Yeah, exactly. On this thread, a lot of people mention punk as a sort of "socially unusual" way of behaving. But that's not at all how it is typically used when the cyberpunk genre is described. Usually the punk in cyberpunk is a reference to anti-authoritative attitudes, a little guy versus the Man or a street-level grassroots culture.

At least one of these definitions also covers the maligned "trenchcoats and mirroshades" group. Which I find entertaining, given that people complained about it. Conflating a movement with its visual style pretty much jeopardises any weight you could put behind the criticism.

I'd like to see more of an underlying neo-anarchist movement. Not just as shadowrunners, but as 'resistance cells' against the corporate world. Bring back the idea that people actually care what is happening to them, and have the Rocker and Reporter architypes take on higher importance again as they sway public opinion and expose the machinations of The Man. Give the neo-anarchists an edge with a higher concentration of Technomancers (and possibly even AIs) - especially if the Emergence-style fear of them is kept. All that electronic surveillance that can choke out any chance of hiding can be countered by a world in which hacking attempts against The Man happen all the time just for the sake of doing so. Likewise, give the neo-anarachists more versatility in the magic areas compared to the corporate world. However, don't try to organize the neo-anarchist - at least not beyond a local level, or it will really lose something.

So would I. That's one thing I will agree that the more recent editions of Shadowrun lacks.

Neo-Anarchy is dead.

Not if GMs and players keep it on a respirator. While it may not mesh well with our '2009/modern' sensibilities, it makes for a great backdrop element in a future dystopian society... with magic... like Shadowrun.

Yeah, sure. But Neo-Anarchy died the second a dragon became president of the UCAS, got killed and jeopardized the Man's world with his testament.

That's interesting, but I'm not sure I'd agree that the status quo was over-turned by Dunk's will. He shook things up, but the same basic forces make the world go 'round in 2072.

Also, the average citizen and even the average underground radical, doesn't know why Dunkelzahn died. They don't know his death was an act of sacrifice for the protection of mankind. The assassination of the first great dragon president still looks awfully suspiciously like the status quo was eliminating a force of change.

For the record, I am that GM, and I didn't choose that directly. When you describe that campaign like that you are holding a figurative mirror up to you and the other players. I just supplied the rope. Which is probably a better description of my GM "style". For setting flavour this was Hong Kong so I had lots of noodle houses, black market down on the water, offered up the red opium angle (you missed that part of the campaign, a real highlight of it I think), the vast slum housing apartment sprawls (which lead to the infamous keying of the car), triads, and family ties up into the upper crust.

See, with that group the crazy tends to really take off...and soar! Though you might not be the ring leader you play no small part in that. That is that group exploring the world ... and putting their stamp on it.

P.S. It was a van full of "agriculture supplies" chaining to a gas line fire (that the owner of the warehouse made sure was leaking) that took out the warehouse. Oh, and it wasn't a Bulldog, it was an SUV (we might have called it a '69 Hummer?).

Read D's testament again. He empowered a social dropout to field a fullfledged campaign against his favorite hated corp. And that's just one sample of all the confusion and seemingly anarchistic movements his last will caused.

If it caused so much, then why is so little of it spoken of in SR4?

I'd still rather have the core of the neo-anarchist movement be metahuman with assistance from other creatures such as dragons, Free Spirits, and AIs. The metahuman element is still the most important and lets if feel like the PCs (which are typically metahuman) can take on the big roles - not something that happens if dragons hog the spotlight.

Because the lion's share already happened in SR3.

He did, but in 2072, that social dropout is dead and that hated corporation still exists. It's not the same, sure, but it's still a AAA megacorp with pretty much the same treatment of the common man.

But it proofed that neo-anarchy is dead cause the dropout had more power than the whole anarchist movement and lost.

Trans-anarchy is what's in!

I don't really think the neo-anarchists would consider him to be one of their own. His failure, while unfortunate, wouldn't necessarily cause them to give up the fight.



And what's that?

