Not Writing
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Neon Black - Skipping 3.0
🕑 Added 2019-03-09 00:35:00 +0000 UTCHey Patrons,
How's thing? Work okay? Life okay? Getting by as we crawl out of these long dark months? Well, that last question only applies to those of you living in the northern hemisphere...
Anyway.
I have a bit of an update for you on Neon Black, the cyberpunk tabletop RPG I'm working on. For the last few months I've been playtesting and redesigning the game. I thought I was going in a certain direction with it, trimming some mechanics and simplifying things. But recently I've been doing some studying on other cyberpunk games and games that are also hacks of Blades in the Dark. Long story short I'm going back to the drawing board.
At the end of the day I'm trying to change too much. Scum & Villainy, a space opera hack of Blades in the Dark, showed me just how little you need to change to make the BitD system work in a different setting. The Sprawl, a cyberpunk RPG with similar heritage to BitD showed me how to translate cyberpunk politics and aesthetics into mechanics in a way that the next version of Neon Black was completely missing.
So, the next version of Neon Black (I still need a better name than that) will be 4.0 since 3.0 turned out to be a dead end. And dead ends are fine. They are part of the creative process. What's important is understanding how and why you got there, and moving on.
As I read through both The Sprawl and Scum & Villainy, and play my own games to better understand them, I'm thinking I might translate my experiments with those games into serialized fiction for you all to read. I know this space gets updated pretty rarely, and that bugs me. So I'm going to try to put some more fiction up in here.
Thanks again,
Michael
