Brazing Nether history #2: RPG pt. 1

Tabletop RPGs

In my youth I had played fantasy tabletop RPGs, primarily the editions 2 to 4 of The Dark Eye. We always wanted to move to AD&D or D&D 3.5, but despite preparing everything it somehow never happened before our group fell apart as people were moving away for work and starting families.

Playing a Cyberpunk 2020 Adventure?

I've always had this idea of getting the old crew back together, but of course we had all evolved. So trying out something different seemed like a good idea. I knew that Cyberpunk 2077 was based on a tabletop RPG, and decided to go looking for the game and some sourcebooks.

While I think that Mike Pondsmith did a great job with Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020, especially if you consider the time of creation (1988 and 1990 respectively). I particularly like how he formed a credible alternative timeline where the world evolved differently from ours from the 1980s onward. Ideas like the "lifepath" mechanic are fantastic, too. However there are of course also some design decisions that I don't necessarily agree with and thus things I'd do differently. Eventually I became convinced that even making some adjustments, this wouldn't be the right kind of RPG for us, and I gave up on the idea. The material had been a fun read, though.

Writing Cyberpunk?

Cyberpunk (the computer game and the tabletop RPG) have had a lasting effect on me, though. Of course I had known that there was a literature genre called Cyberpunk, but up to that point I had deliberately ignored it. Why? Because I hated (and still hate) it when people who don't understand the first thing about tech are talking "cyber this", "cyber that". That had basically ruined the name for me so thoroughly, that I had avoided the whole genre. Thanks to the game, though, not only had the spell been broken, but I had also understood just how great this genre is for social commentary! That was extremely interesting.

I've been a writing fiction literally since I was taught to write in first grade. My first story was about the adventures of two dwarves in the wood and I've stuck to mostly fantasy and some sci-fi for a long time. While I'm not going to bore or annoy you with my political creed, let's just say that I care about society - including the people who are not exactly wealthy. So I decided to leave orcs, elves and unicorns behind and write some Cyberpunk!

The short story that I wanted to write was a complete failure. Sort of. Well, in fact I never actually wrote it. In case you're not familiar with how writing fiction works, let me just note that you usually don't just start writing. There's preparation to be done. Things like plotting, world-building, researching things, etc. I had started with the world-building and that proved to be a "mistake". While I had meant to create a rough frame as a backdrop for my story, this work got me hooked so much that I spent my nights on this project for weeks on end. I enjoyed crafting this world, its history, its factions, political system, important figures, fights and slang so much... When I was finally done with a first draft, I realized that this was too much of everything.

My Own RPG V1 ("Neon Abyss")

There was no way I could hope to use half of that even in a whole series of short stories! It had been a lot of fun to craft this world, so that shouldn't be too much a problem, right? Still it felt wrong to let so much of it simply go to waste. But if I wasn't going to, say, design my own RPG... Hey, wait a minute! Uhh, no. Just _no_. I was definitely not _that_ bonkers! Or was I? Ah, why the heck not?! I mean, it could be fun! And if I were to bring my own RPG to the table (pun intended), that would massively increase the chance of us actually sitting down together again. Nah, I was a hobbyist writer, not a hobbyist game designer. And this was far too big a project compared to a short story or two. Yet it was so damn tempting! I could also just start doing it and quit anytime, right?

I didn't quit. The process of designing a game was hard work, I'm not going to claim otherwise. But it was quite enjoyable as well. Before too long, I had the first 50 pages or so typeset in LaTeX and thought about telling a first friend about what I was doing. Browsing the TOC before sending him the PDF file, I found that I had once again overdone things slightly. For example the system was designed to allow for 40 (fourty!) character classes and the rules where not just a bit on the complex side... About this time I also found out that the working title that I had been using had already been taken (there's a weird computer game that uses this name). So after a couple of months of work I felt I was at the point where I needed to start what would become the first major revision of what I had done so far.

