Progress and process
over 6 years ago – Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 10:24:48 PM

Happy Holidays! Whatever you get up to this month, I hope it's good. I live in Sydney, so personally I'm going to be sitting around on a hot summer day while bushfire smoke paints the sky red. If you enjoy hellscapes and would like to do a trade, let me know.

In the meantime, work continues. I haven't talked about what I've been up to much lately, so this time I'm going to explain my writing process a little.

What I'm Doing

Right now, I'm doing locations. The book will cover about half of the station's 15 Wards, and the rest will be left vague for the GM to fill in. Each one comes with its own plot hooks, Districts, side characters, and so on.

The art above depicts part of the Marukyu Ward. Marukyu is a major commercial and business Ward, and it's well-known for Earth imports. It has a lot of stores selling Earth media, expat bars, tourist traps, business hotels, and so on. Criminals flock to the place to prey on newcomers. Besides that, it's also a major center for youth culture.

I set it up this way to cover two types of stories I wanted groups to explore. It's a starting place for PCs who only just arrived on Grand Cross, and players new to the setting. Also, one of the big conflicts in Grand Cross is between the people born/raised in orbit and the older folks who run the station, and this is a good way to illustrate that.

That said, Marukyu is also loosely based on Shibuya, because half this game's inspirations are anime and I need to reference them somewhere. That creates a Problem, though.

A lot of cyberpunk works use Asian culture (Japan especially) as an aesthetic, with neon kanji signs and gratuitous Japanese on the cover and other retrofuture callbacks to the age of Blade Runner and Neuromancer, where Japanese dominance was a shorthand for a mysterious dystopian future. That gets pretty weird after the fiftieth time or so. Also, I literally wrote "cyberpunk is not just an aesthetic" on the KS page.

Luckily, this is what we have consultants for. One of the people helping me with this is Chiaki Hirai, an editor at Anime Feminist. I asked her for advice, and she sent me a whole white paper about the subject. (This and other consultant notes will be included in the behind-the-scenes PDF, by the way.) Much like the pages of O'Neill Cylinder technical specs are at least partly based on science, I've tried to do my research here.

One thing that helps is that Grand Cross wasn't really designed with enclaves, and Marukyu isn't meant to be a Japantown. Its central District is based on Shibuya, but each Ward has 20+ Districts and there's plenty of room for different places and characters in there. I'm not writing about all of them (that's a lot of work and again, I'm leaving things open for GMs), but Marukyu should have more than enough depth.

(It also makes it easier to get away with sneaking the entirety of Die Hard into the game later. Coworkers don't read this.)

Oh, and one more thing: see the building on the left in that pic? That is an indoor park. It's basically a public indoor space with loads of seating and power sockets, where locals can relax and hang out with their friends. Grand Cross has a few places like these, usually connected to public transport. (It works out especially well in Grand Cross because space is at a premium on the station, and you can't stack outdoor parks in layers.) Long story short, I saw some tweets about how cool more public indoor spaces would be and I decided it sounded rad. That is the other part of my process: throwing in a bunch of stuff that sounds cool and seeing what sticks.

So, that's some of my writing process. I hope that was interesting! I'm going to start posting WIP drafts of the setting soon, and Marukyu should be the first location I post, so look forward to that. In the meantime, I'm still open to District name suggestions if you got 'em.

I'll be back after the holidays with more updates. See you soon!

PAX Aus panel recording
over 6 years ago – Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 04:38:23 PM

Hey there! I hope you had a good Halloween. (If you didn't, here's two games I made about Bigfoot and Mothman that will hopefully help.)

So, last month I went to PAX Australia to do a panel about cyberpunk TTRPGs. It wasn't streamed, but we did manage to record it with a laptop and some phones, which is a downgrade in quality but more cyberpunk if you think about it. Check it out:

Besides myself the panelists are Dana Cameron, Dr Hamish Cameron, Steve Dee, Adrian Thoen, and Melody Watson, who are all pro Twitter follows if you like Australians and tabletop.

Here are the slides I made too, if you're curious:

Enjoy! That's all for now. Later this month I'll come back with an update on how the game's going, so see you soon!

Some Music + Audience Participation
over 6 years ago – Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 11:37:39 PM

Hey! The next update might a little late due to that PAX trip I mentioned, so I thought I'd make a small post to tide you over.

Music

neonshudder is working on music! By the time the game drops, we'll have an OST of tunes that GMs can use as background music. As a preview, here's a demo of one of the songs:

For maximum effect, picture one of these as the track plays:

• A tense pursuit through Grand Cross at night, illuminated by flickering street neon and moonlight filtering in through the window panels;
• Me doing more reading and realising that a bunch of cyberpunk TTRPGs are just Neuromancer. Shadowrun is Neuromancer with elves! Cyberpunk 2020 is Neuromancer without elves! How deep does this go 

Seriously though:

Audience Participation

I like naming things. (I'm one of Those People who spends hours on the "enter your name" parts of video games.) Grand Cross needs a lot of them, and while I'm posting this update to tide you over I thought I'd pick your brains.

I'm trying to come up with cool names for parts of the station. Grand Cross is divided into 15 city-sized Wards (similar to Tokyo's special wards), which are subdivided into 20+ Districts (which can be the size of towns or just a village). I'm intentionally leaving some Wards and a lot of Districts unnamed to let GMs fill them in, but I've still got a lot of blanks to fill in.

