Cyberpunk: Legends FIRST GAMEPLAY LOOK with Mike Pondsmith and James Portnow

No. I have to be in the cool shades before I take them off because I can't see anything. Right. And now it's YouTube. So now now everyone Now everyone's all here. Hello everyone. Welcome into this. I I don't even know if I have words to describe how happy and excited I am to do this. Hello everyone. Welcome to I don't know if we came up with an official name for it, but this this Cyberpunk Legends sort of debut interview. I am your humble host Will, joined as always by my pal Matt. And today in addition we have some esteemed guests who you may or may Apparently I'm esteemed. Yeah, no. Yeah, right. I I think I think you're required to admit that you're esteemed at this point. We have James Portnow and Mike Pondsmith here to talk to us about Cyberpunk Legends. Friends, come on in. Pull up Pull up a chair because we're going to be here for a little while. We have a whole bunch of questions that the folks over on the Night Crew Games

Discord have sent in. Matt and I have a bunch of questions and we have some time. So Matt, what what what do we want to know? What what do we want to First of all, first of all gentlemen, how are you on this fine Monday evening? Are you doing all right? You just you had an announcement and now there is must be much to do. I'm just going to put these shades back on. Maybe I'll sleep over here. I'm I don't know. It has been hectic as can be. We are a small and scrappy shop on the Night Crew side. So you know, we've been up 24 hours a day making sure that everything's in place. And I am tired, but this is going to be amazing. This is the moment I've waited for. We haven't talked about gameplay yet. I'm hoping we get a chance to do that today. But yeah, we'll see if I make it through these two hours. How are you doing Mike? I'm doing fine considering the fact that for the last three and a half four weeks I've been in Poland hanging out with the guys at CD Projekt Uh, who also do the Cyberpunk stuff with us. And in addition, they all came out here yesterday and hung out with us.

Uh, one of the more amusing things is that at some point, James actually ran them in this game. Oh, nice. It got so bad that eventually one of the producers had to come over to the team and say, "Guys, we have a game to do. Get back to work." It is actually true? Like, they kept asking for more sessions? And uh, at some point we had a new CC on the emails being like, "Yeah, uh, we have to maintain a schedule, so no more game nights, guys." Amazing. That's what you want though, right? Like, from That's That's a a huge uh, a feather in the cap. Right. Yeah, your game mastering is so good, you derailed an entire video game. Good job. Yep, yep. Not only that, but it's satisfying because originally they did not understand what we wanted to do with this when James and I were first pitching it around. And then, once we got them playing it, they understood it and they loved it, but

they're also at the upper levels, a little like, "You guys, you're throwing things off here, okay?" Right. Well, and the great thing about it actually was honestly like, the CDPR people are awesome. They are. They were really kind, right? Like, we're tiny shop doing a small part of this IP, and they were like, "Yeah, sure. We'll throw you on our socials. We love the game. Let's like, let's just put you up there." So, that was just entirely voluntary on their part, and that was That was phenomenal when they said they would do that. Yeah, awesome guys. We tell stories we've been working with them on the Cyberpunk projects for about 9, 10 years, at least. And you know, we've gone down to where we get together and we all go out drinking and hanging out, and Polish vodka is awesome, by the way. It is. Can confirm. Uh, well, as people are trickling in, before we get to sort of some of the the meat and potatoes of the gameplay of Cyberpunk Legends. Mike, quick I'm sure you get this question all the time, but I wanted to softball this as as we

started. Sort of what's the story of of how and or when you first came up with this phenomenal world of Cyberpunk? Like where where did this all stem from? Uh jeez. Well, it it originally started with my favorite movie, Blade Runner. Yeah. So, you know, I have every bloody type of copy of Blade Runner out there, a script, a bunch you know, I mean you name it, I've probably got it. Um I probably have a stuffed Roy Batty somewhere in the closet. Nice. But, uh basically at some point or another, um I ran across a book that was written by a a friend of mine named Walter Jon Williams called Hardwired. Oh, yeah. And Walter was at the time actually a playtester and in a game of Mekton, which is another game I wrote years ago. And so, when one of my friends who was going to be one of the playtesters on this basic concept came up, he said, "Yeah, you should get Walter." And I said, "I'm reading his book." Okay, we're good. So, that actually worked really well for us

because the thing is is that what Walter had written in Hardwired was much more of a wild and rocky roll kind of story where, you know, the heroes they're they're not everyday heroes, but they still win. Yeah. And that was great. And I looked at that and said, "Okay, we we should do something more." And from there, it just kind of grew into what was natural for the time and so forth. I mean, we're talking Miami Vice type time. We're talking about, you know, style and substance being blended together. And it just kind of evolved like that. But, I would say Walter was kind of the main kickoff on it. And the nice part was, you know, as we we became friends, we knew each other. He's written stuff for Cyberpunk, as well. And it gave me somebody else and then over time, you know, we've met and talked to a lot of other people like George Alec Effinger and so on. People who have also done classic Cyberpunk work. So,

I got to say that it grew and there was no real intent other than this sense of yeah, you know, this would be really awesome to play. Yeah. You know, and almost everything we do at Tal is pretty much that. We write what is awesome to play. Yeah. You know, it's what we would do and that's always been our hallmark. Hell yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, that's how it got started. Uh Years later I'm standing around going, "Oh my god, look at all this merch. I have no idea trying to Cyberpunk. isn't present. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then James, uh when when did you in your uh not only game design background, but it's just history playing the RPGs and all that, when did you first come to find Cyberpunk for yourself and what sort of grabbed you about it? So, I was in high school reading through as one does, all of William Gibson's work and like you

just said, I was like, "Man, I wish I could play this." And there really wasn't a lot out at the time and my friendly local game store happened to have uh some Cyberpunk. Um and so I picked up all the books and proceeded to not really be able to convince my friends to stray away from D&D for a while, but then I got them and we were hooked from there. You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah, yeah. It's always it's always a bit hard to pull them and then once they're gone, they never ask to go back. Yeah, once once you've disentangled them, right? They're they're on the Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the amusing part was that years later James and I started working together at a couple different gigs and we kind of hit it off right there. So this game actually evolved out of a crazed idea that James brought to me and I said, "We want to publish that." You know, that would be cool if we did that. Well, and it was there were enough of us to do it. So he had to invent a company. Well, it was actually awesome because so

it was early pandemic. I was working on a game idea, right? Like I had a basic design that I was like, "Okay, I want a narrative card game that's co-op that I can play with my friends that's really easy to set up." So I was playing things like Arkham and I had friends who were bouncing off because the rules were too hard to learn or it was just took too long to set up. So I was like, "Okay, when this pandemic is done, I want to be able to get together with everybody, like sit down at a diner, play this game wherever." Uh and the entire time in the back of my mind I was thinking about Cyberpunk. And then I show it to Mike and Mike was like, "Ah, this like this core design is awesome. Why don't we do a Cyberpunk?" And I was like, "Why don't we do a Cyberpunk?" Oh, no, man. It's it's it's so good. Twist my arm just a little bit harder. Oh, okay, I give. I give. By this time he said years of con me and almost anything. It's a little bit true. I normally don't play poker with him, but I will play

this with him. There we go. Yeah, I mean we're talking about the Okay, so so Yeah, well, you know, remember it's a licensed property. Speaking Speaking of playing, um just just to kind of get a sense of um how you both relate to like the world of of Cyberpunk and everything else, what are your roles like like I know you know you two have like designed all of this and talked about this. What are your roles when you're playing? Uh do we have the same role? This will be interesting. Okay, so what do you play primarily? I actually almost always play Nomads. Really? I love nomads. All right. I play rockers. Which makes sense. Yeah. The hair. It's It's required, right? Once your hair hits a certain length my hair this length? Right, yeah. Specifically so I can fit the part when we're doing some Cyberpunk. And we never did rappers into the game, so you know, I had nothing to do except Oh man, maximum Mike wraps. I I want this so bad.

I sense a new career. You know, there's always There's always time for a new career. I like it. Oh my god, perfect. Yes, I will beatbox for you, no problem. Let's Oh yeah, James and go. Um So so um I guess like we talked a little bit about this uh in the uh short that you wrote, James, for I think uh Extra History. Mike, I think you've seen it that uh recounted the the the Reagan era of all this stuff, and basically how it felt like Cyberpunk was the what happens if this goes to like the the natural extreme of of oh no, um how is there anything Yeah, right? Yeah, exactly. Like is there anything like especially like um the real world like it's sort of mirroring Cyberpunk or diverging from it? We don't like for instance have the near the level of prosthetics that like in Cyberpunk, but of course we're all glued,

you know, to our phones. We're all kind of our own little uh cybernetic beings in that way. Are there things that like have fascinated or like that you were surprised how right you got it or like something that um you would have said like oh, I would have never predicted that like in this world? Uh actually, what's been terrifying, and I used to get teased by people, family, friends, and so forth, is how accurate we were on a lot of this. Um things that I'll give you an example. Um we at some point had South American wars and things going on and we literally were talking about things like taking over the Pan Panama Canal or drug dealers blowing things up or any number of things that all kind of came around and then the technology began to explode as well. So, um for example, we invented a thing for for uh Cyberpunk. It was in the B3 level called the agent and the agent was a large what you we would call a smartphone now.

But in those days everybody went no, cell phones are never going to be that big again. And this the agent was essentially a kind of super phone and you bought programs to put in it called micro progs and you could program the phone to do things like remind you to go buy uh new bullets for your gun, you know, or any number of things. And my fun my son likes to tease me. He says, you know, you realize dad that years ago you invented the smartphone and I said, yeah, and I didn't get paid for it. But basically people always think that I pull it out of nowhere, but if you do the research, you can get a pretty good idea of where we're going. And there are sort of trends that both historically and technologically just build on themselves and you can look at it and go, "Yeah, I can see how these two things will come together." For example, 3D printing.

