Scale and Borderlands for Cyberpunk

 So it's been a while.

What was surposed to be a short break for work and to reset my erratic schedualing managed to become 2 months. My only consultation is that Throne of Salt, the blog which inspired me to restart this blog after leaving it for 5 years hasn't updated since September, but Dan writes more than me and more frequently.

So if you don't know Borderlands, it was a video game series by Gearbox Software which pioneered the Looter-Shooter genre. Where you shoot through a class-based FPS and constantly find and exchange gear (mostly guns) for better versions.

Apart from the nice cell-shaded graphic, the main draw was the desolate wastes of the planet Pandora and the dark humour that cam with it being populated by an ecology of horrible monsters, Mad Max bandits and hard-scrabbled settlers.

But there is a fun intersection here with Cyberpunk. In a set of audio logs, the governor of one of the few refugee settlements to survive lays out the background details of how the planet came to be like it is. This background and the whole setting's background changed every game so it's only relevant for the first game where the lore was established.

• "With thirty thousand prisoners on Pandora, you may wonder what Dahl's security plan was. The answer is just as cheap and short-sighted as the plan to have thirty thousand criminals do your work for you. Dahl's security plan consisted of 600 armed men, and over forty six hundred unmanned sentry turrets. Predictably, when the prisoners took over the mines and prisons, they took over the sentry turrets as well."

This puts the game in a new perspective. Thity thousand prisoners got released 2 years prior and manage to route 600 armed men (who were mostly left there by Dahl), plus an unknown, isolated by well-armed civilian/administrative population. There couldn't have been more than 100,000 people on the entire planet in it's heyday and probably a lot lower. Yes the Crimson Lance was there as well making things worse but this looks less like a Mad Max planet and more like a single region left as an open-air prison.

Which brigns up to the topic at hand.

Death Valley Free Prison is descibed as 4000 square miles of hell-on-earth.

Within its borders dwell half a million depraved Gangmembers, battlescarred mercenaries, renegade netheads, demented road warriors, psychopathic felons, and other assorted social rejects. It's easy to get in, but just try to escape.

This does everything Borderlands wants (bar the monsters) and leaves the video game as simply a failure to conceive scale. Every plot and character you want out of the Borderlands 1, 2 and the prequel can fit inside Death Valley or any other part of the ruined USA you want in a way for your players to visit without having to justify why the bandits haven't overrun Night City.

Now DVFP was made for Cyberspace, a derivitive of Spacemaster/Rolemaster and not for any of the Cyberpunk editions. But in a fortunate coincidence, I was in Florence, Italy, in a little games shop off the Cathedral called Stratagemma. I found a Cyberpunk 2020 adaption of it. It looks like the European distrabutor had a habit of releasing various 2020 books that were alt-universes like Gravity Falls as far-future sourcebooks and repackage other games lik Cyberspace as 2020 books presumebly becuase they sold better. So I ended up with a compatible game but in Italian.

With a few conversion equations from Challenge Magazine, you can even you wing the process. Now we got not a lot of material on SoCal in Cyberpunk's timeline, so there is plenty of game space to insert DVFP either exactly as it appears or as a wholesale reference to Borderlands.
If you want an excuse for why no on cares, you could set it in Texas where there is a lack of setting material and empathy as well. You could even set it in the nebulous south-west if the rock formations are essential.

You can always blame Biotechnica for the monsters.