Atenociti's Metro Terminus

I assembled and primed this a while back, but I wasnt satisfied with the poster images supplied with the kit. The downside of speaking Japanese, is that when random text is copied and pasted to make cyberpunk graphics... it bugs me. So today I searched for a some advertising images from the Cyberpunk 2077 video game.

I resized them to the appropriate dimensions in GIMP and printed them on photo paper. The result is a much more appealing bus stop shelter.

De-Mekton-i-fied.

Mekton Zero Kickstarter refund from R. Talsorian Games received and promptly spent on Copplestone minis. Should have done that in the first place.

Mekton Zero - Support Revoked

Lisa Pondsmith sent an email to backers offering a full refund of their Kickstarter pledge yesterday.

I jumped at the chance. Sent my request in as soon as I got home.

Honestly I wan't invested much in this Kickstarter (unlike Dust Tactics) - I greatly reduced my initial pledge during the Kickstarter because it was not managed, what I would call, well.

Here we are over two years latter - I've received nothing of what was supposed to be delivered in December of 2013. No dice. No pdf. No book. Apparently trying to use an outdated edition of Quark has caused them to be unable to deliver on the prime product for two years. Communication has been a fiasco... it was delegated to a small succession of backers, none of whom were consistent, and who had nothing to say from the Pondsmiths. No mention of what was delaying the book for over 18 months. R. Talsorian didn't take control of communication for as long. There have been no updates on the miniatures or other supporting products. I might add that the info on Cyberpunk 2077 has been as nonexistent these two past years; perhaps the idea is not a dark future game, but a dark present one?

I've been an R. Talsorian customer for most of my life. For years I ONLY played Interlock games (there were even Star Trek conversion I made for Interlock and Fuzion). I own every edition of Mekton and Cyberpunk. Every single one. Indeed I am missing only one Cyberpunk 2020 supplement.

I wish them luck - that they can get their act together. But I will never patronize that company again.

Cyberpunk 2077 - Looking excellent.

Two months ago, CD Projekt Red dropped a teaser trailer for Cyberpunk 2077. With moving and life and all I haven't gotten to speaking on it until now.


It's a complete nerd-gasm. Chock full of references to the the pen-and-paper game (Network 54, Alt, Hammerman etc.). I am truly looking forward to this game, and the quality of the trailer leaves me very okay with waiting another two years.Cyberpunk is in good hands.

Speaking of hands... Maximum Mike (Pondsmith) was also featured in a CD Projekt Red video explaining Cyberpunk. It's also fantastic, a must watch.


I've read that Maximum Mike is working on developing a 4th edition of Cyberpunk to coincide with 2077. I truly hope this is true. Cyberpunk 203X (3rd ed.) was something of a misstep, not as bad as most make it out to be, but also not really worthy of succeeding CP2020. I truly hope that 4th edition is in the pipe, and that it is as excellent as 2077 promises to be.

Login Tabletalk RPG Series: Gundam Senki

Heh heh. So this is a Japanese RPG book, called a TRPG for 'tabletalk', as 'RPG' in Japanese is used almost exclusively for the videogame type. 

This here is a special one. This is the official MS Gundam RPG, using R. Talsorian Games Mekton Z rules. RTG, for those that don't know, was the company behind Cyberpunk 2020, my very favorite RPG. Mekton Z (pronounced 'zeta'), and thus Gundam Senki here, use the same system, Interlok.

Very cool. Not sure I'd have gotten it new, listed at ¥4800 in 1999) but my copy ran less than a quarter of that - and it still has the hex maps and fold-up counters!
 
So, the book is in Japanese of course, and rather difficult language (political, military, and gaming terms abound), but I now have official write-ups of the characters and mecha from the year one war! See, there's Amuro!

The book itself is about B4 sized and a very Japanese dust-jacketed softback. 336 pages, 123 pages of setting, 50 of rules, and the balance of NPC and mecha stats!

Kriegstagebuch 001: Sunday Night Firefight

One of the really appealing aspects of Cyberpunk 2020 is highly visual nature of combat. To be sure combat is gritty and dangerous - but also very descriptive. With two of my players unavailable last night, I ran the other two through a couple CP2020 combats. We whipped up characters using the Friday Night Firefight quick generation rules from the 2013 boxed set, and armed and armored them using the quick and dirty expendables chart in the 2020 core book.

PCs:
Chris - armed with a HK MP2013 10mm submachine gun and wearing a heavy armored jacket.
Jon - armed with a Sternmeyer Type 35 11mm heavy handgun and also wearing a heavy armored jacket.

NPC:
Fred - armed with an FN-RAL 7.62mm battle rifle and wearing medium armored jacket.

