I kind of expected a stronger connection between tech magic and Cyberworld (1994) when I set this week up, but alas, we leave magic behind now. Cyberworld is a generic sourcebook for a near future dystopian roleplaying experience.  GURPS sourcebooks tend to aim for the generic (it’s right there in the name!), and I guess this one does too, but it winds up being a pretty unique flavor of cyberpunk.

The basic premise is pretty familiar. The year is 204X, and everything is fucked. The hows of that are honestly a little less important than the how-nots. For instance, as I mentioned already, the world is not magically fucked, as in Shadowrun. It isn’t even fucked up to the degree of Cyberpunk. It’s funny, because Mike Pondsmith has always said his world was inspired by lots of stuff, but not William Gibson’s work, but Gibson is so enmeshed in the indicators of cyberpunk that when I’m reading Pondsmith’s stuff it seems like a sort of dubious claim. But then I read this and all of a sudden, I can see how much more out-there Cyberpunk is, with its telepathic tanks and whatnot. Cyberworld is a little bit more fucked than Gibson’s Sprawl and maybe a little less fucked up than Underground. The corporations and the government and the cartels all feel like gangs, there’s plenty of plausible tech and violence, but everything feels grounded. You can see our contemporary world underneath the chrome, still. It’s cool.

Cool cover by Keith Parkinson, with maybe the earliest anticipation of 21st century alt-models I’ve seen in genre art. Dan Smith handles the interiors entirely and gives the proceedings a nicely unified look.