Neon City Overdrive's cover.

Neon City Overdrive is a game written by Nathan Russel and published by Peril Planet Game Studio in 2020. This is the smallest core book of all the ones we’ve seen so far at 72 pages.

We’ll also be looking at a supplement named The Grid, which focuses on hacking and has another 60 pages.

Setting Overview

Most of those 132 pages are dedicated to the setting and to a set of adventure seeds, both of which are largely based on vibes instead of relying on laboriously crafted timelines or detailed maps. This is the game of stylish cyberpunks running dangerous jobs in a neon-lit sprawl. The reader is expected to take it from there to add details as needed.

The setting as provided is just a basic sketch. The game takes place in The City, which is divided into dense residential and commercial zones called Metroplexes, equally dense hellish industrial blocks named Grinders, and the Streets that flow in between. The City and the world it’s in are covered by the Grid, a global computer network where nearly every device that can be described as “electronic” or “computerized” has a presence.

The Grid gets a somewhat more detailed description because I’m using material from the supplement here. Like the physical world it has several components. The Signal lets all those devices connect to the Grid. It’s maintained by an army of antennas, and repeater drones. The devices attuned to the Signal generate The Overlay, which is projected into the physical world as a combination of holograms and augmented reality. Most devices have an augmented reality interface instead of physical controls, and most signage exists in the Overlay only. Hubs are big static computers. Some of them help route and maintain the Signal and the Overlay, or host public virtual environments, but others are private servers used by the sort of organization your cyberpunks need to hack.

You can use the grid through an interface that resembles a real-world smartphone or desktop browser, but it’s also possible to go into full immersion VR. This works as you’d expect if you’re familiar with the genre (and if you’ve read the other entries in this series, you are). We have our Gibsonian matrix here, with wireframe or low-poly graphics by default, but with specific hubs represented as more realistic environments. The more powerful the owner, the more realistic their hubs’ presentation.

A lot of social events happen entirely in the Grid’s virtual reality, from important business conferences to sport tournaments and nightclub gatherings. Virtual reality ensures they feel mostly like physical events. That sure would have been handy during our real world pandemic.

The downside is that “common” grid users are constantly monitored and tracked. Player characters and other dirty criminals have their ways of evading this, and despite the efforts of law enforcement agencies and corporate security, grid crime is very common and not going away any time soon.

When you go into VR, you emerge at the Local Area Zone corresponding to your physical location but can move to any other LAZ you can access with a thought. Movement within a LAZ is restricted to the sort of thing a real person would be able to do in the physical world, and the landscape reflects this. Want to go to a site in your LAZ? You need to walk. The book recognizes this is inconvenient. Some area zones are private, either disconnected from the public Grid entirely or separated from it by virtual gates that admit only those with the proper credentials. A skilled enough hacker might be able to break through a gate. Totally isolated networks can only be accessed by physically jacking into their hubs.

People can access the grid using wearable computers, which are cheap and widely available. Serious hackers (called codeslingers here) have an implanted interface chip that has all the same functions and allows diving into VR as well. Those who can’t or won’t use implants can make do with a “Grid-box”, a VR helmet that also covers the mouth and nose. And both can further benefit from a sensory deprivation chamber if they’re really serious.

This default presentation is subject to change, as GMs are encouraged to tweak the arrangement to get the right vibe they want. By tweaking the list of available technologies and how common they are you could get anything from mainframes-and-telephones with a chrome veneer to a Ghost in the Shell-like ubiquitous net where everyone has implanted computers.

Mechanics Overview

From what I understand the rules of Neon City Overdrive belong to the lineage of Forged in the Dark games. There are no specific mechanics for the Grid here, not even if you use the supplement. Hacking uses the exact same mechanics as everything else.

Tests use six-sided dice. You start with one Action Die, and gain more for each factor in your character sheet or the story that helps you succeed, and a Danger Die for each factor that gets in the way. Then you roll the resulting pool. Each Danger Die cancels an Action Die that rolled the same value. You take the highest value rolled in the remaining Action Dice, and use it to determine the result. A 3 or less is a failure, a 4 or 5 is a partial success with a cost attached, and a 6 is a complete success. The book goes into a bit more detail than this, but we don’t need it for this article.

Narration and the fiction it creates are supremely important because they’ll set the stakes for the roll and inform you of which positive and negative factors are in play to build your die pool. Players are the only ones who roll dice. Enemies and obstacles are a source of Danger Dice but the GM never needs to roll for them.