The set up was random. Fred was positioned on the east sidewalk of a city avenue, about two storefronts north of the corner with the cross street. Chris and Jon are 20m south-west, they are crossing the cross street on the other side of the avenue, about 4m from the north-west curb. Neither group is in cover when initiative is called.

Fred gets the drop and emptied the RAL's 30rd magazine at the two, at a range of 20m. Nine rounds find targets, five on Jon and four on Chris. The first round is absorbed by Jon's jacket, but the next round causes a serious wound to Jon's unarmored right leg. The following three rounds all compromise the jacket's kevlar weave and drill into Jon's torso. Jon falls to the pavement stunned with potentially mortal wounds. Chris is hit in the left leg, right arm, and twice in the torso. The leg wound is minor. The hit to the right arm penetrates the jackets kevlar layers but inflicts minor damage. The two torso hits are more serious - both penetrate and inflict serious founds. Despite these critical wounds, Chris is able to return fire with a long burst from the HK. Fred is still in the open and takes eight 10mm slugs. The first round hits Fred right in the noggin - his skull ruptures like a ripe watermelon - instantly fatal. The next round binds up in the armor over Fred's torso, the third strikes the femoral in his left thigh, followed by a round that traumatically amputates the leg above the knee. Two more rounds drill into the left leg, followed by one to the right and a final hit to the bloody stump of the left thigh.

3.2 seconds had elapsed.

Originally I'd planned to have two gunmen, but seeing the extreme havoc that the battle rifle caused I settled on one. Barney did show up for a later bar fight. Fred was taken right out and Barney, though unable to cause any significant damage to either Chris or Jon, was able to absorb a great many hits before being KO'd. I think we went about 6 rounds in the hand-to-hand... that's a bit less than 20 seconds.

Chris seemed to enjoy the system - Jon not as much. Me - I loved it - it's been years since I ran Interlock and I forgot how detailed and deadly it was. Skill sets need to be reigned in or it will be a bloody meat parade. Both shooters hit at rather high hit ratios - Fred with 30% and Chris with 25%.  Both were world class shooters (top 10%) and I was not using the 2013 rule for coolness under fire.  With some reigning in of 9 and 10 level skills, supplanting a 2d6 roll for the 1d10, and the coolness under fire rules (essentially a COOL save modified by the number of firefights you've been in) - hit ratios should drop to a more reasonable 15-25% or so.

Finished: Copplestone Scavengers & Partisan

In May I finally got some Woodland Scenics Burnt Grass flock to finish the bases of my Copplestone Castings scavengers. They actually come from three packs; Two are Sewer Scavengers (FW2), two are Scavenger Heroes (FW31) and the last is from the Partisan Fighters (FW40) pack.  I've had these minis for years - part of a large order I placed in 2004 while living in Japan.  They sat a round for quite a while, were based on washers then MDF rounds, then washers again...  Finally I decided to paint them at our weekly paint night, without an actual plan.

I don't paint particularly well, occasionally I manage to pull off something cool, but mostly I block paint and use Army Painter Quickshade.  This is mostly from a lack of patience and that if I don't do it this way I'll be repainting them forever.

My basic plan is to paint minis into 10 man units/gangs, a nice round number that fits well into VHS box mini cases.  Four of the scavengers here will be part of the same gang, noted by the red articles on all of them - I was inspired by a western gang painted with the same idea in Warhammer Historical Old West.  The tall, man-ish lady will be part of another gang noted by the blue.  Basically I ended up painting Crips and Bloods/TAP Boyz. - though that certainly wasn't planned.

The black chap was towards the end of the night and is based on a friend of mine.  You can see that my accuracy had suffered a bit from fatigue. Still on the table he looks fine and I don't think I'll repaint - though I might use a black Sharpie to nick that red fleck on his dreads.

Of all I think I am most impressed with the Crown Royal bag on the belt of the dude with the SMG.  Sitting around painting with a bunch of old-skool gamers, that part of the sculpt just screamed "Crown Royal dicebag!"  I am rather pleased how the stitching came out.

I got these guys painted in pretty much one night, a couple touch ups and the quickshade applied later in the week.  It was about there that they languished as I was without any dull coat.  Once I got around to picking that up I needed flock... thus the weeks added up.  Finally (a couple weeks later) they stood finished.

These are the first minis I'd completely finished this year, though I have a about seven western minis that were painted and quickshaded before these guys (awaiting dull coat and finished bases).  These guys have already appeared in a Daring Tales of the Sprawl game, and should work well in post apocalyptic, dirty/hard sci-fi and even modern settings. Last week an order from EM4 of ex-Grenadier Future Wars minis arrived from the UK - once my bases arrive from Litko I'll try to get them painted up to oppose these guys in Combat Zone and Cyberpunk/DTotS RPGs.

Arasaka Corporation Ltd.

