Through Thursday, January 16 we present the Hard Wired Island Bundle featuring Hard Wired Island, a retrofuture post-cyberpunk SFRPG from Weird Age Games inspired by ’90s anime. Set in an alternate 2020 in Grand Cross, an O’Neill cylinder space colony orbiting Earth, Hard Wired Island is about marginalized people using technology to try to change the status quo. The Offworld Cartel sells space exploration as a shared dream, but its true aim is control of Grand Cross and the future of space settlement. If the next station election goes their way, the Cartel will become the landlords of human space. Your group of Grand Cross citizens – Fixers, Hackers, Influencers, Soldiers, activists, investigative reporters, gig economy workers – fights criminals, corrupt cops, hate groups, Cartel androids, and the unchecked greed that bleeds your communities dry. If you do things right, you can lead Grand Cross to a better future.
The easy-to-learn Hard Wired Island system uses six-sided dice. There are rules and unique actions for Social situations, Stealth, Hacking, and Conflict. Each character has one or more Occupations, which define how your character solves problems: the Fixer, the Hacker, the Influencer, the Operator, the Soldier, the Street Fighter, and the Thief. Each has its own unique abilities. Social actions and problem-solving skills are at least as important as hacking and getting into fights. Before missions, characters create a pool of points called Prep that can be spent later on items, flashbacks, and other bonuses. This flexible system lets characters adapt and change their plans on the fly without wasting their earlier efforts. During play you can call on a Community of side characters, or make a little extra cash with a Gig Work App.
Instead of wealth, characters track their Burden score, which represents how comfortably they live on Grand Cross. Lower Burden is better: 0 means you’re comfortable, 4 destitute. Between missions, characters can suffer an Economic Shock that affects how well they perform; higher Burdens risk more frequent Shocks. Cyberware implants don’t make you less human or prone to mental illness; instead, augments add to your Burden.
Hard Wired Island may resonate with you to the extent you find its premise believable. Although the rulebook describes Grand Cross as “a ceramic jungle of technological wonders,” where “people sport cybernetic augmentations and rub shoulders with androids,” inequality and crime are on the rise, while privacy is shrinking. “Old, corrupt politicians sign over the station’s future to corporations as its youth struggle for control of their destiny. This is the world you’re fighting to change.”
The Hard Wired Island corebook spends more than 200 pages detailing Grand Cross, from the 72 hatbox cylinders of the Agriculture Ring at the front (Sunward) cap, along the three ground panels (Harbou, Tezuka, and Verne) through 15 city-sized wards (Voyager, Turing, Cixin, Foundation, etc.) and dozens of districts, to the solar power station at the back cap. The total habitable surface area is 325 square km, the population 4.5 million.
Opened in 2010 (in this alternate history), Grand Cross ran decently well until 2017, when the Cartel-backed Unity Party won the first real election. Each of the 13 major corporations in the Offworld Cartel incarnates a particular kind of greed, vice, criminality, and/or incompetence. Directed by this bunch, the Unity Party started privatizing services and cutting costs. These measures caused the destruction of another space habitat, and its refugees moved to Grand Cross. Now, in 2020, a new election looms, where the Cartel plans to tighten its grip. Yet events have galvanized its opponents, and no one knows what happens next.
Seeing the plight of Grand Cross – advanced tech, degraded society, omnivorous greed – we might feel despair at humanity’s continual wresting of defeat from the jaws of victory. Even the game rules make progress difficult: If you hit an Economic Shock between missions, you can lose your home, augments, or Traits, or you might suffer Disadvantage on skill rolls. Nonetheless, Hard Wired Island is about fighting the fight. Don’t submit to an unfair system; fight it, and rely on yourself and your friends to see it through.
“The thing about working toward a better world is, The work is never done” (p.327). “There’s always someone else who needs help, or a community in need, or whatever. If we ever did get a handle on it all, some genius is gonna have a new idea that lights everything on fire again. But things still get better. So keep doing the work. Leave the world in a better place than you found it.”
This new Hard Wired Island Bundle presents the entire line for a terrific bargain price. Pay just US$12.95 to get all six titles in our Hard Wired Collection (retail value $64) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 400-page Hard Wired Island core rulebook, the three-scenario anthology Tales from L5, two semi-serious Occupation playbooks – The Reborn and The Cat – the Hard Wired Island Soundtrack, and a making-of memoir, Hard Wired Island: Behind the Scenes.
[The Hard Wired Island core rulebook (retail price $30) previously appeared in our November 2022 Cornucopia offer. The titles new to the Bundle of Holding have a combined retail value of $34.]
This Hard Wired Island offer goes missing in a Crosser camp in the basement under Réamann District Thursday, January 16.