Hacking also uses those rules. The additional rules material in the Grid supplement is just a clarification that purely physical traits and tags don’t apply to tests made in the Grid, and Grid-specific ones don’t apply to the meat world. Can´t use your muscle grafts to hack the Gibson, can’t use your fancy programs to lift a car. Mental traits might apply to either “reality”, though. The book encourages focusing on the imagery of the simulation and making it as close to the physical world as possible, to make it easier for the group to describe actions without needing to know a lot about computers.

Run Parameters

We’re supposed to set the exact shape of our Grid when we play, so let’s say it’s more or less the same as Shadowrun 4th Edition’s. It’s not a pure mesh network, there’s cell tower hubs and such, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

Our hacker will be going along with the physical team. The target office’s Grid layout is the same as in the SR4 version. The physical location surely has its own set of tags but the one that affects us is that our good disguises give us the element of surprise. Losing this might be one of the consequences for a hacking complication here. In a real game that’d affect the rest of the team too.

Target Systems

We have an office intranet that’s connected to the general Grid through a firewall, which we bypass by being inside the office. Its security from the inside is nothing special except that access to the bank accounts is well-guarded.

The internal security wireless network covers the office but not connected to the outside. It’s hardened against intrusion and has a piece of Blue ICE that will trigger at the first complication.

Our secret server in the records room with no wireless network at all. Our hacker must physically jack into it. It’s also hardened, and has Black ICE constantly watching over it.

Our Hacker

Pixie (non-binary human)

Trademarks and Edges: Metroplexer, Codeslinger (Hacking, Cyber Combat), Infiltrator (Alarms, Locks)

Flaws: Greedy, Socially Awkward

Gear: Interface Chip (Fast, Advanced), Icebreaker (Silent, Deadly), Stealth Program Suite (Mimetic, Subtle), something else non-hacking related.

Pixie is kinda min-maxed to fit our scenario, to be honest, with lots of traits that would apply to hacking. They’re a passable sneak in the physical world but not very good at physical combat and bad at social interaction. That’s what the rest of the team is for.

Run Summary

Our team gets into the office as usual - we always assume this part works out. Pixie hides in the bathroom to find the security network and hack into it via VR.

I decide to roll the security server hack as an extended task, since those require three successes and we have three goals in here. Pixie decides to use Infiltrator instead of Codeslinger for this, since it is an infiltration of sorts and that’s where they put put their Alarms and Locks edges. I’m being lenient towards my player (who is also me) here. Those traits plus all other relevant tags give Pixie a total of seven action dice.

Pixie is opposed by a single danger die, from the server being Hardened, but that die rolls a six and eats the one I rolled on the action dice. They’re left with a 5 and a 4, which count as successes towards our goal but apply consequences as well. So I rule we lost our Element of Surprise and that the Blue ICE on the server activated.

I rule that the ICE hasn’t found Pixie yet, but it does get to add its relevant tags as danger dice on the next roll as it looks for them. Fortunately none of those roll a six and the action dice do, allowing Pixie to unlock the final door ahead of time. Tests from this point on are made using Codeslinger as expected, since they deal purely with stuff that lives in the computer.

We get to the secret server and I rule that the Black Ice in there is already active but will only spot Pixie as a consequence - they start out stealthy. The ICE however does get to add its Counter-Intrusion and Scary tags as danger dice even so. Fortunately its rolls are crap and Pixie gets a 6, finding and downloading the evidence.

Finally, let’s go for the money! This means the office network’s Well-Guarded tag becomes a danger die, but as before the ice only comes online as a consequence. We roll a 5 here, so it does come online, but not before we transfer the money.

The physical team proceeds to try to leave the office, but as usual we stop our simulation here since the main hacking bits are done.

Total elapsed time: 15 minutes.

Run Analysis

I love engaging with crunchy mechanics but narrative systems do have their advantages! 15 minutes is the fastest time we have so far, beating the “silent run” from SR 4th Edition by 2 minutes. And this only took so long because I have absolutely no experience with Neon City Overdrive and had to keep looking at the books.

It’s possible this run was too easy, but it’s okay because it’s inserted into the larger context of the physical break-in. Pixie would have plenty to do in that part of the run. I might have made a mistake here in simply having “unaware” ICE add some of its tags to the hacking roll. The system is abstract enough that I could have ruled slipping past the ICE undetected would require “fighting” it and filling its Harm boxes while describing it as a sneaking attempt. Whatever form it took in the narrative, combat would have made things take longer, but not by much.

The mechanical bits of the run would probably be much faster than the 50/90 minutes I’ve been assuming here, but this would be offset in all cases by the extended narration and roleplaying the game demands to frame those mechanics and establish all the influencing factors for each roll.

Our experiment however does allow us to conclude the obvious: when you use the exact same simple resolution mechanic for everything, everyone has more or less the same spotlight time and the classic “Decker problem” won’t manifest.