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Sample File Published by Tin Star Games Sample file Published by Tin Star Games. Writing: Jake Nelson Development and Editing: Steve Dee Layout, Design, Cover and Incidental Illustration: Matt Roberts Original Illustrations: Kristopher Neal McClanahan © 2021 Tin Star Games First published 2021 by Tin Star Games. Find more exciting Tin Star Games at tinstargames.com Sample file “Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer The streets blaze with neon, the people gleam with chrome, the rain stings with acid. It’s a brave new world, omae, where meatspace and cyberspace, man and machine collide… and yet crime is the same as ever. Welcome to cyberpunk, a dystopian vision of the future that, these days, seems closer than ever to becoming our reality. Cyberpunk takes a lot of cues from the noir genre: the mean, rain- slicked streets are just as mean and rain-slicked even when filled with bright neon, holograms, and augmented reality pop-ups. To the noir tone, it adds transhumanism – the augmentation of the human body with technology, such as cybernetic implants – as well as themes of capitalism run amok and the paradoxical fear that technology is eating our lives; as such, ecological collapse tends to be another feature. As a note, cyberpunk often tends to be rife with Orientalism, due to a pervading fear at its genesis that Japan was going to “take over theSample world” with its culture and technology (these days,file mainland China is the main boogeyman; meet the new boss, just as racist as the old boss). Think twice before you fall back on the well- worn trope of the evil Asian megacorp, especially since Western megacorps seem to have more than enough evil to go around. Not much changes in this File in terms of rules. Cyberpunk detective stories run very much like modern cop shows. It’s the nature of the cast, their abilities and the type of clues that give it the different feel. Sample file “Ithinkworkingwithanofficerwithpersonalissuesisanadded challenge, but adapting to human unpredictability is one of my features.” – Connor, Detroit: Become Human Cyberpunk protagonists classically tend to be dwellers at the fringes of society: the downtrodden, the outcasts, the detritus of the digital age, scraping out a living in the shadows of the megacorporations and their flunkies. This usually – but not always – means they are not cops, and often have an adversarial relationship with law enforcement; for their part, police forces in cyberpunk are usually either hopelessly corrupt, nothing but private security forces for corporate interests, or both. That failure is often why so many freelancers are in play. So, if they’re not cops, what are our Wild Card and Straight Shooter? They could be a lot of things: private detectives, freelancers on the legal grey fringe of society, small-time crooks patrolling their neighbourhood or professional thieves (aka runners of the net and the shadows). They could be hired for the same job – like risk- taking hacker Case (Wild Card) and professional razorgirl Molly Millions (Straight Shooter) in Neuromancer – or even unlikely partners blown together by the whims of fate who need to escape theSample predicament they’ve found themselves in, like filemercenary V (Straight Shooter) and digital rockerboy ghost Johnny Silverhand (Wild Card) in Cyberpunk 2077. The Superior – unless the Partners are, in fact, cops – is not usually someone with a position of actual formal authority over them. Instead, it’s more likely that they’ve hired the Partners for a freelance job, and what’s more, they usually have something to hide or a cross to double. Armitage from Neuromancer is a classic Superior in this mould, as is the endless parade of Messrs Johnson that a Shadowrun RPG party faces in its line of work. (The Superior as the client is also how things go in Partners: The Noir File, and it makes excellent companion reading). Superiors who actually are the formal superior to a pair of cops include Almost Human’s Captain Sandra Maldonado and Captain Tanaka in Altered Carbon. Hackers make excellent Oddballs, as they tend to be absorbed in cyberspace to the exclusion of real-world social graces – see McCoy Pauley from Neuromancer, Alec Sadler in Continuum, or Mr Universe, complete with fake girlfriend, in Serenity. Often the oddness is a perfect way to show off the setting, so they might be a hologram AI like Poe in Altered Carbon or the decidedly inhuman Jones in Johnny Mnemonic. Another brand of cyberpunk Oddball is the fixer: an information broker, someone who arranges jobs, fences goods, and so on; Neuromancer again supplies us with a classic Oddball fixer in The Finn. Cyberpunk is about street economy: nobody can do anything alone, so deals are made and the Oddball stands in to provide and give a face to the resources the main characters lack. Sometimes they also show off the seedy side of the setting too, so they might be a sex worker like Zhora in Blade Runner, an addict, a victim of the corporations or the state, a criminal, or a wanderer like The Drummer in Subway. They might reflect the class divide by being on the high end: Thomas Hass in the Android setting is an example, so is Marlon Shakespeare in Judge Dredd. Touchstones rarely fare well in cyberpunk, given the heavy noir influence.Sample They often end up dead or imperiled Neuromancer’s( file Linda Lee and Altered Carbon’s Quellcrist Falconer), but they serve as a driving force, a motivation to push forward – to get out of this city, to pay back your sister’s debts, to get your boyfriend off the new designer drug that’s eating him alive. Alice .
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