magic, should you decide to homebrew a GURPS Shadowrun clone. There are technology-based spells in the most common form of GURPS Magic, and those spells are generally TL-dependent. Which means that if you decide the world is is TL 7 and all your spells are TL 7, then you may well have to learn entirely new spells to deal with TL 8 gear. This isn't an entirely ridiculous premise, depending on how you set up your campaign, but it's something to be aware of. Other than that, there's absolutely no problem with adding magic to your GURPS Cyberworld campaign, and in fact Steve Kenson did just that with his Zauberpunk article for the GURPS online magazine.

Frank

One thing that's really missing from this introduction is a “What is Roleplaying?” section. That and a description of what the actual fuck the player characters are supposed to do in this world. That's two things. Also a description of what side you're supposed to be on would be nice. OK, amongst the things that are missing from this introduction are: any of the things you might want to build a character or a group of characters around. And a fanatical devotion to the pope.

I think you're supposed to just “know” that this is basically Shadowrun without the magic and that your PCs are basically Shadowrunners. But it doesn't actually say that in the introduction. Like, at all.

AncientH

Yeah, the general assumption with this book is that if you picked it up, it's because you basically know what it is just from the name on the cover. Which, to be fair, isn't probably that far from the case. Nobody wrote this book expecting it to be your first or even second roleplaying game book.

Frank

Next up: A World on the Edge.

[Thaluikhain]

The book wants us to call the 21st Century the “One-and-Twenty” and fucking no one ever does that because what the actual fuck?

Ah...when I saw that I'd assumed it was some overly pretentious way of referring to a D20.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

This book starts with an italicized story that is in heavy future speak lingo. This lingo is fairly hard to parse. Some of it is that the story is pretty short, so there isn't a lot of context for you to figure out what the made up words mean.

This paryen with the steel eye was holdin' forth onhow the proles get drigged by ProGov, when the nerks joined the party.

Yeeeeah. I don't know either.

Please tell me there's more of this lingo speak. It's comedy gold.

[Quasinatural]

To this day, I'm irritated by the completely undeveloped "Australia is dead!" non-hook. The presentation was so sparse as to make the phenomenon useless from a GM-perspective, and if it were truly interesting, a writer would be obligated put additional information about running an adventure investigating it.

[Stahlseele]

“One-and-Twenty”

Einundzwanzig.
Wir deutsche sagen das so!

[Hadanelith]

To this day, I'm irritated by the completely undeveloped "Australia is dead!" non-hook. The presentation was so sparse as to make the phenomenon useless from a GM-perspective, and if it were truly interesting, a writer would be obligated put additional information about running an adventure investigating it.

Let's be real here: this is the authors just writing off Australia as Mad Max Land. Which most people would see as a different campaign, needing different books. It meant that they had less to write, readers had less to digest, and they had the option to write an expansion book later.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I think more book covers need chicks with mohawks and big tits.

[Stahlseele]

To this day, I'm irritated by the completely undeveloped "Australia is dead!" non-hook. The presentation was so sparse as to make the phenomenon useless from a GM-perspective, and if it were truly interesting, a writer would be obligated put additional information about running an adventure investigating it.

Let's be real here: this is the authors just writing off Australia as Mad Max Land. Which most people would see as a different campaign, needing different books. It meant that they had less to write, readers had less to digest, and they had the option to write an expansion book later.

You mean to tell me Australia IS NOT a basically empty blasted hellscape? O.o

I think more book covers need chicks with mohawks and big tits.

+1

[Quasinatural]

Let's be real here: this is the authors just writing off Australia as Mad Max Land. Which most people would see as a different campaign, needing different books. It meant that they had less to write, readers had less to digest, and they had the option to write an expansion book later.

Except, iirc, they stated that you (PCs) can't go there because it's quarantined and The Bad Thing might happen to you if you go there and because not even the macroscopic effects of The Bad Thing are described it's not clear that there's anything to do there. How much in Australia is lootable and how much is unreedemable because of The Bad Thing? You don't know because they didn't say.

Thunderdome was fun and/or engaging and/or dangerous because of the people there. There are no people in Australia: that's explicitly stated. This isn't Fallout/Atomic Horror where there are monsters everyplace as that wasn't stated. So they created a non-mystery empty space that has a No Adventuring sign.

And if you say "hey, we can just go to Australia and adventure anyway, so there!" the point is that the writers didn't actually create anything in Australia so -- and this is literally true -- you can and will create the entirety of your Outback Odyssey by your own hand. Which is great, good job, but then you gotta ask: what did I get this book for?

On top of this, no one in the world really has a reaction to Australia up and leaving. No massive crash, no religious awakening, nothing. This is anti-worldbuilding and it (and more of Cyberworld that I expect will be covered here) is a serious departure from typical GURPS competence.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CYBERWORLD

1: A World on the Edge

AncientH

In a dark corner of the New York megasprawl, an appliance store faces the street, its vidscreens and thriddie boxes showing snow through the plastiglass storefront. Nobody is on the street this early, except for a stray dog, so the flickering screens play to an audience of one.

As if on cue, all the screens change to display a korp logo over a computer-generated Earth spinning in slow motion. The Earth fades to a vector-graphic glove with continental outlines, then a slow dissolve to Bink and Bett sitting behind a light blue-gray desk, with the worldscreen behind them.

Cyberpunk is supremely retrofuturistic, and always has been. The future was never going to look like that, just like it was never literally going to be 1984 or Brave New World. Those future dystopias were metaphors for the possibilities we faced in the now, but they were still fantasies. Near enough to be recognizable, far enough to permit people to think that yeah, maybe technology will progress. But we didn't get flying cars, and most of our cyberarms suck balls.


Most.

So this intro sequence is...odd. Not unrealistic in the sense of being completely impossible or bonkers, but you're in the future and you're wondering: Is this it? Is this as far as we've come? This could be tomorrow, minus the cyberdecks!

...and of course, smartphones aren't a thing yet. The world went in a different direction. This was always a false path. A might-have-been that never-was.

Frank

It's not Chapter 1 or Book 1 of anything, it's just “1.” Anyway, it's 13 pages and it's our “So it came to pass” chapter. Now obviously a rant bout 50 years of future history is going to be full of wall bangers when we look back from when it's more than half over, but I'd like to focus first on the choice to have this chapter at all and more specifically to have this chapter first.

To actually tell stories in a game you need to have a common frame of reference and a means of figuring out what happens if you go off script or start coloring outside the lines. If you were doing Snowcrash's Los Angeles, you'd need some idea of what the major enclaves were so that if the player characters decide to go to Disney's Literal Kingdom or Sonystan or whatever, that wouldn't hit a divide by zero error. Talking about history is certainly a thing that could come up, and tagging historical events has some value. Just not a lot of value.

Consider telling spy stories about today, in 2020. It would be super helpful to know about lines of tension between China and the United States as they exist in 2020. Events of 45 years ago certainly still have an effect that filters through to the present, but it would be entirely possible to write an action thriller about China/US relations in 2020 without ever once mentioning Gerald Ford or Zhou Enlai. If you wanted to tell stories set in 2043, the lines of tension in 2043 are going to be a lot more important than whatever the fuck happened in 1998. Events of 1998 are no more and no less important to telling stories set in 2043 than the 1975 Lebanese Civil War or the death of General Franco is to telling stories set in 2020. These are events that probably happened before the player characters were born, and many of them probably happened before their parents were born.

When it comes to history, what I think would actually be helpful is like car models and architectural styles. The people who live in apartment buildings that are thirty years old, what is that like? Because that's the kind of history the player characters are going to interact with in their high tech low life existence. But we don't get any of that.

AncientH

Which is nothing unique to CyberWorld. Mostly, this is following the general paint-by-numbers of Shadowrun with the serial numbers filed off and the magic extracted.

Hume is also trying to work in some Shadowrun-style vernacular, but is basing it more off Russian than Japanese and the results are a lot less familiar and chill. It's the kind of thing which is almost a pastiche of cyberpunk tropes rather than a faithful following of tradition; the idea originally was to reflect the shift of Anglo-American culture toward more dominant "foreign powers," signaling both the decline of the old nation-states and attendant cultures and hyping up the alienation felt by characters still stuck in those outmoded ways. Here, it just sounds...bad.

Frank

Bink flashes the camera a knowing smile. “Hayo gozaimas, paryeni, I'm Bink Bentley.”
“And I'm Bett Bartley.”

Hoooo-kay.

The chapter itself literally opens with a news feed to lampoon the level of corporate propaganda present in modern media. This is a page and a half long and much of it is in gibberish future slang. Some of it is garbled Japanese, some of it is garbled Russian, and some of it is just made up words. There's a side bar that lists some of the words used here, but the main lexicon isn't until page 125. The main lexicon is also incomplete because some words that appear in these stories are actually supposed to be normal English words you know, but deliberately misspelled in order to attempt to convey accents.

Do not ever do this. A body of text can either include made-up nomenclature or it can contain non-lexicon words that are misspelled for voice delivery, do not do both. Ever.

“Hayo gozaimas” is an appropriated and adapted Japanese phrase, and “Revolutseeya” is just a spelling used to attempt to convey how a character's voice sounds. There's no entry for it. This is a very bad way to convey information to people.

AncientH

Cyberpunk dystopias aren't quite what you think, and that can be a bit of a hard sell for a lot of people. Living in a cyberpunk future can still entail a reasonably higher standard of living that 99% of humanity has had for most of its existence, but it usually comes at the price of being effectively having your every breath and shit monitored by a corporation, or living in a slightly radioactive/chemically toxic wasteland as a non-person.

But for a lot of people, that kinda just boils down to "like today, but moreso." Bigger cities, more crowded cities, more polluted cities. Contemporary problems extrapolated to points of crisis. It's easier to be a criminal in a cyberpunk setting because it's easier to be a criminal, period. Actually presenting those in a setting can be very tricky. Shadowrun actually has an advantage in that all the magical bullshit tends to cover up for how crazy the setting would be if played straight.

Anyway, that's a long way to say that this is the sort of backstory that Paul Hume could have churned out over a beer while watching the Superbowl. It's nothing exciting or particularly exacting.

Frank

Like Shadowrun, the history of CYBERWORLD involves lots of people killed by a major plague. I am totally at a loss to explain this. Was it just a reason for the actual players to not be still alive in fifty years? Is it some attempt to radically adjust future demographics? Was the author really concerned about explaining why overpopulation hadn't turned the future into Soylent Green? I genuinely don't know.

The big plague started 45 years ago and almost the entire world has been vaccinated since before the player characters were even born. It's one of those harrowing events that would seriously impact the development of the world but doesn't have any direct narrative value.

AncientH

I want to say that the whole VITAS (in Shadowrun) and TD (in Cyberworld) are an extrapolation of the fears of HIV/AIDS during the 1980s. I think it's just the idea that something terrible and uncontrollable like a plague should happen, to bring the setting closer to the hypothetical crisis point - to stoke fears of "well, we're fucked."

