Sunday, September 26, 2021

Two Rpg Flavors Combined - Paul Elliot's Zaibatu rpg & Postcards from Avalidad by Miguel Ribeiro, & Manuel Souza

 "Postcards from Avalidad is a darkly surreal Tech-Noir game setting and adventure context for *Punk, and Actual F*cking Monsters."


































"Avalidad combines cyber, bio and psi punk to create a Burroughsian nightmare world of decadence,"


Postcards from Avalidad by Miguel Ribeiro, &  Manuel Souza is a darkly surreal rpg of beast. And it its a great post cyberpunk rpg resource as well as a decedent beast of a game. The game clocks in at two hundred & four pages. Over the past two months that its been on my hard drive I've been fguring out various ways of torturing my friends & fellow players with Postcards from Avalidad.  Postcards from Avalidad lists among its Appenix Surreal  the following; "William S. Burroughs' works such as Naked Lunch, the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket that Exploded), William Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, most of David Cronenberg's films, and Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart and The Scarlet Gospels. There are some references to other authors, such as Paul Auster and Kurt Vonnegut, but they weren't major sources of inspiration." Readers of this blog know that I'm a fan & avid reader of these authors. 
Now what if there was a way of combining this surreal biotechnological rpg feel with the speed of the 2d6 cybernetic retro technological goodness?! Paul Elliot's Zaibatu rpg has been staring at me from the book shelf for the better part of a week! The back of the book lays it all folks;"As the street soldiers of the world’s most powerful corporations (the Japanese zaibatsu) you become expendable and deniable employees fighting for profits, power and your lives. You’ve been recruited from the dark and murky Japanese underworld to carry out illegal terrorist activities on behalf of that employer and have one foot in the stylish corporate-minded boardrooms of the zaibatsu, and one foot in the filth and squalor of the criminal underworld"
So do the bio boosted street soldiers of Zaibatu fit the asthetic of 
 Postcards from Avalidad?! 

































Perhaps a bit too well?! The surreal nature of Postcards from Avalidad with its streets & mazes of the mind fits the 2d6 street smarts of the street soldiers world of Zaibatu in spades. For example the part of adventurers or agents might run into the back end of the  ZONESEC

"Established in the early 1960s to uphold security in the corporate areas of Avalidad – at the time still known as Interzone – ZoneSec has grown into a kind of state police. Most of the petty crime victims are left unattended since ZoneSec's operatives have other priorities: fighting corporate espionage, protecting the lives of essential executives, scientists and their families and trying to contain the leakage of technology and drugs into the City's underground. Aziz Crowe is ZoneSec's current director."
































Should the PC's come face to face Aziz Crowe then its gonna be far too late. They might be classified as mutants or worse. Then mind flipped into 'turn coat' agents & sent back to their employers as fixed assets. The underbelly of Postcards from Avalidad is a mix of interzonal otherworldliness & the products surreal biotechnological marketplaces.   So how does a DM structure & sell a surreal biotechnological campaign?! Easily folks.. The idea of a mix crew of cut throats from  Postcards from Avalidad & Zaibatu rpg. The NPC  patron has ties to the criminal underworld of both settings allowing the DM to switch rpg campagins settings as needed. 
Postcards from Avalidad has some excellent low life  scum NPC's that fit the cyberpunk surealness needed. And that's the start of the weirdness that the PC's can get into. 

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