You get 3D printing and then all of a sudden I have um a couple people we work with who have 3D printed limbs that they've had built and now they are in turn working with kids who had, you know, problems, no arms, legs, whatever, 3D printed limbs. Um that's a natural. It goes together and people are going to go as they say this you know, as Gibson says, the street finds use for things. Um For example, you know, I wear these glasses. Most people don't know I wear them because at a point in time, uh I had cataracts, runs in my family, and bright light really hurt my eyes. So, I went in eventually, and my doctor said, "Well, you're in pretty good shape, but you're going to have to get your eyes done. You're going blind." And so, they went in, and they did it on a machine. And it was like being at a Ripperdoc's. Yeah. They sat me down. They plugged me into some drugs that wiped out my short-term memory, and I said, "Open

your eyes." And I opened my eyes and didn't remember I did it. And the machine got lowered into my face, and about 15 minutes later, my Ripperdoc, as it were, said, "Okay. Uh you're going to have to wear a patch for like couple days, but you know, come back in 2 weeks, and you'll be set." And I said, "Wait, you didn't have to like cut open my eyeball and do, you know." And she said, "Oh, oh, we did that." Wait, you did Yeah, the machine does that. Yeah. And I went, "This is Ripperdoc technology." Yeah. So, I I think it's God, I'm sorry. I was just going to ask you, do you want to tell uh the world how lucky your particular doctor is and the swag that they got for giving this? Yeah, yeah, I actually have to. Uh my doctor turned out to be a bit of a Cyberpunk fan. Oh, hell yeah. So, when she did this to me, I said, "Okay, so you're now my Ripperdoc." Well, as it turned out, as you could see from the wall back there, the CD guys send us stuff all the time. Tons of

stuff. It's amazing. There are bottles of champagne we still have not opened up. So, we had this great neon sign that they gave me for Kiroshi Optics. And it was just you could see it from space, it was so bright. And I looked at it, and said, "I have no place to put this sitting in my office. I can't even plug it in, you know, now that I've got my eyes fixed, I still can't look at it. So, I gave it to her. So, I I gave it to her and said, "Okay, so you're my ripper doc and now you're you're actually a Karyo Optix I guess uh surgeon." Yeah. I pray that I pray that is in her office and because like it's so funny because if if and when Cyberpunk fans come in there, like even nervous, I even feel like that would be an incredible way to be like, "Oh no, this is fine." Like I don't know. It would I don't know. It would instill confidence in me. Yeah, absolutely. But Well, she's good. She's really good. The

machine's really good, too. But yeah, it's fascinating because all of this stuff just evolves and a lot of it is a natural outgrowth of the technologies that are coming along. So, a large part of what we do and when I mean we, I mean, you know, the entire Talsorian team for years and years and years, we've all kind of, you know, been throwing our brains together at this to figure out how it all works. It's it's a natural outgrowth. You know, we don't like come up with weapons and ideas totally out of nowhere. We do a lot of research. And I'm My my library back in my office is about 30 ft that way. It's just wall-to-wall reference books. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, in the product, I mean, you don't need me to tell you this, it absolutely shows. And it is so I love it when when worlds in the games that I play are so deep and you can tell are researched to a level that makes even the fantastical things in them feel as though they can occur. Like and and as we've just discussed, some of the

stuff's moving in in various directions that way. And the thing that's fascinating is that, for example, with CD, the fact we did that much research meant if that their job was so much easier because they didn't have to guess how it was it done. I could say, "Okay, read this. Take a look at that." Well, and the thing that's fascinating, so for us we're working much earlier in the timeline, but because you guys do so much research, it's very easy to extrapolate up and down the timeline for Cyberpunk because all the all the background is there, right? And since wherever there's gaps, the research is still there, so it's very easy to say, "Okay, this is what this piece of the world would look like Mhm. taking back or forward 30 years." And that's actually very important to how both we and CD have basically worked on the franchise and concept is uh the deal is right now we take everything up to the 2060s, and they take everything from then on. Got you. But the trick has been that we work with each other constantly. There's a feedback loop all the time. So that if

somebody, for example, over in Warsaw says, "Gee, can we have a company that does this?" I'll go, "How old is it?" And I'll go, "Well, we'd like to have it start in 2046." And we'll go, "Okay, so let's figure out where we want to put it, and let's go figure out where it would be, and what would have happened in the intervening 20 years." And it's all tied together. Yeah. And it all works because it's not like they picked it up, and they went off on their own on it. You know, I was there for a lot of it and worked on it, but also they respect the core as they bring it forward, and I respect what they're doing because I know how much work they're putting into it. Yeah, and that's that's sort of like you you want that in any good partnership, right? Like that's how all this stuff works. And and sort of pivoting to that, uh the partnership between uh between you two and uh your respective companies, uh do James, do you want to give us the sort of Cyberpunk Legends elevator pitch? Like

we you you've announced the game, it's up for pre-order now, the the whole thing's sort of started. Can you tell us if we were if we walked into an elevator The glasses are coming off. The glasses are coming off for this one. Yeah, tell us give us give us that elevator. clear? Uh not in this neon light that we've got going on in this room. I'm going to lose them soon. That's why I'm still wearing these. I think smart. Um so, uh the elevator pitch for Cyberpunk Legends is sort of what we've already talked about a little bit. I wanted a co-op adventure card game that was really narrative focused that would give you a campaign that you could play time and time again with your friends. I really wanted a sort of portal into this world that was a little bit more uh approachable than you know, having to read as much as I love the RPG books. I know lots of people it's a hard place to start, right? Sure. Um and so, what we wanted to do was make something that was really easy to set up, uh easy to start playing, and gave you that feel of an RPG

uh but with just cards. Uh so, that's sort of Cyberpunk Legends. Well, I I I believe uh at this point, I mean, that that is a good elevator pitch. However, uh I know Will and I were talking before the stream. We would love to sort of like cuz you haven't showed it actually played yet, right? Like that has not happened. No. In fact, I believe we discussed this being the place that we debut for the world. There we go. Okay. There we go. Uh so, without further ado, I mean, do you guys want to just uh ship the card back bring a couple more team members in and show us how this thing functions? It's funny because like while you do that, I'll I'll just sort of say this. Will and I have are lucky enough to have uh play test this in the past and uh I am so flipping excited that we get to actually see this uh with everybody else here for the first time. Uh awesome and you're all going to have to forgive because this is my phenomenal uh you know, play test bucket. But, I said it could be set up in 5 minutes or less.

Deck. Deck. Deck. Uh Uh, Aiden, have a deck. Here you go. And scenario deck. And that's it. Uh, we're going to call these shades my leader token, and that's the whole thing. That's all you need. We're actually totally set up. Um, So, you could totally like take this to Denny's at like 2:00 in the morning and just play, right? Like I have so many fond memories of my college years where we would go and we'd grab whatever was in the bargain bin and just crack it open at a diner at like midnight and play till dawn trying to figure out this thing. And so, yeah, I want to make sure there was a game that, as you saw, it takes like 30 seconds to set up. You're ready to go. And I mean, I can slip in my pocket and just play anywhere. And it honors the basic roots of cyberpunk because a lot of what we ended up writing in the world was done at 3:00 in the morning in Denny's. Oh, yeah. I feel like I feel like Denny's at 3:00

a.m. is peak cyberpunk. Like vaporwave Denny's 3:00 a.m. That's just cyberpunk. That's it. If you have ever If you have ever sat in a small town Denny's, especially one that's like along a trucking line, and just witness the interactions that happen at 3:00 a.m., boy, is it cyberpunk. And it gets even wilder when you're doing that in San Francisco at 2:00 in the morning. Oh, I'm sure. Uh, dang. You'd be amazed at the weird people we saw. I I mean, it's, you know, sometimes you write what you know. Yeah, you do. You do. Uh, well, uh, two gentlemen who just joined us, uh, would you please also introduce yourselves and what you're doing on this project? Come on. Squeeze in a little bit. Hello, everyone. Uh, I'm Brett. I've been here the whole time. I haven't been on the Extra Credits Switch channel since 2013. Welcome back. true. With Emmons, yeah. Well, welcome back. our streams of death. Nice. which I'm not doing again. Damn it. The curve has almost almost got

him. So close. I think we did a like live reading of uh Kentucky Route Zero at one point. Whoo. That game wasn't finished at that point. Right. Um and yet it was still so good. Uh Hi, I'm Aiden. I'm a designer on the card game here with James and uh with Night Crew and we've worked on a bunch of projects past few years. I wrote one episode of Extra Credits a couple years ago. Nice. Uh so yeah, that's Uh and I dragged them here because you know, it's one to four player co-op. Uh you can there's a single player mode, um but I think it's most fun to watch uh a team of four people play it. I think it'd be less fun to watch me do the solo mode by myself. And so uh also easy to learn, right? I said that. Uh so put my money where my mouth is, I'm going to teach you all the basics of this game. Um if you had gotten the rulebook, the rulebook is kind of written in a narrative style. You and your crew have just showed up in

Night City. You've come to a pawn shop to sort of tool up, get ready for uh you know, life in the city. And basically the pawn broker is there as you're looking through stuff, he's explaining to you the rules of Night City. And he gets right to the end and he goes, "There's one more thing, super important." And then he stops and he listens. He goes, "Wait. What's that?" And then it tells you to open the first scenario deck. And these scenario decks are all like basically old D&D modules. You can think of them as a single run, right? And they connect to the campaign often, but that's what they are. So you open up this first scenario deck and the rules are very simple. First rule, uh whoever has the leader token, which I'm going to call these cool cool shades uh because I left my leader token at home, um is going to flip the top card, read whatever it says on it, follow any instructions on it, and when you're done, flip the next card until you get to an obstacle. And once you get to an obstacle, after you've overcome that obstacle, the leader token moves. So,

everybody gets a chance to, you know, narrate the story and do all these things. And that's it. That is sum total of the meta rules. And then we'll get into how to overcome an obstacle in a minute. So, all right. Pawn broker has just stopped, looked around, you've opened up this deck, and boom. Bullets thud into dermaplast walls. You vault over the counter looking for a way out. Nothing. Glass shatters, displays erupt as two nomads spray the shops with ancient automatics. You check once more for a back exit. Dead end. The only way out is through. And since there was no That wasn't an obstacle. There was no instructions. It's just a narrative card. We flip the next card. And here we've got bike raiders. And this is where we get to obstacles and the core interaction of the game. So, everybody want to draw five? So, uh just real quick, what are you draw You so you each have your own role decks? Is that how this is functioning? Yep. Perfect. Uh yes. Unfortunately, you're not getting to see the cool sleeves with the actual backs for each deck. Um but, for example, I am playing the

netrunner deck. Uh you are playing the nomad. Uh who's got what else? Oh, I've got the rocker, baby. Oh, you're a netrunner. You're a rocker Oh, you're right. I'm so I didn't actually even look at my cards. Um to be the rocker? I'll trade you. You want to make it worth my while? Let's do this. My hand's terrible. Yeah, man. This is the great thing about, you know, working working with people you're you're friends with, you know, they're going to make you look good on stream. Um Oh, I You're going to shuffle in my hand. I know how it is. I'm not thinking of I know how it is. Um awesome. So, you got this card that Will's got on screen. Um you can see in the upper right corner that two, that's how much damage it's going to do to us uh if it survives the round. We have 20 health. We live or die as a team cuz I don't like games where, you know, one person can get out and then has to wait half an hour for everybody else to slowly die off. It's It's Night City, right? You live or

die as a crew. Um so, this is going to do two damage to us if it survives the round. You uh you have eight health as the next number on it. That's how much damage we have to do to this thing to overcome this obstacle. And then the big bit, the important bit, right in the center, right under the name Bike Raiders, uh you're going to see this thing that's a little weird. And that's the two-hit target. To hit this thing, we are going to make a cooperative poker hand. And this uh there's a whole little sheet telling you what all these symbols mean, but basically this is saying we either need to make a pair uh with a body symbol in it, or we have to make a straight or better to hit this thing. Uh any damage we do, any damage that we put into the plan, which we're going to establish in a minute, uh if we don't do if it doesn't have one of these two requirements fulfilled, counts as nothing. We just miss. Um and lastly, how do we do make a plan? Well, each player we're going to go around the table, and each player on

their turn gets to lay down one card from their hand. Um the interesting thing about this is there are table talk rules. Uh the table talk rules are basically you can't say the name of cards, you can't say suits or numbers. So, you have to figure out how to talk around it. We highly encourage people to you know, this is Night City, bend the rules as much as you can. Don't break them, because table talk table talk rules are fun. But, uh any way that you can think to talk around these things, absolutely do it. Um I, as our fearless leader in this case, am not the most uh punchy. Anyone have uh any any thoughts any directions? got sing our solo we'll have an answer to our body problem. Uh this got some friends. Excellent. Yeah, I know some people. Perfect. If you know if you know some people then

I am going to do my you know weak pathetic rocker kick them in the face. So I'm going to kick the bike raiders. You'll see I don't know if you guys have the card sparring but this card you can't really see it. It it has a four body symbol and plus one damage. So basically this has the symbol we require but now we're going to need another four if we want to make that pair. And it deals one damage if we hit. So with that Mike to you. Okay, well I am a bit more punchy because you know I have to get off the motorcycle and beat people to death. So I'm going to be playing in the new Bushido. Nice. Okay, the new Bushido plus two damage if used to make a three of a kind or better which since you need a bit more of these guys It's true. So It should help. We'd have to make a three of a kind all of that also has a body symbol. So Brett You guys aren't cooperating, you know.

