Wasn't expecting a longform post on the value of verisimilitude in RPG worldbuilding from you, but here we are. I agree that it's the mundane stuff that cements a fictional place as one you can mentally inhabit without suspending disbelief to the point that the imaginary world around you looks like PS1 graphics, so to speak.
With that thought and what I gather are your tastes in mind--take a moment to check out the Mothership RPG, and specifically the setting/adventure book "A Pound of Flesh".
Thanks for that trip down memory lane. CP:2020 was by far my favorite RPG when I was a kid ... less cumbersome than D&D, and it felt more real than Shadowrun, for all that the latter had its moments. I always felt like CP got overlooked - no novelizations like Shadowrun or the various D&D worlds, just the rule books. But there was something so deeply compelling about it, the way that world seemed just around the corner, for better or for worse ... simultaneously horrifying and seductive.
As those milestone years of 2013 and 2020 came, I found myself checking back in with the game timeline, to compare. Obviously, we don't have the cool tech, nothing even close to it, and society hasn't collapsed entirely. Yet in so many ways it feels prescient. We're nowhere near people deliberately becoming cyborgs (RFID chips notwithstanding), but some of the prosthetic hands out there are getting remarkably good. Paralympic athletes are sometimes outperforming those with fully organic bodies. Cybereyes are being developed. Our security services are full of juicers with physiques training alone can't create ... and mercenary armies are becoming larger and more terrifyingly competent. It often feels like Pondsmith wasn't wrong, he was just a little premature.
This is a fantastic read, and I agree with your thesis on great literature. But, I believe the franchise's success might be even more traceable back to William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. He created something truly special. Everything that comes after in the genre is derivative, most obviously the RPG game, which is what great literature does.
Oh ya Gibson's sprawl trilogy is great and codified a ton of the genre... Half of Cyberpunk is a Gibson reference.
The Bladerunner film would be the other big landmark.
The thing Pondsmith did that was unique though was he actually formalized the rules... like Roy Batty might be running out of time to live, or Case might has poison sacks in his neck that will go off if he abandons the job... but its just not obvious from either that that desperation, that scarcity, is essential to any story in the genre or any cyberpunk world...
Like you actually needed great writers with great instincts like Dick, Scott, or Gibson writing those stories and instinctually knowing what would and wouldn't make good cyberpunk.
With CP2020 and Pondsmith's worldbuilding anyone can generate a story that has the same tone, characters that are similarly struggling, etc. and once you read and understood the worldbuilding, writers even in other countries and cultures like CDPR in Poland or Trigger in Japan can tell a story that has all the same emotional weight, even as they iterate in weird and divergent directions.
Like almost every side story in CP2077 follows this logic. 100s or unique characters and cyberpunk stories all generated and written with the same intensity, scarcity and desperation it took genius artists in the 80s to do for 1 or 2 characters.
.
For me it's huge because I tried a few time to write cyberpunk short stories... and every single one turned out completely fake and gay from just square one moment of conception "Well maybe a guy could... no that's lame... well maybe... no that'd suck"
And It was only getting back into Pondsmith's world that I realized how different the narrative rules for Cyberpunk are than almost any other modern genre. You just can't write good cyberpunk like an adventure, or comical romp, or murder mystery, or heist film.
You actually have to write punks down to last dollar getting shot and almost bleeding out... or Corpos having to mortgage their kidneys to get an upgrade that will give them a shot at promotion, or Androids with a preset lifespan trying to find a way to extend it in their last 3 months.... you can't follow the logic of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, or Hollywood action film because it won't work, there isn't a question if James Bond might actually get lasered in half or the Bond Girl actually eaten by piranhas... in a cyberpunk story a main character might actually die either way or come out horribly maimed.
honestly that part of why I wanted to write the Ayaan story and pour so much detail into it... I wanted to see if I could actually write Cyberpunk now that I'd internalized Pondsmith's rules.
If you wanted an analogy its like if Gibson and Dick and Sterling are like Euripides and Achelous and Sophocles who've all written tragedies/cyberpunk...
And then Pondsmith is like Aristole coming out with the Poetics and a formal laid out theory of how tragedy /cyberpunk works.
This was an amazing reply. I totally get what you are saying now. As a new writer, it's extremely interesting what you say about the Pondsmith creating "the rules," for the genre. Never thought of RPGs like that, but you are right, also a new place to look for inspiration.
What makes Pondsmith so important then, wasn't catching lightning in the bottle, like Gibson or Sterling. He actually formulated the lightning, and told you how to catch it in a bottle. Like a crazy alchemist, he created the recipe to capture that magic I feel when reading Gibson or Dick but couldn't put a name to.