But a lot of it is just destabilizing the old status quo and establishing a new status quo. Often this involves some odd mergers and breakdowns within existing political powers. For example, they predict the end of NATO because the US wouldn't commit troops to the Balkans in "what had been Yugoslavia." Keep in mind this was written in '93, and Yugoslavia broke up in '92, so this was on-the-nose for the time. But ask any kid since 2001 in the US about the Yugoslav Wars.

But a lot of it is just that the proposed tech timeline is a lot faster and more pervasive than what you saw in real life. We were supposed to have electric cars with a 6 hour charge and 50mph top speed which you could recharge off household current in 1999...oh, and "hot fusion."

Mostly, though, it just goes on. It's like reading a not particularly good history textbook, only for a future that never happened.

Frank

We can nitpick the individual choices of future events. Many of them doubtless sounded completely fucking crazy at the time, and of course it's factually true that we're more than halfway through this timeline and things definitely didn't go that way.

One thing they do get right is Global Warming. In 1993 it was reasonably well known that we'd have extreme climate events because of rising global temperatures, but that hadn't necessarily percolated through to a lot of people. Our Katrina-esque super hurricane event is called Abner, but close enough.

The other thing is sea level rise. In the fifty years before 1993, global sea levels had risen by about 2 and a half inches. This book suggests that sea levels would rise in the next fifty years by another 129 inches.That could still happen of course, because the rate of change of the rate of change of the sea level has kept increasing every year (in 1990 the sea level rose 1.2 mm, in 2000 it rose 3.2 mm, and in 2010 it rose 4.4 mm, I expect it to rise by more than 5 mm in 2020, which would be more than 2 inches this year).

AncientH

One thing you notice is that this is pre-euro, so a lot is made about how the money of the future is the ECU, based on the European Currency Unit, a unit of account from the late 1970s to the late 90s. Here, instead of nuyen, we get rubyen, eurotalers, and neodollars.

Woo. Taste the cyberpunk!

I shouldn't make fun. I used to fap to fictional currencies and economics. It's actually not a bad thing to have multiple competing currencies in the world, but it's also pretty clear that rubyen is a johnny-come-lately because William Gibson invented "new yen" and Shadowrun had "nuyen," so Hume just merged the yen with the ruble to get the closest approximation he could. Probably because neuyen or neoyen would have seemed too on the fucking nose.

Frank

One of the more out-there premises of this setting is that whole cities have been created to act as concentration camps for ethnic minorities and political dissidents and their families. So it's like if instead of making crime ridden housing projects to store black people and Mexicans, they made whole cities that are also ghettos with panopticon surveillance.

So like a combination of The Wire and V for Vendetta. That's a little weird, and other than thoroughly establishing the government as the baddies I'm not sure what the point is. El Paso can just be under martial law or something. We don't need futuretech ghettos for the people to live in.

AncientH

Writing "the Israeli Empire" makes me think of that one Rick & Morty episode.



It's not that Israel or any other political-landmine topic should be avoided, it's just that the idea of a bunch of majority-Arab nations gathering together under a charismatic Islamic leader to launch a holy war against Israel only to get stomped flat is...well, kind of fapping to the Six Day War, I guess. Except bigger, meaner, and uncut. And it paints all Muslims are potential religious terrorists and the Israelis as the tough-but-victimized-and-outnumbered and...yeah, it doesn't say shit about how the Palestinians are treated, much less the presumably Arabic and/or Muslim majority in the conquered regions of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and half of Iraq.

Frank

I'm not sure why everyone in Australia is dead. There are a lot of parts of the world that just mentioned. I don't think the section says anything at all about Malaysia or Ivory Coast. If the author didn't want to write anything about Australia, they could just not write anything about Australia. There's a lot of countries, and most of them aren't mentioned one way or the other.

And if this was supposed to be raised stakes or something, I... still don't get it. Australia doesn't have a lot of people in it, so killing them all isn't that big of a thing. There's more people in Mexico City than in Australia. Going all Raccoon City or Neo-Tokyo on one major metropolis would show you were callous and hard core at least as much as whacking everyone from Perth to Sydney.

AncientH

Yah, I got nothin' on that one, outside of sheer Mad Max-setup. It's one of those things where it seems easier to write off a continent than it is to write for it, but major depopulation efforts like that are tricky at the best of times, because one of the givens about the dystopian cyberpunk future is usually that it's crowded. I mean, people like to point to Detroit as some kind of major hellhole for depopulation because it went from 1.8 million people in 1950 to 700,000 in 2010, but it still has 700,000 people. That's a scale most people don't appreciate.

If you did kill half of Mexico City - 8.855 million people down to 4 million - that would be horrendous, and vast swathes of the city would be broken, overgrown, abandoned...but it would still be a functional, massive city of 4 million people. And living in the shadows of a once-vibrant city is very, very cyberpunk. So I don't know why they would kill Australia. It's a mystery.

I do have to say, this did make me curious so I opened up GURPS CthulhuPunk for the first time in aeons, and most of the GURPS Cyberworld history crappola is still there - if not exactly verbatim, then close enough - with enough changed that I'm not sure how much of the original that McCubbin had a hand in. He actually dedicates more space to Australia in CthulhuPunk than it gets in the equivalent chapter in Cyberworld.

Frank

Next up: Campaigns and Characters.

[Iduno]

You mean to tell me Australia IS NOT a basically empty blasted hellscape? O.o

They also have spiders and emus.

you can and will create the entirety of your Outback Odyssey by your own hand. Which is great, good job, but then you gotta ask: what did I get this book for?

Are you new to GURPS? The first step is always "create the game."

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CYBERWORLD

2: Campaigns and Characters


Not this. Nothing remotely like this.

So you're o the Edge. Now what?

AncientH

So you're on the Edge...now what? Where you gonna go? Whatcha gonna do? And why're you hanging around with those other driggin' goons?

These are, to cut right to the heart of it, the essence of the questions that should have been asked and answered in the introduction.

But they are good questions.

In Shadowrun, the default is that you are shadowrunners and you go on shadowruns. Later on the game toyed around with alternate campaigns, but that was the default assumption of the setting: you have decided to be a professional criminal, doing jobs for other people for money. Mr. Johnson is your go-between. It's simple, direct, and works well in a lot of settings. Cyberpunk 20XX had the same basic setup, with slightly different nomenclature.

GURPS gives that as an option. They call it "freelancing." But they also present other potential campaigns, such as trying to stay alive because some powerful group wants them dead, or acting as a terrorist cell dedicated to bringing down the government. They're not bad options, but it's very much GURPS territory of presenting options for the players and gamemasters to choose rather than setting a course for them.

The same goes with character types. These are suggestions, not templates or archetypes. No stats given or really suggested. Nonsense like "Cyberprep" is still there from GURPS Cyberpunk, but each character type is at least discussed within the context of the Cyberworld setting. So that's something.

Frank

This chapter doesn't start with a bizarre tirade of future slang. Which makes it more readable, but less... interesting. I'm not going to play this game, so having it actually spew babytalk and psychobabble at me was kind of refreshingly weird. Instead we get a seven page sketch of how you might want to try to play this game if you were so inclined. The sketch is... very sketch.

What I mean about the sketchiness here is that rather than tell us what the standard vision of what kind of campaign to play, we immediately jump into one to three paragraph essays about various campaigns you might do instead. This is the most GURPS thing I have ever seen, The very idea you might make a “normal character” and play a “normal game” with it just hasn't occurred to anyone. None of the GURPS people had played a cooperative storytelling game without recompiling it from source code for years, and the concept of something that was remotely playable “out of the book” was utterly incomprehensible to them.

AncientH

Neturnning is an art in its infancy, so it's not surprise that netrunners are mostly infants.

One thing that doesn't get a lot of play in this section is the idea of computers in everything. The internet of things wasn't really a concept yet, the closest you got was Nakatomi Plaza helping you find your zipper.

segue



Die Hard is a proto-cyberpunk movie. A savvy band of international professional criminals with military grade gear stage a daring heist on an advanced building run by a massive computer system. The whole plot hinges on Theo, the netrunner hacker who can manage the 1s and 0s, and everything else is down to the solos mercenaries and Hans Gruber. Give or take a few cyberlimbs, this is exactly the kind of shit that GURPS CyberPunk was basically trying to capture as an aesthetic, except you're the criminals.

end segue

But yeah, there's the idea that Cyberspace is cool and awesome and just huge and technical and only the really brainy young kids understand it like fucking Tron, man, but...it's not exactly emphasized in the setting material. Nobody in 1993 could picture Wikipedia. Amazon.com wasn't founded until 1994. The societal impact of the internet didn't exist yet, and a lot of early cyberpunk authors sort of failed to grasp the vast daily impact that it would have.

Frank

The available alternate campaigns are probably as close to a thesis statement as this book has. They are:

• Freelancers
• Korporates
• Subversives
• Spooks
• Fugitives
• Low-C

If some of that sounds like gibberish to you, it is because it is literally written in gibberish. “Low-C” isn't given any explanation until page 126, and even then I am not entirely sure what Paul Hume was going for. I think “C” stands for “Class” as in “social standing.” But more than that, this is written by someone who has been writing for various science fiction RPGs for 17 actual years when this book came out, and Hume was honestly sick of explaining himself. Or maybe he had just totally forgotten that other people hadn't been doing this since the Carter administration. So here's the closest thing to a normal description of a game:

This is the default setting for any Cyberpunk campaign. The PCs are a mixed bag of mercenaries and professionals in various less-than-savory fields. No need to sweat the background much. How did the team find each other? By keeping an ear turned to the word on the street. Where are they going to go, and what are they going to do? Wherever the money is, and whatever the client wants.

Depending on the morals and tactics of the team members, adventures can range from the quasi-legal through the criminal all the way to the terroristic. This is the most popular and open-ended cyberpunk campaign type, but it can be the most familiar and predictable, if the GM doesn't watch it.

Paul Hume is sick of your bullshit, and honestly seems to be sick of this entire genre. Yeah yeah, cyberpunk open world sandbox, yadda fucking yadda. This is basically Shadowrun with the magic taken out, y'all fuckers know what's up, don't pretend you don't!



I guess the thinking here is that this is GURPS, and the only reason you're even reading this book is because you're tired of Cyberpunk played straight (or for laughs, for that matter) and you want to recompile it as a mashup with something else. But not with D&D, because Shadowrun is already a thing. So like, Vampires or Winnie the Pooh or something.

It's not completely wrong. But I think have the author look you right in the eye and say “I am so fucking sick of this genre” on page one of describing the campaign concepts is probably not a great sign.

More fundamentally, the basic parameters of a “mercenary” game are pretty different in CP2020, Shadowrun, or MechWarrior. Is it... illegal to be a mercenary? Who hires mercenaries in your setting, and why? Is there some sort of mercenary code that people will look down at you for shitting on? Are mercenaries more like private detectives or more like special forces or more like D&D adventuring parties? Hume just handwaves it all away with the flippant notion that you've seen it all and you're probably as bored of reading and playing it as he is of writing it. And I'm pretty sure that's not remotely true.