Why? We have numbers. It's a coop game but you know there's Well let me call my friend the razor girl. And a six. Ah. Ah. I I unfortunately thought you were bringing in a much larger posse to this No. Because this is where the table talk rules get fun especially as you start playing the game. I completely misinterpreted what Brett said. So I was specifically a much worse play because no plan as soon as you contact the enemy right continues. Of course. And one of the fun thing about this is sort of working around those moments and trying to get as a crew hectically assemble plan on the fly. And so plan your plan consists of five cards and then it's done, correct? Unless there's a modifier of some kind. Right. So, this is a good point. Speaking of that, I was hoping our rocker. Rocker is kind of like the clerical druid of the party if you are you familiar with D&D terms

because you have a lot of support there. You're the rocker. Oh, you're right. And so whereas the the netrunner There you go. There we go. is basically one of the people who can really help manipulate the plan. So, what are you going to do? So, I'm going to hack the planet. You can't really see this card, but it's a seven with a tech symbol. And it gives a plan size plus one. So, what's fascinating here is so being the leader, whoever has the leader token is going to end up if you're in a four-player game, get to getting to play twice. Whereas everybody else only gets to play once unless you have plan size plus one. So, Mike's going to get to go again. But, looking at our cards, right? My sparring has a four. Uh Brett's razor girl has an eight and six. Your hack the planet, all it did was provide us a seven and a tech symbol. But, we've got a four, eight, six, seven. The city moves. I'm going to play the city moves. It has a five. So, now I've got a four, five, six, seven, eight.

We've got a straight, which these guys to hit number, as you can see on your screen, either requires that we make a pair with body symbol. Okay, we failed to do that, but we made made the straight. So, now if you just want to dump any damage that you got, we should just be smashing these guys as hard as we can. Okay. Well, I'm going to drop in some more damage. All right. So, We can extend the balance. So, we've got one, two, three damage. We didn't end up making three of a kind or better with this queen, unfortunately. Well, it would have been good if we had. It would have been amazing if we had. So, we didn't meet the special conditions for that. so we're only dealing three damage. We take two damage as a party, we go down to 18 health, we put three damage on these bike raiders, and then we clean up the plan. So everybody grab your cards from the plan. Okay. And we are going to continue. The person with the leader token remains the leader until they are until we've cleared out this obstacle. Okay. I'm keeping score of both of your health your health right now, and if you

if you all lose to the bike raiders, I'm going to be very upset. I'm just saying. If we on stream lose to the first obstacle, I I just retire. Just just just peace. So I want to ask a a couple of questions real quick as we're as as y'all are redrawing and looking at your at your next plan here. Um So first off, it sounds like these decks are not while they have numbers and symbols that might be associated with like a standard deck of playing cards, they're different and they're different per role. So each of you each of your role decks is full of different things that really tell the story of being a rocker, a nomad, a netrunner, or a solo. Yes, and as we can talk about a little bit more the design impetus behind these is also uh there's a lot more I like the back in the day, I really loved the creativity of building a deck before we did a lot of net decking. And one of the really interesting things about these is there are so many more vectors when you're thinking of a poker hand as a designer that I can put down, especially

when I can make a card with, you know, three or four numbers on it or a bunch of symbols. And so there's so many more vectors I can play with. It is very difficult to actually find an optimal deck. Optimal deck will be different depending on who you're playing with, what how people think, and just like there's a lot we've had a lot of back and forth between very similar cards. Um and so basically these are poker cards that can get wild, right? Loteria of style we've got, you know, whatever. Uh, you can make you can make two fours of a kind in a hand if it once you've leveled up enough and are really good at out. Right, because they don't It's not just one number and a suit. Right. Yeah. Right. Sometimes there are things like uh like our razor girl, which I don't know, can you pull up uh razor girl on your end? I I I I I don't have those unfortunately. had the three elements from the actual scenario. the scenario dot cards. Yeah.

After after this, uh maybe we'll send you on Discord uh some images that you can pull up and we can talk about the design behind them. Um but like this razor girl that Brett had played uh and has uh was basically an eight, a six, a body symbol, and one damage, right? So, as a designer, I can change any of those vectors and is let's say is 97 or 86 better? Well, it really depends on a lot of what else is in your deck, right? Because it's context. Right, it's not because you're because you're going for a a a hand, a pair, a straight, a whatever, it's all about the people that you're playing with. There's also an element that I like which reminds me of bridge in a weird way, and that is normally you cannot tell people exactly what you're doing, right? But there is a chronological element of if I saw what Brett brought down and he saw what I did, when I look at my next hand, I go, "Hmm, he probably is going to have something along this line. Right. So, I'm going to then know what I

want to play. So, if I had, for example, the ability to ditch a card and change, I know where I want to go. I know I what to get. So, I can back up whatever Brett's going to throw down. After a while, what happens is you get to know the play style of the other people in your team just like you would in a real Cyberpunk. Right. Mhm. Right. And it's funny because when testing, right, we have some teams that are really good at like making flushes versus other teams who are really good at making straights. And sometimes teams like literally won't see like the straight in front of them. And so cards that are good at straights are actually way worse for those teams. There is a card that was very similar to Brett's razor girl, but instead of dealing one damage, it basically deals two damage if you've made a straight. Is that better or worse than the razor girl? Really depends on who you're playing with and how you build your decks. That was one of the things that really got me in in the playtesting that I was lucky enough to do was the fact like every time we played with a few different groups like Aiden you were there I think 95% of the time, but then

we'd rotate through if James could make it someone else someone else. And every time we played it the team like what it felt like what we were going for like the mind meld worked differently based on the group which is exactly what you want like that feels like an RPG to me. That feels like a group of people playing like a much more complex thing. You get the emotional investment and it's awesome. Real quick Yeah, exactly. Someone just asked in chat just another point of question Okami Okami sorry I'm butchering that asked um Uh so if if there were three people playing like would then say um would Brett have gotten a second turn as well? Yeah right like it would go it would change right? Excellent thinking. Yes, that's exactly how it works. So if you're playing with three people how we balanced it is actually it's a little bit easier if you can take multiple turns right because you get a little bit more control of the plan. But on the other side if you're down a roll, you know, if you don't have

your net runner and you have to hack some cameras or whatever, that's going to be a harder challenge and so it sort of naturally balances out. So good. Yeah. And then if for those of you wondering about solo, basically you're going to be playing two decks, but because you know, you got a hired gun there who's not totally under your control, they start every obstacle by flipping the top card of their library and that goes straight into the plan and now you have to figure out how to make the plan work with this one totally random card in it. That's actually the best way to play. It's so good. Basically this very NPC shows up who might be worthwhile or might be a disaster. And sometimes Leroy Jenkins it right into the middle. I just go I don't know what to play so I'm going to put put a card down but you guys deal with it. Speaking of, let's go for the next round. Um so I This is the other thing. As a as the leader, one of the really interesting moments is trying to communicate to your team what you're thinking by the card you play. So in

this case I'm going to I'm going to have some electric dreams. I've got it's an eight, a six, a four and has a tech symbol on it but only counts towards a straight or a straight flush. So so we can't make any pairs with this. And when he plays that, I'm just going to go ahead and tell the rest of the table, just do damage. Excellent. Don't worry about it. Nice. Netrunner's got this. All right. about it. Um so we have to deal five damage to this thing if we don't want to take any more damage to it. So that's the other side like right even when you know that you're going to hit, the question then becomes like the strategy then becomes okay, how do we optimize damage? If if we have a very diverse set of skills that we're going to throw in this, I can I can certainly help with us with this. So I think one one of the very interesting things is as folks are playing is all of this is contained in that card. Like this entire encounter is contained in this very

simple straightforward obstacle, right? That creates this because it's it's presenting an interesting challenge that your decks must solve together, right? That's one of the really interesting things that I love like the how small the amount of information to present a cool challenge is, right? And as you can tell, right? That also allows us a lot of room for complexity, right? Like the bike raiders, I didn't read it, but like, you know, it says they're here to talk. So there's some flavor text, but that whole box can contain other rules text. Uh this is what I mean by really easy to learn. You've already learned everything in the game, right? Like you know leader flips over these cards till we get to an obstacle, uh and you know how to set up a plan. That's the whole game. Anybody watching the stream has already learned it. Yes, there are some small interactions that like if you're really hardcore and want to know like the errata, we got it for you. But you could play the entire game just learning what you've learned here on stream. Yeah. Um and

the space on the bike raiders allows us to create very interesting or complex uh wrenches to throw into how you're trying to solve these problems. Uh but I've talked for too long, Mike. Okay. Well, we're looking at things that can bring up that damage. So I am going to actually play guns, lots of guns. All right. Plus one damage for each fist or fighting card, as it were, when the plan is executed, which gives us one already. Right. So now we've got a lot of different vectors, right? We have we've got the opportunity to throw in every time that now somebody else throws in one of those punch symbols, uh we're going to deal extra damage for it because of this card that Mike played. So now maybe that changes the plan Yeah. uh of people after. Well, we have solo Yeah, normally I go solo, but if you brought enough to share, I'm going to call in the local reinforcements. I love this. So local reinforcements, you guys can't see it. Local reinforcements is a card that has

no text, no numbers, and just three of those punch symbols. So it's dealing three damage here, right? already done three and then four. Yep. And we are one away from a flush now because we have one A flushes and straights are are five card runs basically. Or five symbols, whatever in the case. Um five numbers or five symbols. So, we've got the one from the ace, we've got the three from local reinforcements. We're almost hitting this thing. So, my question now to the team is do you think it's better for me to make sure we hit right now or do you think you can make sure we hit now that we're one away from a flush? Pretty sure I got this. Okay. Because then I can add some more damage. Actually, until you without giving anything away by him just leaning back and looking badass is so we know probably something there that he's got. Well, you know what? I'm I want to do the cool thing. So, actually, I'm going to make us hit and do one more damage cuz I