 

The Arasaka Corporation is the primary antagonist of R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk RPG.  I love this game. It was pretty much all I played in junior and senior high school.  I've been continually amazed at how prophetic both Cyberpunk and Robocop have been over the last twenty years. I noticed when the Pittsburgh Police started driving Ford Tauruses. The rise of the PMC and Blackwater. The Citizen's United verdict greatly increasing the rights and powers of corporations, and the financial disaster precipitated by virtually unchecked corporate greed.  A decade of warfare leaving millions dead, and thousands of veterans disabled; The rise of advanced prosthetic technology, biofuels, and near universal computing access.  We live in the dark future.

Of course the game (written in 1988 and set between 2013-20) has had some misses as well. Fax machines are not the epitome of digital publishing technology. Hacking is still more Wargames than Tron. And true cybernetic prosthesis are awaiting the nerve-circuit connection.

This has left me with some choices in running Cyberpunk.  I don't want to run it as written - it's too retro.  Revamping the timeline and pushing the action into the 2050s or beyond is a possibility that, I think, engenders a more sci-fi mise-en-scène bordering into transhumanism. The option I'm left with is an adapted modern setting... merely a couple years in the future. The world is as it is now, a bit darker, with more cyberware (no full 'borgs, cyberpsychosis is still being identified), and technology and equipment that we see everyday - perhaps a more than a little inspired by Millennium's End. I think of this as the Robocop version of Cyberpunk.

The more I think of this the more appropriate it sounds. The first edition of the game was set in 2013 - next year!  A low tech campaign requires very little modification to adapt it to the modern day.  My favorite miniatures (Copplestones and EM4) have a rather modern look, and mix well with my fleet of modern vehicles. Such a setting requires less preparation for a adult rather than teenage players - who have less time to read background. It's now, but with robotic limb replacements.

So I guess I have some work to do... What stays the same, what changes, what needs to be added, and what dropped? Do we play with Interlock, or with Savage Worlds powered Daring Tales of the Sprawl or Ghost Protocol rules?

Cyberpunk NOW

R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2020 was a watershed game for me.
At a comic book convention in 1991, I picked up a bootleg of Akira and Appleseed. This quickly lead to Cyberpunk SWAT gaming – powered by the only modern rules we had – Palladium. We’d been playing Palladium for a while in a Macross game (Robotech with all the Macek inspired crap stripped back out) and I grabbed Ninja’s & Superspies to use as a basis. Well, as anyone who’s ever played a Palladium game can tell you – the rules suck.  It embodies the worst of power gaming and is inconsistent.  Following an adventure where I’d emptied a 30rd mag from my M16 into a terrorist’s chest at close range, and a 30mm grenade… leaving the man wounded but still in the fight – we decided to look elsewhere.
Relating the adventure to some fellow (sadder and older) geeks, we were turned on to Cyberpunk 2020. I ordered a copy immediately.  It was the only thing I played for about 5 years and then it shared time with Star Trek gaming.
Eventually I fell out of Cyberpunk gaming… the late 90′s made a dystopian future seem improbable. Crime was down, economy was good.
Suffice it to say that the last decade has done much to validate the Cyberpunk premise.
And I have returned to Cyberpunk.  Last month we began a Cyberpunk game, two characters were generated using Interlock, but with an influx of players we switched to Savage Worlds in order to get down to playing.  The game is pretty much ad hoc and I’m still figuring out what exactly to do with it.  Do I stick with Savage Worlds, or do I Interlock up the new players and run Cyberpunk rules.  Very different play styles, CP is extremely deadly and a bit crunchy. Savage Worlds is rules light and cinematic.  Do I update the setting, the timeline? Cyberpunk play was set between 2013-2020. The way I see it I have three choices:

1. Play the Cyberpunk Setting as written – RetroDark Future
2. Advance the timeline adapt the tech (no faxes) to reflect modern cyberpunk a’la the new Total Recall, Red Faction, and Deus Ex.
3. Play modern cyberpunk, the Dark Future is now (or tomorrow) basically a darker version of today with emergent cybernetics (the Robocop option).

Of these three I’m drawn to the second two. I have lots of modern vehicles and minis, and many older cyberpunk minis (Copplestones, EM4 et cetera) lend themselves more to the Robocop style of cyberpunk than the universe of Infinity.  This does mean a bit of a drawdown in tech – basic cybernetics – full borgs very , very, very rare. Netrunning becomes more like hacking, the game ends up being Millennium’s End with cybertech like that in I Robot.  If I want to preserve those two aspects of the tech I need to advance the timeline and end up with a more sci-fi type universe  (Lockout, Total Recall, and Infinity).
If I go the Robocop option I can keep Saburo Arasaka… hmmm… I think that’s the ticket.