“Wrote for Luck” Connor on creating Damus Nostre

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I had a chat with my lad Connor about his BPRD pointman character “Damus Nostre” and taking him from a loose concept to a fully formed RPG character….

One of the things I enjoy most about roleplaying games is converting my ideas for a character onto my uncontaminated sheet of A4 paper and, with this being a BRPD game, the only limits the player has when creating their character is their imagination….although this is apparently somewhat limited in my case!

In my mind one of the things that makes the Hellboy universe fun is the concoction of the occult and the links to the real world, and I really wanted my character to embody that heady mix of influences. Like The Happy Mondays I wanted to blend lad rock (the investigation aspect of BPRD) with house music (those esoteric tendril MM has running through his world). As the rest of the party had somewhat normal human looking characters I took the opportunity to be the dick head of the group by combining influences from 16th century Europe and modern day doomsday cults and conspiracy theories. Continue reading →

Ultimate Cyberpunk Soundtrack -Fat of the Jilted Generation 

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Mess with the best, die like the rest

Author: Stephen Hupfer
This was originally going to be an article dedicated specifically to The Prodigy’s – The Fat of the Land, but after having a chat with Sophie about how good Music for the Jilted Generation is as well, I thought I’d encompass both albums. Seeing as it’s Cyberpunk Week at Corehammer, we will tilt our hats to the ultimate Cyberpunk soundscape artist and take a trip down memory lane.

The year is 1995. Johnny Mnemonic, Waterworld, Tank Girl, and Judge Dredd have all hit the theatres. On top of these high-tier films sits the ultimate film of all time, Hackers. Now, I know this is not a Hackers spotlight, but it is my favourite film and it happens to include the tracks “One Love” and “Voodoo People” from the album Jilted Generation, which was released a year prior, so I had to give it a spot. Whenever “Voodoo People” comes on when I’m not watching the film, all I can picture is rollerblading on the run from cops in New York City. This album doesn’t sit as high for me as Fat Of The Land, but it definitely still has some major hits.

Note: that heavy-ass riff in “Their Law” makes you want to crack someone’s head with a beer bottle and get involved in a 200 mph car chase. Continue reading →

You Can’t Stop Progress – Hardware

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Author: Andrew Carr

When Corehammer sounded the horn for people to write about cyberpunk, I knew I had to answer the call. Now, there is a wealth of amazing cyberpunk flicks out there and I was pretty spoiled for choice, so I decided to avoid the obvious classics and look at some of the more niche flicks out there. I considered the artier stuff (Burst City/Tetsuo: The Iron Man) and also the trash (Hands of Steel/Nemesis); however, I eventually decided on something that kind of sits in between and holds a special place in my miserable Lancastrian heart – Hardware.

I only found out about this film a few years back, as I was starting to discover all those movies whose VHS cover art I used to stare at longingly in the local Spar when I was about seven. Podcasts like The Gentlemen’s Guide To Midnite Cinema and The Cult Of Muscle reminded me of those glorious days, when Cliffhanger was next to Ninja III: The Domination and Coneheads was a couple of rows below. As a kid, I discovered cyberpunk through Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and the rest of 2000AD. This evolved in my teens into an interest in Cyberpunk 2020, sci-fi movies and an unhealthy obsession with Fear Factory. As an adult, this finally morphed into a love of genre cinema from the 80s and 90s which, strangely enough, brought me right back to those days spent staring up at copies of Nemesis that I could never reach….. Continue reading →

The Slugbait Rumor Mill and Other Stories

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Author Nick Baran:

The start of my true love affair with miniature wargaming started with this box.

In 1994 I was part owner of a gaming store with some older, more mature, gaming friends of mine. I was in my early 20’s and playing in a straight edge hardcore punk band called, Halfmast. We were an unlikely group of game store owners: a chemical engineer (our chief investor), a mid-sized retail chain store manager, one of his employees, and myself – an irresponsible punk rocker. We opened the store on the tails of the first big wave of Magic: The Gathering hype. With all of the money we made selling M:TG in our first 6 months we had paid off the chemical engineer’s investment and had a pile of cash `to be invested into another game line. The distributors were pushing a game called Warhammer really hard, and we threw our all of our nested profit into it. Then we did it again with 40K. I started an army for both systems but didn’t fully fall in love with either until a new game dropped called, Necromunda…. Continue reading →

Hackers – This is the end, thank you for calling

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The year is 1995. The only internet you have access to comes complete with screeching dial up tone, and pictures that load in 3 colours, one row of pixels at a time. The most technologically advanced thing in my house at the time that I was allowed to touch was probably our waffle maker. And then I put my chin directly on to the hot plate waiting for them to cook and it became the most hi-tech thing in our house that I was no longer allowed to touch.

