[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

Well a lot of this discussion has led me to ponder if (as someone earlier suggested) I should be thinking in terms of Transhumanism rather than Cyberpunk.

(SNIP)

That may be the way to go, because when you say "cyberpunk," that means a certain thing to those of us who've been around awhile. :)

To start with, the important thing to understand about "punk rock" is that the most important thing was the, "punk." To the punk rockers, rock music was supposed to be about rage, and outrage, and rebellion, and arose during a period when "rock" and "pop" had started to diverge.

The "punks" looked at artists such as Simon & Garfunkel, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt, and Elton John as musically-skilled but (basically) gutless crooners, who had no business calling themselves, "rock musicians." The punks especially despised the control the record industry had attained over the rock music scene, by the mid-1970s, especially since rock was (to them) supposed to act as a punch to the face of, "the establishment."

In Britain, especially, that anarcho-punk attitude overlapped, a great deal, with labor unrest taking place during the 1970s, in which the Labour Party (which was supposed to act as the political arm of the UK's labour unions) began to act against what many union workers considered their core interests -- to the extent that many workers began to call wildcat strikes, in defiance of Labour Party preferences.

That anti-authority stance only gained intensity when the Labour Party government fell, and Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives took power in 1979.

The term, "cyberpunk" is supposed to reflect that anarchist, anti-establishment alienation from -- and rebellion against -- a social, political and economic order perceived as fundamentally dehumanizing.

Cyberpunk took off in the United States in the 1980s, partly triggered by the Reagan Administration's systematic assault on labor unions, in this country.

The corporate-dominated society presented by William Gibson (and others) was inspired by the increase in the power of corporate hierarchies at the perceived expense of regular working people, and most cyberpunk stories featured that corporate dominance carried to an exaggerated extreme.

That not only allowed loaned itself, beautifully, to settings rife with conflict; it also provided ready-made premises for stories about scruffy, morally-reprehensible underdogs engaged in ethically-questionable behaviors that (heroically...?) targeted the most grotesque of oppressors.

Now, if you wanted to step away from that particular set of themes and conflicts, and move more toward Transhumanist ideas, that's certainly understandable.

But, to do that, you need to replace the anti-establishment conflict with conflict of another sort. Moreover, that conflict must be compelling enough to hold the players' interest and understandable enough that they know who the characters are supposed to be, and what they're supposed to do.

That was the core problem with G: Transhuman Space. It was a beautifully thought-out setting that many of us struggled to figure out what to actually do with.

I mean, Bill Stoddard eventually came up with a compelling campaign premise in Whispers, but IIRC, it took even him a while to figure it, and he's as compulsive a campaign-builder as anybody.

You need to think through some of the same things. The themes you'd like to explore are some of the most compelling, but "exploration of themes" does not drive a story. Dramatic conflict drives a story, and when most players think of "dramatic conflict," they mean gunfire, explosions, harsh language, and rolls versus HT to avoid stun, unconsciousness or death. :)

So, who will the characters be, in your campaign, and what sort of things will they do, that pulls them into an action-adventure setting, rife with conflict, while also allowing them to explore the themes you find so interesting?

I mean, think about it. In Ghost in the Shell, Public Security Section 9 regularly crosses the line into extra-legal violation of individual civil liberties by a para-military "hit squad" that operates under the aegis of a government hierarchy willing to overlook the use of military-grade weaponry and tactics, against civilian targets, in the name of expedience.

The only thing that makes the Major and her unit the "heroes" of the story is that they fight terrorists even worse than themselves. Plus, they're a pretty personable bunch, for a squad of chromed-to-the-gills killers.

I'm not sure I'd be happy playing a member of a team such as Section 9, and would likely try to figure out a way to overthrow the government that paid the salary of those sorts of characters.