#Cyberpunk Red Campaign

[medtech-mara]

[cyberpsychotic-purgatory]

Jack "DreadMed" Adams "Their nightmares will come to life before their very eyes."

Fraternal twin brother to Jayce Adams, Jack is a former Trauma Team Medtech who now works as a mercenary with the sole purpose of preserving the life of the woman he loves.

Trying to balance his own humanity with his steadily growing lust for violence, he struggles to maintain himself as the man she fell in love with. Every upgrade, every gig, every life taken, slips him closer to that edge.

Thankfully Mara keeps him level and grounded. For now. We'll see how the dice roll.

[aggravateddurian]

WIP Whenever

I was tagged by @medtech-mara for the weekly WIP report. Here's the latest stories.

Cyberpunk RED: How to Save a Life

"My name's Avery, I'm a netrunner."

Cyberpunk RED-era Data Entry, using default Photo Mode frames and backgrounds.

Yesterday I revealed Avery Greer, an FIA netrunner. She's cynical, possibly clinically depressed (my notes say that she's pathologically unable to smile) and desires change in her life. She has already decided that her future does not involve the NUSA or the FIA. She may already have plans in motion to engineer her escape.

She works under a senior FIA agent named Hunter 'Bishop' Wilkes. Bishop is ride-or-die for the NUSA and has already been betrayed by a netrunner before (their AV was hacked by a netrunner who made a covert deal with an African militia to hand over FIA secrets in exchange for safe passage to Nairobi, and from Nairobi to Luna). He already suspects that her change in behaviour could be a prelude to betrayal, and already has her under close watch.

You're gonna see more of her.

Bakeneko: Select images from their latest show

A teaser for a photo story coming next week!

Vega Hawse sings Bakeneko's first original song Wolverines!, written by Dorian 'Durian' Bautista (image credit: NCT News)

Another day, another pic in the screamsheets of So Mi living her best life in NC with Vega (this displeases Myers).

In 2078, Dorian Bautista (y'know, Dorian, the former corpo, turned fixer, then rockerboy) founded a band named Bakeneko ("Changed Cat"). They originally were a Samurai cover band, but something was off about their sound.

Then V came back... well, kinda. Vega's technically genetically 33% Johnny Silverhand and is a hybrid consciousness, but one with all of Johnny's memories and skills, as well as perfect knowledge of every SAMURAI song. Dorian reached out, and after some slightly mocking encouragement from Johnny, Vega joined Bakeneko and became the band's frontwoman.

In mid-2079, Bakeneko signed on with Silverhand Studios. While they still do SAMURAI covers, Vega (and by proxy, Johnny) and Dorian are working on an original EP, due to come out in 2080. Rumours that Kerry Eurodyne will appear in one of the songs are currently unconfirmed by N54 News.

MR BLUE EYES INTERROGATES AN FIA ASSASSIN

Warning: the following story references torture

The agent sat in the darkened room, his face and chest bloody. Electrodes were still attached to the more sensitive parts of his chest and torso. A black-uniformed soldier with blue glowing techgogs threw a bucket of icy water over the agent. He yelped as the ice pelted his bruised and bloodied skin, "Wake the fuck up, fedscum!"

"What the fuck do you want!?" screamed the agent, "just tell me what you want! I'll tell you anything! Just make it stop!"

A man stepped into the room, temporarily blinding the agent as the light of the hallway blasted into the room. He turned to the soldier, his blue eyes glowing in the darkness, "That'll be all."

"Sir."

Mr Blue Eyes circled the FIA agent, "Who was your target?"

"It was a traitor."

Mr Blue Eyes produced a stun baton, and without a second thought, drove the baton into the man's ribs. He cried in pain as electricity coursed through his vulnerable flank, "Specifics, please, Mr Jordan."

"It... her name is Song So Mi. She attempted to kill President Myers. There's a one million eddie bounty on her head."

He nodded, putting the baton back on the tool bench, "See, you can be cooperative... I'm going to let you go, Mr Jordan. In a few hours, you'll be back in Langley, no doubt being treated by the FIA's best medtechs."