Wasn't expecting a longform post on the value of verisimilitude in RPG worldbuilding from you, but here we are. I agree that it's the mundane stuff that cements a fictional place as one you can mentally inhabit without suspending disbelief to the point that the imaginary world around you looks like PS1 graphics, so to speak.
With that thought and what I gather are your tastes in mind--take a moment to check out the Mothership RPG, and specifically the setting/adventure book "A Pound of Flesh".
Will do!
Thanks for that trip down memory lane. CP:2020 was by far my favorite RPG when I was a kid ... less cumbersome than D&D, and it felt more real than Shadowrun, for all that the latter had its moments. I always felt like CP got overlooked - no novelizations like Shadowrun or the various D&D worlds, just the rule books. But there was something so deeply compelling about it, the way that world seemed just around the corner, for better or for worse ... simultaneously horrifying and seductive.
As those milestone years of 2013 and 2020 came, I found myself checking back in with the game timeline, to compare. Obviously, we don't have the cool tech, nothing even close to it, and society hasn't collapsed entirely. Yet in so many ways it feels prescient. We're nowhere near people deliberately becoming cyborgs (RFID chips notwithstanding), but some of the prosthetic hands out there are getting remarkably good. Paralympic athletes are sometimes outperforming those with fully organic bodies. Cybereyes are being developed. Our security services are full of juicers with physiques training alone can't create ... and mercenary armies are becoming larger and more terrifyingly competent. It often feels like Pondsmith wasn't wrong, he was just a little premature.
This is a fantastic read, and I agree with your thesis on great literature. But, I believe the franchise's success might be even more traceable back to William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. He created something truly special. Everything that comes after in the genre is derivative, most obviously the RPG game, which is what great literature does.
Oh ya Gibson's sprawl trilogy is great and codified a ton of the genre... Half of Cyberpunk is a Gibson reference.
The Bladerunner film would be the other big landmark.
The thing Pondsmith did that was unique though was he actually formalized the rules... like Roy Batty might be running out of time to live, or Case might has poison sacks in his neck that will go off if he abandons the job... but its just not obvious from either that that desperation, that scarcity, is essential to any story in the genre or any cyberpunk world...
Like you actually needed great writers with great instincts like Dick, Scott, or Gibson writing those stories and instinctually knowing what would and wouldn't make good cyberpunk.
With CP2020 and Pondsmith's worldbuilding anyone can generate a story that has the same tone, characters that are similarly struggling, etc. and once you read and understood the worldbuilding, writers even in other countries and cultures like CDPR in Poland or Trigger in Japan can tell a story that has all the same emotional weight, even as they iterate in weird and divergent directions.
Like almost every side story in CP2077 follows this logic. 100s or unique characters and cyberpunk stories all generated and written with the same intensity, scarcity and desperation it took genius artists in the 80s to do for 1 or 2 characters.
.
For me it's huge because I tried a few time to write cyberpunk short stories... and every single one turned out completely fake and gay from just square one moment of conception "Well maybe a guy could... no that's lame... well maybe... no that'd suck"
And It was only getting back into Pondsmith's world that I realized how different the narrative rules for Cyberpunk are than almost any other modern genre. You just can't write good cyberpunk like an adventure, or comical romp, or murder mystery, or heist film.
You actually have to write punks down to last dollar getting shot and almost bleeding out... or Corpos having to mortgage their kidneys to get an upgrade that will give them a shot at promotion, or Androids with a preset lifespan trying to find a way to extend it in their last 3 months.... you can't follow the logic of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, or Hollywood action film because it won't work, there isn't a question if James Bond might actually get lasered in half or the Bond Girl actually eaten by piranhas... in a cyberpunk story a main character might actually die either way or come out horribly maimed.
honestly that part of why I wanted to write the Ayaan story and pour so much detail into it... I wanted to see if I could actually write Cyberpunk now that I'd internalized Pondsmith's rules.
If you wanted an analogy its like if Gibson and Dick and Sterling are like Euripides and Achelous and Sophocles who've all written tragedies/cyberpunk...
And then Pondsmith is like Aristole coming out with the Poetics and a formal laid out theory of how tragedy /cyberpunk works.
This was an amazing reply. I totally get what you are saying now. As a new writer, it's extremely interesting what you say about the Pondsmith creating "the rules," for the genre. Never thought of RPGs like that, but you are right, also a new place to look for inspiration.
What makes Pondsmith so important then, wasn't catching lightning in the bottle, like Gibson or Sterling. He actually formulated the lightning, and told you how to catch it in a bottle. Like a crazy alchemist, he created the recipe to capture that magic I feel when reading Gibson or Dick but couldn't put a name to.