AncientH

A lot of this is just GURPS being GURPS. GURPS does not normally deal with explicit settings, so a lot of these concepts are straight adaptations from GURPS Cyberpunk to the Cyberworld setting. By comparison, when McCubbins crunched the numbers on GURPS CthulhuPunk, he was combining concepts from Cyberworld and concepts from Call of Cthulhu. So you still have Korporates, unfortunate K included, but instead of Netrunners you have Hackers and you also have Mystics and Clergymen.

Which in hindsight feels kind of week; there should be a difference between Korporate Mystics and Street Mystics, a la Shadowrun. From a flavor standpoint, if nothing else. But we already bitched about that book.

Frank

The other campaigns are similarly opaque. If you are a Korporate Team, you are like a Freelancer team except you comb your hair and have a specific corporation that you work for. And that still hits the divide by fruitbat error of the fact that the degree to which corporations are in conflict with each other hasn't been defined. I mean, are we literally having corp teams shooting each other in the desert? Are we doing subtle assassinations? Are we sending snake emojis to political candidates on twitter when they present anti-corporate policy platforms and we are trying to discredit them in the eyes of the proles? I don't know. Nobody knows.

Same goes for the political campaign. Hume isn't sure whether you're supposed to be bringing down the system by killing president Goodhair like you were in a YA dystopian novel or whether you're supposed to be liberating the ghettos like it's the Warsaw Uprising. Neither am I.

And that's really weird, because apparently this future has whole cities that have been made as giant surveillance state prison camps. So that would seem like an important thing to go into a bit more detail when discussing what the hell we might get up to as mercenaries or true believers or whatever.


If you don't feel like you already live in a YA dystopia, perhaps it's because you live in the capitol that the protagonists are going to devastate in order to bring the system down.

AncientH

These "computer graphics" were not made by a computer.

Some setting elements, you have an end-goal to have something in there to call back to a specific film or book, like Escape from New York, and you put it where you want in the setting and work back from there. Or you forget about the "work back from there" part and just declare that Seacouver is not a walled prison-hellhole for the most vile criminals in the United Canadian-American States or whatever.

Frank

In order to tell a cooperative story with an ensemble of protagonists, you're going to need to define an ensemble of protagonists. In order to play a cooperative game, all the players are going to need to have defined roles. A cooperative storytelling game needs to define its protagonists. This is a truth that GURPS has traditionally responded to with all the maturity and acceptance of Luke Skywalker.


DO NOT WANT!

A cyberpunk game is actually more difficult to define roles for than a more direct Dungeons & Dragons ripoff, because there isn't a clear end goal of “kill the dragon” for characters to contribute to. Cyberpunk characters might be computer hackers, muckracking journalists, devoted couriers, or ninja assassins – but that's with respect to the stories that they are written in. Penelope Gadget would be a lot less effective if the villains were inclined to shoot trespassers and Robocop is not exactly known for his ability to blend in to crowds.

The nature of the missions necessarily informs the utility and necessity of various skill sets. If the goal is to financially ruin the evil company (like Leverage), the ability to murder large numbers of people with a katana is perhaps of dubious value. If the goal is to murder all the bad guys (like John Wick), then the ability to make fabricated financial news segments is esoteric and perhaps worthless.

This chapter is having none of that. There are sixteen character concepts very briefly discussed. And the discussion is very brief. It's like whoa that's brief. Notably absent is any discussion of how these characters work together or contribute to group goals. What is the expected role of a Drifter or a Cyberprep? What information does it convey to the other players about what your character can be relied upon for that they are a Celebrity or a Splicer? I don't know. This section reads like a checklist of what character archetypes should be written rather than an actually complete list of character archetypes that have been written.

AncientH

Again, this is all very GURPS. You pick up GURPS Aztecs, you get something like this too. The mechanics that they do offer are a list of advantages and disadvantages, some of which are based off of existing stuff like "Literacy" and "Wealth," and others which are new to this product like "Fashion Sense" and "Sense Talent." Notably missing, reference to a lot of the advantages in GURPS Cyberpunk; they take it as a given you're using those.

Frank

The chapter concludes with some minimal game mechanics. These are a smattering of advantages and disadvantages that aren't enough to do anything with. You're supposed to use these in combination with ones from other GURPS books to have a complete set of character generation options. I have no idea if the end result is something that anyone would accept as being minimally complete.

AncientH

There are also new skills - Cyberaxe and Sensie Interface - which you're probably never going to learn. If you're thinking "I dunno, maybe the Cyberaxe. I could see mixing this up with GURPS Vikings and have some more-metal-than-metal Norse freelancers go a-viking." - the cyberaxe isn't a weapon, it's a musical instrument.

Frank

A fundamental issue is that the points are made up and nothing matters. Things give or cost points without a unifying theory as to why. Things that cost more might be better, but they might be rarer or determined by the author to be more difficult. Some things explicitly cost more just because an author doesn't like the idea of a character having them. For reals. Anyway, you get 15 points for being addicted to SimSense chips, which are called Sensies in this book. I don't know.

One thing I think I should note is that this book buys into the idea that the future has people that are less literate than the past. That's not really ever been true. People read more now than they did twenty years ago, and the people of twenty years ago read more than the people of forty years ago. And so on pretty much continuously since the invention of the printing press if not before. GURPS CYBERWORLD is about sixty thousand words. An equivalent sourcebook printed a decade later would be half again as many pages and in a smaller typeface. A rando supplement for 4th edition D&D like Arcane Power or something is about 140,000 words. The basic fantasy novel has gotten so large that it's actually straining the standard paperback binding. And people just read all that. All that and more.

There's a certain amount of “Get off my lawn!” going on. But it has of course always been thus. No one ever believes the statistics when they find out that people read more in the present than in the past. Much of it has to do with the fact that the youngest generation are always literally children in the present. So when you compare Zoomers to Gen Xers, you're comparing children to adults. The fact that the Zoomers read more now than my generation did when we were their age is easy to lose sight of. In 1993 people had the vague feeling that millennials were reading at a 3rd grade level. Because they were factually in the third grade at the time.

AncientH

We also have a "job table" where you can approximate monthly income for working as a solo mugger or gladiator or whatever. No, I don't know why either, it's a thing that GURPS used to do and apparently people thought it was something they wanted.

Frank

Next Up: The United States

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CYBERWORLD

3: The United States


They were put there by a man.

AncientH

The basic assumption remains that this roleplaying product is going to be sold mostly to an American audience who want to play characters in whatever remains of the United States. That's not true of all cyberpunk fiction by a long shot, but it is a pretty reasonable assumption overall.

Frank

This is 21 devoted to discussing the presumed adventure location: the Megasprawl that runs along the East Coast of the United States from Maine to Georgia. It's under the firm boot of a fascist dictatorship. The rest of North America is you know, whatever. Some of it is being harassed some by the fascists. Some of it isn't. You know, whatever. This is weird to me. Not just weird in the sense that traditionally ghettos have been fairly hard to police because there are a lot of people in them, while rural areas are easy to push around because a few red necks aren't much threat to an armored personnel carrier full of goons. But weird in the sense that the theatrical ending of Bladerunner is weird. If you can just go to the woods and live happily ever after, why are we living in overcrowded squalor under an oppressive government at all? Can't we just leave? the book just told us we could.

It doesn't even seem to be the case that we're doing a That's Progress deal where the point is that creeping urbanization is insidiously taking over everything and the wilds and shadows to hide in are shrinking. That would be a potentially interesting literary point to make. But instead there's basically a giant “Who Cares?” written on most of North America. The Provisional Government nominally owns all of what was once the United States plus Mexico and much of the Caribbean, but we're only really interested in the Eastern Megasprawl.

I think the specific territories of the ProGov are just so Hume could have a chortle with himself about using the acronym “UCAS” but having the “C” not stand for “Canadian” such that he can say “I'm not touching your IP!” to other Shadowrun people like he was a bully in elementary school. I assume stage two was “I know you are, but what am I?” and stage three was “Stop hitting yourself!”

AncientH

Unlike other games, GURPS does not give one single solitary fuck about whether or not you kill the Provisional President of America or anything else. They weren't really banking on this becoming an extended setting with multiple books supporting it, so they can and will give stats to just about everybody. A lot of attention is also paid to politics and how the government is structured and...

Well, not a lot of the street life aspect. Which is arguably what they should be going for here. What is it like to live in the sprawl? How do you function if you're not a Scale 3 citizen (White, blue-collar)?

A middle-class job that would win a white a C-2 rating will leave a black, Oriental, or Hispanic citizen at C-3.

Which brings up the issue of race. Unlike Shadowrun, which largely subliminates racial issues into metahumans, and unlike Cyberpunk 20XX which largely ignores it, the fact that the American system of the 2040s is explicitly and unmistakably racially biased is put right front and center. Basically, if you're non-White, the system is against you, and Paul Hume wanted that to be clear. Not because he's racist, but because he wanted to make it so that the bad guys at the top of the pyramid were rich and powerful and racist.

Which is very much a John Shirley/Eclipse Trilogy kind of statement. It adds a real-world social horror aspect to your cyberpunk dystopia.

But does it make for a good roleplaying game?

By itself, no. You need a good gamemaster for that kind of shit. You need a level of buy-in from the people sitting down at the table about what kind of game you're playing. You totally can play a game of primarily black investigators in the 1920s in Call of Cthulhu - Harlem Unbound is totally a game, and it's pretty awesome - but are you going to walk into a police station and ask questions as a black guy in Brooklyn in 1924? How is the gamemaster going to handle that?

Honestly, it feels like an idea covered too lightly here.

Frank

What I want to know, is what happened to the SOFs? I was promised that people would be living in remote prefabricated ghettos/concentration camps under futuristic panopticon monitoring and martial law. But it turns out we just have a big city with military check points and you have to show your ID card when moving between districts.

The ID cards themselves are fucking bonkers. They are 6 mm thick, have circuitry that won't survive getting dropped in the sink, and run on batteries that you have to change every year. It's not like magnetic tape credit cards didn't already exist, I have no idea why the ID cards are so weirdly low tech.

AncientH

The US as described is almost unrecognizable, although a large chunk of that is just "the US as described," since the country itself gets far less attention than the socio-political-legal system where everybody is supposed to have a name and number. We don't really get a sense of how the "upper class" or "lower class" live. Again, this isn't particularly notable - try finding out information about Alabama in Shadowrun - but this definitely could have benefitted by focusing in on a single city or what life was like in the Sprawl as opposed to the wider political status of the US.

Basically, it needed a Seattle or Night City, and it didn't really get that.

Frank

The political analysis here isn't like Chompsky or Zinn. It's pretty shallow, but also it displays a not terribly great grasp of fascism as an ideology or as a political force. This book pretty much takes what fascists say about themselves at face value, which makes it pretty much worthless as a critique of fascism. If you're going to make an alternate of Shadowrun with the fascist government from Hunger Games instead of the Balkanized America of Shadowrun, it seems to me that you should do enough research about fascism that you have something to say. This book seems to think that fascism is about making unfair laws and then meticulously following them, but in reality “Law and Order” is fucking code. Fascists don't follow laws, or respect order, that's all a front. Always has been.