don't have any more uh any more body symbols. Uh but so, James started out with the card with four, six, and eight on it. I'm going to add a five and a seven with one card. Quite serendipitously, we uh have a straight with two cards. Yeah, so I played my electric dreams, he plays his ghost in the mist, and in two cards we made a straight, right? So, that's the sort of like ways that as you start figuring out how to work as a team and as you start building up these things and it allows opportunities to other things. This is you know, since we're not going to do more than just this card, I'm going to throw down my the setup plus one damage for each different suit in the plan. Well, one, two, three four because now we've got this. Right. I didn't see that. got uh the whole gamut. So, I'm dealing four, five, six, seven, eight, nine because of Mike's play. If we had done this as our first round, we would just obliterate this thing in one round and taken no damage. Um so, that's like the variance, right? And as you start learning how this works, as you start

learning how to work together as a team, uh you know, this is these scenario decks are going to get harder and harder. Oh, yeah. And you're going to have to figure out, okay, now Well, right now this we only needed a pair or a straight and, you know, we needed to eat damage. But it goes pretty far. Yeah. Um So, with that, we'll clean up our plan. Bikers dead. Yeah. Tags are down. Bikers. And um I So, now this is the obstacle goes in the discard. Uh the leader token moves. Uh Mike, do you do you want to do some reading or should I pass this on to somebody else? Uh I'm going to read. All right. Grab the top card. Read it to the to everybody. Okay, let's get some pain out here. Wreckage. Okay. The bikers try to flee. One makes it, one doesn't. Something's wrong here. You're new in Night City, but even you know that this is expensive tech for a couple of nomads just in from the

wastes. It's time to ask the pawn broker some questions. Remember, set aside your blue clue cards. You can refer to them at any point. Now, clue cards are things that you can run that will give you more information about a situation. So, it's not an obstacle as much as a way to help you push through an obstacle if you don't know enough. And later on, there are puzzles, uh there are choices you have to make as we go through, and you can refer back to these clue cards, and you're just going to set these aside, and as you get to these other moments, you may find an encounter where you don't know exactly what to do or how to solve the thing you're facing, but it's always going to be there, somewhere in some of the cards in front of you. Uh and so, these clue cards you can look back at for how you overcome the things in the future. And you also find yourself having to remember what you have found in the way of clues. They don't just pass. For example, in another run that we did earlier,

uh we discovered that there was a clue we were given by the pawn broker, not give too much away, but what we found was three or four obstacles later, that was an important thing. Right. And we're going, thank god we remember and we were all running around saying, how do we do this? How do we figure out where we're supposed to go? Oh, crud. That's right, the pawn broker said that. And it's funny because right, like this is it says the side of the side is sitting there on the table, but you're looking at this thing and you're looking at things And then yeah, I think it was Mike in that case who was like, oh, right, remember the pawn broker said isn't what he said to us. We should do this thing here. Because otherwise we went and did the wrong thing at first and we almost got ourselves trashed. Yeah. And yeah. So that's That was bad. You've basically learned everything. Like the only other things is you refill your hand after each round and after each obstacle you can toss as many cards as you want and draw back up to five. And that's it. That's the whole game. You can play everything with the amount that

we've discussed in these in these few minutes. So, yeah. Welcome to Cyberpunk Legends. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Uh as as we as we clean up our little example here, I did have a question from chat that I thought could use a small bit of clarification. So that scenario deck that that's not something you have to shuffle or anything else. That is that is a preset run essentially. It's a story in the form of a deck and you just put that down on the table. You don't have to read it ahead of time. You don't have to shuffle it. You don't have to do anything. You take it out of its package, you put it down and no one has to prep. No one has to like it gets to be an experience that the four of you share. No one has to be in charge of learning it ahead of time or doing any work, right? And nobody has to GM and sit out or whatever. This is all And the really interesting thing is from a design perspective, there are two elements to cards, right? There's the randomization element to the cards. So, for the example, the player decks, right? I shuffle them and it allows

scenarios and things to change, right? It gives me randomized. But, there's also the data retention properties of a deck of cards. This can function like a stack of memory in a computer. Uh and so, in this case, right, because it's all there, not only can you immediately jump in, but as a designer, I can do stuff like you encounter somebody and I can say, "Well, do you say thing A to them or thing B, right? If you say thing A, discard the next card without looking at it. If you say thing B, draw the next card, right? And this allows for us to build in some of those RPG feeling choices and puzzles and other things into this style of deck. Yeah, and there's another thing about that deck, which is really great, is that a lot of times when you're running a game, you have a problem of you're going to get interrupted, you know, your kid comes running in and goes, "Hey, I drew on the cat." or whatever. Oh god. That's happened. I'm not going to ask, but But, you can at that point say, "Okay, we're this far in the deck.

Give me a rubber band." Well, let me tell you it keeps going. Yeah, you can pick it up 2 weeks later if you want to. It's actually you don't even need to rubber band your cards and destroy them because the way we're building the box, there's actually a place to separate out the part you played, the part you haven't played. Uh and a place to put all your clues and the other pieces that I'm not going to ruin the surprise on that you might want to set You'll like it. Exactly. Yes. Aethelred the Unready just said, and this is a sentiment that I 1,000% the first time I played this game, I truly believed, which is basically, "I love my friends, but not when they take 45 minutes to try to teach me a game." This is a game that literally you can be taught in 5 minutes and actually be playing and enjoying and not going back and opening up a rulebook and like trying to figure out all this stuff. Like it's just there. Well, when I did There's no rulebook. I can teach my parents how to play this game. Yeah. My My dad likes poker, so he's already got half the rules already, you know. That's the institutional memory of like basically the functionality of what you

were trying to do. The rest is is cool wrapper. Yeah. Right. You'd be surprised. You put four game designers together, uh it still takes half an hour to read the rules because everybody reads a little bit and says, "I understand how this works." And they're completely wrong. So, it's really funny because we've obviously play tested this with a lot of people. Yep. Uh and many of them are just, you know, people who are outside the industry, but when we when we play test it with uh you know, really high-level groups of designers, it is really funny sometimes uh testing the rules and being like, "You know, most people are actually better at reading the rules than you are." Yeah. Yeah. And part of that because as a designer, you're used to figuring out where the manipulation can happen in the rule. Yes. And there's not a lot of manipulation happening here. And as a designer, sometimes we like know so many games that there's a shorthand that we But Oh, yeah. there aren't many cooperative poker

games out there, right? There aren't many games that use a scenario deck in this fashion, and so it's really funny seeing people sometimes uh shortcut over things in ways that um are not correct. But like honestly, uh I would say we certainly We've done enough play tests that it takes about 5 minutes to teach any group that at least one person knows poker, and by about 10 minutes to teach people who don't know poker because we've got a little handy uh like poker hands card that comes with your game that you can put next to. Even even in the uh the play tests I've done where I take four people who've never played before and never seen the rules, and I just give them the rulebook and say, "Figure it out." Usually, one person that's the most, you know, experienced with these types of games, reads the rulebook, and then is able to teach everybody pretty fast, and I think with the way the scenario decks work, too, it's really easy to just jump in and kind of learn as you hit Oh, I hit an obstacle. How do I do an

obstacle? Let's check the rulebook really quick. Oh, okay, I understand. Also, also, we have a I I I feel like all four of you will absolutely love this. We have a wonderful question from chat, which is, "Hey um hey hey y'all, why why's that biker got an Arasaka arm?" And and to that I say, "Great question. Next question." Huh. So, huh, we saw something in the art. I wonder if that's going to help you figure out something later on. On the clue card. That was on a clue card. The level The level of detail in even the the the the pretest decks that I have seen, and the way that you The ways that you can disseminate information in this game, and the way the story is told, is so fun. And I like I'm a very visual person, so I clock these things, too, but like I might not maybe get like that narrative hook of like a clue in a written word where someone else does. There's so many different ways for different types of players to not only contribute through the use of their cards, but also the way that they deduct

and and process the information. This has been one of my favorite things. So, sometimes we'll get groups where, you know, uh to use a term I don't super love, but like we'll get like three or four people who have different levels of gaming skill. A couple of them will be like hardcore gamers, right? And uh they'll be super into the combat, and like have really deep thoughts on that. And we'll have some people who are maybe not as big of game players. Uh And then it's amazing, because they will get their moment to shine. Almost universally, they will hit a puzzle or an uh an obstacle that requires you to look at the clues or whatever, and while everybody else is beating their head against it, that person who may not be as big on like card combat goes, "Oh, I got it, guys." And they feel great because they get to participate in a way that sometimes they don't in games. It fits in with types of gaming that you can encounter. Uh one of the things I really like about it is that, and you'll see this as you

play your way through the scenario decks, um scenario deck cards don't necessarily have to be just one axis. They can be, for example, one of them that I was engaged with, there were three different ways to play that. But you needed to remember stuff that had happened earlier. So, what happens is that you're no longer looking at the cards and the art and going, "Ooh, shiny art." You're looking at it and going, "Does this mean something? Is it really a clue?" It, you know, and so what happens is people pay attention to what's going on in front of them even as they're counting on what's going on in combat or the current problem. And one of one of my favorite things that I got to Yeah. One of my favorite things that I got to see in the play test, um and I will give nothing away, is how many different ways you can use the idea of cards as a discrete packet of information given to the player that has

a known side and an unknown side, and the number of different ways uh that this game has explored that concept, like that very fundamental idea, right? There's a card, you get to see one side and not the other, and it'll tell you a piece of information, and that's it. And maybe you make a choice and do something based on that. And there are so many different ways to explore that in a game that has fundamentally very simple rules that lets you do new interesting things each time you run into a a different part of the scenario deck, which I just found absolutely fascinating. Yeah, it's it's one of the that which you can use that scenario pack as well. Yeah. And this is this is one of the things that we were really trying to achieve as we were building out this game, right? Like the idea of Cyberpunk, like we were going to the RPG and you don't want just linearity, right? You don't want to just look at things because Cyberpunk is layers, right? Like Night City is so many layers

and we want to get that in the feel in the way that you're playing the cards. Um and so I'm trying not to spoil things. It is so hard. That's the thing. I I I like I have so many elements of this that I kind of have and I've only scratched the surface, mind you, with with the few the playtests that I've done, but like there's so many things that like we all have to kind of dance around like the cool like there's so many different ways that you interact with the adventure in this that is so much better if you don't know them beforehand. Like it's just And you don't want to give anything away either cuz what happens is I can think of three or four things cuz we played through an entire deck at once and you'll find that there was a way something was presented that you didn't expect and it totally changed what you were doing in relationship to everything that followed. Yeah. Yeah. Ha. Well, maybe it's see here You want your fingers? Tyler will take your fingers.

