Hard Wired Island (Part 2)

This is the second part and conclusion to our Hard Wired Island critical analysis. You can find part one here.

Lucrécia

Hard Wired Island rules are pretty simple, if not the easiest to remember. However, those are almost independent from the game’s engine (for the most part).

The engine of the game is precarity and the systems it uses to model it.

The game goes back and forth to a familiar cycle of free-play and missions, but most organic and flexible than most; player characters have their own lives in Grand Cross and whole sessions can happen. So what keeps player characters venturing back into the cyberpunk grind and away from their precious Tetsuo Overdrives and anime conventions?

Burden.

Characters have a Burden between 0 and 4. Less and you have upgraded to rich pervert, and are unplayable. The best you can do is Comfortable — you can afford most stuff, for now, but you are never shielded from precarity. Your Burden positions your character socio-economically in Grand Cross: it is not what they can afford, it is who they get to be, how they get to spend their time, what needs go unfulfilled and where they get to exist.

Burden piles out fast. Got pressured into new cybernetic upgrades under the threat of getting replaced by automatization? Burden. You have a generous nature? Burden. You are a party enby? Burden. Poor impulse control? Burden. Dared to get an education? Burden.

It is gonna be an uphill battle to keep against your Burden. Before any mission, you must check for Economic Shocks. These make it more difficult for you to accomplish missions, but also keep pressure for you to do something about your Burden — things can only get worse from inaction. You need Cash; Cash is both a mechanical resource, but also the only way you can reduce yourself or someone else’s Burden. 1

But imagine you have been a good little prole. You sold your labor and have kept your Burden at 0! You can avoid doing missions and getting into trouble! Next election you gonna vote for a new Grand Cross! You prepare yourself for headpats and being called a “Good Girl”, but then…

Materialism strikes back2.

You are not alone; what anti-social creature would you be if you could bear to see your friend destitute? Furthermore, each group is tied by a community — which has its own Burden! Not only that, communities are specifically vulnerable to economic shenanigans, and each loss of a community makes Grand Cross worse. That’s how the corpo wins, by atomizing every single one of you into good consumers. You don’t want the corpos to win, do you?

But fine, you think you managed to outsmart the system and get your perfect balance of anti-social behavior and corpo drone persona to game Burden.

Corporation greed gonna lead to trouble, and you are going to foot the bill. So, if you are not proactive fighting off corpo bullshit, improve life in Grand Cross, or [REDACTED] [REDACTED] in Tetsuoblox, everyone’s Burden gonna rise up.

Thankfully, you are not going to let that happen, will you? You will try to help your buddies and develop your community every chance you get. Right? Right?

Brad

Burden is the heart of this engine, and once again, my collaborator has killed a breakdown of it. Burden is a powerful engine because it is both Carrot and Stick, it is both punishment and reward. The system keeps players on their toes and drives their entire plot arcs.

Ludo

I had a lot of trouble with this, so I’m gonna be relying on Brad for this.

Decision paralysis is an actual worry in this game. The setting of Grand Cross is rich but dense; you or your players will probably not have time to read it with the minimum prep.

I usually don’t recommend this option, but Hard Wired Island designer has a penchant for unique, memorable3 characters. It is probably better to pick one of the pre-generated characters and jump right in; be reckless, and after you are done with them after session one, make them be another part of your community as you bring your own characters.

From there, you should pick some of the starting hooks (pg. 341) that tie to the pre-generated character chosen by the players: did they pick Jupiter? Involve them with L4 refugees. One of them is Brian? Involve them in cyborg activism, and so on. The reason why I suggest you pick those is because they have specially tailored hooks for them (pg. 347).

If you only have one session and no time to read the 400 pages book, well, I would not bother with missions. As fun as they are, they are not essential to get what Hard Wired Island is about. I would recommend trying to grab those assorted hooks, then look at the examples of different scenes (pg. 33-49) and run one of each related to an appropriate hook.

Terabyte Boys (pg. 352) is a good scenario, but I regret trying to use it as a short intro. Definitely session two material, but if you don’t have time to read more of the book, I would avoid it for session one/only.

Funny enough, if you follow these guidelines, you should learn the system but not interact with the Burden engine. Brad, any suggestions about that?

Brad

Before I answer Ludo, let me cover some other very important stuff. I designed a custom ward and districts; don’t do this, use an existing one. Ut was cool homework, but because my players elected not to continue Hard Wired Island it ended up being thrown into the dungeons of dead ideas. I also genuinely recommend picking a couple of unique lore pieces to mention each session and otherwise just giving an overall idea.

Ludo is also absolutely right, you are probably better served to pick out some pregen characters if you just want to try some stuff out. Character creation is not hard, but time-consuming, and while I consider it very very enjoyable if you are not sure it’s going to be in your regular game for a while can be a tad disappointing.

Now that I have done all of those caveats, make sure to make your players roll their burden, and then pick a player to roll for the community. If one of them fails, great make sure your plot hook incorporates the Burden on them or their part of the community. If you don’t get that lucky, it’s time to play a little unfair, and make one of your plot hooks about a community member under threat of Burden, in my test scenarios it was a local drone racer who was being muscled out of his living, who I made clear that if Burden on the community came up, he would be first on the chopping block. You may not be able to get any mechanical Burden interactions, but if you get your players in the mood of Burden, you are halfway there.

Two of my four players had none of the 90’s anime knowledge that the setting winks and nods at. It didn’t affect their experience at all, they got the core concepts of the setting, knew what they were about, and may have just had less enjoyment of some jokes, but still overall had a good time.

Lucrécia

The question that must be asked of any great cyberpunk piece of art:

Can it remain relevant?

This is especially hard to assess with roleplaying games, as this art form only becomes so when collaborative storytelling is performed. As tools, it equips players to make relevant social art — and it should update and stay relevant to changing material conditions as the post-neoliberal nightmare continues.

Still, hard to make predictions in such things. What I can say is that the designers and writers of Hard Wired Island have showed they are capable of breathing new life into cyberpunk. As long as they keep expanding Hard Wired Island, you can count this game to remain relevant art.

Hard Wired Island is well, a canned experience — quite fitting when you live in a space bin. The setting is tall and deep, but can feel claustrophobic. If you want to explore the post-Impact Earth, the Moon, the colonizing efforts of Mars, other orbitals… but this is really not the game for that. Hard Wired Island is going to deliver you Grand Cross. It is quite difficult to escape such constraints. It is a good setting, but not something you can easily mod into your version of cyberpunk.

Communities are weirdly… small. It is true that Grand Cross is quite unique a place, but communities feel either like a large polycule or a small Discord server. It is a compromise to make things manageable, but alas, can cause some social dissonance until one gets used to this scale.

Brad

The only additional point I will add is that so long as you understand the vibe of the setting, you can easily add your own areas to it, and the players will still be able to easily interact and customize it. I do think that communities felt really small, which could be very restrictive to a long-term game.

Ludo

Very little within Grand Cross needs to be in Grand Cross. Or played through Hard Wired Island. This game is such good cyberpunk that you can lift this setting entirely to whatever system you prefer or partially to an ongoing game and still have that cyber-hunger fed.

Also, do yourself a favor and use and abuse the goddamned tables at the end of the book.

Could not get details about licensing at the time of this review; cannot say how easy it would be for you to expand the world of Grand Cross.

Brad

Honestly, look at the burden engine, absorb its rad design principles, and figure out how to create a satisfying gameplay loop, it will lead you to wonders.