Hey now, I've reached 50 followers! Nice! Not bad for a fat kid from South Jersey! ;-) Seriously though, it's pretty cool to feel like there are people that value one's words. I hope it's because my rekindled passion for the hobby is coming through in my posts. It really is important to me to give something of value back to our little community here, even if it is just the tale of my musings on the hobby and stories of my actual gaming experiences. Anyway, I'll spare you the Sally Field act...
Now on to my other topic for this post:
My other great love besides fantasy fiction is cyberpunk. I don't care what the genre fiction pundits have to say about the supposed death of cyberpunk as a science fiction subgenre. It will always be alive in me as a fan. Gibson's Neuromancer is one of the books I've reread the most in my life (about 10 times). As I get older, I get something new out of it every time. I don't care about how the passage of time and the progression of technology makes some aspects of the book outdated. There is such a possibility as alternate futures and divergent technological development, just like there are alternate pasts to be explored (see cyberpunk's "sister" genre, steampunk).
I've owned the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG for over a decade but never played it. Same with Shadowrun (but frankly I couldn't stand the combination of magic and technology). I played Rifts here and there, but that also put too much emphasis on magic. I've considered using the Shadowrun and Rifts systems/worlds and stripping out the magic, however.
It's been one of my holy gaming grails to do some cyberpunk gaming someday. I was tempted to run a Matrix movie game using the online free system based on the D6 System that's been on the web for years now. But again, this never came to pass, due to the myriad circumstances I've talked about in my testimonial.
I just heard that there's a new game called Technoir in development, and it looks interesting. There's a beta that's been released, and I'm trying to find the time to delve into it. There's also a fund that's raising money to publish the game.
So, maybe once I get a goodly bit of fantasy gaming under my belt to really cement my return to the hobby, I can move on over to exploring some cyperpunk gaming. See you in the matrix (not the one inhabited by Keanu Reeves, either)!
