Mastodawn

i am in love with this very obscure setting and technical supplement for the Cyberpunk pencil’n’paper RPG i just picked up

HardWired is an entirely different setting from the base game, with entirely different rules and history based on a series of books by Walter Jon Williams. what blows me away is its faithful adaptation of 80s and 90s hacking: telcos, modems, bulletin board systems, sysops, and LANs

it even has a fully implemented BASIC interpreter (including file I/O!) called EBASIC that functions exactly as you’d imagine: you write scripts, read them aloud to the DM, and the DM inteprets them in realtime. 😂

#rpg #cyberpunk #ttrpg

@vga256 never see this before! Is it fir first edition ("cyberpunk 2013") or second ("cyberpunk 2020")?

@luigirenna it was printed around the time of the first edition, but doesn't contain any edition-specific rules. it's got so many of its own rules and setting-specific stuff that it could be used with pretty much any role playing system

@vga256 PASSWORD CHEETOFIX

@exquisitecorp ffs now i have to update all my passwords

James Baker 🍁4d ago

@vga256 Dang, I remember reading this one as a wee young lad back in the day, this and the recently re-published Web of Angels by John M Ford… Good times!

@GrumpusNation wow! i completely missed this book series in the day

James Baker 🍁4d ago

@vga256 I specifically remember a scene of the HardWired dude in "cyberspace" borrowing vast sums of money for fractions of a second for some kind of purpose… The ultimate day trader!

James Baker 🍁4d ago

@vga256 (Sadly, my life as a web developer has been rather less glamorous than as depicted on that book cover… Maybe I need a new shirt?)

S. John Ross 4d ago

@vga256 Well I know I'm elderly when I go online and see this book described as "obscure" when I remember it being on the shelves of every game shop I frequented in those days. 😭

@SJohnRoss try telling anyone under 20 that there’s a cyberpunk game not called 2077 😅

@vga256 wait, WHAT, they made an expansion for Hard Wired?!?!?!

Simon Greenwood 4d ago

@vga256
Oddly enough, I came across a copy of the first novel in a bookshop at the weekend. I was trying to think of where I'd heard of it.

David Dunham 4d ago

@vga256 I just checked, I have that. As well as another setting. I don’t think I played either sourcebook, but I was a big cyberpunk (the genre) fan.

If you’re collecting, I might have a few things to clear off my shelf…

@radiofreelunch so very kind of you to offer - but no, not collecting - just using these for research.

that's a very fascinating setting - I've read the novel series it is based on

David Dunham 4d ago

@vga256 It looks like I no longer have either series, I downsized much of my fiction.

Ben Chandler 3d ago

@vga256 ‘crystaljock’ sounds like the sort of thing I’d have to visit the urologist about.

@ThreeOhFour 😬