Show notes, Night City Secrets BONUS Episode 1 Interview with the REFEREE Cover Art for the podcast from “Cyberpunk madness,” by the artist Eddie Del Rio. Intro and closing music is from Amoebacrew, called simply "Cyberpunk royalty free music.” It is available on Youtube: Background ambient music is from RoyaltyFreeSounds, called “Soundscape Ambient, Cyberpunk Music. Royalty Free.” It is on Youtube: TRANSCRIPT INT So hello, welcome back to Night City Secrets. Today I’m going to interview our illustrious Referee. How would you like me to refer to you. REF God might be a little pretentious, let’s just go with “Referee.” INT [laughing] All right Mister Referee. REF Sir. INT Sir, that… that’s always good. So how long have you been playing Cyberpunk 2020? REF Ah, so I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2020 since probably around 1989 or 1990. Now, that’s not consecutive, I mean, there’s been a lot of off and on years, but, again, 89-90 timeframe when we were *really* heavy into role-playing. I’m sorry, I should probably give a little bit of context, too. I’m 46 years old. So, eh, I was, 18, 19? I was young, right, and we were really heavy into role-playing at the time. We logged hundreds of hours playing Cyberpunk 2020. INT So you were in High School, I guess, basically, when you started doing this? REF Yeah. Yeah, high school or right out of it. INT What is it that you think attracted you all to table-top role-playing? REF You know, we were always kind of the fringe crowd. We weren’t the jocks, we weren’t preppies, we weren’t stoners, we were always kind of a fringe crowd. We got along with everybody, but we didn’t really belong to any specific genre of friend-group. Uhm, we were all very creative, very imaginative, we liked reading, we liked theatre, we liked music, we liked anything creative. Uhm, Jamie is still an aspiring writer. You’re a writer, right? I mean it’s just the type of people we hung out with. And back then, video games were… they were starting, I mean, we had them. We had computer games, but they were still pretty new and still pretty remedial. And so, if you wanted an opportunity to explore “strange new worls and seek our new life and new civilization,” your opportunity was role-playing games. So that’s what hooked us. INT And you guys grew up in a pretty small town, right? REF Yeah, good point, Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Uh, population at the time I think was about 7 or 8,000. Very small, my entire school, my entire high school was around 400 people. About 100 per class. So yeah, it was small. Didn’t have a lot to do. Your opportunities were: a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, a lot of getting in trouble, and role-playing. [laughing] INT So did your parents, did everyone know you were doing this role-playing stuff? REF No, I don’t know that they did. You know, I can’t say it was anything I kept from them, I just, you know, my parents never really took an active interest in what I was doing when I wasn’t at the house. So I never came to them said, like, “He dad, I’m playing D&D, and Cyberpunk,” it was just… I was out of the house and he never really asked. INT Well, I guess the reason I ask is because, around that time frame, it was maybe a little bit earlier than your time, but there was the whole… I’ve heard people call it the “Satanic Panic.” REF Yeah, the D&D scare. INT And so parents were hearing these bad stories and they were not wanting their kids to get involved. That’s what happened to me. REF OK, and that makes sense. And you know what, funnily enough, now that you mention that, I can… I’m not sure that I can actually recall, but I do know that I was probably fairly adamant about not telling my mom what I did. My mom is very religious and I probably omitted that from her. But my dad just never asked, so… INT Yeah I, I wanted to play role-playing games, but I didn’t know anyone that really did, and my parents frowned on that activity, they didn’t really want me doing it anyway. REF We would have been really good friends in high school, dude. [laughing] INT I was in an even smaller high school than you. REF No kidding? Oh, that’s right, you were up in Steamboat, weren’t you? INT Uh-huh, yeah. You want to guess my graduating class? REF OK, if mine was 100 in Glenwood, I’m gonna guess yours was probably what…. 