Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Finder’s Archives.
Today, I return to an old favorite of mine: Genres. I’ve previously covered both science fiction and horror in RPGs, but this time around, I think it’s time to turn my gaze upon Cyberpunk – with the looming release of Cyberpunk 2077 and things like Altered Carbon (which is getting its very own RPG too), I think we’ll see more of this genre in the future. So, let us get into it.
Cyberpunk
I recently saw a postulate, that without Star Wars, there would be no Cyberpunk. And I think that is true in the grand scheme of things (basically Star Wars blew all expectations for Science Fiction and allowed all the sub-genres to grow). The first author is generally considered to be William Gibson, and his book Neuromancer, which released in 1984 – a few years after Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back – and the year after Return of the Jedi.
Neuromancer was in many ways a counter-response to Star Wars, and all the books and films that followed it, and which were trying to tap into that success. Where space opera is fantastic, cyberpunk is gritty. Where space opera reaches into mythology and tells of grand vistas, cyberpunk takes you into the realism of today – all the nasty little things we do not want to see – and takes you into the trenches of humanity. All the paranoia that we show about things like technology tends to come true in cyberpunk – humans cannot be trusted, we destroy our own planet, and we live in a “big brother” – style society. Many would say that our current situations are “the darkest timeline,” and that – more than anything else – pretty much defines cyberpunk. It is everything that can go wrong – has gone wrong – though generally without going into apocalyptic war. It is the breakdown of society that we sometimes notice around us; capitalism or socialism (depending on the type of Cyberpunk) runs rampant without check. And it is the inevitable struggle of a single person or group against the unending resources of “The Man” or simply the ennui of the people around them.
And it all seems to originate from William Gibson and the authors around him. (I am not going to take anything away from them, but Gibson is probably the best known).
In gaming!
In gaming however, there is another front where this all started. Cyberpunk (later on Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red, which takes place in 2045) – the grandfather of Cyberpunk RPGs – even if it’s not necessarily the oldest, it is the one that stands heads and shoulders above the others of its time. It has sometimes lost this post to Shadowrun as the most well-known of the Cyberpunk roleplaying games, but there is a reason that this game bears the name of the genre.
The timeline of the various versions of the game diverted from our timeline in 1990, and it has been ravaged by capitalism, the fall of the various superpowers and governments, and the rise of the Megacorporations. The Middle East has seen the ravages of a nuclear war, cybernetics are all around you and corruption is ever present: You are not safe if you do not have resources. It is as simple as that.
Within that context you are trying to live, trying to survive – struggling and fighting – inevitably to fail or become part of the system. But that is the intrigue of the genre – you know you’re ultimately doomed to fail, but there’s just that tiny sliver of a chance that you can advance or make a difference, and that…That is enough to dive into the worlds of Cyberpunk.
So, do you have what it takes, choomba? (Or since more people will know the expression for “choomba” in Shadowrun: “So, do you have what it takes chummer?”)
Kim Frandsen
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