itch.io

We've been making homebrews and the like as friends in our gaming group for years now, and we figured a jam would be a great opportunity to start making things that are a bit more presentable and actually legible to people besides ourselves. Hence this being our first published work as a team!

The size of the game mostly comes down to the Forged in the Dark rules format that it's based on, it's a design space we're very comfortable in so we decided to start there; cyberpunk specifically is a genre we've been interested in for a really long time and it fit the theme of this jam excellently, so it all sort of fell into place.

Since the very basic rules were adapted from an SRD and added to with things like the Power system, our new playbooks and our modified harm rules, creating the example session was actually what took most of the work! It helps that we're a three-person team, so the scope could afford to be a lot bigger than a solo project.

Thanks for asking!

This is a genuinely wonderful little game with some absolutely stunning visuals, and it made me feel like a terrible person in the best possible way.

Specifically placing the players in the shoes of a record company was an excellent touch, it makes us feel complicit in the injustices of the era, to the point of explicitly giving us the ability to participate in those injustices as a tool of survival.

The gameplay loop itself adds to this, we don't see our artists and their talent for what or who they are, we see them as the mechanical benefits they present us. We first and foremost see a brilliant triple-threat as a lucky gacha pull that will earn us great profit, not as person with a story to tell and compelling art to create.

Incredible stuff, one of the best solo TTRPGs I've played in a long time, with great integration of and commentary on the jam's theme.

A delightfully bleak and depressingly accurate game. The easy restart had me looping upwards of five times, each time thinking about what I could do differently, but of course that never ended up mattering. Each replay was just another roll of the dice, nothing more. All in all a deeply sobering and genuinely relatable experience.

An excellent, really interesting read. Especially enjoyed the flagging of ideas like planned obsolescence and the extrapolation of capitalism's most modern 'innovations' and the way it's effected the world's recent crises into a cyberpunk future setting.