Trans-Anarchy is what happened to Neo-Anarchy after Crash 2.0

Using the new transhuMan's Tools against himself.

"Die by the very weapons you adore"?

Ok... I suppose I was letting my memories of your preferred character archtypes affect my view of your GMing style.

After all remember you've produced, a transgendered racial dwarf, a halfling paladin riding a flying wardog (with the breaking of physics that that entailed), and an entire clan of paladins and priests who's names can be punned into Jihad.

I think the question during the 80s was more of who. But what is also a valuable point.

Ernesto che Guevara gives us three important lessons from the Cuban revolution:


Johnson, Joshua From Cuba to Boliva: Guevara's foco theory in practice

Personal emphasis added. I think this quite well defines what punk is, by what punk aims to do. However punk is an evolved nature of the three lessons. In punk the lessons can be summarised as:

(1) unpopular forces can win a war against the government
(2) It is not necessary to wait for until all the conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.
(3) In developed North America, the urban landscape is the basic area for armed fighting.

The foco theory still holds for point 2. In that of immediate action initiated by an elite few. Instead of working to defeat an army through military means, unpopular forces allow the government controlled media to make them unpopular. Continued opposition to unpopular forces by the media allows for an estrangement of the population. When a government has been popularly elected, and legal outlets for political dissent exist, a revolution can be inspired. In these cases, peaceful action cannot replace the need for guerrilla tactics in affecting desired change. The focus is changed from large scale uprisings in the countryside to selective dissent in the urban landscape. This is what I would call punk

-Chrysalis

Punk is the human spirit crying out against one too many top ten feel good and ignore the drek piled up to your chin mainstream simploid jingles. It is the castle of the outsider, the country of the anarchist, and the realm of the Slot off and die mindset.

Punk is the snake in the garden that handed Eve a cheeseburger and said"Try this,these things RAWK!!"


Viva Le Ramones!!!!!!!

"Punk" as a term can relate to one of two things:

1. Any attempt at anti-commercialism. The 1980s punk rock scene of the Ramones, CBGB, mohawks, leather jackets and chains had been commercialized and was dead by 1990. The punk scene has fragmented into various subcultures that all derived from punk. These include glam rock (which is what most people think of when they think punk rock), ska, metal and thrash, and industrial rock cultures. There's even a tentative tie to hip-hop. Mohawks don't make one a punk. You can wear a suit and have a Ken-doll haircut and still be anti-commercial.
2. Any post-modern art attempt that defies categorization at the time.

Cyberpunk as literature is simply the reactionary antithesis of the utopian sci-fi winged rocket ship futures portrayed in the Buck Rogers comic serials from the 1930s and 1940s as well as World Of Tomorrow!-type films. It has its tropes but that's it in an nutshell. Virtual Reality combined with Orwellian distopias was one way to approach it but it wasn't the only way, especially in the case of writers like JG Ballard.

When the Internet and its peripheral industries became mainstream, cyberpunk lost most of its predictive charm as the technology it fashioned itself around was mainstream. Most cyberpunk writers have moved on to other genres like post-humanism and transhumanism (Rudy Rucker, Charles Stross, etc.), historical and satire (Neal Stephenson), fantasy/steampunk, and techno-political, techno-artistic and techno-thrillers (in the case of Gibson and Sterling's most recent works).

Wikipedia seems to ave everything: Punk ideologies

Johnny Ramone, "punk conservative". I think my world just imploded. I guess he and "punk liberal" Joey Ramone had some interesting discussions. And then there are the Punk Neo-Nazis, Punk Socialists, Punk Libertarians, etc. etc. So much for the idea of punk moving against the machine. Punk is the machine.

"No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
- George Orwell, Animal Farm, Ch. 10

welcome to a dystopian orwellian future, Chummer!

I'd just like to remind Dumpshockers that the neo-anarchism as explained in the Neo-Anarchists guides is a free market anarchism which is quite different from what a lot of people have in mind when they think "Anarchy".

