Time moves in one direction, memory in another
The weather has been gray and rainy and cold, and it's taking a toll. My bones are tired. It feels like we've been living in the apocalypse for a hundred years. But as exhausting as this all is, we keep going, because the other option is always worse.
For a long time, I've been interested in stories and art that look at what it means to feel hope in hopeless times, to keep fighting. This very newsletter is named for a song that does exactly that. I've realized this is the kind of story I want to tell. I haven't written much of anything in a long time, but we finished up our Scum & Villainy campaign last week, and my head has been swimming with possibilities for a new campaign that takes this theme and runs with it.
I really didn't expect the S&V game to end last week -- I knew we were approaching the end game, but everything just kind of fell into place and it felt like an ending. An ending, not the ending, and there are certainly more stories to tell in that universe with those characters. But we ended with the crew of the Manheister faking their own deaths and taking off into the Unquiet Black, in possession of the fabled Aleph Key -- one of the keys to the mysterious Hantu Gate, a jump gate that was forcibly closed by the Precursors before their exit from the galaxy. I'm curious what will happen next, and I am excited to play to find out. But I am also excited to spend some time telling a different kind of story. I struggled in many ways to run a game whose setting was so big -- an entire sector of a far-off galaxy -- with space battles and all the other hallmarks of the space opera genre. The game ran best for me when we kept things more grounded, focused on the street-level scoundrels and gangs that fought for control of Procyon Sector's underground.
It was many months ago now (February, according to Twitter, which feels like decades ago) when I heard the song "Sunyata" by Tor and I started coming up with an idea for a new campaign. Some elements came in fully-formed, others less so, but the main thought was wanting to do a cyberpunk actual play podcast that focused on the themes I'm most interested in -- mutual aid, building community, organized resistance, and hope in hopeless times -- and soundtracked by the best of 90s trip-hop. Whether we'll actually do a podcast is totally up in the air (the idea of editing an AP is very, very daunting), but the seeds for a new campaign were planted.
Seems like cyberpunk is all anyone is talking about right now, thanks to a video game that's grabbing a lot of headlines, many of them for the wrong reasons. My thoughts on the game notwithstanding (I haven't played it, but I take the accusations against it very seriously while admitting it looks gorgeous), I think there is a lot of room for discussion about what cyberpunk even is anymore, whether it means anything when the real world often looks even worse than what the genre's progenitor's predicted back in the 80s, and the anti-corporate ethos is left as little more than window-dressing (not to mention that the genre has for a long time been overwhelmingly populated by stories about edgy white cis males, written by the same). By and large, the genre has settled into a very strange position -- instead of looking forward, as a warning, it is looking backward, a genre that is more retro than meaningful, tinted in flickering neon and viewed through a pair of rose-colored mirrorshades. The love for cyberpunk as a genre, and for the homonymous game, is more about nostalgia than any interest in what the genre is still capable of critically interrogating. A genre that once was heralded for its progressive, anti-corporate ethos becomes regressive and fans ironically have built their identities around defending corporations and punching down on the most marginalized members of the gaming community.
So is cyberpunk, as a genre, dead? Well, I sure hope not. I think there's still plenty of fertile ground to be explored in that space, but to do that, we have to abandon the neon-drenched dystopias and skies the color of dead channels and move forward into the 21st century. We have to reckon with climate change, racism, police brutality, the global rise of fascism, how technology has colonized our minds, how bringing everyone together in a global community has somehow resulted in being more alienated than ever before. And we have to move past the dystopian to re-imagine a future worth hoping for. And the truth is, there is plenty of work in the genre (or adjacent to it) that is doing just that, but in the pop imagination, cyberpunk hasn't evolved much past Blade Runner and Neuromancer.
Not to say that a group of folks playing a tabletop roleplaying game has to tackle all that in their weekly game .. but I think it's an important discussion that we as fans of science fiction need to have (and keep having), or the genre will be dead, co-opted and fetishized by the exact kind of megacorporations that the genre was supposed to be tearing down. ###
When I was searching for the right game for this next campaign, I knew that I probably wanted to stick with Forged in the Dark, as it's a system we've all become pretty good at, and it does a good job of having straightforward and easy-to-implement mechanics and foregrounding narrative over mechanical crunch and physics simulations.
Thankfully, there are a number of options in that design space (Hack the Planet, Runners in the Shadows, Replicant or Lesbian, Ruralpunk, Hello World, and Neon Black, among a few others). I went back and forth between a couple of different options, but eventually picked Hack the Planet, in part because it does what's discussed above -- by marrying cyberpunk with climate fiction, it drags the genre into the 21st century and puts a more explicitly anti-capitalist lens on things.
But still, it didn't feel like a perfect fit for the themes I wanted to explore. Hack the Planet, like the cyberpunk games of yore, focuses on a crew of criminals doing scores and fighting for a higher place on the ladder. And while extreme climate effects (called "Acts of God") often throw a wrench in the works, I couldn't get over the fact that the mission-focused, get-rich-or-die-trying approach to things felt fundamentally out of step with an anti-capitalist point of view. Anti-capitalist themes can be explored, yes, but it's still a game about throwing others under the bus to come out on top. Maybe we could tweak it to make those themes more explicit, but it just didn't quite feel right.
Then I found Neon Black.
Neon Black is a game that is, in fact, explicitly anti-capitalist in a way that I haven't really seen before. It's not just window dressing or themes that can be explored or not, but the actual mechanics of the game reinforce the idea that (as the itch.io page says in big purple letters) capitalism sucks. It's a game about building community and mutual aid. The punks aren't glitches living outside society, trying to get rich -- rather, they are regular people with jobs just trying to get by while resisting the corpocratic rule of the villainous rich.
Like, I don't think I could have written a game more suited to the themes I'm hoping to explore.
I'm not sure when things will get underway, as we're planning on taking a break after wrapping up Scum & Villainy. I also have no idea if we will actually attempt to do a podcast -- or if the world needs another fucking actual play podcast -- but if that happens, I'll definitely talk about it here.
I recognize that this was an especially long one, so may the gods bless you if you actually made it all the way to the end. I'm sure next time I write it'll be less about gaming and how to make genre fiction more meaningful and more about like, life, or whatever. Maybe some cute pictures of the kid or musings on the holiday season.
Whatever the case, I appreciate you. Take care of yourselves, and stay safe.
j.
PS if your brain didn't get totally fried after reading this and you would like to read more about how to make cyberpunk meaningful again, I highly recommend the following:
Does cyberpunk's vision of the future belong in the past?, Tom Faber (Financial Times)
Neon and corporate dystopias: why does cyberpunk refuse to move on?, Paul Walker-Emig (The Guardian)
Nine sci-fi subgenres to help you understand the future, Jay Owens (Quartz)
The Queer Cyberpunk's Guide to Tabletop RPGs, Nathan Blades