I am crowdfunding a cyberpunk TTRPG adventure for the game Cy_borg, and wanted to share some of the influences that went into it. I am a long time fan of the cyberpunk genre and think that this is a creative and original take on it.
William Gibson's Neuromancer is seen as the origin of cyberpunk, but the genre also has a godfather: Philip K. Dick. He is best known as the author of the Do Androids Count Electric Sheep, which was the basis for the classic cyberpunk movie Blade Runner.
His book Ubik was a big inspiration for Dead Internet Theory. In Ubik, a detective investigates murders occurring in a retirement facility for elderly people who are cryogenically frozen at the moment before their death so they can live on in a virtual world.
A digital utopia is implied pretty heavily in the Cy_borg core book in the description of Fideistic Transformations, and that is the basis for this adventure. Ubik has a sort of banality to it that still serves the aesthetic of cyberpunk that I tried to use
The second wave of cyberpunk was a resurgence that includes Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash. The second wave was the modernized edition of Neuromancer written by 90’s computer nerds, but also included more poetic excursions like the techno and drug delirium trip that is Jeff Noon’s Vurt.
In Vurt, they enter a psychonautical cyberspace by doing a drug called Vurt, that is a feather that they put in their mouth and inhale from. Each feather is designed to create a new experience, but also connects you to a psychic internet.
The characters tumble through a depraved future underworld, with scenes in clubs, derelict urban spaces and cyberspace psychedelia. I tried to evoke these things when writing Dead Internet Theory and even stole a detail or two.
There is a rumored alternate origin story for the robot overlords in the Matrix movies. It made more sense in a hard science way, but the studio thought it was too convoluted so they took it out. Originally, the Matrix itself and the robots used brains for processing power.
This idea of brains as hosts for AI computers is one of the central themes of Dead Internet Theory. To be honest, I can’t remember if I read the rumor first or came up with the idea on my own, either way there is a resonance for me with the Matrix’s mythology.
Superhero scifi is a genre of scifi that combines two broad genres with surprisingly fun interactions. It is certainly a genre of science fantasy that leans to interstellar high fantasy, with immense empires, millennia old wars, and reality shattering technology.
The villains of Marvel are well known, played out even. I’ve long left behind the Marvel blockbuster franchise, but the ravenous cosmic god Galactus has always stuck with me. What a perfect all destroying incomprehensible alien deity to fit the cosmic horror of Cy_borg
I hope you join us in bringing this passion project to life by backing it today!