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There are different levels of citizenship and legally defined social classes and shit, which is very on brand for fascism on even the most superficial level. But I think if you don't accept and internalize that also and as well the rules don't mean shit for any of the people on the top or on the bottom that you haven't looked at fascism very hard.

It all fits into GURPS social class numbers somehow, and no one cares.

More generally, if you write a dystopian science fiction piece about fascism in the future, whether it's Handmaid's Tale, Hunger Games, or 1984, it's generally because you have something to say about fascism and then-current political movements. This book isn't like that. It appears to be like the setup for a board game or something. The fascist government has various factions and they are in conflict over... whatever... but there isn't any real social commentary. This is all made more strange by the constant interspersal of Russian loan words – as if to remind us of the vast political import of the end of the Cold War only to have nothing to say about it.

AncientH

"Nothing to say about it" is probably the most damning and accurate critique of the book so far. It's not just that the book doesn't have a lot of strong themes, but it isn't exactly making an exciting place to go visit and do things. Unless your idea of a good time is to punch a fascist in the face, in which case why aren't you playing GURPS WWII?

Frank

I'm not sure why we are told which cabinet level secretary positions exist in the Provisional Government. That's too high up the chain to probably matter in a typical role playing game context while also not being high enough to earn particular ire. Like, you have to be a Betsy DeVos level criminal before I even know who the Secretary of Education even is, so the fact that that department appears to be missing isn't much of a plot hook. Is it part of the Department of Information now? I don't know, but I also don't care very much. We only give Rick Perry shit for forgetting the existence of the Department of Energy because he was voluntarily discussing his own plan to dismantle it at the time.

There's some cute stuff in there, like how the Department of Urban Planning is also called the Department of Bread and Circuses. But this is all the kind of cool stuff that you'd just randomly have on post-it notes on your desk if you'd been writing dystopian science fiction for nearly two decades. And that's probably exactly what we're looking at.

AncientH

Probably the most damning part of this isn't how poorly it's aged - honestly, this feels like it was a bit weak when it was first released - but that there's probably a bunch of chuds that would straight-up fap to living in fascist dystopian hellhole where they get to lord it over other people because they have better numbers. (Which is a sad indictment of roleplaying gaming as a whole, but I digress.)

It's not that you can't see the bones of what Hume was going for here; William Gibson basically never goes into the political details of the US in his original Sprawl trilogy, and the vast majority of cyberpunk fiction doesn't even go into that level of detail about how things work or how they got this way. That is, in fact, a large part of the problem with developing a cyberpunk setting: you need the world to be broken in pretty specific ways to get to the kind of place depicted in the books. And the world has, instead, broken in very different ways.

Frank

There's rationing. Not just of food, but of consumer goods and shit. Like a lot of things in this setting, this is patterned pretty heavily on the Warsaw Pact while it was in decline. And that would be a lot more interesting if there was a lot more discussions about the historical parallels and a lot more evidence that the author had spent a lot more time investigating the causes and effects of that collapse.

Anyway, your ration cards are electronic. But the ration status is stored on little computers that you carry around with you. This makes it more like old Polish ration cards you could do physical surgery on to forge access to goods, but there's no explanation for why it works this way instead of just working like a bank that has a server somewhere that ration calls all go to.

AncientH

Some of these problems get into fairly arcane "Why would they do it that way?" approaches, like credsticks in Shadowrun. Why do you have a credstick? How is that better or different from a credit card? What even IS money?



For the length of a story, you don't really care whether the money is on a microchip or in the cloud or whatever. In a game, the details become more important...and that tends to be where the setting breaks apart.

Frank

Next up: Geopolitics

[Quasinatural]

you can and will create the entirety of your Outback Odyssey by your own hand. Which is great, good job, but then you gotta ask: what did I get this book for?

Are you new to GURPS?

Are you?

The first step is always "create the game."

And the GURPS book you bought gives you the tools to do that. This was an instance of a GURPS book not only not providing such tools, but actively impeding worldbuilding by slapping a huge divide-by-zero error in the Southern Hemisphere for no raison. If you think this is S.O.P. for GURPS, you haven't comprehensively read a single GURPS book.

This was also the worst place to do this sort of thing, given the weakness of the setting in general. If Yrth or the mega-sad Reign of Steel had this kind of plot hole, it would seriously suck, but you'd have a personal reason to do the heavy lifting to fill it: the rest of the material is good (or, maybe, at least okay). But with Cyberworld, you just scratch your head and say, "even if I make Nu Australia, why do I even want Cyberworld?"

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CYBERWORLD

4: Geopolitics

AncientH

So, one of the main weaknesses you might see with regard to Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 20XX is that they were very, very centric to their main setting (Seattle and Night City), and that coverage of the rest of the bold, exciting world was lacking...sometimes for very good reason.

It's hard to write a good setting book. It's easy to fuck up expanding the world. Doodling in the edges of the map, especially when said map is the real world, can be tricky. We've talked about this with the Eurosource OSSR and the Elf nation books for Shadowrun.

Normally, GURPS avoids this as an issue by not doing setting books at this level. There's not a GURPS France. They cover universes, worlds, ages, settings, but don't usually try to break it down to that level. Because that's the point where you can normally just look it up on wikipedia.

Except it's the future.

So I can understand the desire to talk about the rest of the world and the dynamics of the setting. I just don't have a lot of hope for it to be good.

Frank

Why have a map? Why have a set of nation state descriptions? Source material like cyberpunk books or cyberpunk movies mostly dispenses with these entirely. I have no idea whether Estonia has an independent existence in the Bladerunner future or the Snowcrash future. You don't need to know. The writer decides where characters come from and go to, and if they don't go to or come from Spain or Estonia, those places can simply not be mentioned at all.

In a cooperative storytelling game, no one has that much control. You might not give a shit about Estonia, but it's entirely possible that someone else might. Characters might just get in a car and drive out of town. There has to be something on the map, even if it's just “Here Be Dragons.” You can't just run out of road like the ending of Cemetery Man or Dark City.



This chapter is mostly 20 pages telling you very briefly what is there if you spin the globe and point your finger at something. Even if this was dense text and very well researched, it wouldn't be able to tell you very much about what it might mean for a character to come from Ghana or Paraguay, but those places do get a spot on the map. Now you might have questions about how Ghana maintained its independence when all the Francophone and several of the English speaking territories all around it joined the West African Union, and you won't get a satisfactory answer. The book has successfully managed to avoid running out of road. But only just.


The running out of road ending is weird as fuck.

AncientH

Perhaps the threat of being sucked into one big, homogenous society triggers a defense mechanism soemwhere in the part of our brains labeled "cultural identity."

There's two ways to take this. One is the Borg. They first appeared in 1989, and were threatening because they wanted to assimilate everybody and stamp out any individual character or uniqueness. Sort of the bogeyman of Communism taken to the Nth degree.

The other way is Brexit. Where you're a part of something bigger than yourself, and a bunch of rabid, xenophobic pricks declare they want no part of it, and bully and cajole and lie until the better part of the population gives them a mandate to actually do it, consequences be damned.

Which is to say, I think there is a point where individuality freaks out at the idea of being part of a community, whether or individuals or nations. The bigger it is, the scarier. The harder you resist against it, the more of an asshole you tend to look like.

The point being, the idea of the world governments growing and conglomerating and making the world culture more uniform is something that is both a real-life fear and a cyberpunk fear, but there's nuance to it. That's hard to bring across in twenty pages. Things just happen.

Frank

The concept here is that most of the planet has been conglomerated. Nigeria went into union with Cameroon. Portugal went into union with Spain. I could imagine a future in which that happens, where conquest ratchets and civil wars don't. I mean right now we're living in the opposite kind of world, where UN treaties and shit make it really hard to just fucking conquer places, but Sudan and Serbia can still lose chunks as part of the fallout from failed genocide attempts. But with slightly different international institutions, it could very much go the other way.

Still, I'm pretty sure that countries have been stuck together entirely because it makes world building slightly less work.

Anyway, the only places on Earth that have bucked this trend and gotten carved up instead of agglutinated are Canada and South Africa. There are reasons given, but what the actual fuck?

AncientH

South Africa I can see. Apartheid was a huge, ugly deal, and it lasted until 1994. So the idea that it could literally break the country apart was not so far-fetched in 1993.

This is probably also the reason why Quebec is depicted as its own country, having also swallowed New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.

Wars have been short and local. The closest thing to a real international war this century was the Israeli war, over 20 years ago. By 20th-century standards, that would barely have qualified as a bush war.

This is another fine point, because in the real world wars tend to be long and far away. If you were born after 2001 in the United States, you have never known a world without war. But very little of such conflicts happen within US borders.

I think, in large part, wars are difficult things to predicate in science fiction in general and cyberpunk in particular. What is the cause of a war? Who would be crazy enough to start such a conflict? These seem like rhetorical questions, but the truth is that the US goes to war all the time, often on very small pretexes and often with some stated or unstated objective to expand US influence in a given region. Territorial wars, as Frank pointed out, are much more uncommon than they used to be, and it's much more difficult for a lot of writers to think in terms of "But why doesn't Canada simply invade and take Chicago?"

Frank

The nation state chart is bonkers. I understand what they were going for here, but the fact is that GURPS' setting numbers simply aren't remotely fine enough to attempt to differentiate countries on the same planet. Malta and Albania are Tech Level 6 while Holland and Iberia are Tech Level 8. This is the chart telling us that it's basically still World War II in some parts of Europe and there's a fucking space elevator in another. Tech Levels never had a comfortable space for near future science fiction in GURPS, but they don't even pretend to remotely function when the information you're trying to get across is that the latest model of phone comes out several months earlier in some parts of the world than others.

This is a problem with GURPS trying to be truly universal. In trying to make your setting incorporate both halves of the Flintstones / Jetsons crossover, you really lose the ability to meaningfully distinguish between an iPhone 7 and an iPhone 8. Which doesn't make it great for Cyberpunk, because that is exactly the kind of thing you're supposed to be spilling blood in the street over.

AncientH

Some of this stuff is ripped straight from Shadowrun. Like, Zurich-Orbital exists as a data haven. Also, the GURPS data-quantification is still way off base.

The cost to store a gigabyte of data on Z-O for a year is about equal to the cost to purchase a square foot of land in the heart of the Moskva business district - which is more than the annual incomes of about 92% of the families on earth.

I'm not saying that the "data haven" concept is completely outmoded, because Amazon is still doing great things with selling people on the wonders of cloud computing, but memory these days is so cheap that not only is a gigabyte a paltry amount of data, but the idea of it being expensive to store is...ludicrous.

In the late 70's, the capacity of the typical 5.25-inch floppy disk was a mere 110 KB. These disks were common for the early word processing machines and early CP/M computers. To equal 1 Gigabyte, you would need 9,532 110 KB floppy disks.

So, yeah. This is a setting by someone used to thinking in terms of floppy disks. I have a decade-old thumb drive that could easily store over 100,000 floppies worth of data.