Just trying to fit into the gong show.

P.S. I'm pretty sure you don't appreciate exactly how serious a character Gerold of Had was. But that's a discussion for another day since we are getting even further OT...

Indeed.

In my opinion, one of the major features of cyberpunk is the bleakness of modern life. That's still around, but one major aspect of that is that you can't do anything. Nothing you do can have much of an effect on anything. You're pawns of the man. If you run in the gutters, you can be kings, but your kingdom is a small one.

I think this all changed with Harlequin, when we saved the Sixth World.




As I understand it, Johnny and Joey didn't speak. One of them married the other's ex-girlfriend...

I've always felt Cyberpunk borrows from Film Noir (which is fine, as I like Noir).




The part I like best is that even "the man" is a pawn of the game.

Chinatown is a great film, but kind of sucks as an RPG scenario unless you are playing Paranoia.

To those of you who want to say that Punk Is Dead(and for the most part it is, thanks to Corps), go download Days of War Nights of Love. Trust me, it'll give you the dystopian 'fight the power outlook' you're looking for.

You'll feel that cyberpunk spirit again, no doubt.

This topic has given me some inspiration for a game that I was wanting to run. I've been considering doing a test run of SR4 (I'm currently running and SR3 game) and now I have a better idea what kind of game I am going to run. A low point, gang, freakshow type of gang. I might think of moving the setting to somewhere besides Seattle to make this point clear. Any suggestions besides LA (which I am considering).

Anywhere mentioned in Feral Cities. Chicago works well if you want to work with a very low resource level.

Fight the power is a post-punk, hip-hop mantra.

If some sort of 4th ed. Shadowbeat-type book is released and it doesn't include rules on how to be a successful rhymer I'm going to throw a garbage can through the window of my neighborhood pizza parlor.

I wonder if rap battles have made a comeback since Orxploitation became a big business?

-paws

Doubtful. No record label would be willing to risk having their new prodigy that they've invested millions in marketing embarassed by a talented amateur in the crowd. New talent won't be found. It'll be grown, where they can be sure that no skeletons will emerge from its' closet. A group of advertising agents will find someone with an asthetic that they like, who'll be taught everything he needs to know to do canned performances, a background designed to help build a fan base will be manufactured, and nothing will happen to his career that his handlers haven't carefully planned. In the end, any professional rivalry with another big name artist would have all the legitimacy of a professional wrestling work.

The 2070s will never see another 300 Bars, or another Ether, or another Takeover. Instead, we'll get a steady stream of better managed Vanilla Ices, and the second coming of "Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes".

I agree your assessment, from a Corp "Talent" Farm perspective. Most of the successful acts out (90%) there would be heavily produced and manged, as you described.

Still... there have to be garage acts out there that are have actual talent. Most probably won't hit it big (or do better than struggle to pay the rent), unless they manage to ride the wave of the latest and greatest music fad. Even then their fame is likely to be short lived. The first Ork and Troll groups to hit the Top 100 had to come from somewhere.

I can see a hundreds of corp-naive amateurs out there hoping to make it big... Posting videos on indie music networks (which are probably used by the corps to scout for semi-talented people) and blog sites (which are so bloated with posts that everything gets buried in minutes).

Anyway, might be an angle for a street level, music-oriented game. Not punk or rock, but definitely a way to thumb your nose at The Man.

-paws

I could definitely see there being an underground music scene full of people who just want to make music for the art of it, because it's how they express themselves, but I can't imagine that a corporation is going to take the risk of talent scouting them. I can definitely see the media corporations watching the independent music scene very closely, and even encouraging it to some extend, but they'll fabricate their own copies of the innovators, rather than deal with some kid from the barrens who actively hates the corporation and everything it stands for.

