6 thoughts on “Somewhat off topic but:”

  3. There are two PbtA cyberpunk hacks that are in any stage of completion, AFAIK. There’s The Sprawl, which is straight-up cyberpunk: http://www.ardens.org/2013/08/the-sprawl-v-0-2/

    I’ve not read v0.2, but 0.1 had both bits I liked and bits I didn’t – it reuses the harm clock from AW which I’m not a fan of, I’m not super keen on the way the stats are done, cyberdeck rules feel forced and unneeded, and there’s a move for getting paid for a job which mostly assumes the client is going to be fucking you over.

    There’s also Sixth World, which is a DW-based Shadowrun hack: http://pulpwood.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/sixth-world-dungeon-world-hack.html

    This one I really didn’t like, because the Matrix rules are absolutely horrible – they require the GM to set up a separate dungeon for the decker alone to go delve in, which represents the Matrix nodes he’s hacking. This is a horribly clunky way of doing decking, and embracing the Shadowrun problem instead of using the initiative-less flow of *World games to solve it is a big problem.

    It’s called the Shadowrun problem for a reason! A much better way to do it would be to reduce the act of breaking security on a system to a single, Ritual-like move and then let the decker be the master of information-gathering, IMO. That said, Sixth World is stupidly polished if you like Shadowrun, it’s worth noting.

    Also, more generally, the PbtA community is here, and is much more likely to know of any other cyberpunk *World hacks: https://plus.google.com/communities/107071334810365821574

    As a final thing, it’s also worth noting that it takes very little effort to reskin Apocalypse World into a cyberpunk game. Just switch +weird for +wired. Your Brainer becomes your decker, Open Your Mind involves searching the Matrix and you can figure out an explanation for any other moves which used to use Weird.

  4. My take on this is that Cyberpunk could be totally considered as an apocalypse by Apocalypse World’s standards and it would make sense just to use AW to play it as Alex Norris suggested.

  5. Thank you for all of your suggestions. The Sprawl looks quite good, the other ones I have not read yet.

    But I am not quite sure if my understanding of “cyberpunk” matches my understanding of “apocalypse”. Have to think about it…

    Again, thanks to all of you!

  6. Jens Koprowski: Apocalypse World’s definition of “apocalypse” is an event that breaks the old social order and leads to resource scarcity, a struggle for survival and “weird” shit happening. This absolutely fits a (certain type of) cyberpunk narrative – the event is the dissolution of national government power to be replaced by corporate sovereignty, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor means that for the average cyber*punk* protagonist, they’re going to struggle to make ends meet, they’re usually not going to get what they want in life and they will be fighting for survival. The “weird” in AW is supernatural psychic stuff; in a cyberpunk narrative, it’s the radical societal differences that derive from the existence of an all-pervasive matrix which maybe contains AIs.

    This doesn’t work if you’re talking more post-cyberpunk of course, but for a “classic” (i.e. Gibson and the body of RPG work adapted therefrom) cyberpunk narrative, it totally works. It’s essentially no different from having a post-apocalyptic wasteland where most people live on the barren, irradiated ground but there are floating cities of sky people (or hidden cities of underground people) who have advanced technology and get everything they could possibly want in life but don’t get the freedom to adventure – except in this case the barren wasteland is a derelict urban wasteland outside the corporate arcologies, which is naturally where the protagonists (as punks, i.e. people outside the system – the SINless or chip-less whatever else you want to call them) are going to be operating from.

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