"W-what?"

"But not without conditions," Mr Blue Eyes told him, kneeling and grabbing the man by the jaw so his eyes met the agent's, "You'll be sending Ms. Myers a message. Night City is off limits to the NUSA, and by extension, so are Song So Mi and Vega Hawse. If me, or my associates, find your agency operating in our city again, and especially if we find you harassing them, there will be consequences."

"A-are you nuts? Myers will never listen to that!"

Mr B shrugged, "You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, Mr Jordan. All you need to do is deliver the message to the FIA, and you'll be home free. Do we have an accord?"

Jordan bowed his head, "Fine."

Mr B turned to the soldier, "Find this man some clothes and bring him to NCX. He has a flight to catch back to Washington."

"Yes, sir."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's about it for this week. Normally these come around Wednesday, but today's the day I guess.

People have probably already been tagged for this, but I'm gonna tag: @genocidalfetus @byberbunk2069 @theviridianbunny. Absolutely no pressure involved, only if you want to :)

[gauntletqueen]

I just wanted to show this funny man running in circles, but then

[prototypelq]

The Most Unreliable Narrator I Have Ever Seen

soooooo I had a Cyberpunk-obsessed phase pass recently, and this time Johhny Silverhand's character caught my eye. His story, more specifically, and how... inconsistent he seems, depending on each source.

In the game, Johhny acts like a bastard for most of the game. He panic-rages on his first meeting with V, throws many threats around, but is later beaten into the background with the blocker pills Misty gave to V. Even Johnny's friends' are well, they react Loudly to his return. Y'know, make it known his presence alone provokes a lot of anger from them.

Even during his first appearance, when V gets thrown into Silverhand's memories of his SAMURAI concert, the only real thing V recalls is the all-consuming rage that he felt, which he tried to shout out through the microphone, but it never felt like enough.

And doesn't this sound weird then, that the only thing Johnny does throughout the game after that first meeting is help V out? He learns about the Smasher guy hideout at the docks (he does that through dubious means but that's Johnny for you), he helps V out when the seizures become worse, he calmly agrees to Any decision V makes, despite V clearly Not being in any real state to oppose him in the finale of the game, he plans the whole thing with "Alt" so V can get his body back at Johnny's own expense, from the beginning, and he doubles down on that claim at the end of the game.

Do you see the dissonance? The egoist rockerboy that admitted to using his friends to getting what he wants, and the downright self-sacrificing hero and a friend that is Johnny at the end of the game? People change, sure, but this divide is very massive and too sudden, so I wanted to dig into that. And what I've stumbled upon, with the help of canon Cyberpunk materials like the Red sourcebook (or, more specifically, LayedBackGamers' reading of the canon books and his lore videos on different topics), is that

Johhny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077 is the Most Unreliable Narrator I've Ever Seen.

Count with me here:

Johhny's personality in general. No matter what your interpretation of him his, it's impossible to ignore that Johhny is very much a people person and he exploits that knowledge and charisma to suit his own goals. If you choose to trust him, then you might have already been played.

2) Johhny has been alone, only his lovely self for 50+ years inside the Arasaka chip. Don't ask me how he is still even remotely sane, I haven't got a clue (hopefully the time as a construct without outside stimulation flies differently and he hasn't felt those 50 years in real time). The thing to mention here, however, is that, being alone with your thoughts and emotions for a long time, having nothing else for entertainment, is a great opportunity to rewrite your own memory of events or emotions you've felt.

3) Lack of a body. The aforementioned constant rage, that was the dominant emotion is Johnny's life (before Alt, at least, if Never Fade Away is anything to go by, and I mean, that's literally a love ballad), is a symptom of his PTSD from his too-young years serving in the corpo war, same as his signature silver hand. I'm not a specialist here, but I do know PTSD, especially for war veterans, is a physiological illness just as much as it is a mental one. Johnny's body literally had trouble living normally after that experience, and knowing this bastard - he never managed to treat that. Existing as a personality construct frees him from the many bonuses of being corporeal, but it also free him from the physiological side of PTSD. His day-to-day existence is fundamentally different from that of the Johnny Silverhand that the world knew 50 years ago, so yes, as a 'time traveler' or a source of information and comparison about the 70's and 20's of cyberpunk world Johhny is not a good source.