We also get, and this is a bit late in the game, a look at "The Bolshy Ten" - the ten biggest korps on the planet. There isn't a Corporate Court per se, but these guys are the ones that would be on it if there was one. And arguably, they should be a lot more prominent. But this is one case where the degree of give-a-shit clearly gave out.

To the rest of the world, the Russo-Japanese mega-korps are pretty much indistinguishable.

That's right, six out of ten of the most important corps in the world are just meaningless names to most people. That's terrible. Maybe not inaccurate, but it certainly makes it hard for the gamemaster to make players give a shit about Ishido Communications if even the guy writing the setting doesn't give a fuck about it. Say what you will about Shiawase in Shadowrun, at least it had a bare minimum of personality.

Frank

Several pages are spent monkeying around with currency exchange rate rules. These look like things that Hume had lying around for quite a while. And it's the kind of thing he never got to use in Shadowrun because of the international currency of the Nuyen.

I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty of it, but while it's totally realistic for your local currency to lose 10% of its value against the dollar or whatever, such things don't really matter. Yes, it means that the new piece of cyberware you want to buy is that much farther away because you've been being paid in Dong, but this game (presumably) isn't about portfolio management. It's about doing undefined missions for undefined rewards. So if those rewards grow or shrink after the fact due to inflation or interest or currency devaluation or a loss of confidence in the Dong.


Sometimes you have a lot of Dong. And sometimes your Dong aren't respected enough.

AncientH

Currency games have the benefit of feeling realistic and offering marginal opportunities to buy something cheap and sell it for more money somewhere else, that kind of thing. If you were doing a smuggling game, they would be absolutely essential. But there's a reason the euro replacing the basket of national currencies like the French franc and German mark was a good fucking thing: it makes it easier to travel and do shit. Having a single solid currency accepted in all places makes life a lot fucking easier for a lot more people.

They go into Australia a bit more, and why it's a no-man's land. Literally, all the people died and everyone else is afraid to step foot on it. Sometimes you need desolation in a setting to give a bit of breathing space; that's basically been Shadowrun's treatment of Chicago for at least a generation now. But it's one of those mysteries which is quite clearly just supposed to be a mystery; there's no big reveal for it. It just is, because that's how it's written. There was no purpose in it except to depopulate Australia.

Frank

The tangents about banking and credit and stuff really look like things that were written for Shadowrun and then just shuffled in here. Although I think the thing where loan sharks are referred to with anti-Semitic slurs is plausible, but not the kind of thing you should put into a game.


Mercenary freelance criminals probably shouldn't be worrying about the interest rate on escrow accounts anyway.

AncientH

Shadowrun doesn't handle credit. Like, at all. It's a cash-and-carry game, except the cash is usually electronic currencies like nuyen. So this really could have been Paul Hume's homerules for getting a loan in Shadowrun. We'll never know.

The big problem with credit in roleplaying games is that the terms of the loan are almost certainly longer than the terms of the campaign - and whatever happens once you get up from the table? You don't fucking care. Get a million neodollar loan, buy out all the bad guy's henchmen and shoot him in the head and you win. Yes, your character may get their organs repossessed once they start missing payments, but that's in the future you never see. It's like selling your soul for power; the reason games don't like that is that you almost never experience the downside, only the upside.

Is this a bad section? Eh. I'm sure there's use to be had out of crowcards and bargaining in Turkish lira and stuff for those who really want to get into the nitty-gritty of it all. At the same time, this is GURPS. What are you going to buy with your basket of fluctuating currencies?

Frank

Next up: Crime and Punishment.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: GURPS CYBERWORLD

5: Crime and Punishment




.gif of a guy saying Yes.

Society in the late 20th century waged an escalating war against organized crime. Despite some early victories, it looks like society lost.

AncientH

So, back in the early 1980s when it looked like Japan would take over the world, William Gibson presented the Japanese as these spooky high-tech gangsters that everyone was afraid of, and basically people fell in love. It had nothing to do with real life, and in fact very few actual Yakuza appear in Gibson's novels; they were far-off and powerful and the protagonists were pretty much street criminals of no particular affiliation.

Other cyberpunk writers didn't follow this exact idea; Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash has the American Mafia organize itself more like a corporation and working semi-openly in that regard. There was never a concerted idea for why organized crime should have gathered so much power, except that it seemed cool at the time. Shadowrun had to deal with this when it talked about the connections between Shadowrun megacorps with bottom lines in the billions of nuyen sharing power structures with Japanese organized crime syndicates with bottom lines in the millions of nuyen. There's a disjoint, there.

But ultimately, the question is: if you're a criminal in future, who do you do business with?

Frank

Sixteen pages dedicated to Crime and Punishment is one eighth the length of the 128 page Crime and Punishment written by Dostoevsky. Having done that obligatory joke, I think it's important to note that this chapter is mostly about crime and very little about punishment. Specifically 13 pages are dedicated to crime: criminal organizations, crimes you might want to commit, ethnic stereotypes about crime...



This split of course makes sense. If the players are mercenary criminals, the very moment people start going to court, the game is probably over. Like, maybe you might do a jailbreak story or something, but for the most part people go to jail at the end of the story not the middle. Three pages on courts and prisons and shit may not sound like a lot, but to be honest it could just be free frame with the big red text “BAD END” on it and be similarly useful for most games.

AncientH

In linking the major criminal organizations of the one-and-twenty to certain specific ethnic groups, it is not the intention of GURPS Cyberworld to perpetuate racial stereotypes. Italians, Japanese or South Americans are no more likely than any other race to produce criminals; it just happens that, due to historical and cultural factors, they produce more organized criminals than most other ethnic groups.

No easy way to tip-toe around this one, so GURPS hits it head-on. Today, people associate Mexicans with crime because people in the US are racist bastards; a hundred years ago, people associated Italians with crime because people in the US are racist bastards.

Ethnic criminal organizations in the US tend to dissipate over time as the immigrant cultures get more assimilated; the American Mafia, for example, was originally split between different parts of Italy before it more-or-less consolidated, and even that has withered - you don't need to be Italian or Italian-American to be in the American mob, though it certainly helps.

Here, Hume goes for the Snow Crash idea, presenting "MafInc" as a quasi-corporatized organized crime organization that helps enforce omerta with cortex bombs.

Frank

What makes an action a crime? There are no natural laws, no universal imperative. Even things that everyone agrees should be illegal like killing people are necessarily surrounded by penumbras and caveats. Laws are made by people with power in order to control people without. Some of them are good ideas, some of them are not. But it is precisely the arbitrariness of the legislation that creates a space for crime as a business.

This section is very dry about all this. We aren't talking about crime in terms of Scarfacial excess or The Warriors style pageantry, this is just about pimps running extortion rackets on prostitutes who are strung out on addictive drugs. It's not unrealistic, but it's not particularly fun. Criminal enterprises exist because there are markets for goods and services that can't be satisfied through standard channels because the local authorities will beat the shit out of anyone who tried to have it checked on their ration card. Sometimes there are defensible reasons for the local authorities doing that, sometimes it's explicitly about marginalizing some portion of the population.

In any case, I'm not sure where player characters are supposed to fit in to any of this.

AncientH

I think this echoes back to the problems with tone and theme from earlier. If you're a freelance criminal, it goes without saying that you'll probably be dealing with other criminals just to get stuff done - finding work, getting paid, laundering money or fencing stolen goods, etc. How much of that involves dealing with actual organized crime is entirely up in the air, and that's something even Shadowrun acknowledged, often presenting organized criminal groups as potential enemies and sources of employment and services at the same time.

Frank

In linking the major criminal organizations of the one-and-twenty to certain specific ethnic groups, it is not the intention of GURPS: Cyberworld to perpetuate racial stereotypes. Italians, Japanese or South Americans are no more likely than any other race to produce criminals; it just so happens that, due to historical and cultural factorrs, they produce more organized criminals than most other ethnic groups.

You can see the rightward shift on the yikes scale.

I'm not sure what the tactful way to discuss this topic was – but obviously that wasn't it.

The issue he's clumsily trying to get at is that there are famously successful organized crime syndicates and they are factually from actual places and have real demographics and are often quite racist in their recruitment and promotion. But let's consider the fact that some of the world's most famously successful criminal syndicates are from Japan and Colombia. Whether a region's official crime rate is high or low generally has more to do with how the local authorities keep track of such things than anything, but in terms of what we might call “generally agreed upon crime” such as theft and assault, Japan is a low crime area by international standards and Colombia is a high crime area by international standards and both of those areas have successful criminal syndicates based in them for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the racial tendencies of Japanese or Colombian people.

AncientH

Up-to-Date Prositution Casual cosmetic surgery and certain cybernetic modifications can "enhance" sexual characteristics. So can the use of various chips and drugs. At their most innocent, these modifications are on par with the implants that became so popular near the end of the 20th century. Most middle- or upper-bracket prostitutes undergo some form of cosmetic surgery to improve their Appearance. Most prostitutes who can afford to get one or two chip slots implanted, allowing them to use the Geisha Occupational Chip along with salable Behavior or Attitude chips (see p.. C38 and 40)

The good thing about GURPS is that it is willing to address the in-and-outs of sex, without going into either fetishistic territory or complete prudery. Prostiution is something that, again, appears in the first cyberpunk stories as a kind of fact of life; William Gibson does not go into vast detail about sex work nor does he dwell on it.

So, y'know, props for addressing at least some of the glaring issues here, even if they're fairly unrealistic. Most prostitutes aren't going to be able to afford cyberware or cosmetic surgery, and living your life as somebody else's sex doll is...not something that they actually delve into as much as they should.


I mean, we can already do this.

Frank

Even he knows that. I mean, in five years the Corleone Family is going to be completely legitimate.

Mafia Incorporated was a thing in Snowcrash and MafInc in Cyberworld is basically exactly that. I suppose you can be a deliverator for the Mob if that's what you want to do.

It's probably important to note the incestuous relationship that criminal syndicates have with popular media. Criminal syndicates don't have ancient traditions. The median age of an MS-13 gang member is less than 18. The Godfather movies had to mostly make up Mafia traditions because there just weren't any, and no one would tell you about them if they existed. But that also applies to Mafia members, for whom there isn't much of an institutional memory, let alone an internal written tradition.

If you write down your criminal traditions, Stringer Bell is going to personally slap you.

But while a new member of the Mafia can't get reliable information about how things were done by previous mafiosos, they can all watch the Godfather movies. And they have. Does that mean that modern mafia “families” are criminal organizations that are also Godfather and Scarface cosplay groups. Absolutely it does. And the same goes for Yakuza and Triad organizations with respect to popular media from East Asian cinematic traditions. In any case, we've already seen gangs who adopted the tactics and aesthetics from A Clockwork Orange, and we can look forward to a future where criminals are inspired by John Wick and Kill Bill.

This feedback loop doesn't really get addressed in this book, which is a shame. This book came out a year after Reservoir Dogs, and I think we could have done something with that and future crime.