I can't speak for anyone else's game, but for me:
Edition change didn't take the punk out of my game. Me getting older took the punk out of my game. As a GM, I started frowning on zany, stupid, rebellious, devil-may-care antics. I started responding with realistic, reasonable consequences. When you run your game so that the pink-mowhawk guy with a chrome shotgun-arm has consequences associated with that, people are going to start dressing inconspicuously. If you run a game where punching Mr. Johnson and dangling him out of a window as part of the negotiation ruins the run, or sharpening your cyberspurs isn't a smart negotiating tactic, they'll stop doing that. If you run a game so that tearing through downtown in a combat-Winnebago firing rockets at police has consequences, players will stop doing it. I started focusing a lot more on runs and plots making sense, and being reasonable, rather than being AWESOME in the face of logic and sanity. And as your players get older and start getting used to considering consequences they'll tend to stop doing this stuff on their own.

In a certain way, my SR games were a lot more back when my buddies and I were in high school, and we did every one of those stupid things listed above.

If you want a punk-ier game, let the players know that it's going to be that kind of game. Let them know that crazy stunts will be rewarded with karma, and that cold professionalism, while not being punished, will not be rewarded. Long-term consequences will be downplayed, and if they can ditch the police chase, then they've gotten away.

Maybe your definition of '80's awesome punk is different than mine, but the ultimate point stands:
If everyone can agree on the game they want to play, and if the rewards/punishments are in line with that, you're 90% of the way there.

Its hard to completely fabricate street cred, though that certainly hasn't stopped people from trying, and even succeeding in some cases.

I wonder how quickly that kid from near the edge of the Barrens will turn down the possibility of raking in millions? Live the life of luxury or live out of the dumpster behind the Qwik-E-Burger... Hmm.

Again though, there's the naivety issue. Just because you're street smart doesn't mean you know drek about the corporate entertainment world. That kid probably will assume he can have his cake and eat it too, only to find out years or months later that any "authenticity" he had is gone and he can't get out unless the corp says so. Now... Imagine that kid, now a few years older and wiser, putting some of his stashed nuyen toward hiring some folks for an extraction. His own extraction. And failing that, maybe they know a way to help him fake his death?

Besides, if the corp wants him to be "edgy" and "dangerous" they might just engineer the bar fights and drugs and everything else needed to help maintain his bad boy image. And you can bet they'll be trying to set up Mr. bad boy to have a beef with another, similarly manufactured, big name.

Anyway... I guess I'm drifting into popular culture land here. Let's talk counter culture.

What are some ways that you might see regular folks giving one or more corporations the finger?

• DIY crafts and clothes might be a start. Heck, in the lowest income areas, it might be a way of life.
• Planting a container garden. The food might not turn out great, depending on the pollution level and your own skills, but even a little food that's not coming out of the vat factories is noteworthy.
• Making your own music. As we've been discussing. Nothing like a bunch of folk getting together to just jam for the hell of it out on a stoop or street corner.

-paws
Not really arguing with you DWC, just trying to shake out a few ideas.

I don't think the corporations are worried about the kid from the barrens turning down their offer and continuing to eat garbage. I think they're worried about exactly the prospect that you bring up. Eventually he'll figure out that he sold out and decide he wants to quit.

Raw rap battles would be relegated to the underground hip-hop scene but, hell, even MTV Total Request Live has rap battles. It's full of talentless poseurs with less skill than a first round American Idol contestant but it's a rap battle all the same. I could see a Horizon label like Shangri-La pitting its two rising stars in a broadcast battle of the rhymers. It would give the audience the illusion of participation as they vote on who should stay or go.

For me punk has always been more about the social politcal movement of self empowerment and political responsibility that just an image. Don't get me wrong I think mohawks are cool, a bitch to maintain but iconic.
Its less about the badge you wear and more how you choose to live your life.

Cyberpunk for me, is mix of the pace of life speeding up to a point where the individual cannot adapt to society and has become virtually worthless to the corperate machine except as a consumer base. Bucking the system is both abhorant and necessary to survive as person of conscious. Sell out have everything of materialist value or rebel and have your dignity.

Hmm. That has potential.

I smell some SLA in here...