4) The chip with Johnny is literary inside the head of another person. The characters in game question, multiple times, just which decisions is V making on his own, and which of them might be Johnny's doing. Not consciously, no, but V and Johnny are clearly not your simple neighbours. They are not your 'close friends that start subconsciously copying each other' too. It is quite possible that the chip with Johhny is adapting to the 'hardware' it is running on, so it is specifically implementing parts of V's personality into Johnny, to minimize the 'friction' between the personality and the body it is supposed to inhabit. Everyone say hi to existential horror)

5) How does Soulkiller ever work? Is there data on how much the resulting engram actually resembles the person it tried to copy? How did the process of copying Johnny go? I can answer the last one - very badly.

Death of Johnny is told in excruciating detail in the Cyberpunk sourcebooks. Johnny died on the floor of Arasaka tower, torn in two by a shotgun blast from Smasher. There is no information on how much time it takes Soulkiller to create the engram from the brain, but it better have finished doing that before Johnny's brain started dying from a lack of blood and oxygen, and he clearly didn't have much time either, considering bisection is not the best for bodily fluid preservation, so it's a wonder the engram even works properly. Plus, during the initial heist to steal the chip with Johnny, the chip was damaged further before the idiots decided to stick an unknown harddrive into their heads to preserve it. Basically, it's nothing short of a miracle, that engram-Johnny is actually a whole damn person, that he can function, think and feel properly (well, as much as Johnny can do those things)

It is very sad that V can't talk to Johnny about this, as the man does blame himself over things he hasn't even done, and he had done enough emotional damage to himself and people around him without that kind of burden on top of it.

6) Johnny's memories are literally false. The attentive reader had to pick this up in my previous point - didn't Johnny die in the hands of Arasaka after they interrogated him? Nope. Nope, and I can say that confidently because,

(drumroll please)

Cyberpunk tabletop sourcebooks! Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk universe and the TTRP series of games, has worked closely with CDPR writers during the production of the 2077. He oversaw everything, and he says that 2077 is in the same cyberpunk universe too, it's not an 'alternate reality' or anything.

Johnny Silverhand died while trying to buy time for his friends to escape, from a shotgun shot from Adam Smasher. That's it, he died on that floor, there was noone to interrogate, no rooftop helicopter he ran for.

The sequence of 'memories' we see from Johnny's POV in the game is a mishmash of two different assaults on the Arasaka towers, yes towers there were two of them. There is a great video explaining all the small and Major details Johnny's version of events got wrong, because we have the sourcebooks and the text inside. You may accuse me of holding a 'holy canon' argument ... and well, yeah, this is kind of holy knowledge, as it was written for gamemasters.

Still, some of the things in Johnny's version are Major, and while the media certainly covered the whole story extensively with corpo propaganda (oh, btw, Johnny didn't bomb anything, he probably didn't even know there was a nuke involved, he is literally just a scapegoat), there are some holes that a citizen of this world might know and wish to poke. The aforementioned Two Arasaka towers, or the absence of the legendary solo Morgan Blackhand from Johnny's story. Interestingly enough, there is a radiostation of Maximum Mike in-game, who is actually just pretty much Mike Pondsmith, and he does propose a couple of questions the 'official' version of the attack doesn't cover (like, where would a rockerboy even get a nuke, he might have been popular, but that's not just something you find without military contracts, and that means corporations). Another thing is that since Arasaka owns Soulkiller and has had the engram for a couple of decades, it is quite possible they are the ones responsible for messing with Johnny's memories.

So uh, yeah, Johnny is the Most Unrealible Narrator I have ever seen. Johnny of 2077 is most certainly not the Johnny of 2020's, but this might be a good thing. Maybe the 'real' 2020's Silverhand could never have made the progress the engram did, or become such a good friend and companion for V, or maybe he could have done those things too. We'll never know. I really love this story anyway.

