Cyberpunk: War of the Corporations - D&D 5th ed. homebrew WIP part 1

For those that don't know, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a table top RPG with a setting in medieval times. You have to play it in a group and each person controls one character, and there's a Dungeon Master (DM) that controls the adventure. Ideally, the party is composed of varied characters with different abilities that complement each other. Sounds familiar? Yep! That game you play on PC/Console is based in some way in D&D. What really sets apart this game from a PC/Console game is that you are playing it with real people by your side, so the interaction is much more fluid and intense, and you have this amazing freedom to do anything you want, as long as the DM allows it. Yes, there are extensive rules. The DM should know them very well and you, even if you don't, very soon you will, because they are very logical. Even if you wish to do something that might not fit the rules exactly but it is cool and benefits the party and/or the adventure, the DM will certainly allow it. This kind of social interaction and adaptability is what sets this game apart from conventional PC/Console games.

I've been playing D&D for about two years with some friends. When discussing alternatives, Cyberpunk came to mind and right there, Shadowrun. But the rules are still based in the 3.5 edition (at least that I know of), that is a lot more cumbersome than the current 5th edition. Besides, for example, having orcs in a Cyberpunk setting doesn't make any sense at all... We quickly realized that Shadowrun is out of the question. So, we set ourselves to create a legit, faithful and true Cyberpunk table top game, a homebrew based on the D&D 5th ed. rules.

We created a Facebook messenger chat group so we could discuss ideas and star organizing things and moving this project forward. Quickly we realized that using this tool only, would be very inefficient. Me and some other guy started getting things done and very rapidly there were enormous dialogs with useful information, but hard for us to scroll back and filter it. If it was hard for us, imagine it for the guys who would later join the conversation. So I thought about creating a Wiki. Selected contributors could lay down the information in a organized way, for everyone to see, and work collaboratively. So I quickly started looking for a solution. First, I tried some free online Wikis but soon realized that in some way or another, they wouldn't provide the features we wanted. So I ended up registering for a free webhosting account at https://www.000webhost.com. The only advertising present is very small, on the bottom right of your browser's windows, just saying that the website is "Powered by 000webhost". Then it was time to search for free Wiki software. I found several that would fit my needs, but my webhosting solution is free and, of course, has some limitations. It offers PHP and MySQL so that's the kind of software I started looking for. One of them, I don't know why, kept saying that a MyQSL connection couldn't be found, so in the end I chose a software that wouldn't require a database. Every bit of information is stored in .txt files. I have no problem with that. In the future, if we need to migrate for another solution, it might be even easier, and it's working flawlessly. The Wiki software we're using is called DokuWiki.

Very quickly I gave it a look more suited to our project and started laying down it's foundations. The day after, me and another guy (a dear friend of mine and a DM) started organizing content. We already had discussed several things some days before, mostly races and classes. He's the one that gets the technical side of things done. All the rules, traits, abilities and stats are his thing. He also wrote down the general idea for the lore, but I'm much more knowledgeable in Cyberpunk and quickly realized that a lot had to be changed. So, taking the core of his ideas, I re-wrote completely the story of humans and it's three variations. I still have to revise every other race, as they're either incomplete or extremely sci-fi (not in a Cyberpunk way). Very quickly, other people in our group also started giving their feedback, noticing immediately things that should be corrected. Without question, this is the workflow we needed.

I'm not going to discuss here what fits or not in a Cyberpunk universe, but for the sake of variety that this type of game requires, some alien races had to be introduced, and even off world humans. The thing is, I didn't want to focus very much on those aspects. So, every off world human is rare on Earth and aliens even more rare. Aliens exist but are occult from the majority of the humanity, and when moving among earthlings they do so disguised as humans. Just think X-COM 1...

Inspiration for Cyberpunk: War of the Corporation comes from several movies and games. The *Syndicate games, Satellite Reign, the Deus Ex games, the X-COM games, System Shock, Shadowrun and many others, all have excellent aspects that we are basing ourselves upon to make a great table top game. Of course, movies and anime like the Blade Runner movies, the Ghost in the Shell OVAs, anime and movie, RoboCop, Johnny Mnemonic, the Matrix movies, the Judge Dredd movies, the Terminator movies, Total Recall (both the original and the remake), the Tron movies, Akira anime, Cyber City Oedo 808, Psycho-Pass, the Armitage OVAs, Appleseed, AD Police, the Bubblegum Crisis OVAs and many more, are also a very strong inspiration to us.

This is a labor of love still in progress, in it's early stages, but it will be done. We set ourselves a time frame of six months to a year to finish Cyberpunk: War of the Corporation. We are all currently playing a D&D campaign and will finish first. This will also give us time to finish the homebrew and keep us entertained. Currently, we are writing it in Portuguese (our native language), with some expressions in English. If you need translation, just use Google. Maybe in the future we provide some kind of functionality for translation. The work we are doing it's free and is under the Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Very easy to understand and comply, and gives people a lot of freedom. I think it's a very reasonable license...

If you want to check out our work, still in progress, you can go to https://warofthecorporations.000webhostapp.com. But please remember, we're still a long way to finishing it. For example, we still need to create a logo. As it is relevant, I'll do more posts reporting the progress. Cheers!

Links

• https://www.000webhost.com
• DokuWiki
• Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
• Cyberpunk - War of the Corporations

If you liked this, please upvote, comment, follow and subscribe my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/besg666/videos

Get More Upvotes by SteemFollower! Please use this referral link and help me out. Thanks! https://steemfollower.com/?r=6423