Well, our social media uh will kill me for like so but so what I will say is maybe maybe we'll come back on. I do also don't want to spoil anything for the audience cuz I do actually think there are really fun reveals. Like we've had moments where people go, "Oh." And I don't want to ruin that for anybody, but uh you know, maybe later on when we reveal some more cards, we'll come back on the show and and talk about some of the ideas behind some of this other stuff. Now, if you playtested this and you hit a puzzle, uh you're on your own. Cuz right, right. Well, yeah. Something we could eventually talk about in when we at a future stream or something like that could also be like going through the different Rolodex too, because those aren't necessarily secrets after you've revealed cards in those Rolodex. And so we I was I missed the someone in in chat wanted to go over sort of This was a bit ago, so I apologize for not remembering their name, but they were talking about like it sort of the roles that you sort of played, obviously they have different cards in them to give you the feeling of

that role. Um, as far as sort of the suits are, they're not classic poker suits. What are the actual suits overall and then like you'd kind of just sort of plug them into the right roles, correct? Overall. Yes. So, I have been avoiding this a little bit because I apologize, Frank. When we were doing our playtesting, we're not using I wanted to use cool, instead we're using charisma because we want to reach people who who may never have played Cyberpunk before. And when we were playtesting, and we said cool, like there were a lot of people who were like, "Oh, what's that? I don't fully get like this concept." Or an icon for that was really hard. So, anyone who's a big Cyberpunk aficionado, please don't don't don't get super upset that we're not using the the Cyberpunk stats. Kids, face it. It's work to change it. Trust me on this, okay? It's an interesting It's an interesting sort of it's it's moving they RPG from one sort of format to

another. And the also the institutional memory of what those two words mean across those two genre not genre, sort of like delivery methods of gameplay, right? Like Right. I can totally see it getting confusing for both people that are super familiar and people that are not familiar at all. So, that seems like a change that I do understand. Makes me a little sad, but I'll I'll get over it because of how freaking awesome the rest of this thing is. And it feels like there's there's harmony there between the the these these brand this brand new crew, right? That just rolled into Night City and people who might not be familiar with Cyberpunk and this is a way to get them in. And one of I play a lot of different games from a lot of different series here on the channel. And one of the biggest things one of the biggest obstacles to existing big monolithic franchises ideas worlds like Cyberpunk is how do I get in? It's intimidating, right? And so something like this while it may not be what folks are used

to this does I I am not very knowledgeable about Cyberpunk. And when I did my playtest I felt like it was easing me right into the world of Night City and like that I was that I was learning everything I needed to learn as I played the game. And I think that really is important. Yeah, if you don't mind me stepping in on this one. I just came back from Poland and I did a conference called Digital Dragons where the talk I did actually was how you have to adapt franchises to different modalities. How you can take something that isn't just oh for example Cyberpunk right now exist video game, it exist in books, it exist in comics, it exist in TTRPG, it exist in board games. All of those things are part of an enormous franchise as you can see from all the stuff back there behind me. And yet you cannot deliver it the same way for each one of those uses. You have to look at the best place to deliver it. And yet still keep the feel.

And what I talked about in my TED Talk Every time you talk it's a TED Talk. So continue. Yeah the important part on that is that this respects that change of modalities. And what we did discover as we deal more with the Cyberpunk franchise is that people pick up and transfer things that are important to them into the other modalities. One of my personal favorite is Edgerunners, for example. In Edgerunners, the trigger guys and the team that put that together were very very intent on getting across the feel of Night City and what was going to be there. And you can literally go through and I love wandering in Night City, by the way. I would get in my car and drive all over the place. Yeah, same. Night City, man. Yeah. Yeah. I would have been there. But um seriously, what I loved was that they

did Edgerunners and they really reproduced stuff. And people went out in the actual video game and when you could have boyfriends and girlfriends or whatever, they went on dates to the places that David and Lucy went to. Now, that's pretty wild, but what it means is that they found pieces that weren't even part of the play modality, you know, and they picked it up and said, "This is still important to me. I want to know what it would have been like to do this." When you have a franchise that can do that, when you have a property that has something that can reach out to everybody, you have something that everybody can find their specific hook to. And that means they don't end up feeling like they're left out. They're in there because they found your door or their door into that world. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I I That's an excellent Yeah, that's I'm I'm

That's the best I've ever heard that, yeah. May May May Mike talk, thank you. Yeah, that's They recorded it, but it's in Polish. But Now it's in English. Yeah, yeah. I probably shouldn't have said this. Uh what Polish? I can order beer. Which is the important part. That's I one. Yeah, I'm I'm good. All right. So as as we move into the the second half of our of our time together, shall we shall we ask James and Mike some some more questions about this about this game? We've got we've got some that are burning burning away we're just dying to ask and some from some of the VIPs over in Night City Games Discord. We can we can dive right on into that. You guys think that's good? Let's do it. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay, let's do this. Let me just zoom the camera back in. Oh yeah, yes we should. Yes, please. Aidan and Brett, thank you thank you so much for all of your your playtest assistance. Thank you, thank you. We got to get you one soon. You're absolutely right. I want to take this to

my poker game. We have a regular poker game and I want to take this. Yeah. Throw it down. I think relatively soon at least deck one cuz we're putting together all the demo decks for for Gen Gen Con. Yep. And so There was a question in chat someone was like I'm going to Gen Con will this be at Gen Con? So yes, but the demo is sold out in literally like two two actual IRL minutes. That said, uh come up to us if you say you were on the stream, if you're a VIP in our Discord what have you like you're an early adopter. We love you guys. Come up to us and we'll try and figure out some way to get you a seat at one of these things. Uh We'll play it in the hallway. Right, like if they're at Denny's at 3:00 a.m. let's go. Yeah, right. And over to our tail, we have plenty people who really enjoy this as well. So you know, if you look at them

nice and you slip them a tenner under the table, they might go walk with you. This is the Night City way after all. Yeah. It is. Indeed. Um I was going to say so so kind of swinging back to the the the genesis of all of this. Mike, when when James and Night Crew came to you with just this sort of like super fast-paced gameplay that anyone can learn in 5 minutes, like what was your initial reaction to this just right off the bat? Um, my initial was, "Wow, this is really great." My second was, "Oh my god, we don't have enough people right now." because I looked at all the stuff we're currently doing. Yep. Because we also did Witcher, we're doing our new game Shadow Scar, we're doing all the back stuff for hundreds and hundreds, it seems like, Cyberpunk projects. You know, I went I don't want this to go away. I want to do this. We just have to find a way to pull it off. And James and I are very good at sneaking around the

edges and finding ways to do stuff that we want to get away with anyway. Which has almost gotten us fired at least once, I think. I mean, but that's how you get stuff done, right? By getting almost fired. Walk on my line, right? Yeah. Yeah. The James you you I I I will say having worked with you for so long, you are the perfect partner for something like this because you will take a great idea and no matter what, just just run a 10K with it. Like even if you have to do it on the back burners of everything, like it's it it it this partnership seems like a match made in heaven is what I am Well, it is cuz we've been for years talking about we want to do something. I've been literally wanting to do a game with you forever. like talking about this like we got to find something we can do together. At some point that World War II game, like we're going to actually do it. We're going to do it. Um, but uh yeah, no, we're called Night Crew for a reason. Uh, you know, a we are a small company. I'm like there's a lot of other stuff we have to do to keep the the place afloat, but we've been doing this for a bunch of years and you know, I cracked out my

life savings to make sure that we had real artists, right? Rather than just doing the AI stuff that you see on Kickstarter all the time. Um there's always a way, right? And uh it's taken a long time. We've It's been a long path, but like Mike's been super supportive the entire time. It's been great and it's been amazing watching just like the franchise grow and grow as we're working on it. Right. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, uh I want to make sure I know we've got like 40-50 minutes left. I want to make sure we get to the questions that were thrown at us on the Discord. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, do you want to take one of those? We'll do it. Uh so so we we've been talking a lot about the how to play the game and the and sort of the world and the concepts. I have like a really a really like cut and dry question that I think it it's really good to get answered. Um so when people buy this, how and also like what's what's the format going to be? So obviously there's the the four character decks and some number of scenario decks and how is that

going to work? And you mentioned the box and can you tell us a little bit more about that part? And then that general question comes from someone on your VIP Discord uh named That One Guy. Oh, okay. That guy. Right. Hey guy. Uh no, guy. So uh basically one of the things we wanted to do was make it a little bit lighter on your wallet than a CCG, right? Um the core set that you're going to buy is going to come with all the player decks you need, all of the like scenario decks to get into the campaign, um and hopefully give you like, you know, a bunch to do. And then on top of that give you the upgrade packs, which we didn't even cover here, um but to grow and level your character, which I'm sure maybe on another stream we're going to talk about. Um and then after that we're going to be selling expansions to finish out the campaign, to give you new scenarios to do, to uh put in other roles, things of that nature. Uh and so that's really the

model. We're planning right now. We've gotten it down to about, you know, we think we can get out a scenario every about four months and on top of doing one big campaign a year. So we're trying to continuously add content to this so it's a living world so you can use your deck not only in this product that you bought now, but hopefully for years to come. The things that you're buying now will like an RPG like Cyberpunk like will be relevant, right? Will be relevant. Level up. Right. Okay. So sleeve your role deck. Got it. Okay. Cool. Great. Awesome. Well, and that's a cool part, too. That's part of the during some of the play test that kind of blew my mind when we finished like a section of a scenario even a scenario moving into a a second scenario. The way and then we won't go into how it does it, but it's really nice cuz even throughout multiple play tests across I think it was like a couple months. It did feel like the character that I was playing I believe I did the Nomad as well. No,

yes. No, I did do the Nomad. That it felt like based on what I chose around how well we did versus what stuff you get that like I'm actually building something that is honestly mechanically different than it was before and with sort of like the idea that you could with new scenarios that obviously would come with sort of like, you know, new ways that could change in the future as well of what you get and how you level up. And like obviously it's not going to be as deep or complex as like the RPG. Sure. But we did really work hard to make sure that there was uh the option to choose whatever life path you wanted. Sure, I may be starting by playing the rocker deck, but I could go hard and commit to being like, you know, carry your a diner or whatever or I could go the other direction and start making my character a generalist who got interested in tech or you know, decided you like big guns as well as

guitar. Um, and as you start to upgrade your decks, you'll have those options to craft the path for sort of your your character and how you want to play. Yeah, you won't have a deck, you'll have a character. Yeah. Yeah. Which is something that I find incredibly incredibly interesting. The way it sort of speaking of characters, obviously when you're playing with a group of four friends, etc. And you would both have mentioned this in the past and Mike I know you you sort of baked this into to Cyberpunk as well. Like that feeling of teamwork. No one survives alone in Night City after all. That always has felt like a core tenant of the world of Cyberpunk. Um, I guess how I this is sort of a question for both of you, but like um Cooperative poker games, as you have said, are few and far between. I've played two or three of them. Um, but they are not all over the place. How did how did poker or you poker hands as a format in in conjunction with making sure that you actually felt like a cohesive unit in a team. How did that

