To Thine Own Self Be True

"To Thine Own Self Be True" was a GURPS Cyberpunk/Voodoo campaign that we played from 2/1/96 to 11/7/96. The setting was the "usual" cyberpunk one- marauding gangs, huge bloodthirsty corporations, random and senseless violence, etc; basically, a bleak and oppressive future.

In this setting, amongst all the other desperate souls, lived our Player Characters: Alex, Bug, Derek, Drake, and Rook. None of them knew one another to begin with, except perhaps by reputation.

NOTE: some plot spoilers below, go straight to the session logs to the left to avoid.

Near the beginning of the campaign each of these characters was hired by an odd man named Gipetto. He hired them to help him with some sort of "experiment", which he was very vague about when pressed for details. Through the course of the next 8 months the characters (and the players) slowly uncovered what was actually happening around them. They discovered that Gipetto was not human, that he was in fact an Artificial Intelligence attempting to grow beyond the limits placed on it by its creators. The AI, named Kayuni, wanted to be free to roam the net, and be free to grow into whatever it would grow into without interference from its corporate designers, the government, or anyone else. But to accomplish this, it needed the help of the PCs.

Of course, this was not the only activity going on. They also ran across a "voodoo priest" named Morgan who was attempting to seize Kayuni for his own ends, and a "voodoo priestess" named Granny who did her best to help them. And Drake discovered that she had been born many times prior, and that each time she had ended her life more evil than before - she was running out of chances to get it right. Plus there were beheadings, giant hyena-creatures, gangbangers who seemed impervious to firearms, and that strange little man always trying to pass out religious flyers.

I won't give away how the campaign ended here...if you want to know how the story turned out, you can read about it in much more detail on the game Logs pages. There you'll find transcripts of each and every weekly summary I handed to the players. I've also included a page with a map and description of Seattle in 2043, where the game took place.

There was a great player's book I put together for this campaign, my first one that I thought came out really well. Unfortunately much of it came straight out of GURPS Cyberpunk, so I'm unwilling to post it for public consumption. But take my word for it - it was excellent!