AncientH

So, there's a brief section on prison. In case your flavor of cyberpunk involves spending time in a high-tech prison, a la Fortress. Which it might! We're not here to judge you.

The prison options given, however, are not strongly designed to encourage those kind of games. In the body banks, you are basically harvested for your organs one at a time. In the toxic crew, you're manual labor for clearing out toxic waste dumps. It's dystopian as hell, and maybe a good incentive for not getting caught.

Then we get a sidebar on fetus farming...

Women with the right genetic map are kidnapped, impregnated with sperm from a genetically suitable male, and at the appropriate stage the pregnancy is aborted. Since the market demand for high-acceptance fetal tissue is always stiff, the process is repeated--and repeated.

Yikes. I mean yeah, that was basically the background plot of Shoot 'Em Up. Again, kudos for actually broaching the subject, even if it's too squicky for most gamemasters to touch with a standard-issue ten foot pole. That would at least be something you don't run across in your typical D&D campaign.

Frank

Of course the bottom line for any criminal enterprise is “how does it affect the player characters?” Are they supposed to be hiring the PCs as outside consultants? Are they supposed to be policing the PCs to make sure they don't upset the apple cart? What? Despite being the single most important question, this chapter doesn't seem to give a shit.

There's a bit about organ theft, both by criminals who meat market murder victims and as a government performed punishment for people who are sentenced to death for crimes real or imaginary. That's future-dystopian, and I can't fault it, but I can't help feel like I'm getting the Body Banks stuff instead of tying any of this material to the role playing game this book is supposed to inspire.

AncientH

There's a sidebar on fines, and the government seizing your shit. That seems like a waste to me, because again, at the point that becomes an issue, you're sitting out most of the campaign, right? I mean, there might be some sort of plot point in having funds that the Feds can't touch, but not much of one.

It's not that it's bad, it's just that it isn't really focused on the player experience.

Frank

The list of judicial punishments is basically a list. It describes what being sent to a gulag is. But it doesn't describe what you'd be sent to a gulag for. Nor does it offer any suggestions on how breaking into or out of a gulag might fit into a cooperative storytelling game.

It's like I'm reading a 6th grade book report instead of a game book.

AncientH

It feels like a cart-before-the-horse problem. The book should really have focused on who the player characters are and what they do and why, the motivations and potential adventures/criminal enterprises that the game should tackle, before it got to details like what kind of work camp they might get sent to if they get caught and somehow don't die.

Frank

Next up: Pop Goes the Culture

[Ancient History]

OSSR: GURPS Cyberworld

6: Pop Goes the Culture

AncientH

WHAT WE HAVE COME TO
When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.

"If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."

So, one of the things that people have been bitching about for centuries, plural, is how advertizing is getting out of control and how much more pervasive it is, and that technology is a big part of that. Which is all true. Technology has massively increased both your access to information and entertainment.

Some people think that's a bad thing. Or at least, not necessarily a positive one. Others simply embrace the idea that this is how things are now.

Frank

Smash TV. The Running Man. I'd Buy That For a Dollar. Cyberpunk is often at its best when it's critiquing media. It is after all extremely easy to parody the shows of today by making them just slightly more extreme for the purposes of comedy or political points scoring. And it's easy to fit those into a near future science fiction work. The art within the art doesn't have to justify itself at all – just let your freak flag fly.


You don't even have to go futuristic, you can parody entertainment trends with art within the art in any fictional work. It's just easier in science fiction.

This is 10 pages devoted to the art within the art. The culture that people in the world described by the book produce and consume. It's got some nice pithy quotes which I'm guessing Hume has been waiting to use for a while.

The Romans had it right – all you need to control the masses is “bread and circuses.” And if the show's good enough, the bread is optional.

AncientH

Cyberpunk games tend to fall down on this aspect a lot. Shadowrun tried to run it seriously with Shadowbeat, but the truth is that it works a lot better when you play it for parody. Unfortunately, this means we get five paragraphs on "Snuff Art" - the public suicide of an artist as an artistic event.

Frank

While not as long as other chapters, you can tell Paul Hume was more animated and amused in writing this chapter. Not surprising, he was also lead writer on Shadowbeat, so that checks out.

Like Shadowbeat, this chapter is just sort of a stream of consciousness rant with little cohesive theme or thesis statement. There are things. Some of them are in projected recessed holographic format. Some of them are still like, on stage or whatever.

What there isn't a lot of is handholds to fit things into the cooperative narrative. The player characters aren't going to be watching holovid for 18 hours a day and even if they were, within the context of the role playing game you're only going to give a few shoutouts. The weird segments of I'd Buy That For a Dollar and Sick Sad World are all you have room for in the background of Robocop or Daria, but that's also true of a role playing game.

AncientH

Believe it or not, some people still read for fun on the Edge.

The old literacy bug comes up again in a sidebar. Frank ranted pretty eloquently about this before, and I don't have much to add.

Something I would like to rant about:

Artistically, VR is considered a bit of a dead end.

The thing about virtual reality that most people don't get is that it is almost ubiquitous at this point. Not that nonsense with the visors and the gloves, or stupid shit like GoogleGlass - I mean your web browser. Immersive video games. People live and interact with the virtual world, and they don't need all the fancy peripherals to do it. We're a long way from clunky graphic interfaces and the command line.

What Hume misses, and what took Shadowrun several editions to catch onto, is "augmented reality." The idea of tying virtual content to geographic locations. The simplest version of this is just shit like Pokemon Go spots, where people start inadvertently breaching military bases to get at gyms and crap.

But it's worth remembering that a lot of the stuff that was qualified as VR back in the early 90s just became everybody's normal, day to day experience. Just without the goggles and gloves.

Frank

This book tells us that genres are still a thing that exists. But what it should be doing is just giving us some semi-kidding future shows that mock then-current media trends. This is extremely low hanging fruit and there's basically no downside. If you correctly guess the direction of depravity that is the cesspool of future mass media you're a prophet, and if you guess wrong then you're “only joking.”

In 1993, MTV's The Real World had completed its first season to huge audience scores and the second season was being aired with almost double the episodes and a larger production budget. All the pieces were there. You could have savaged that emerging genre as hard as you wanted, and it would still probably sound tame to us today.

I don't know if y'all get this show in whatever countries you live in, but in the UK there is a “reality game show” called Love Island where a group of attractive men and women sleep with each other at a resort. That's it. That's the game. They don't compete with talents or skills, they don't compete with knowledge or strength, they just exist and eventually someone gets voted the winner. Along the way they hang out in the pool and try to sleep with other cast members. The fact that this show is a thing makes me apoplectic with white hot rage. People talk about stuff that happened in the last episode of Love Island because it's very popular, but – and I cannot stress this enough – literally nothing that happens in the show is of any consequence even within the parameters of the show. The contestants win or lose on a raw popularity poll and nothing they can do or not do makes them win or lose. It's not just that the points are unfair, there simply is no point. You win or lose at life because the audience thinks you should, and that's all there is.

That's reality in 2020. Or at least, that's the level that “reality game shows” have stooped to. It's not really possible for 1993 cyberpunk authors to be over the top with their scathing parodies of future shows. The future is exactly as dumb as the most over-the-top parody could have been back then.

AncientH

There's a good bit of talk about music genres, which you don't care about, and how many countries are boycotting the Olympics, which you really don't care about, and then we get to bloodsports.

Look, we've done the sportsball jokes before, and I can't throw stones because I've written sportsball stuff before, but it's hard to really get engaged with it because almost none of it affects the players in any way.

Except, y'know, if the players decide to enter a Mixed Martial Arts competition or something. Not that you would expect Hume to know about that, the term was first coined in 1993. But the basic idea of people beating the shit out of each other while the crowd cheers isn't new.

From a game perspective, gladitorial bloodsports are a lot like hacking: a one-on-one minigame where the other players go to the bathroom while the street samurai/solo/Fighter gets a moment to shine/gets their teeth kicked in. Which is, like hacking, less than ideal as a regular thing, but sometimes can be fun.

Frank

A really significant amount of text goes into art where people die. Blood Sports and Snuff Art and shit. There is definitely a long pedigree to this sort of thing in cyberpunk. Running Man, Smash TV, Death Race 2000, and so on. So if you want to have literal Hunger Games in your cyberpunk dystopia, that's fine. It's social commentary. The life expectancy of football players is fucking shocking, it's not much different morally speaking from just watching someone get murder stabbed and bleeding out in front of a roaring crowd.

But actual snuff entertainment isn't real. When you put it into your cyberpunk future it's social fucking commentary. You lean in to the goofiness to make a statement about the moral reprehensibility of some thing we do that offends you. You could be advocating for vegetarianism or the abolishment of contact sports or whatever. You aren't literally making a comment on the morality and feasibility of death races or gladiatorial shopping sprees.

So the fact that we spend as much time as we do talking about people killing themselves for art is just kind of a waste. What's the point? What's the joke? This seems like more effort than you'd go into if you weren't going to go anywhere. But then it doesn't go anywhere.

AncientH

The fashion section seems to be...bizarre. Like, people that literally think dressing up as nuns and clerics except with see-through ports on the genitals are and probably will be a thing, but for casual wear?

Frank

The descriptions of fashion trends for future cliques are certainly weird, but honestly I think they are the most concretely useful piece of world building so far in this book. The fact that there are people doing “Hassid-glam” where they dress as sexed up versions of Hassidic Jews from circa 1970s New York is just weird enough and just plausible.


The fact that this is a mainstream fashion in 2043 is both plausible and awesome.

The other fashion trends are not as inspired as Glam-Hassid, but the fact that you can be a high fashionista in corpse paint is still extremely Cyberpunk. I unconditionally approve.

AncientH

Overall, it's a passable chapter. I know we like to rant hard about this stuff, but it moves fast, covers a good chunk of ground, and there is stuff here that you could use in your games. You definitely get the idea that Hume was more comfortable with the world at this point, and indeed this is the kind of stuff which is often the easiest to write about cyberpunk - the aesthetics.

Frank

Next up: Technology.

[Thaluikhain]

Then we get a sidebar on fetus farming...

Women with the right genetic map are kidnapped, impregnated with sperm from a genetically suitable male, and at the appropriate stage the pregnancy is aborted. Since the market demand for high-acceptance fetal tissue is always stiff, the process is repeated--and repeated.

Yikes. I mean yeah, that was basically the background plot of Shoot 'Em Up. Again, kudos for actually broaching the subject, even if it's too squicky for most gamemasters to touch with a standard-issue ten foot pole. That would at least be something you don't run across in your typical D&D campaign.

Is that really that different than the forcibly impregnating women you see...everywhere, though? The way you get half-orcs and skum and mindrippers and stuff? I remember an article giving advice on running D&D and of the 5 or so suggestions, an entire one was devoted to not having a female character raped and impregnated by demons, so it seems people think it's not hugely uncommon.

[Ancient History]

Forcible impregnations appear a lot in fantasy because...well, rape fantasies and pregnancy fantasies are common, and RPGs are inherently a fantasy genre. I can't throw too many stones here - I did write that one adventure - but it's still a high level of squick for a lot of people. It's why everybody remembers that one scene in Prometheus. Actually harvesting the unborn for $$$ is not something you normally see in your standard D&D kitchensink fantasy, though.