sort of come together? How did did that happen instantly? Was that an iteration thing? How did that go? So, I I mean, I tell all these guys and these the the poor people you saw on the stream just a moment ago, who are sitting just off camera, uh I throw out 80% of my work. We throw it out as a company 80% of our work because I do believe games are an iterative process and that's how you get to the best of it. It's just you keep saving that top 20%. I went through about six, I think, core mechanics for this game before we hit on poker. There was a very math-heavy version of this game, all these sort of things. But, what I realized was it actually drew inspiration from the the TTRPG because life in Night City is all about risk and reward, right? And combat is hectic. You don't always know what's go like and it's always a gamble, right? It's not like some of these games where you're playing a like invincible superhero. There's

always a risk once like bullets start flying. Or even when you're trying to like hack a security system or whatever. And so I started thinking about well where do I feel like what other game systems do I feel like give me that same sense. And all of a sudden one day I was like oh Poker. Um Risk and reward. Right. And so it comes from the the gameplay that is baked into the TTRPG from way back from Mike. And yeah, going along with what James said earlier is you know, I have a filing cabinet. Actually it's four levels now of just game design concepts I've tossed out over years including about five different versions of Cyberpunk. Um what we had to bake into the original was a sense that there really was realistic risk. Or to put it another way, people say, "How come it's so deadly?" And I go, "Because one of my playtesters was an Army Corps Ranger paramedic who'd been out there in the sandbox and knew what

happened when a bullet hit you." Yeah. And he told me that in exhausted detail. I kind of went, "Okay, I'm glad it was you not me." But we wanted to make you feel when you were there that there was something that you were risking. But if you made it, kind of like a really good heist movie, it wasn't you good went to jail. You made it, you got a great score, you kept moving. If you screwed up, you were dead. And that's important because it puts all the cards up on the table. Yeah. No, that and it gives it that actual sense of meaning, right? Like, you know, after a while I I love Marvel movies as much as the next person but after a while like there's just no stakes. You're just like these characters are invincible. Like even if they die, I know they're coming back. Like You'd think a skybeam would do something but turns out not really. Yeah, you know. What's a little skybeam now in there? And so to get that sense of stakes you need that sense of risk. So actually we

have a question from chat that I think perfectly mirrors that from Bob eration over in twitch chat what's the fail state if the party hits zero? Is there a penalty and you continue? Do you have to resort do you have to reset the scenario deck and or you just dead and that's the end of it like what is for your campaign what does that mean? I will say You don't have to reset the scenario deck but there is a there is a single line in the rulebook which says if your health reaches zero open the trauma team pack. And that's all I'm going to say about it. Hell yeah. I'm about it. That's that's loves them some trauma team. Yeah, I want to make a scenario deck for trauma team. We've been talking about that for weeks. I love trauma team. I want to make capital out of And and stupid part was trauma team was there because you couldn't get clerics in realistic cyberpunk situation. Cleric oh yeah flying clerics oh yeah clerics in really big helicopters. I got clerics backed up by Talibans who just happened to have two

giant guns. I I I think that of all of the things that resonate as like symbolic of what it means for something to be cyberpunk trauma team is like very close to the top of the list of just like The oh yeah that makes perfect sense for the world of cyberpunk and also I don't know how to feel about this. That's kind of it's just a lot of feelings. It's very cool. Well and there's just so so many cool stories there right? Like I what I love about getting to work in this franchise is Mike has built this place where like there are so many stories in Night City and very often we see these like big high level like corp CEO or like edge runners who are legend stuff, but like I love the idea of a trauma team story about people who are just going through their lives like employed by trauma team and what that would mean, right? And how that would feel. Yeah, the comic book. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I got that comic. You look at comic you kind of went whoa, I didn't even think that was going to happen. Yeah. I also want to get a

trauma team jacket for my my own doctor because I think she deserves it. Yeah. Um another question from your VIP Discord uh Captain uh Wizbiz asked, "What excites you the most about this iteration of the franchise and what kind of stories are you excited to tell with it?" That you might have to dance around that slightly considering, but is there any uh nuggets you could drop on that one? Uh I got this. You want to go first? Should I go first? What do you What do you How do you want to do this? Uh I'm excited with the idea of that you can tell smaller encapsulated stories. Yes. Usually the biggest problem you have with anyone trying to do cyberpunk from the outside is they think of it as "We're saving the world." Yep. Right now, you save yourself. You save your friends. You are not making the big score just because you want to become rich. You're making the big score because there's a reason, whether it's desperate or revenge-driven or whatever. And one of the things I really liked about the decks is that they essentially present stories that lead to some places

that are very personal. And that's really neat because that's the feel you should have in a good cyberpunk story. Well, and on my side, right? Uh one of the coolest things to me is most of the things that exist in this franchise are monolithic endeavors, right? Whether it be the video games or you guys getting out of book, right? That takes a really long time and a ton of work and it's not that these aren't a ton of work. Doing each of these scenario decks is a ton of work, but we can get them out faster, which means we like we're starting in 2012, right? We're starting at the very sort of beginning of what you would understand as Cyberpunk. And we're going to get to explore a lot of places in the timeline. And so if you're Cyberpunk fan, we're going to at least get to touch on all these places that we usually don't get to see because it's just you can't really do that if you know like making a new core book is

a multi-year endeavor, right? And so you have to do the big stuff. And here we can touch on places that like, you know, you may not have gotten to ever go to or top period in time that you might not have seen a lot. So yeah, that's what I'm excited about. Awesome. Nice. Awesome. Awesome. And I guess that kind of touches on this question that Charlotte asked also from the Discord. Is there any like So so this is all going to be new lore that's introduced. These are new stories that you're telling and this is going to be sort of canon to the series. This isn't like like an off in the boonies sort of thing. This is all deeply integrated into the I guess what I'm thinking what I'm thinking of in my mind is like the master Cyberpunk timeline. Oops. Okay. There's things I can tell and things I can't. That's all I'm going to say. But understand that everything that is done in the timeline inside the franchise is in a master timeline. That has been just hammered to death so that we all know

exactly where we want to be. And in fact, I had a conversation last night at 2:00 in the morning because Poland's 9 hours ahead where we were working out something where it was okay, the writer wants to do this, but it affects things that happened 30 years earlier. So we need to figure out how we get there because we don't want to shut it off, but we want to make sure it all goes together. The last time I dealt with anything that extensive was years ago working on Star Wars projects at West End and so forth where you had to make it all kind of work out or, you know, George was going to shoot it down anyway. Right. Right. So, you have a responsibility to make that world work. And when you have it working, the cool part is you don't have to tell the big stuff that changes everything. You just need to tell what's happening that concerns the players and what they're

doing. For example, one of the earliest and the ones I typically do is one called the apartment. And the apartment is essentially a very simple scenario. All of the players live in an apartment building that right now is relatively rent control free and is it actually in a combat zone and is now they all get comfortable, they like it and then somebody in a corporation decides they're going to knock it down and they're going to put a radio tower up there. How do you stop that? That's not a huge thing. It's my house, our home, about to be flattened by some enormous corporation somewhere and I'm not going to go up to that corporation and blow up the corporation. No, I've got to find a way at the ground level to deal with this. Yeah. And that's personal and when it's personal people care. Yeah. And Oh, please. No, go for it. Yeah, I was going to say those are the kind of stories that really resonate with me.

Earth-shattering, world-saving things, sure, that's great, but like I feel like this is just me on a soapbox, but I feel like media in general has gotten to the point where like that is now what is expected, but because that is expected and that's what we get so much, it just becomes boring. It becomes mundane when it should be incredibly special. What feels special to me right now, Mike, is a story like you just said. What this is a this is a personal thing about your home and a group of individuals and you can get that story across and it can be incredibly resonant. You don't need world-shaking events like as far as a global perspective because your world is very personal and Cyberpunk is a perfect sort of uh uh I guess venue for stories like that and I'm psyched that we'll get more of them in in in all the different variations of of where you're putting this world but this card game in particular. Yeah, one of the interesting things is, you know, um Edgerunners which is our uh uh anime. Yeah. Uh Edgerunners works because at core it's a story about

a guy, a girl, maybe a triangle going on, a found family and the dangers that go with it. Everything that David, for example, goes through all the way to the end is for those people he cares about. And he puts it all on the line for those people. He doesn't do it because he's going to get rich. He doesn't do it because he's going to go, you know, up a corporate ladder somewhere. He does it because he cares about those people. Yeah. Which is why when, you know, almost every time I've watched people watching Edgerunners they come out of it bawling their eyes out. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. It's yeah, guilty. I yeah, I hope to God no one ever hits us with therapy bills on this. Right, right, right. But yeah, basically it's because it is personal and you want to see those people come out of that because after a while you realize it isn't some abstract thing like we have to stop this, you know, enormous threat from space that will destroy us. It becomes this enormous

threat is about to step on my kid's school. Yeah. And and it feels like that's really um the distilled purpose of sci-fi, right? In general is to do that. Tell very human stories in a different place in a different time in a way that lets you magnify the humanity and the similarities of those stories to your experiences, right? The like the the the whole idea of humanity be sci-fi having the darkened mirror effect, right? That you get to you get to tell this cool story that's fundamentally, right? A guy, a girl, a love triangle, a struggle in a different world that magnifies that in a way that resonates with the viewer is I think one of the best parts of that whole genre and the way that you're doing it here with James talking about with small stories, right? Is feels so important to that, right? Cuz I'm with Matt. I think that it's very easy to have giant stories, but small stories that get billet welded

together to make a world are my absolute favorite. Yeah. Same here. Yeah. Speaking of sort of um things that can I'm going to I'm going to co-op this. I'm going to take a question that I wanted to ask. Uh first and foremost, James, you brought this up very briefly, but the art for this game is phenomenal for all the cards that I've seen. And also I think you've got some phenomenal artists on this. I love that you're it's it's, you know, as you said, real human artists doing real human work and I I love that to death. What were some of sort of the the must-haves that both of you really like felt you really needed in this game to not only convey the feeling of what you're trying to get across from a narrative perspective, but also like to ensure that various gameplay elements may or may not be tied into those said pieces of art. Are you talking about must-haves on the art side specifically? Yes. Yes. Well, so from my side and then I'll hand this off, but like from our side one

was obviously working closely with the artists on all the puzzle and clue cards so we can make sure that the game design and the art was actually integrated, right? And that art was part of the game design rather than these two things just being separate. And then the other part of it that we wanted to express was we wanted to have more varied styles. Some of your card games today that actually look very good also look a little samey. Like if you lay them out in front of you, you kind of can't tell what's what at a glance. And we felt like Cyberpunk has so many different feelings in it, right? That like the the like the triumphant rocker moment should visually look and feel different than like the CD noir moment, right? And so we tried to capture different styles for each of those things and sort of present Night City as not just monotone, but rather like having this vibrance and