[neonandsynth]

Some more player character art for my Cyberpunk RED campaign, once again featuring Lulu the Media and Vera the Medtech, by artist C. R. Warner (x)

[studiesinpolterghost]

Sunsets spent in idle contemplation

tbh this drawing might not end up being canon LMAO bc of undecided lore

but if something changes i might edit this drawing and repost :D

[kimarisgundam]

Lowkey going to murder my friends >:U

2 of my friends thought it would be fun to put fake tattoos on ourselves during our Cyberpunk Red session so we can larp as our characters

Yeah, the session was like yesterday and this is the mess I'm in now:

Omg wtf 😭. It can't come off 😭. My friends who play Rockerboy and Solo2 brought a bag of fake tattoos, but they didn't tell us that there's 2 types of tattoos in the bag:

The normal water slide-on tattoos

Ink based tattoos that "stain" your skin

My other friend (who plays Exec) and I never used temporary tattoos before, so we didn't know that the stain types are transparent when you first apply them???

We thought the tattoos were expired and couldn't transfer off the paper or something???

Both of us initially declined applying the fake tattoos cos our characters don't dress like that (Exec only has 1 tattoo on his wrist, and my Netrunner is very straight laced cos of her family background. So no tattoos or anything)

^ everyone just assumed we didn't apply any tattoos, so one one noticed we used the stain tattoos 😭

4 hours into our campaign, my friend who plays Rockerboy noticed something appearing on my wrist and my other friend's neck...

That's when they were like "Oh crap O_O" and tried scrubbing us with soap and hand sanitiser... but it was too late... the ink already seeped in >:U

Our DM thinks this is hilarious and canonized this as Rockerboy screwing up (again) and accidentally misleading Exec and my Netrunner into getting embarrassing permanent tattoos 🥲

You know why my irl tattoo is a snake? It cos Johnny Silverhand has a snake tattoo on his hand 🥲. I wanted to be like Johnny 🥲

Our DM said she is using her powers as a DM to dictate that my Netrunner got a replica of Johnny's tattoos on her arm cos she thought it was temporary 🥲

This is a disaster, I was from Arasaka 🥲. My bio father is the current head of Arasaka's R&D department 🥲. I'm low contact with my family now, but my big bro and dad will flip if they see the tattoos 🥲

[cryberpunkart]

look at the ceo dawg im gunna get fired

A little attempted animation of my character, Bel. They own a ✨wellness✨ company in the cyberpunk setting I have with my partner.

[hocky-polayor]

:')

[medtech-mara]

Been trying to move on, been black and blue, trying to turn the old into something new.

Song - Synthetic - The Midnight

credit: @cyberpsychotic-purgatory My hubby had done the editing on this photo. I always show him my VP, and he will sometimes be inspired to do something with it.

[cyberpsychotic-purgatory]

The Only Fan Service

For @imaginarycyberpunk2023

Those who know me, know that I don't care at all for glam shots. I'm a world builder. However, imaginary as been supportive and actually reads my blogs so for you, just this once.

[aggravateddurian]

My new Cyberpunk RED campaign, 'How to Save a Life' has begun.

My players have chosen their roles. We've got a rockerboy, four nomads (all Aldecaldos), two solos, a medtech, a netrunner and two lawmen.

Their first act is to pull security for our rockerboy's band as they play, and boy will they be busy, because rockerboys are rarely careful about the groupies they hook up with, and one of them happened to be a very jealous Solo, a known quantity of the Afterlife.

Despite Rogue's counsel that going after an ex-input who spurned you was a gonk idea that generally ends poorly (wonder how she knows that?), Scarlet Johnson, a woman with the combat prowess that commands some of the highest fees at the Afterlife, and a temper so explosive it would make Panam look positively calm by comparison, has organised a band of her own. Their chief instruments are explosive violence and full metal jackets.

Tune in tomorrow to find out how they went, and where our poor gonks are off to next...

[cringedaddy]

just a sketch of one of my pathetic incels

[neonandsynth]

Some player characters from my Cyberpunk RED campaign: Lulu, the Media and Vera, the Medtech Illustrated by @cosmicraelum