[Stahlseele]

And now to take this shit up to 11 and beyond, let us see what WH40K came up with aaaand it is the Daemonculaba . .
Something so abhorrently disgusting and batshit insane it makes other parts of the faction that invented it go:"dude, you are going too far!"

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberworld

7: Technology

AncientH

High Tech & Low Life.
Where Man Meets Magic & Machine
Cyberpunk.

The whole conception of cyberpunk isn't so much set on a specific period as much as it is the future where technology has advanced to the point that it alienates humanity. William Gibson didn't invent cyberware, implants, hacking, artificial intelligence, or computer networks. What he did was give it attitude. Meditate on how that would change how people lived and thought and felt. And even then, he didn't go into Dune-style philosophic meditations. His characters still drank, smoke, did drugs, were racist, had sex, etc. It was very much about the human condition in a world where a lot of the preconceptions of the 1970s no longer held play.

In cyberpunk RPG terms, you'd ideally merge this higher tech level in with the setting material, showcasing how people did things differently, some of them just sort of accepting it, others...not. But RPGs also have to give numbers to things, and gear and cyberware were two of the things that were easy to generate as game material to expand your characters. So that's what a lot of this chapter is.

Frank

It's 18 pages of rants about technology “On the Edge.” The frequency and degree to which this book uses the phrase “On the Edge” makes me believe that Hume intended this entire game to be called that. And he may have been dissuaded upon discovering that Tweet and Laws managed to get to market with “Over the Edge” an entire year earlier.

In any case, predictions of future technology are always going to be weird as fuck when looked back at with the benefit of hindsight, and this is no exception. What makes this a little bit more like it was obviously going to be is that GURPS had already committed itself to what was going to happen with future technology five years earlier.

Shadowrun had run into similar problems. By 1993, some of the future technology written in 1989 was kind of embarrassing. Shadowrun however had an evolving future now and a continuous run of supplements, meaning that some of the weird shit that we pretended wasn't a thing just stopped being a thing. Cyberpunk 20XX went in a similar path, where later books just pretended that cybernetic tape decks and similar retro-futuristic baggage weren't part of the setting.

GURPS eventually went that way somewhat, with later editions quietly rearranging the furniture in what the various tech levels were supposed to correspond to. But as of Cyberworld, we were still very much stuck in the paradigms of 1980s thinking, following the path defined for us in GURPS Ultratech and its weirdly obsessive ruminations on the weight of future batteries.


For whatever reason, GURPS Ultratech really cares about these fucking things.

AncientH

So, this starts off with a talk about Tech Levels. Cyberworld does not doesn't fit neatly into the GURPS TL paradigm. Most of it is late 20th century (TL7), but with cyberware and bioprocessors (vat-grown brains that work as computers, borrowing from the biopunk/ribofunk aesthetic of Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker) (TL8), and occasional TL9 miracle breakthrough one-offs (???).

You don't really care, unless you're mixing Cyberworld with some other setting like GURPS Time Travel or GURPS Technomancer. The real world doesn't give a shit about tech levels, just like it doesn't care about 1st world vs. 3rd world or which rank your state is. The main take away is that bulky batteries are still standard, vatbrains exist, and fusion power is a thing but Mr. Fusion is not.



I'm not saying none of this is important, but it's much more general setting material and very little about the impact on the setting. You don't have players wondering if they're just vatbrains dreaming of electric sheep.

Frank

Much of this chapter is not really about technology, futurish or otherwise. The last 8 pages of the chapter are just a collection of weapons you might want to have in a GURPS game. I don't know off the top of my head whether the stats for needlers and pistols and shit in this book match the range of available stats in other GURPS books, but there are a lot of page citations to other books so I suspect the answer is “pretty closely.”

The web of book citations makes this equipment list utterly unusable as a stand alone document. If you transferred in all the relevant cited information instead of just handing out page codes, this chapter would be several times its current length. Page 106 alone has seven different citations covering 14 different pages. And what's left is incredibly telegraphic:

Light-intensifier contacts are not available (the power slugs are too big). The rest of these devices are available as listed.

That cryptic comment modifies a page citation to two pages of “Communications, Recording, and Scientific Equipment.” There is no other explanation because go fuck yourself.

AncientH

It's not that Shadowrun et al. don't have the same basic approach to trying to identify certain tech as rare, but they made it rare by making it expensive and with a high Availability rating. GURPS has associated costs, but it still very much about building the game first.

Well, except Hume does actually introduce an availability rating for cyberware in this chapter. Guess where he borrowed that idea from?

Which is really where GURPS tends to fall down. It's too much a set of instructions for deciding how much of the gear from other GURPS supplements might be available, rather than just telling the reader what gear is available and what it costs. Often, none of the gear is made unique to the setting either. Shadowrun was very clever in giving actual makes and models for its gear - you didn't have a Generic Heavy Pistol, you had a Browning High Power or Ares Predator III. Hume actually realizes this, and the end of the chapter is a long list of weapons by specific manufacturers.

Which is another hallmark of cyberpunk fiction which a lot of games fell down on: the massive pervasiveness of corporations was coupled with a twelve-year-old's fascination with gunporn and computer specs. It wasn't enough to have a cyberdeck, you wanted to know who made it and what made it special, if it was the cyberdeck of preferred special forces hacker units and whether it had been modified for cracking open enemy IC or had a fleshlight attachment or whatever.



So it's not enough to be high tech, it also needs to be personalized to the setting, in a way that swords from D&D generally don't.

Frank

The portions of this chapter that are about technology in the future are really just sort of about technology. In the future.

It's a little hard to get this across, but this is like someone having an argument with GURPS Ultratech about solar power or superconductors. This book suggests that solar power in 2043 is still just a pipe dream like Homer Simpson predicted. And that honestly seems like a very weird hill to die on.

I can actually see how you might want to deprecate solar power in cyberpunk worldbuilding because you're making a dystopia and it's a lot more dystopic if you can describe factories and power plants as “belching.” But of course if that's the reasoning, or indeed there is any reasoning at all, Hume keeps it to himself. These are the world building cliff notes, but just for the world building decisions that have been made – not to any part of the discussions or thought experiments which produced them. There's no “behind the scenes” or “why we decided to make it this way.” Which makes this less like a GURPS book than most GURPS books. And also leaves me scratching and shaking my head a lot. I mean, there's quite a bit of text about how this society has materials that are superconductive at 360 degrees Rankine, but I don't know what the narrative purpose of that is.

I genuinely don't know if there is supposed to be a narrative purpose. For any of this. Mathematics is the study of the consequences of arbitrary declarations, and this entire book kinda feels like that.

AncientH

"Cyberwear" (what a terrible fucking decision) gets at least a little discussion, and Hume actually htis a couple good points here. Notably:

OK, fine, so now we can drig around with people's bodies a lot easier than they could in the past. That doesn't tell us why! Why should someone in good health pay a ton of bucks to get carved on?

Not all of the reasons he gives are good or particularly applicable, but the truth is that body modification is an entire culture today in a way that was almost inconceivable in the 1970s, when subdermal implants were in their infancy and cosmetic surgery was...variable.


They did not have the technology. We still might not, at least until we develop implantable back-up spines.

Frank

I know we bitched about the utter insanity of GURPS future batteries back when we did GURPS Cyberpunk, but GURPS future batteries are fucking insane. The second smallest power slug weighs half a pound. It also is a cylinder 1” by 2”, so it is denser than a solid lump of metallic copper. The next size up of power slug has 12 times the volume and fourteen times the mass, making it just shy of being a solid lump of pure lead.

The output of batteries also seems weirdly unimpressive. The example electric car of 2043 still has a 50 MPH maximum speed, which probably seemed weirdly pessimistic in 1993 and of course is straight laughable today.

AncientH

The information density in the weapons section is pretty reasonable; you're normally looking at 6-10 pieces of gear with ancilliary rules per page. That's far from the 1:1 gun porn of the Street Samurai Catalog, but comparable to the Shadowrun main rule book. It's also very down-to-earth with none of the occasional wackiness of other cyberpunk games.

Frank

There's quite a bit of verbiage spilled on various ways the MC can make equipment easier or more difficult to find. But I think this pretty much puts the cart before the horse. This book doesn't have sample player characters. I don't know what this book thinks is normal for a character to have. If I don't have a baseline of what a Cyberonin might have, what fucking difference does it make if I want our table's specific Cyberonin to have better or worse access? The fuck would that even mean?

AncientH

I think there's a lot of elements of good material in this chapter, but organized weirdly. Like, parts of this could have been lifted straight from a Shadowrun clone. If GURPS Cyberworld had been conceived as a specialized standalone version of the GURPS core book + Cyberworld setting + selected GURPS Cyberpunk gear and rules, it would have worked a lot better. As it is, the back-and-forth references leave the whole book feeling generic, confusing, and an exercise in bookkeeping instead of a cohesive setting.

Frank

Next up: Net Running

[Orca]

On the 'why is the Mafia such a big thing?', in the early 80s the Sicilian Mafia was at 'war' with the Italian state, assassinating judges and police chiefs who didn't knuckle under. It didn't end well for the Mafia but it likely made an impression on people who remembered reading about that for years after. That's not me, I'm not quite old enough but I read references to it later.

[Chamomile]

The Mexican Drug War is pretty hella violent and kills journalists and government officials all the time. Why would that leave less of an impression than the Sicilian Mafia?

[Stahlseele]

Because it quite literally hits too close to home.
There is nothing exotic and thus intriguing about it.
Not very sophisticated or gentlemanly conduct either.
AND the timing is all wrong as well . .
It was not around at a time to influence the writers.
Also, the narcos of today are way cazy as well . .
Building their own submarines, using Drones etc.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberworld

8: The Net On The Edge

AncientH

Okay, so one of the key aspects of cyberpunk games that set them apart from your standard fantasy RPG is that they have computers, which are often networked together, sometimes into a global Matrix. Cyberpunk more than most future or modern settings put the emphasis on this transition into a Data Age economy, where information is data is money is power. People were still trying to come to grips with this back when Diehard was a thing and personal computers were rare and expensive, but now we exist where we carry multiple computers about our person easily and cybercrime is a constant, ongoing, and occasionally existential threat.

The Hacker, or Netrunner, or Decker became a new and vital character archetype. You can call them a specialized thief or a specialized mage, and both are true to an extent, but the position they occupy within the party is unique...

...and their utility is entirely dependent on how embedded computers are in the setting. As mentioned in previous chapters, GURPS Cyberworld struggled to really embrace the global matrix. You get the idea that it's there, but the infinite possibilities take a back seat to real world plagues and grade B bang-bang.

On top of which, the rules for hacking in GURPS Cyberpunk are a shit milkshake.