this very different forms of life throughout it. Um actually, courtesy of Aiden, I have I have a couple of examples. You were talking earlier about razor girl. Mhm. So I thought we could we could show that off and like talk like this this is the kind of art that you're you're seeing. I absolutely love this art. I just want to show it off cuz it's it's so like it's such a unique style. Right? And Aiden, can you clear with Irene, our art director, another piece to show that is like a different style? Yeah, to show the variations. Yeah. Because sorry, I just want to make sure like our art director has done a lot of work and has been very patient with me when I'm like, oh, for game design reasons it actually has to be this way. And so I just want to make sure that we're not showing off artwork that they want to save for later on. Um But yeah, Mike, what are what are your thoughts? What do you feel like? Well, first of all, Talsorian does not

use AI art. And there are a number of reasons including the fact that my art director on my side Winter will basically beat us with a stick if we do it. And we Hell yeah. We of look at it as it's something that doesn't have the soul you need. But the other thing, which I think is very true in this card game, is you can afford to have extraneous nonsense. For example, if you have AI generate something and it generates the wrong number of fingers, that number of fingers may be important as a clue later on. That scene that you've generated where there are 50 people and it would be easy to have AI just generate 50 people, you may have to have specific people in specific poses and places just to set that scene. So, it would a little bit like trying to do a movie and having something outside

generate that movie. Well, and it's like, you know, Night City is is such a like living place. Mhm. And AI can never generate Playland by the Sea, right? Like, it doesn't know what that is. And so, if we want to put something there, like a human a human can represent that in a lot of ways, but they they will represent that place, unlike, you know, a machine which might just give you a Ferris wheel on someone's head. Right. No, absolutely. Yeah. Uh Will, do you want to take the next uh VIP question? Oh, I I I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I Well, I was going to snipe the last one cuz I think that's a great question. Go for it. Uh Diamond Jack wants to know, a very important question that I think is burning on all of our minds. Um and and we just got to know, Mike, Yeah. what's your order at Afterlife? What's my order in Afterlife? Yeah.

Fans really want to know, Mike. That's They had all this room to ask about the card game. Someone used their shot to ask me about that order. My My order in the afterlife there's a drink that I actually have made in the past called the Darth Vader. Nice. And it begins It begins with dark rum, peppermint schnapps, vodka as far as you can fill it, and usually if you can get it some kind of um well, in Night City through probably radioactive, but some kind of glowing swizzle stick. Somebody described it when I made the first one they said, "This is like choking an entire uh pine tree down my throat, but then I'm happy about it." So, yeah, that's And what I look at it is, you know, Darth Vader is dead now, but he was a legend. And if he was around If he was around in Night City, he'd be the baddest ass solo ever. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah, it's no I don't

You have angered me. Perfect. That is the fight. That's the fight I'm playing. Yeah. Someday I feel like that there are other universes which we must get licenses to just so we can set up some of these encounters. Um let's see. I'm trying to go through some of the other things here. Oh, yeah. Like just great. Oh, here's Okay, here's another lore question and then I promise we will get back to actual game design thing. But Noel asked on the VIP Discord, at what point in the Cyberpunk universe timeline do you foresee humanity becoming spacefaring? Speaking of Star Wars, of course. We do have a lot of orbitals. Yep. Yeah, we We have the orbitals. We have a failed colony on Mars last I heard. Yep. We sent them out there. I don't know whether CD decide to let them stay or not. Sure. Sure. But there was a cycler that went out there that we mentioned in Deep Space, which is one of our earlier

books. Mhm. Um and there are there's at least two colonies, I believe, on Moon right now. Mhm. Uh one of them, which is actually running a Tycho mass driver, if I recall right. Um going beyond there has been a really interesting question because to get into really deep space, to you know, kind of go the Blade Runner, you're on another world sort of thing, that's a lot of time. Yeah. And it also requires a lot of people. You know, you It's a thing you never really think about when you look at, you know, Alien or, you know, Blade Runner or whatever, is how many people are out there? How How long did it take for them to get to those places? Right. And that's something that because we've gone out of our way to make this all work, tend to make this a reasonable, foreseeable future, interstellar is not something we're really going for until somebody in real

life pops up and says, "We figured out how to make the Albuquerque drive work." Well, Yeah. And what's really interesting to me, also, is you have this like hyper-capitalist realm, right? Like, you have this hyper-capitalist space in Cyberpunk. There's not really, at least with the like modern super corpo like capitalism, it's not really good argument for doing interstellar travel, right? Like Right. The early returns on an interstellar spaceship are not very good. Five centuries later, you get to find out if there's something worthwhile. Right. Yeah. And uh you know, exploiting it is very difficult, right? And your time scale doesn't fit with it, right? Cuz if you're not going to do like super FTL, you're talking about Right, we're talking about 2012, 2066, right? We're talking about like very narrow windows of time when people are going to be a like I assume we're going to go like cryosleep close to light. They're going to be asleep for hundreds of years. So, even if it hap- even if it launched today in the Cyberpunk world,

you know, we're we're way down the timeline. Okay. That's That's awesome. Adrian Tchaikovsky, uh who's a science fiction writer, I really love his work. And he does a series called Children of Children of Time, Children etc. etc. And he tackles it that way. He says, "Okay, these people have extended lifespans anyway, but they are sleeping cold sleep for centuries." He has one where literally, you know, the people involved are in a much better spaceship than we could ever make. And they're still knocked out for close to a thousand years. Yep. And that's a realistic timeframe for what we can do. To get there, I'll I'll Okay, things that I do within the world and that we extrapolate are based on what exists, okay? Or what could exist. So, I want you to think about something. If you can get together the level of power that's required to get an interstellar spaceship up to even

a reasonably high fraction of light, let's say 10%. That's more power than we've put together in most of all human history in one place in one year gone. If you could do that, you don't have to worry about anything else. You have you At that point, you have anti-gravity, you have eternal life, you I mean, you know. Right. If If you look at the um the the power curve of that, I'm trying to think of the No, I mean, you're right. Like, it's very hard to have for for power curves. Yes. Yeah. Uh and like, you know, the different civilization levels. Yeah. But, right, like you can't really have It's difficult to even have a Cyberpunk universe Mhm. in a space where that level of power exists, right? Um But, no, it's it's interesting. I'm glad people like are Don't on the other hand, you know, if you're home brewing, go nuts.

Well, that Yeah, I mean when when I think Blade Runner, you know, I don't think of the off-world colonies as being off system. I think of them as okay, some are out there around Titan. They're building colonies and that's the off-world colonies. You know, but I am never thinking about Yeah, they're out there with space marines, you know, flying out there. No, you know, and part of that is again, Cyberpunk works because it is around the corner for where you live. Well, and a little bit of the stuff in Blade Runner, we get hints that it's part of the reason for replicants are so we can send them out into space because, you know, they don't die like human beings and whatever. Sure, if you want to do a thousand-year investment, okay, we put together the ship, we have it go at 0.1% of light speed and then okay, you've got a man by 500 replicants and who cares. Or you send them out there and when you get there 500 years later, you say, "Okay, decant all the baddies." Right. Yeah, then you then we start getting into into into trouble.

I did warn everyone on the Discord that Mike and I are prone to tangent. So, feel free to No, no, no. Veer it back. I'm going to veer it back. So, speaking of Speaking of Let's see if I can do this correctly. Consolidating power towards a very cool end goal. Can you talk about what is sort of what the pre-order system is live now or what a possible crowdfunding thing is going forward? Can you Can you give us any hints on how this will be How power will be gained toward this project moving forward? Um So, this is really funny. I appreciate that was quite Well done. I love it. Yeah, practice. That's how you used to do this, not me. So, from our side, okay, right now we've got our pre-sale page up. If you drop a dollar on the thing, basically you're reserving access to the Kickstarter before everybody else. You're going to get the biggest discount that we're going to offer. You're going to get a shiny

foil silver hand when you buy the base game at the Kickstarter or ship with it. And you're going to get VIP access to the Discord. As you've seen like we've got a bunch of questions from VIPs in the Discord. And like that's where they come from. And so yeah, if you're at all interested, I believe it's presale.nightcrewgames.com. And yeah, you can you can sign up for this thing. And then you know, when it goes live you're just you're going to have access to it first. And that's basically where we're at. I was not expecting to be softballed to make a sales pitch, but I really appreciate it Max. I appreciate it. Good job there. Well, thank you. I know that is also part of Will and my job right now, but it is such a I don't want to I don't want to you know, blow smoke or any of that jazz. It is such a pleasure to talk to both of you and James sort of even learn as you've been going on with this

project. Like this game pardon I'll do my one swear word for the day [ __ ] rocks. Like I have such a good time when I play tested this game and it is something that I have a real belief that people are going to experience this at places like Gen Con and like as you guys slowly roll out like more and more stuff. Like I know it's it we're doing the drip feed right now, but this thing this thing rocks and it is going to be big. And I I I am happy to do the roll into sales pitch because I will be there front and center day one let's flipping go. I'll let you know that I uh I passed the link around to our moderators uh and I was like, "Hey, just so you know, if anyone's asking, here's the link to pre-sale." And several of them went, "Right. Other other people, um hold on a second. I got to I got to do something before we start." Yeah, okay, cool. Now now I'm ready to start the stream. Don't don't worry about what I was It's fine. If you if you are somebody who moderated

this Discord and bought this thing, anytime you see me at a convention, just come up and we'll figure out something. I will find something. Yeah, I will maybe grab this man and then grab him and give him a pen because I I I appreciate you all. I did accident- What? What? Oh. What? Too much hype. Too much hype. The stream's crashing. Wait, hold on. Wait, oh god. No, are we fine? We're fine. We're we're fine. They're not. We're we're okay. Everybody Everybody Yeah, Arasaka got them. Er Oh, they're gone gone. Yeah, Ara- Arasaka got a hold of of James and Mike. Do not worry. The megacorps, they they hit. Yeah, that's right. Um I wanted to ask I wanted to ask Mike what his favorite cut of Blade Runner was. And now I'll never know. Uh I feel like you'll know. I feel like he'll be right back. See, like they're they're coming back in right now. There he is. Like I said, any netrunners nearby, we apologize. Right, yeah.