When I finally was allowed access to our computer, it wasn’t anything like Hackers had promised me. MS-DOS was just green gibberish, no one tried to talk to me, much less start an argument with me, animated by HTML flames, and I didn’t descend into a pixelated cyberspace every time I turned it on. Also it took like 5 full minutes to warm up. The closest I got to an ambiguous and sinister online identity, was using a thunder and lightning emoticon in my MSN name. It was heartbreaking.

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World Of Ruin – 5 Classic Cyberpunk Video Games

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Author Adam Dyeson
Filled with visions of a high-tech low-life future, the cybernetic neon soaked film noir futures envisioned in many Cyberpunk classics were practically destined to find a home on computers and video game consoles. Often reaching past the technologies of the present, but anchored with the all too real potential misery of a dystopian future, the settings often found in the genre have made for some great video games experiences. Here are 5 classic Cyberpunk video games…

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Neo Tokyo Drift – Akira turns 30

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Author: David Ager

What’s that, mate? You love future bikes? I do too. And what was that? You like laser guns and people that swell to a thousand times their normal size like they’ve been filled with Sunny D? I like that too. It may have been that strange combination of interests that means I ended up loving Akira, or maybe it’s the fact that if you have even a passing interest in science fiction then it’s almost impossible not to like Akira (even if you don’t understand it.)

It’s Cyberpunk week on Corehammer and when Nate threw the question out to everyone to see if they’d like to talk about something Cyberpunk that was close to their hearts, I knew that top of that list for me was Akira. I first saw Akira at a friends house when I was about 13, at the time we were obsessed with Metal Gear Solid, his Desert Eagle BB gun & these large figurines you could buy of SWAT and SAS figurines from a weird shop in Hull. Looking back at it now we were probably going the direction that several school shooters took but luckily my friend showed me a frog he’d killed and we didn’t speak after that.

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Soul Of A New Machine – Cyberpunk World Building

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Author: Henry Taylor

As a setting, cyberpunk is unequivocally a product of its time. Defined by its polarised classes and advanced technology, it could be considered as the rising sentiments of the 1980s taken to their extremes. While parallels and comments on society have to be purposefully added into other genres and other kinds of ‘higher’ science fiction (I’m thinking Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, or Dune), cyberpunk’s social critiques define its very nature. Without that aspect of a yawning societal divide, it’s just science fiction. The word punk is there for a reason.

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An ode to the Rue Jules Verne

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Distorted Japanese neon signs, reflected in the pooling rain on a Shinjuku sidewalk. High tech low lives, mirror shades, cyberspace decks, smart drugs, riding on light, neural data jacks, androids, replicants & and the infinite possibilities of technology. This was the future I signed up for and it was glorious.

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Fear Tomorrow….Corehammer does Cyberpunk

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Once again it’s time for a week of themed posts over here at the mighty Corehammer. Our Seven Nights Of Samhain theme was pretty successful last Halloween and it was a great opportunity to throw the doors wide open and invite some friends and allies to get involved. We are doing it all again this week and the theme is something thats been on my mind a lot these past few weeks, CYBERPUNK!!! With shows like Altered Carbon and Phillip K Dick’s Electric Dreams popping up in recent months alongside the new Bladerunner movie and Akira turning 30, I figured it’d be an appropriate time to don our disheveled trench coats and step outinto the hard rain of Neo Tokyo to take a look at yesterdays vision of tomorrow.

Any nerds who grew up in the 80’s will be familiar with the Cyberpunk juxtaposition of High Tech/Low Life. With it’s strong aesthetics, punk sensibilities, class politics and speculations on technology Cyberpunk caught hold of a lot of imaginations and inspired an enormous amount of radical art, literature, gaming and cinema. If you’re reading this blog it’s a reasonable assumption that you’re already familiar with genre benchmarks like William Gibson, Phillip K Dick, Akira, Bladerunner and so on…but what else?

Over the course of this week we’ll be taking a break from our regular content to probe the matrix by looking at some of the movies, music, games and ideas that contributed to Cyberpunk as a subgenre and it’s legacy in 2018.There’s also a new episode of Dungeonpunx in which the guys try to get their heads around cyberpunk by watching Johnny Mnemonic …..

Massive shout out to everyone who reached out and got involved. Check out Andrew Scully’s awesome SCUM poster at the top of the page and be sure to follow his work on Instagram @scullcomixinternational  I really appreciate all your efforts. We’ve got some great stuff for you this week..