Hard Wired Island's cover. Hard Wired Island is a cyberpunk game published by Weird Age Games in 2020. It’s a beefy 400 page tome comparable in size to the Shadowrun or CP RED cores, but only about 25% of that is rules. Setting Overview Hard Wired Island takes place in Grand Cross, an O’Neil Cylinder habitat orbiting Earth’s Lagrange 5 point, in the “distant future” of 2020. It was built according to an idealistic plan in the wake of terrible environmental and economic disasters on Earth, but is currently in the process of being co-opted and corrupted by the interests of ultra-rich corporatio ..read more

Kolthunral is the Netherese flying fortress currently besieging Surcross. We’ll look at it first because it kinda dominates the skyline and its goals are important to contextualize everything else that’s going on in this area. The arrival of the fortress was a complete surprise even to Szass Tam, who considered the current conflict with the Netherese to be a distant and minor dispute over Shadowfell supply routes way off to the west in Neverwinter. That conflict is happening because, as we already know, both sides have ongoing plots happening in the Neverwinter area and need a constant influx ..read more

The Firefox logo. I usually write about roleplaying games around here, but I just spend quite a bit of time chasing down a weird computer issue and I want to write about it somewhere to record the steps I took. If you’re not a big Linux nerd, feel free to skip this. If you are and have issues with how I did things, feel free to skip this as well. If you want to read this anyway, I try to explain some of the basic concepts behind this quixotic adventure in footnotes. What Happened I run Ubuntu on my home desktop, and I currently updated to the latest release version, 23.10. It was a small upgr ..read more

Shadowrun 20th Anniversary's cover. Neon City Overdrive is a game written by Nathan Russel and published by Peril Planet Game Studio in 2020. This is the smallest core book of all the ones we’ve seen so far at 72 pages. We’ll also be looking at a supplement named The Grid, which focuses on hacking and has another 60 pages. Setting Overview Most of those 132 pages are dedicated to the setting and to a set of adventure seeds, both of which are largely based on vibes instead of relying on laboriously crafted timelines or detailed maps. This is the game of stylish cyberpunks running dangerous job ..read more

A while ago I posted a compilation of methods and tools for underwater adventuring. In this post, I’ll add a few items and artifacts that further help with that or that make sense as possessions for underwater people. This is a grab-bag article without much direction, but I hope it will be useful nonetheless. Alchemical Pills Any drinkable concoction (including magic potions) might be made as a solid pill instead. Pills tend to be round, thumbnail sized, hard, and meant to be swallowed whole. Pills are popular with alchemists and herbalists who don’t have a line to a crystal vial supplier, and ..read more

The Shadowfell Road ends in Thay. This is where the book technically breaks its promises. While every other place so far has been presented as somewhere the party could go, the text here sounds almost scared when it talks about the Thayan heartland because that’s where Szass Tam and all his epic-level wizard buddies live. It makes it very clear that the PCs should not go there. Fortunately, the bulk of this section is not actually talking about the massive plateau that makes up the Thayan heartland, but about the peripheral areas surrounding that plateau. Special attention is given to Surcross ..read more

Shadowrun 20th Anniversary's cover. We set our parameters in the last post, so let’s do the actual run in this one. Run Summary Our decker enters with her team, and they get past the reception as usual. This time I decide to do things a little bit differently and go for spoofing peripheral devices over trying to control them from inside the host. This seems to be the correct way to do it in SR5, judging from the examples in the Matrix chapter. The Control Device action is only used for things that would require a conventional skill test if done in the physical world, like shooting a turret’s ..read more

Shadowrun 20th Anniversary's cover. For this post we’ll be taking a look at Shadowrun 5th Edition, originally published in 2013. The book we’re looking at is the Master Index Edition published in 2016, which is largely the same but incorporates some errata and includes an index of supplementary material. I’ll confess I have some reluctance to tackle this specific system, because its return to expensive cyberdecks was part of what made me kinda stop paying attention to Shadowrun at all. But I’ll read it with as open a mind as I can manage and give its rules a fair shake just like I gave all th ..read more

The last couple of posts have already covered all important locations inside Evernight, so now we leave town to look at its surroundings. Burning Woods Turns out the surroundings are mostly on fire! The Shadow reflection of the Neverwinter Wood started burning when Mount Hotenow erupted and never stopped. The fire spread through the whole forest and the trees still smolder decades after any mundane plant would have been reduced to ash. Travelers going from the city to the Wood first wade through a wasteland where they’re calf-deep in ash sprinkled with embers. The smoke in the air becomes thic ..read more

I still think this cover is cool. After creating both our netrunner and the systems she needs to hack, we can start the actual run. Run Summary G0blin Jr. goes in with the physical team, they get past the reception, and as the rest of the team pretends to work she locks herself in the bathroom to try and hack the security server. We are cheating a bit here, because it turns out you need to be within six meters and within line of sight of an access point to hack the corresponding architecture. I don’t want to actually map the whole office out like I would in a real adventure, so we’re kind of ..read more