Ch- Chat's guess was that Arasaka finally caught up. Right, yeah. What's that burning Oh, netrunners. Exactly. at some point we're going to get like uh there will be enough folks who are both running scrappy institutions. His much like, you know, more established than ours, but I'm waiting for the moment where we can end one of these streams by actually shattering a window and having someone swing through. I volunteered to be the person swinging through the window. You can swing through broken glass. Yeah. Yeah, that fits our new game we're working on now, uh Shadowscar, where we have ninjas leaping in from everywhere. Perfect. Do you want to just like give them the one-line on Shadow Scar? Since you're Scar. Um jeez, this has been something my my son Cody who also uh developed and did The Witcher TRPG as well. Um this has been something he's been working on for I don't know how long, but essentially the way I look at it is Shadow Scar is sort of like ninjas and Ghostbusters using the technology level of um

the what's that Remember that old show where they jump through the Are you thinking because uh mine Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap. Uh what are we talking about? No, not Quantum Leap. Uh jeez, it just Stargate? Stargate. Yes. Stargate meets Ghostbusters meets ninjas. Okay. I I I I love the start Stargate is just ranks up there with one of my favorites cuz the the pitch for Stargate is your gods are dead, take these guns, we're starting a rebellion, and I'm just here. I love that. Well, in this one it's okay, you you like ninjas? Well, we're going to give you all of uh the horrible side of Japanese mythology, and we're going to spread it out across the universe to destroy everything. Good luck. Nice. Nice. I'm pumped for that. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's a it's a hoot. Nice. Uh I think we probably have time for two or three more We got like 14 minutes

left. Yeah. Uh And Will, do you have one queued up? I have another one from the VIP if you don't. I I was going to I was going to ask this this one that was last on our list cuz I think that that's sort of like a good place. Um Sure. So, uh Oh, we're getting hitching. Waiting No more hitching. Uh Waiting for the frames. I can still hear you guys. Is it still working? Yes. We can hear you. All right. Okay. Um Guy, can you see me move? Uh uh Oh, nope. I'm definitely at a slow seven frames a second. Yeah, you know, I'm going to Dude. I'm going to go with we were lucky it lasted this long given that it's gotten this bad. It's fine. No, it's okay. It's It's clearing up. It'll It'll clear up in a second. So, um All right. So, let's let's you know, you're big on imagining the the near future. Let's imagine the near future. You get the the the Kickstarter. You get all of this out. You get this in people's hands. You're doing like the the you know, a scenario every 4 months, a big campaign every year. What's your big vision for this? Is it Is it to do

that until you know, you have like a whole series of small stories? Is it to escalate? Where are Like what's What's your big overall vision for this look like? So, I mean, that's that's very complicated. I don't want to say anything, you know, at the very very beginning because whatever I say now is going to prove untrue. Sure. But on the broadest level some of it you can't. Right, exactly. On the broadest level though, um we want to make this a a game that, you know, you can take with you in the same way that like Cyberpunk, there are people who've been playing Cyberpunk for 20 or more years, right? Whose characters like it's what they get together with their friends to do on the weekends. And the stories they tell have changed a lot since they were like 14 and first cracked this out, but it's still this universe. It's still this place. Um and that's kind of what we want to do. Uh for me, I love card games of all types, um but there's only a handful of really

strong narrative card games, and I wanted more of that. I wanted that experience that I could play with my friends, that I could do co-op, that didn't have some of the, you know, barrier of competitive or like just when we wanted to do something together as as a crew. Um and it's my hope that this last for a lot of years, right? My long-term hope is that honestly, I can hand it off. Like that's my real hope where 5 years from now I've trained up enough people who are like really good designers on how this all works, that we can be turning out a lot more adventures, and that like different teams can explore different aspects, and have different visions of these parts of Night City. The other part I throw into that is that something he hasn't thought of yet, but we have learned in in amazing detail is going to be foreign licensing and foreign versions of it. We have

Cyberpunk now, and I think like 10 different languages. Well, let me tell you. This is going to be fun when I see Well, I don't even know how we're going to get the Japanese cards to get everything on there, but you know, I'm looking forward to seeing the art of Japanese cards. Um well, I mean, you know, I do hear localizing in Polish worked out okay for you many many years Yeah, yeah, that's a story in and of itself. Um but so from on our side, uh I know I've said this a lot, mostly because, you know, forgive us when we make mistakes. We are a a small team of actual human beings. Um but one of the things that I want to set as a stretch goal is to localize it for around the world, because we've already had lots of people reach out to us and be like, "Is this going to be in my language?" And I would like to make it native in a lot of languages. Um it's a little bit of a challenge compared to a lot of games, because just by its nature it's a card game, there's a lot more words than, you know, many just board games. And then because so many of the cards, the words, the

order of the words, the specific things said are mechanically relevant, it becomes a little bit of a challenge, but that's something that we really really want to do. Mechanically relevant, and also vibes relevant. Like the way the way Night City flows, like you have to make sure that not only is the mechanical element of the game, but you want to make sure like correct, you want to make sure that like the vibe of what you're trying to get across in the scenario in the action in the story is also still the same incredibly difficult thing. But the big part of that is that we've already done that worldwide with Cyberpunk and we've done it for dang near 30 odd years. As he was mentioning you know Polish working out all right. That's how we got into the video game was the original CD Projekt guys played Cyberpunk when they were in high school. Which makes me feel really old. Basically what we realized was it could be adapted to all kinds of languages. And the other thing we discovered was

that as it got adapted we'd see other forms of some of the art. We'd see some of the ways things were described. I read at least you know one other language which is German and I was fascinated to go through the German edition and go Oh yeah. It's the idea is there. It works. Yeah. But I wouldn't have said it quite like that but it works because German's different. The difference between localization and translation is huge and fascinating one and so yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Definitely. Matt you had another question from the VIPs over on the on the Discord. I believe I did. Let me scroll back up to it. fire. I think we probably have time for like two to at most three more questions but yeah if there's one you want to grab off the Discord. If there's anything in chat that you guys think I mean I know there's been more questions in chat than we can possibly get to but if there's any you want to

grab. I I'm pulling up I'm pulling I have a final question I'll end with but I got a couple more from the Discord. So Darkwing Drunk asks are there any groups or corps that haven't been highlighted yet that you uh excited or you want to expand on. We we kind of mused a little bit about Trauma Team, but like uh is there anything else that you've sort of like and that's kind of a hard question to answer cuz you you don't want to spoil anything, but I'll leave it to the two of you to sort of walk that minefield. So, from our side obviously I talked about Trauma Team. I want to do that. I would love to do a adventure from a Corpo perspective just because uh we rarely see that, but one of the things that is very interesting to me uh the Bozos. Oh, yes. There is There is the Bozos. We have Bozo plans. That is absolutely true. We There may be a clown mode uh that we've talked about, but also I want to do media, right? Yeah. Um I want to

make sure that At least I think that's a really interesting space in Night City. Yeah. Actually, what always makes me a little weirded out is the fact that the Bozos were created by my lovely wife Lisa. I would have never suspected that, but she came up one day and said, "Can I do one of the gangs?" I said, "Yes." You said, "Bozos are very clever." And that was the beginning of the night game. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm going I always thought you were so serious. No. No, I'm not always. Okay, so who did Philharmonic Vampires? Lisa. That tracks so well. I That's some of the best gangs in Cyberpunk were my wife Lisa coming up with those. That's fantastic. Well, long-term gamers do very strange things. I yeah, I I agree. Just statement of fact. Yeah. Well, what do you got? Um I got one from uh The Bush Chicken. Do you have a favorite Night City legend? That's for both of you. I'm going to let you lead off on this

one, Mike. I think. Oh, yeah. No, my favorite is still Morgan, which is one reason why the way we have things organized, we still are basically following the Morgan tale even through into the 2060s to the 2070s, but I can't tell you what we're doing yet. Dude, I was going to go with Morgan. Um I would love at some point when there's not a camera, you and I got to coordinate uh because I want to do something in parallel with whatever you guys are doing, like a scenario or something like that cuz Bart Moss I mean, that was the next like yeah. Uh we've got a couple of we've got a shout from Aiden in the background about Bart Moss. I data crash. I'm so excited to do data crash now. that's going to be I mean, I think the deck alone is just going to be insane. So, I Okay, this is a little bit of a spoiler for a deck that probably won't exist for a year and a half, so you're all going to forget. But, I am very excited. It's going to come just as a normal totally standard like deck scenario. You don't like you're just playing through.

And then in the middle of a run, the data crash happens. Mhm. And things start to go haywire, right? But, you're not told that at all when you begin this thing. And I'm really excited for that moment for players because I love the idea of the data crash for like other people trying to get stuff done in their lives. Yeah. I thought the idea that, you know, what we've kicked around is the idea that as you do the scenario and it starts to change, it will change also the effects of the cards you have in your hand. Yeah. You think it works like this, but then it says, "If you're playing this, now it does this." Oh, crud. Yeah. Um I think I I will I will let's see, what do we got? Uh do do do do We already did the spacefaring one. You said you had a a final question you wanted to My final question is a little bit it's just for me. It's just for me, Mike. I I need to know uh what cut of Blade Runner is your cut

of Blade Runner? No lies. Uh jeez. Let's just start with voice-overs or no voice-overs? No voice-overs. Okay. the problem Yeah, the problem with voice-overs is while I love some of it, um it tells too much. It gives too much away. Yeah. And I love I I not seen Okay, when I first saw Blade Runner years ago, I remember walking out and saying to my girlfriend at the time, I either love this movie or I hate it. And then I went back the next night. Yeah, I've been there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and so but the thing is is that when I finally saw the you know, not the director's cut but the first uh non-VO cut, and I went, "Okay, this is a different movie now." Because I have to be inside the heads of the characters, and I don't have everything explained to me, and sometimes it's over explained. Yeah. So yeah, it would be uh there's a non-voice version that was post-director's cut if I remember correctly. I believe so. I think I

I might be butchering this. It I think it's the 2007 the final cut is the one that doesn't have the voice-over if I'm remembering correctly. Chat, don't Don't uh or correct me when I'm wrong. Yeah, I think I think that's the last one. Yeah, yeah, the thing is is that that's the one that I love because, you know, if if I'm basically when I when I'm barreling through San Francisco, for example, you know, in the fog and all that, that's my Blade Runner moment. And it's it's also what I do when, you know, I actually We have a huge monitor and super powerful machine that we run 2077 on. And half my fun is getting there, you know, when the evening no one else is around in the office, firing that thing up, getting in my car and just driving to the sunset, and you know, running Blade Runner soundtrack, which unfortunately cannot buy. Uh you the New American uh Orchestra cut, which is not really the original Vangelis.

But yeah, that's just perfect. And so, yeah, I would say that that, you know, the 2000s cut works. Nice. And And the the And the other part is, if I remember right, one of the differences is also it doesn't have the happy ever after ending. Uh-huh. The door slams and you just go, I don't know what happened, and I'm not sure I want to, but I like to believe. Well, and I love I love the opportunity that gives you to think about it, right? Oh, yeah. Um but, man, we I could do this We could do this for like ever. We We will wrap it up. Thank you for indulging my Blade Runner question as the final one. Absolutely. Um And if anybody has any more questions, feel free uh there's a ask a dev section in our Discord. Just come in, bug us. We are around pretty often. I've got like a 2-hour drive home after this, so I won't be around for a little bit, but like I'll be hopping on. Uh yeah, so come bug

us. Like we're very open. Yeah, uh and thank you all so much for Uh-huh. There you go. I literally just had that under the table. Perfect. Perfect. Big laughs. Let's go. And we're out. Um thank you all so very much for joining us. Thank you all to everyone who slid follows. We saw them as people came in. Thank you all for joining us here. Again, I've been Will, that's Matt, James, Mike. If you're interested in getting a hold of uh the most information you can and supporting this, you can go to presale.nightgreengames.com. It's over in chat. Um you can click there, you can put down a dollar, you'll sign up for presales, uh and you'll get as much information as is available as soon as it is. So, uh I think that's going to do it for us. Thank you once again so much for joining us, and we will see you all next time. Bye, everybody. Bye.