Deathwish has been knocking around in my brain as an abstractly defined construct for about three years now. I’ve always had a pretty strong idea of what the game would play like, what the central elements of gameplay and the setting were, and a repertoire of games to steal bits from. As I’ve encountered and absorbed more material in my research and discovered and played new games, my direction of the game’s development has changed drastically several times — the system I’ve been posting about recently is the third ground-up reimagining of the very guts of the rules. Each piece of material I’ve encountered has been an addition to the “codebase” of Deathwish, however; nothing has ever been removed from the library of sources it draws on.
My goal with Deathwish has always been to make the game I’ve always wanted to play with my friends, informed by a decade and a half of experiences with dozens of games and people. It was, conceptually, an artistically compiled professional mix-down of all the gaming and creative thinking I’d ever done. Now, the project is actually defined that way: it’s a system consisting of many modules of various types, each of which acts like a programming library to provide contents and functionality to the whole.
The software metaphors used in describing Deathwish to this point have been fully realized. Previous versions of Deathwish are in the version 0.0.x cycle — alphas that saw some development, but no active testing or release. A retrospective version summary:
- Version 0.0.1 – July-October 2008: Project initiated. The game is intended to be a heavily modified and cleaned-up Cyberpunk 2020 with the background of Nine Inch Nails’ concept album Year Zero as the base setting.
- Version 0.0.2 – November 2008: Lifepath-based character generation proposed. The very core of the CP2020 system is extracted and developed into something harder, first realizing the low-modifier, one-die-one-action principle. Much fiddling with and analysis of automatic weapons rules begins here.
- Version 0.0.3 – June 2009: The system gets more complex, the idea being that keeping the complex rules in the background and using them to create simple numbers for use on the character sheet is the best way to combine crunch with simplicity, accessibility, playability, and speed. There was a lot of subtraction of double-digit and negative numbers involved and much pondering of the nature of exploding (or open-ended) dice.
- Version 0.0.4 – September 2010: Development recommences after a long hiatus. The basic system is torn out and replaced with a prettied-up version of the Twilight 2000 Second Edition rules, which requires rethinking of everything. This version was the first to see really substantial development and approach playability.
- Version 0.1a – January-February 2011: Alpha development of the current version. Savage Worlds is discovered to realize Deathwish’s design goals and is selected as a framework to build on — regardless of whether or not it’s the final system, it will provide a foundation known to work with which more advanced concepts can be integrated and tested.
The current version is version 0.1 and can be imagined as a computer. Deathwish itself is the software element, running like an operating system. It overlays the rest of the systems, passing information in and out, providing rule and setting extensions, and making everything play nice together. Savage Worlds is the core system ROM, providing all the essential functionality. Other modules provide supplemental rules, sub-systems, setting, and theme and tone. This industrial mashup is not at all chaotic, though; each module has a type and a purpose — only certain elements from each are used to avoid conflicts.
Deathwish 0.1 component manifest
Rules module: Savage Worlds provides the core rules, basic character generation, expandable material.
Technology modules: GURPS Ultra-Tech and GURPS Bio-tech provide the catalog of gear available, and Shadowrun, Fourth Edition provides concepts on augmented reality and its effects on society and interaction.
Setting modules: GURPS Cyberworld and GURPS Autoduel provide the details of the geopolitical makeup of the United States and world of Deathwish, including the existence of autoduelling as a sport. GURPS Cyberpunk and Ex Machina: Tri-Stat Cyberpunk Genre provide general cyberpunk genre atmosphere and conceptual advice.
Tone modules: Cyberpunk 2020 provides its fatalistic atmosphere and use of meta-characters as a tool of stylistic expression. Interface-Zero, the game that introduced Savage Worlds, serves as a guide to maintaining a dystopian tone in the presence of nanotechnology, sentient AI, and welfare states. Twilight 2000 captures the chaos and desperation of a modern firefight well. Shadowrun serves a second role, providing the concept of the professional criminal operative as player-character archetype. Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero and The Slip and their attendant background materials give the other setting material punch and resonance.
External rules imports: Pyramid’s GURPS rules for computer hacking; Traveller’s lifepath-based character creation; Interface-Zero’s gritty injury rules.
Due to the excellence and ease of use of Savage Worlds, Deathwish development is now proceeding faster and further than ever before and will soon be ready for its first beta test group. Hopefully, it will be what I’ve always wanted and will provide a fast, furious, and fun night of hellish cyberpunk. I think it will — and I’m more confident of that now than I ever thought I’d be.
Bullet Bill