Ideally, I'd have a range of names in many languages, and a lot of them would be either:

a) Scientists, authors, leaders, and other people who might be considered important to the station and its people, or

b) Cyberpunk/anime references. (I'm also one of Those People.)

If you have any suggestions, shoot them my way! Otherwise I am going to sit here filling my books with bookmarks and opening Wikipedia tabs until I am fused to my chair. I'll probably do that anyway, but maybe I won't need as many tabs.

(Incidentally, Grand Cross is split into three "ground" panels; I'm thinking about naming them Adams, Tezuka, and (von) Harbou. Am I mentioning this to see what others would suggest, or to start an argument about my choices? Yes.)

That's all for now. If you're not going to PAX Australia, I'll see you after!

Thief preview and PAX Aus plans, sponsored by Tetsuo Technologies
over 6 years ago – Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 04:20:05 PM

Hey there! First up, if you're going to PAX Australia and you like cyberpunk, do I have news for you. (If not, skip to the next header for a rules preview.)

PAX Aus Plans

So, I'll be at PAX Aus! Even better, I'll be doing a panel. If you're going, check out Nerdrunner: Cyberpunk In Tabletop on Sunday to listen to me and some fellow Aussie devs talk about cyberpunk RPGs.

You can also find me at the PAX Collaboratory, a space for tabletop devs to playtest work-in-progress games, on Friday/Saturday afternoon. I wasn't sure if Hard Wired Island fit their criteria, so I'll be playtesting a smaller project I've been collabing with Erika Chappell (@open_sketchbook) on since May last year, but it's a decent excuse to come say hi.

Rules Preview: The Thief

Freyja's working on the mechanics! The current focus is Occupations, which the KS preview didn't cover.

Occupations are our class system. They define what your characters do during play: Hackers hack things, Fixers use their skills and contacts to solve problems, Influencers are social and extremely online, etc. Each one has 15 Talents to choose from (these were called Abilities in the preview packet, but so are stats, so we changed it). PCs get +1 Specialty, +1 Generic Specialty, and +1 Talent every level. You can mix and match Occupations, but you get some extra stuff from the one you choose first.

Freyja has written up one of the Occupations - the Thief, who solves problems with trickery and subterfuge. (Not literally a thief, unless you want them to be.) If you'd like a preview of  how Occupations will look, you can find the Thief preview on Hard Wired Island's itch.io page.

Some Light Reading

As for me, I'm technically taking a break. Before I get into the meat of the setting, I decided to do some research and revision. I dug out some cyberpunk books/anime I had lying around, augmented them with some titles from a liquidated bookshop, and hunted down a few others (mostly second-hand) online:

I live near a library and I got a bunch of other works in digital form, so imagine there are more books offscreen. A few special mentions:

• The lower left book is The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology, which is from 1981. I figured it would help me nail the retrofuture "2020 as imagined by 1990s scifi" look. I love it.
•  Soonish is a book about emerging technologies. It's well-researched, interesting, and funny. I got it for the space chapters but every chapter is fantastic.
• Alright, I'll admit the image isn't totally related. The Three-Body Problem series is just a sci-fi series I really wanted to read, and I was in the bookstore and it was there, so I went for it. That one is for me. Everything else is 100% cyberpunk, and again, I am not accepting criticism.

Some Other Things

I've contacted everyone from the writer call. I got a ton of cool location pitches that would work well as short pieces, so I ended up commissioning more, smaller pieces than expected. I think it'll come out great in the final text, though. It'll be a few months before that's all done (though what I've seen so far has been fantastic), so I'll talk about this more in a few more updates.

Art's going well too! Space fans will be pleased to know that we're not only getting proper art of the O'Neill Cylinder, but we're revamping the design from the preview. There were a few inaccuracies. The person responsible would be fired, but that person is me, so I decided to let myself off with a warning this time.

This update's getting a little long, so I'll talk about it more in a future update. For now, check out this sweet android:

Open Call responses going out!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 12:17:08 AM

Hey there! First up, podcast updates:

• Dice Fiends posted the finale to their Hard Wired Island series!
• and The Talent Agency posted their finale too!

And once you're done checking those out:

Open Call Update

So, last month we started going through the responses to our writer call. There were a lot. 169 submissions, many of which contained 2-20 pitches, with a combined word count greater than some novels on my shelf. We finally finished today!

(Also, several pitches included speculative work - not a pitch, but actual drafts of Hard Wired Island content. I considered them anyway, but please don't send people your work unless they're paying you for it! Also be wary of companies that ask for spec work, especially if their name rhymes with Catalyst Game Labs.)

It wasn't an easy process - most of those submissions were great, but our budget couldn't cover all of them, so with great reluctance I've had to yeet a lot of good content into space. If your pitch is unsuccessful, please don't take it as criticism of your writing. (This is especially true if your pitch was about disability, queer characters, cybernetics, or one of the other topics I got a ton of pitches on.)

Replies to unsuccessful pitches will mostly be form letters, because individually responding to every pitch would take too long. If you don't get a response today and it's not in your spam folder, either you gave me a bad email or I'll be contacting you in the next couple days! If you have questions, feel free to post a comment or (if you'd rather ask in private) email hardwiredisland @ gmail.

I'll be back with more updates once I get all of that sorted. See you soon!