We have some great stretch goal news for you. But first a reminder: we’re about to head into the final week of this campaign. All of our stretch goals are based on the number of backers. (For example, we just unlocked a goal at 1,800 backers.) Reaching new backers is how we hit stretch goals—and we can’t do it on our own. Your effort to spread the word this morning really paid off in hitting this goal quickly today. Keep it up!
Now let’s talk about those goals:
The GM Campaign Journal Has Been Upgraded!
We’re really excited about the GM Campaign Journal. We made a truly beautiful—and very useful—journal for the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game, and there’s a similarly awesome one in the works for The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game. We can’t wait to bring that same luxuriant utility to any Cypher System campaign. In fact, we hope to make it even better.
And now we’re going to! Thanks to you, we’ve upgraded the GM Campaign Journal with improved features, including a label set that lets you customize your journal. If you’re not backing at a level that includes the GM Campaign Journal, you might consider an upgrade. And if you run a lot of Cypher System games, like we do, you might want more than one—it’s available as an add-on!
Time to Delve into the Matrix
Earlier in this campaign we funded the Midnight Deck and Otherworldly Sites Pack—unique and immersive extras for High Noon at Midnight and Gunslinger Knights, respectively.
Let’s make something really neat for Neon Rain. We’re calling this next stretch goal the Hacker’s Matrix. Delving into the net is a staple of the cyberpunk genre. Hackers and runners dive into a virtual world, find their way to the subnets and nodes of nefarious corps, criminal groups, and shady government agencies, and confront obstacles, AIs, virtual traps, and other dangers as they seek out information, install their own worms or trojans, or simply tear the whole thing down.
The Hacker’s Matrix lets the player get a taste of this virtual universe. It’s effectively a player-facing map, but instead of being an illustration on paper, it’s a virtual 3D space the player explores as their character navigates the net.
How does it work? When the PC delves into cyberspace, the GM opens the Hacker’s Matrix on a laptop or tablet (or sends the link to the player). The player navigates through an evocative, high-tech 3D space, just like they might use a city map in a game book, telling the GM where they go. Different sites in the Matrix may have encounters, obstacles, characters, or AIs to interact with. Just like with that city map, where you’d play through anything you encounter at the night club or the gang safehouse, you’ll play through the things you find in the Matrix just like any other RPG encounter.
The Hacker’s Matrix will include several different maps, of the sorts of virtual locales cyberpunk PCs tend to dig into: corporate mainframes, terrorist subnets, AI nodes, and so on. It will be web-based, so you don’t need anything special to use it—just a tablet or computer with a web browser.
We can’t wait to use this in our games—it’s really going to make cyberpunk feel like cyberpunk! When we hit 2,000 backers, we’ll unlock the Hacker’s Matrix.
As we said above, your effort in spreading the word really helps bring in those new backers—it worked today in getting us to this goal so quickly! But there are still thousands and thousands of gamers out there who don’t know about this campaign. Let’s reach them, unlock the Hacker’s Matrix, and head into the exciting final week shooting for even more stretch goals!