When starting with my Cyberpunk world, I of course wanted it to feel distinct (within the boundaries of the genre). So I made a some deliberate design choices:

The first was a simple matter. Cyberpunk is about big cities, but I wanted to avoid the "obvious" ones (London, Berlin, ect.). As hinted above, a considerable part of the work that authors do is research, so I picked something that interested me. I don't speak it but I've always liked the Dutch language for some reason. And while the Netherlands are even a neighboring country for me (I'm German), I didn't know terribly much about it, so that was an excellent candidate. Following the idea of deliberately ignoring the too obvious choices, I decided to not base it in Amsterdam or Den Hague. But where else? Rotterdam came to mind, then Groningen. Hey, the latter starts with a "G" which the Dutch pronounce in a pretty unique (AFAIK) way. Let's pick that! At that point I didn't even know exactly where it's located ("it's somewhere in the north, I think"). So I did a little bit of reading. University city, lots of canals, a history of resistance - sounded just right! Groningen it was.

Interestingly my vision clashed with Pondsmith's at the very foundational level. One of the design choices for his Cyberpunk RPG was "style over substance" and while that worked *perfectly* to evoke the picture of a Cyberpunk future in the late 1980s, I think that we... pretty much have arrived right there. (Western) society is rotting, we live in a world of imposers and crazy narcicissists. So that trope is a bit boring and a fresh take on it might be way more interesting. I wanted to have a framework to enable adventures that thrive on deep storytelling, on philosophical questions and exploring the human condition. That's why I'd prefer players to stick with their characters for some time and developing a connection. Those player characters would more often than not be misfits of society who have a higher level of awareness than the average citizen. Oh, and I didn't want to drown the stories simply in "cool tech", so I aimed for a little more grounded feel. Also early on I decided to take away the ubiquity of mobile devices that plagues our time - these things are plot killers! That had lead to a world that was also diverging from ours in the 1980s, but unlike in Pondsmith's world, the Soviet Union didn't survive.

Most of my friends and I have always been metalheads. So when thinking about something visually distinct and special, I came up with the '90s Black Metal movement. According to Pondsmith, the dominating music in Cyberpunk was "Chrome Rock", a form of Heavy Metal. For Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR had watered that down a little, having the iconic band "Samurai" essentially be Punk Rock rather than Metal. I understand why they did this (that kind of music is more common and thus more "accessible" for most players than Metal), but I wanted to go the whole hog. And not only that, I wanted to push boundaries (that's what Cyberpunk does, right?). And the brutality of both the music and certain circles (remember murders and church burnings in '90s Norway?) seemed like an excellent fit. Neon lights being a staple of the Cyberpunk genre, in combination I had arrived at a title of "Neon Abyss: Groningen" and the subtitle "Chrome & Corpse Paint". At that point, I stated that "The game's aesthetics are thus characterized by the stark contrast between the polished chrome of the technological age reflecting neon advertisements and the dark, occult imagery of archaic forces, which strongly underscores the dichotomy of human nature."

RPG V2 ("Neon Nether")

The working title was already taken and my (not so) little game was suffering from complexity issues. So I needed to find a solution to both. Changing the name wasn't easy, and I thought about it for days, playing through various ideas. "Abyss" was about perfect, what else would convey a similar feeling? I didn't like most things that came to mind, until eventually I arrived at "Neon Nether: Groningen". That was rather nice actually: It gave the title an alliteration (which is great) and Nether would have both a connection to the Netherlands as well as hint a dark "below". Alright, check! Next item. What to do about the rules?

After thinking it over, I quickly arrived at the decision to split it up and go with a tiered system. There'd be a simplified set of rules ("beginner's rules"), a standard ruleset and optional rules for veteran RPG players. That sounded about right! So I stopped working on the Core Rulebook and started a Quickstart Guide which was meant to get people new to tabletop RPGs up to speed. Distilling a reduced ruleset from the standard ones was interesting and before too long, I was busy writing the first adventure and pondering how I would simplify character generation. Eventually I decided to not do the latter and to simply provide pre-generated characters to pick from. Things went well, but writing the adventure was a heck of a lot of work (it's assuming that the reader is new to the role of Game Master and thus needs to help him or her getting the hang of it as well as be entertaining for the group). Even though it's more than half-finished, I stopped to pursue a different idea: writing a solo adventure that would introduce one of the three classes of the beginner's rules.

It took me a few weeks to write and polish the prologue. But as I was plotting chapter 1, I realized that I needed to finally come back to an aspect of the world-building that I had avoided in the beginning: the actual city. Megacorporation and lore alone wasn't nearly enough. Previously I had basically declared that the game was set in Groningen and I had a very rough idea what that meant. But that was not nearly enough to create a sense of place. While I didn't take an actual break at that point, I need to explain something else next that I had been occupied with in parallel for a while.

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