This project started right before the pandemic hit. What timing! I took a hiatus from development of it as covid swept the planet as I couldn't find the creative spark for the game when the real world was falling into its own weird dystopian moment. But as it eased off, I eased back into Crypto. It helped that I could start play testing things in person again, as well.

Crypto was my attempt to capture the cyberpunk genre in tabletop role playing game fashion. Not as an after-though re-skin of another game system, not as a co-option of the theme for gonzo-crazy-android gaming, nor as a story/lyric game, but an homage to the novels that started the genre in the 80s. Those books were not about heists or people losing their minds to cybernetic implants, they were action-adventure sci-fi about future people and the power structures they found themselves in, ones dominated by economic powers, ones illuminated and tortured  by technology taken to their imaginative conclusions. They were deeply personal stories, laced with humor and poignant moments that can be best described as human.

This was the tabeltop role playing game I wanted to play. Instead, I picked up Cyberpunk: RED and the new starter kit for Shadowrun and feeling let down by both of them. There were rehashes of games I used to love playing in the 90s, but both new editions felt worse than their predecessors. I couldn't see myself actually running either of those games, but they had reignited a desire to play some dark future games at the table.

There were various other smaller titles, though most were story games. I love story games (and have more of them than I'll ever have a chance of playing, probably ...) but for me "cyberpunk" is a genre about action and adventure, and I wasn't "getting that" from what I was finding. If I want to play Blades in the Dark, I will. That isn't, however, what cyberpunk is for me.

And so Crypto was born, and it slowly evolved into a thing about future dystopias that focused on the character's social networks more than the caliber of their guns or getting lost in "hacking the Gibson" mini-games. It's still a work in progress, with artwork slowly trickling in and both final proof-reading, future play-testing, and professional layout yet ahead.

I'm also very excited to finish up and release the first adventure pack for Crypto. It's called Hireath which means a "deep longing for something, especially one's home," though I've also seen it referred to as longing for things we know of but perhaps have not experienced. A special sort of nostalgia, if you will. It's designed as an intro to the game system, but also an exploration of cyberpunk themes: hackers versus corporations, disenfranchised survivors at the heart of society, the surreal worlds of the ultra-wealthy and powerful, the rise of new technologies that will probably change the world ... 

But for today, just getting out a pre-release version of Crypto is the order of the day. Let me know what you think of it so far!