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Cyberpunk
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Cyberpunk 2020, for those of you who don't know, is an adventure role-playing game set in the near future. Governments have collapsed, society has become semi-lawless, and unregulated megacorporations run amok, polluting the environment and exploiting a labor pool of helpless workers. It's a generally dark, unpleasant world to be in. On the positive side, cybernetic biological enhancement is a part of everyday life. Instead of carrying a laptop or a MP3 player, you have one implanted in your body. Internet kiosks stand on every street corner and you can access it by plugging the jack into the side of your head. Recent movies set in a Cyberpunk work include The Matrix, Minority Report, and Johnny Mnemonic.
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Cyberpunk 2020 was one of the great games of the golden age of the paper role playing games. It was a cyberpunk game based heavily on the works of the great masters of the genre; above all Sterling and Gibson. The system was skill-based, and combat was very, very lethal. Cyberpunk ... emphasized style over heavy rules over overly realistic background stories. The setting was updated several times with source books, but it took until 2005 for Mike Pondsmith of R. Talsorian games to write Cyberpunk v3 - the Third Edition.
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Cyberpunk has a strong garage-band aesthetic. It grapples with the raw core of the near future--its myths, its ideas, its coming practices. It is a pop culture which is theorizing itself into a more cohesive and self-determined existence.
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Cyberpunk music ... describes the works associated with the fashion trend that emerged from the SF developments. The Detroit techno group Cybotron, which arose in the early 1980s, drew influences both from European synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk and from Toffler's Future Shock, producing songs that evoke a distinctly dystopian mood. In the same era, Styx released the concept album Kilroy Was Here (1983), the story of a rock star living in a dark future where music has been outlawed. Kilroy and, in particular, its hit single "Mr. Roboto" may easily be "appropriated" into the cyberpunk genre, whether or not the term was applied at the time. However, starting around the year 1990, popular culture began to include a movement in both music and fashion that called itself "cyberpunk," and that became particularly associated with the rave and techno subcultures. Cyberpunk artists used technology in their music just because they could; it was “the wizardry of the hacker meets the alienation of the punk.”[21]
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The bulk of Cyberpunk is far more mundane. Sometimes the keyboards recall bad '70s art rock; at other times the computer-driven rhythms echo the disco rock that first made Idol's name. "Heroin" continues the campy tradition Idol started with "L.A. Woman" on Charmed Life (1990): It's a clueless techno-destruction of the Velvet Underground dirge with a few bars of Patti Smith's "Gloria" thrown in for good measure.
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Cyberpunk v3 is set in the 2030s or thereabouts. The Fourth Corporate war turned nasty and nuclear. That alone would not have crashed society. Another factor was the “DataKrash”, a virus created by Rache Bartmoss in a retcon during the Ihara-Grubb transformation of Cyberspace (read Rache Bartmoss Guide to the Net for details on that event). Arasaka developed a paper-eating virus. The end result?
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Cyberpunk