Preface

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while now. I’m not gonna lie, writing and publishing those Monster Manual posts is quite soothing. Particularly the releasing part, which is just a few mechanical actions now that I have so much pre-written material for it. Every once in a while I’ll sit and write something that’s on my mind, and hesitate a bit before posting it. This is one such post, which I’d say was written somewhere around late April or early May.

The Post

One of the outtakes from my last screed against Transhuman Space was a rebuttal to the bit where it says it’s better and more realistic than cyberpunk because it doesn’t have any apocalyptic disasters in its Very Serious history of the future.

I had had whole paragraphs mapped out in my mind about how yes, the insistence of 90’s cyberpunk RPGs in inserting these catastrophes was kinda silly. About how they probably had their roots in their authors believing in that “end of history” bullshit just as hard as the text of Transhuman Space itself did, and how they couldn’t see the future being a shitty place if there wasn’t a plague, a nuclear meltdown, or a big war somewhere in there to muck things up.

It was going to end with an assertion that no, you don’t need a big, clear, forced disaster to head down a bad path. A lot of those cyberpunk tropes (evil corporations, authoritarian governments disguised as democracies, and so on) happened all on their own without needing such a push. William Gibson’s concept of the Jackpot, presented in his novel The Peripheral, encapsulates all of this a lot better than Transhuman Space’s bright future. Well, he is William friggin’ Gibson, and he had almost twenty extra years of history to look at, but still.

That post is all ruined now, of course, because it turns out those disaster-licious 90’s games were on to something after all. Here we are, amid a deadly pandemic that’s causing an untold number of tragedies and turning whole societies upside-down as enforced quarantines and lockdowns push them to change their habits in a rush. It’s not nearly as bad as a genuine 90’s RPG disaster, but, in true Jackpot fashion, it doesn’t have to be. It’s not the cause of the evil corps’ and authoritarian governments’ rise to power, but a consequence of it. And I don’t think either THS or the 90’s games would ever have predicted that rich capitalists would, when faced with a plague, suggest that it was OK to let vast numbers of people die from it as long as it kept the economy growing. THS has far too much faith in its Very Smart Neoliberals to suggest such a thing, and it sounds too bleak even for a 90’s-style dystopia.