Thank you for the well-wishes, and we appreciate all the support you can offer! And Arcon was born from hours-long discussions of Cyberpunk, so you are in great company here. In fact, I would highly recommend a talk that Kienna themselves actually contributed to over at twitch.tv/aznsrep on the genre's historical roots, its issues with Orientalism (which directly contributed to one of the truths we implemented in this supplement), and ways we can build from it!
VoD of the discussion here:
I'm diving in to the book right now. This may be a little premature, but I'm (currently) softly critical of exactly one aspect of the book -- the portrayal of violence (note: not crime).
One of the fears of the 80s that's grown stale in the Cyberpunk genre is the suburban hysterics that "inner city violence will spread and be inflicted on us all"; Arcon seems to portray that directly, widely, and unashamedly. It reasons it well and it makes sense for a world that is more or less a disaster zone, but (at least not in the section titled "Violence and Crime in Arcon") not without overlooking some core things.
Using Compton in the 80s as an example; the majority of violence in Compton was gang warfare related -- local power struggles. It wasn't violence that was occurring without context; it was the marginalized fighting for authority in a power vacuum, where law was unwilling or unable or unwanting to step in, and where their communities were left to rot. The portrayal of violence in Arcon seems to want to show these groups struggling for power as wholly bad, and not victims of circumstance. I think it's having difficulty divorcing this violence from the "good vs. evil" trope that emerged in all TTRPGs in the 80s. It's further accentuated by the lack of a prison system in the world (when for-profit prisons are a massive aspect of a capitalistic nightmare world and a key part of class warfare).
Take from that what you will. Really digging the book outside of that, and I'm curious if it gets fleshed out later. Cheers!
Thanks so much for the close read and feedback! It's a lot of really good stuff to think about.
My personal intention with writing the violence and crime section is that there's a lot of different reasons/contexts that violence is occurring within Arcon. Some of it comes from groups struggling for power with each other (like the gangs/cliques that want to establish their ground and authority), some of it comes from the fact that the only vehicle to express the frustration with their circumstances, and overall, it comes from a world where things are terrible and the system tends to encourage it.
I did intend to make it so that violence in Arcon isn't within the good/bad dichotomy, especially to avoid the idea that it's the individual's fault and not the system of oppression that makes people the victim of these circumstances, and also to make sure we weren't condemning the "punk" side of things. It's probably something for us to revisit in the next version with 2.0 to make it more clear what our intentions were!
