Category: cyberpunk

  • Date: 3rd September, 2177 Weather: Rainy Mood: Frustrated Outfit: right now I’m in a Gun Teddy crop top with ice packs on my belly, but yesterday was a job interview so I went conservative, pastel colours and a pleated a-line, nothing too fancy because I didn’t want to look arrogant, which is just as well…

  • 1st September, 2177. Weather: rainy. Outfit: today I punk styled, because I was shopping for some bullet belts when the call came in. Misfits t-shirt, tartan mini, black tights and sensible boots, pony tail, no heavy guns. My e-bags were patterned to “lacrima is my drug,” and that cheerleader squad Nirvana Crush from the computer…

  • The Druid is on the run and out of work, but in the towering ocean megacity of New Horizon, life without money gets real dangerous real fast. Even the desperate people who flee to the lowest deck to hide amongst the sewage and the storm swells still need money to smooth their way through the…

  • I don’t know what you’re doing here When there’s murder on the street I appreciate your concern But don’t waste your time on me I’m ashes on the water now Somewhere far away Dedicated Retribution Unit 471 (Involuntarily Demobilized), known colloquially as the Druid, is my character for an upcoming cyberpunk campaign. The Druid (who…

  • Shadowrun uses a skill check system based on dice pools and opposed checks. The basic mechanism for opposed checks is quite simple: each party constructs a pool of d6s based on their combined attribute and skill score, and success occurs on a 5 or 6. The person who rolls more successes wins, and the number…

  • On Sunday I played in a short Shadowrun (5th Edition) adventure, which is likely to become a campaign. I think Shadowrun is a brilliant idea, and I can’t play it without playing some kind of magic-user: the idea of playing a wizard or a shaman skipping through the shadows of a corporate dystopia is too…

  • Today we heard word of a scandal overtaking the modern Tokyo phenomenon of AKB48. Their 14th most popular member, Minegishi Minami, was caught by a journalist leaving the house of a “boyfriend,” a 19 year old member of some random boy band (compared to AKB48, the boy band in question is largely irrelevant). The pictures…

  • Shadowrun is suited to campaign settings rife with economic corruption, the desperate and abandoned poor, powerful corporations who control the social fabric, shady underworld groups and street gangs in conflict. Sounds rather like a vision of Greece after the default, if you were to chuck in a bit of magic. So let’s do that! And…

  • This is an excellent interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s page-turner of the same name. For my sins, I read the novel and enjoyed it despite its sometimes crappy writing, because the story is compelling and the characters are fun. Both the main male character, Michael Blomquist, and the eponymous female lead Lisbeth Salander are excellent depictions…

  • This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The…