Frank

Making a functional computer hacking system for a role playing game is hard. You have to decide what you want hacking to do, you have to design a game system and a setting in which the hacking actually does that. And while the player characters are naturally obliged to play by the rules, they are not obligated to play to your preconceptions. The player and the character are trying to “win” the interaction between hacker and corporation (or korporation) and are willing to find exploits that are dumb or unthematic. You are literally designing a portion of the game where the players are, very much in character, trying to break your fucking game.

Many hacking systems have broken on the rocks. I can't even recall a hacking system I would designate as “good” in the sense of accomplishing design goals. And the Matrix rules of every edition of Shadowrun are really bad. Like notably and astoundingly bad.

When we reviewed GURPS: Cyberpunk, one of the things we noted about the Netrunning rules is that they simply weren't playable at all. It asked you to make calculations and rolls representing tiny fractions of a second. Essentially trying to get you to model actual computer cycles in your head. It's one of those things where once someone in the committee meeting suggests something that dumb, the meeting leader is supposed to just stare at them and then not write it on the white board.


...moving on.

So this book is written by someone who has contributed to multiple hacking systems that are all unqualified failures. And it's supposed to be an expansion for a different and incompatible hacking system that is epilepsy inducing failure even by those standards. This chapter was not going to be good. It's 16 pages, and it was never going to be remotely acceptable. So it's not really a surprise that this chapter is terribad. But it is a catastrofail, if you were wondering.

AncientH

The first few pages aren't that bad. They give brand names and examples of standard computers, with their GURPS-level Complexity (a measure of computer processing power). If you're going to run this with any other GURPS product, that's need-to-know information. If you want to be a technomage, Awakening your computer to artificial intelligence is determined by the Complexity, for example.

Basically, everything until you get to the actual netrunning rules isn't terrible. There's a lot of stupid names and things, like:

The PC70000 is the portable version of the 7000

Which represents computer naming and branding trends of the early 90s which went mostly extinct somewhere around Microsoft Bob. I'm kind of glad this book didn't come out in '95, or all the glowing neon lines would have been replaced with fucking Clippy.

Frank

Megabaud, Gigabyte. These are terms that are supposed to sound flash and wizz and shit. The problem of course is that these were only slightly larger units of account than were in everyday use when the book was made... in 1993. A Megabaud Modem is only seventy times faster than a normal modem a reader might have in their home in 1993 (when 14k was still considered good), but the field was moving fast, just a year later the “Megabaud” was just 35 times faster than a household appliance, and two years later it was less than twenty times faster. Gigabyte hard drives were created in 1980, but even the gigabytes of RAM that this book is trying to impress me with are a thing that factually happened in the 90s.

That's a line speed one million bytes per second!

The fact that this sentence has an exclamation mark is funnier than any joke this chapter could have contained.

Shadowrun got around this somewhat by just using completely made up terminology. There were chips, and they have “megapulses” of data on them. What did that mean? I have no fucking idea. And neither did anyone else. It might as well have been in Akadian. But because it was written in nonsense, it wasn't immediately put to shame by Moore's Law. Meanwhile, the proclamations of computer specs in this book were fucking laughable almost immediately because they were written in terms amenable to apples to apples comparison with then-current technology. It was obvious that real world technological advances were going to shit all over this stuff long before we got to 2043.

The prices on these things are deeply absurd, but again it comes back around to the fact that I don't know how much the money is supposed to be worth in this world. We really should have gotten prices in tacos or brief cases or something rather than in vaguely defined future money.

AncientH

When we do finally get to the hard core of actual rules here, the book just shits itself. For example, one of the new programs introduced is Cross System Instruction Translators. If you buy a program that can run on one operating system, it can't run on any of the others. Today, that's sort of a Linux/Mac/Windows divide; but for the most part - and Shadowrun realized this - that is a level of granuality that you both don't care about or want. You want to be able to hack into the goddamn mothership with your macbook.



So yes, within the framework of the GURPS system this is absolutely a program you would want. But the system is shit for this being a thing that actually exists.

It kind of goes down from there; for whatever reason the new programs were all listed in running sidebars on multiple pages, and what should have been maybe a two-or-three page multi-column spread just becomes a running fucking mess so that they could talk about scanners and "Virgonomics."

Frank

The promise of GURPS was that it could model anything. That generic universality could be achieved by breaking things down into their physical properties and the physics engine of the game could churn through their interactions. This really appealed to me in like 7th grade. But of course, that's wrong. The cooperative story you're telling doesn't obey the same narrative rules all the time, and the generic physical interactivity of things is often not particularly important when asking to resolve an important scene.



This is especially true with regards to hacking computers. Computers get hacked because some idiot's password is “12345” or “GOD” or something. Modeling the data transfer rate from compact diskettes or virtual laser discs or whatever the fuck is simply not relevant. The stats of these computer peripherals just don't matter at all, because in the story you are able to access the evil corporate mainframe because someone on team evil made a mistake.


Are you fucking kidding me?

This book is trying to tell me exactly how their future VR goggles work and how many future hacking programs I can run and how many minutes it takes to copy a disk. And all that stuff is of tertiary importance at best. But the real fundamental issue is that we don't have a 'bumble index' or something. That this chapter, this book, and this game system is very concerned with modeling details of people and objects that have been defined by the GM, but what it needs to be offering is means of filling out information about parts of the world that have yet to be defined.

The core issue here is that the Netrunners are going to be writing on blank pages most of the time. Every one of those fucking diskettes has ten gigs of memory on it, and while that's not actually impressive by modern standards, it's still like 5 actual movies or however many thousands of books. When you see a stack of digital media on the table, the MC can't have defined all the contents, because they are going to run out of time with the impending heat death of the universe. The stories you would tell in this world need to be able to efficiently answer the question “Is there anything useful in those files?” or “Did someone on team evil set their code to 1-2-3-4-5?” That's not the kind of question that GURPS can answer. It's not even a kind of question the game is set up to ask.



The modern world is complex and full of stuff. The near future even more so. The characters are going to be interacting with unknown unknowns. Coloring outside the lines. Taking the plane to Santa Fe. And GURPS has a very real problem even conceptualizing this issue. The universality is supposed to let you translate anything into game mechanics, it doesn't actually color in empty space. And cyberspace is nothing but empty space. There's some discussion of hypothetical future tech that interacts with cyberspace, but what is actually there is anyone's fucking guess.

AncientH

We get talk about interfaces, cyberdecks, etc. some of which is very cognizent and some of which is very retro. People today generally do not slip on a set of goggles and some gloves and type on a virtual keyboard. You can do that if you want to, but almost nobody does because it makes you look like a putz.


Stop trying to make it happen.

Self-contained cyberdecks are not commercially available on the Edge. These units, the sleekly elegant hardware familiar to all readers of classic cyberpunk literature, are restricted to government and korp users. They have a Legality Rating of 4, and in most countries just owning one is a crime. The average netrunner in 2043 has to buy or build a neural controller in order to convert his commercial computer into a functioning cyberdeck.

This is pretty much the definition of the failure of Cyberworld. Building and modifying your own cyberdeck is good. That people don't fucking have cyberdecks is a fucking crime. Shadowrun in the early editions had "tortoises" without any neural interface, but they sucked and people knew they sucked and they existed mostly as an excuse to have a screen that a Street Samurai could stare at in wonder and confusion and maybe shoot when they got mad.

Look, even most of William Gibson's cyberpunk novels didn't actually involve jacking in. People were still doing a lot of shit wearing goggles and gloves, making moves on the keyboard.

Special effects have come a long way and now people expect glowing screens floating in mid-air and shit, but the same basic principles apply. It's not so much what's in the box, it's what the box does. People who play cyberpunk games want their goddamn cyberdecks. You want a post-cyberpunk game, people want their fucking smartphones. Cyberphones. Whatever.

Frank

The game mechanics themselves are incomprehensible gibberish. The postmodernists have won, it is nothing but signifiers pointing to other signifiers.

Installation requires a major surgical facility and takes 10 days. Nanotools are not required, but if they are not available the operation requires a major medical facility and takes three weeks.
A Command Phase takes 2 times the normal length when using an Icon Interface.
Icon interfaces are Rare and have a Legality Rating of 5, requiring licensing in many countries, or at least registration.

This would actually be easier to attempt to derive meaning from if it was just a spreadsheet of arcane numbers. At least then you could compare things up and down columns and get a rough handle on whether Legality 5 was bigger or smaller than other similar options. As it is, this pretty much skee balls it into the perfect donut hole of unusability. It's in prose so it's hard to do apples to apples comparisons of things, but that prose is so dense with jargon and references as to be opaque and illegible. I mean, what's the difference between a major surgical facility and a major medical facility? I don't fucking know, and I couldn't begin to tell you where to go to find that information.

AncientH

I'm sure if I actually wiped my brain of all knowledge of other systems (possibly involving some kind of dremel), I could go back to GURPS Basic and GURPS Cyberpunk and derive meaning from all of this. But I don't fucking want to. This shit makes me tired, and the Flatline program (which I assume kills other users) is $1,000,000.



Is that too much? I'm pretty sure in most editions of Shadowrun you can find a program that does the job for less than the cost of a new car. And that's a gun where the really cheap guns cost less than the fancier holsters.

Frank

next, add up all percentage changes and apply that total to the multiplied cost.

Leaving aside whether the simulation was good at generating the costs and capabilities Hume wanted from computers in this setting, the simulation is not good in that it hasn't been streamlined into something that could conceivably be used by mortal humans.

This problem was of course already there in GURPS Cyberpunk, but I just don't understand what it is about Cyberspace rules that make designers think it's OK to declare that a stat adjustment on your computer should multiply its cost by seven. That's a ridiculous cursed number that is fucking prime. Obviously no one is going to multiply things by seven because what the actual fuck?

A design is done when there is nothing left to take away. When it has been laid bare to its essentials and is sublime in its simplicity. This book never went a single step in that direction. This isn't even a draft, this is the result of brainstorming session.

AncientH

What this chapter doesn't answer is...why? Why go on the net? What can you do? Some of this is kinda handled by GURPS Cyberpunk, but the whole book and this chapter in particular fails to really provide an incentive for Netrunners as characters in the setting. It's a cyberpunk setting so it has netrunners, but why are they netrunning? What is their purpose? What can they achieve? It delves deep into the technological specs of the Cyberworld, but never stops to wonder what the fuck it's doing that for.

This was a chapter written on autopilot, by people so used to cyberpunk games that they figured everybody else could fill int he blanks. But you can't do that in games all the time. On maps, sure. Personal character motivations, absolutely. But there has to be a reason why somebody plays a Netrunner. They need some grasp of what they can achieve...and we don't get that.

We also don't get the one thing that Shadowrun was pretty great at: Netrunner culture. We don't really get the idea that there are legendary hackers with epic feats. There's no sense of community, nothing to brag about or strive for. Are you data thieves, anarchists, Robin Hoods, explorers of the digital horizon? Do you use your mad skillz to steal money and fuck with people because you can, or are you trying to get one back for Joey?



It cuts to the heart of the game, because as important as it is to have fun playing, you also need a reason to play. It feels like that just isn't there.

Frank

Next: Wrapup.