30? INT 14. REF Oh good god! [laughing] INT And we started the year at 20. We finished at 14. REF Wow, that’s a pretty high drop out rate… INT Yes, well, it wasn’t drop out so much as kicked out. Yeah, I was at boarding school, so…Anyway, enough about me. So are there other role-playing games that you played? What else did you dabble in? REF So I think, probably most people - at least in that age - started with D&D. Somebody said, “What the hell is this game, Dungeons & Dragons?” And so we sat down and played that for a couple years. And then, actually, I think it did evolve into the next game being Cyberpunk. After Cyberpunk, we also played a game called GURPS, a Steve Jackson game: “Generic Universal Role-Playing System.” 93 or 94, probably 94, is when Vampire: The Masquerade first dropped, and, funny enough that was actually the game system we logged the most time with in total. Whereas we played maybe 100s of hours with Cyberpunk, I would guess 1000s of hours with Vampire. It is also the one we played the longest. So where we did a couple years of Cyberpunk, I would say a decade of Vampire. What else? Trying to think, uh… Teenagers from Outer Space, Cyber Generation - which is kind of another iteration of Cyberpunk, I think those are probably the big ones. And probably a couple other systems I can’t even remember. But yeah, a lot of games, a lot of different type of games. INT So you got introduced to this at a pretty young age, and stuck with it for quite a long time, off and on. REF Yeah yeah yeah, the first D&D game I want to say was something like 15 or 16. And probably the longest gap in my adulthood was maybe 8 or 9 years of not doing any gaming. And I don’t know why, it was just kind of one those things where adulthood, life, took us away from it for awhile, but then we realized, we’re like, you know what, we enjoy this, we love it so much, it is such a large part of who we are, and, here we are again. INT Well what is it for you, if you can elaborate, that makes it so fulfilling for you? REF Oh absolutely, so, I mean… you’re the neuroscientist here, right? you could talk about the chemical and the biological reactions that are going on, but at a base, right, there’s a fulfillment in playing these games, right? Video games, and don’t get me wrong, I love video games. I do. I love sitting down, I love playing a video game. But to me, the video game’s almost…you know, barring certain unique circumstances… it’s almost kind of a mind numbing, or mindless pursuit, right? You’re following a script, you’re playing the game, you’re learning the system, you’re learning the movements, and then you just let your brain go and you go with it, right? With table-top games, role-playing games, RPGs, you’re creating a story, and even if you’re not creating a story, you’re immersing yourself in somebody else’s story, and you’re playing a major role in that, right? So, it involves a lot more imagination, it’s a lot more creativity, it’s a lot more action versus reaction. Or interaction, you know? It’s just, it’s stimulating on such a mental and visceral, emotional level for me. INT So the way you are describing, it sounds like it is cathartic for you, in a way. REF Yes, absolutely. Not just cathartic, it is therapeutic, it is meditative for me in a lot of ways. You know, my sleep has suffered, I’m not gonna lie. My sleep has suffered a lot since we started doing this, because I will sometimes lay in bad for hours just thinking through the different scenarios and the plot lines and the different character hooks, and the different ways that things could play out, depending on what the characters do, or what the NPCs do in reaction to the characters. It is very cathartic for me. INT So you’ve been playing a long time, when did you really start getting into being a Dungeon Master or being a Referee, at that level? REF That is a good question. I don’t… Actually, I do know, ok, I take that back. I do know. I would say that I probably never really ran my own game up until Vampire. Somebody else introduced me to the game of D&D. Somebody else introduced me to the game of Cyberpunk, or GURPS, or… whatever the other systems were, and so I was always just a player. The first time I ever referee’d, or game mastered, or was the storyteller, was Vampire: The Masquerade. And that was because I was kind of the one who found the game. I was like, wow, vampires! This is fantastic. I always had a kind of fascination with the dark, the arcane, the occult, vampire mythos, and I saw this game on a bookshelf one time and I was super-intrigued by it. So I was the first one to find it, no one else introduced me to the
