Hi!
Great to hear you may be interested in Neotech
First of all, for full transparency, I am one of the current producers of the game.
What sets this apart from games like Cyberpunk 2020/Red?
One of the things that really sets
Neotech Edge apart from other cyberpunk-ish games, is that it’s not
really cyberpunk at all. Unlike
Neotech 1 and
2 (which were released in the late eighties and early nineties),
Neotech Edge describes itself as
neopunk. What this means is that, rather than being based in the 1980s vision of the future that most other games of the genre nostalgically adhere to, Neotech takes off from our modern timeline, and projects
that 50 years into the future.
As such the effects of climate change, for example, play a major role in the setting. Filter bubbles enabled by the huge online platforms have divided the population of the world into twelve major subcultures, called spheres, all of which have completely different worldviews, fashions and celebrity influencers from each other. These spheres serve as the character archetypes in the game.
Of course there are still plenty of things you'll recognise from more traditional cyberpunk settings. A faceless and ever-shifting symbiosis of megacorps and governments known colloquially as
the System controls the world. Sentient artificial intelligences known as Artilects plot from the shadows. And various groups, especially from the hacker-dominated sphere
anon and the environmentally hyper-active
nomo, fight against both the System and each other to try to bring the world back from the brink — or closer to the singularity.
One of the things I personally really like about the game are the hacking rules. They are much more hands-on than what I've seen in other sci-fi games. They put the hacker right in the middle of the action, and the
sploits and
daemons they use thus feel a lot like spells in fantasy games. In fact, I often tend to describe the
anon book to new players as being the game's "magic book".
Neotech is a pretty rule heavy game overall — especially in combat situations — but this can be fairly easily adapted to serve the wishes of the group. There are special rules for so called "battles", that can abstract away a lot of the detail in situations where you want to handle things on a higher level.
Anyway, on to the rest of your questions!
How well would it play with only one or two player characters?
Very well, I'd say. I always prefer to start off my campaigns with a short one-on-one introductory session with each of the characters, and in my experience at least, this works just as well in Neotech as in many other games. You might wanna avoid too much combat in this case though, given how deadly combat situations tend to be in the game. Without anyone else there to help stop their bleeding and get them to a clinic if things go wrong, a player may not last too long if you throw them in at the deep end and guns start going off.
How much support is there in the rules for non combat activities?
Plenty! You can definitely play Neotech without any combat at all, if that's your preference. There are lots of skills for social situations, crafting, dance battles, and so on. And the game implicitly encourages you to create entirely new skills if a player ever feels like something is missing when creating their character.
What is a typical scenario going to be about?
This one is hard to answer! We have released scenarios covering everything from an intense motorcycle chase in Somalia, to a party-gone-wrong with escaped, drugged-up tigers in the snowy Siberian wilds. Players can take on the role of mercenaries on the streets of Hong Kong, hackers trying to take down a megacorp, gang members fighting off their rivals, or pretty much anything else you can imagine.
The style and immersive language of the books, the uniqueness and variety of the setting, and the way it gives you the tools to play whatever kind of story
you want to play. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the new
E-Frica setting book to be released next year. Cyberpunk set in Eastern Africa is just one of the coolest things I have personally ever seen.
