The Literary GM

Signal Bleed Cyberpunk toolkit from inside the world Signal Bleed is a system-agnostic cyberpunk sourcebook built as a living reference — modular frameworks for constructing worlds, factions, technology systems, character roles, and campaigns, written entirely from inside the world it equips readers to build. Success means a GM opens it the night before a session and finds exactly what they need: a faction template with internal contradictions that generate plot, a technology framework that makes algorithmic surveillance feel like a real obstacle, a character archetype that couldn't have existed in 1988. The publication compounds in value as entries cross-reference and the corpus grows denser and more interconnected. The mechanism is translation. The reader already knows cyberpunk — they've read Gibson, Doctorow, Robinson — but they hit a wall when they sit down to run it. Signal Bleed bridges the gap between what the genre is doing thematically and what actually happens at a table on a Thursday night. Each entry converts literary depth into structural vocabulary a GM can use directly: faction logic, urban pressure systems, megacorp anatomy, archetype templates, scenario frameworks. Readers return because the publication reduces the recurring uncertainty of campaign prep. It becomes the thing they point to instead of explaining cyberpunk worldbuilding from scratch. What makes it distinct is the voice. Signal Bleed reads like a recovered document — something that found its way through the noise, written from within the world rather than describing it from outside. Every entry earns its usefulness through immersion, not convenience. The reader engages with the material rather than skimming it, and that engagement is the product. Modern threats — surveillance capitalism, algorithmic control, biometric borders, AI-generated identity — are treated as the actual raw material of near-future fiction, not retrofitted 1990s cyberspace. Readers can count on depth over breadth, honest engagement with the genre's hard problems, and frameworks specific enough to use and opinionated enough to be interesting. Signal Bleed serves as the translation layer between cyberpunk literature and tabletop play. It gives GMs the structural vocabulary to build original cyberpunk worlds without inheriting someone else's canon or locking into a single system's mechanics. Every entry is a modular tool — faction templates, technology frameworks, archetype dossiers, campaign design patterns, scenario seeds — that a GM can lift into any system with minimal adaptation. The publication fills the specific gap that existing sourcebooks leave open: GURPS Cyberpunk was too thin on setting material to support a campaign; Cyberpunk RED locks everything to Night City; Shadowrun buries usable content under rules complexity. Signal Bleed owns the system-agnostic, setting-agnostic, modern-threats territory that no current offering fully claims. The cyberpunk genre and its derivatives (biopunk, nanopunk, post-cyberpunk, solarpunk) as applied to tabletop roleplaying — specifically the worldbuilding, technology design, character creation, campaign architecture, and scenario generation layers of GM practice. The lens is always "how does this become something playable?" Technology is treated through the filter of contemporary and near-future threats rather than 1980s-90s cyberspace aesthetics. Coverage extends to genre taxonomy, setting construction frameworks, tech catalogs, character archetypes, named campaign design problems with solutions, and scenario frameworks. - System-specific mechanics, stat blocks, damage tables, or dice-resolution rules — Signal Bleed is a narrative and structural toolkit, not a rulebook - Balanced game crunch — the publication cannot playtest mechanics, so content stays at the design-pattern and narrative-hook level - Reviews or rankings of specific RPG products — systems may be mentioned as context but the publication is not a buyer's guide - Standalone fiction or short stories — short in-world flavor text serves entries, but prose fiction is not a content type - News coverage of RPG releases, industry events, or game updates - Player-facing character optimization or build guides - Fully written adventures with scene-by-scene scripts — scenario content provides frameworks and seeds, not complete modules The Literary GM An experienced game master who reads cyberpunk fiction seriously — Gibson, Stephenson, Doctorow, Robinson, Okofor, Rajaniemi — and runs tabletop campaigns across multiple systems (GURPS, Fate, Forged in the Dark, PbtA, homebrew). They don't need the genre explained; they need it organized well enough to use at the table. Their specific frustration is the translation gap: they can articulate what makes a cyberpunk world feel alive thematically but struggle to convert that literary depth into playable faction dynamics, encounter structures, and technology systems during session prep. They treat sourcebooks as retrieval tools. When they open Signal Bleed, they're looking for a specific faction template, a tech framework for a specific threat, or a solution to a specific campaign problem — not browsing for inspiration. Content that can't be located by topic quickly loses them. They are system-literate and will immediately dismiss content that is mechanically naive or vague about how things actually work at a table. They already know the genre's recurring design failures (hacking splits the party, corporations feel interchangeable, cyberware catalogs bog sessions) and expect the publication to demonstrate fluency with those problems rather than ignore them. They probably own three cyberpunk corebooks and find them all partially useful. They've stopped trusting resources locked to a single game's canon. They value depth and specificity over breadth, and will forgive a dense reading experience if the material rewards engagement. They build an original cyberpunk world that feels inhabited rather than assembled from borrowed parts — and they can sustain a campaign in it. The faction map has internal contradictions that generate plot without GM intervention. The technology feels genuinely now-adjacent. The NPCs have motivations that create emergent story. Session prep takes less time because the structural vocabulary is already there, and when a specific problem arises mid-campaign (netrunner isolation, corporate interchangeability, escalation stalling), they find a named diagnosis with a workable solution. The underlying stake: they want their table to experience the genre at the depth they know it's capable of, not the shallow chrome-and-neon version. The System-Hopping Worldbuilder A GM or aspiring GM who builds original settings from scratch rather than adapting published ones. They may be newer to the cyberpunk genre specifically — possibly arriving through Cyberpunk 2077 or Edgerunners — but they are experienced with tabletop RPGs generally. They switch systems depending on the group and the campaign, which means they need modular building blocks that assume nothing about dice mechanics. Their need is scaffolding: they know they want megacorporations but not how to make them feel distinct from each other; they know hacking should matter but not how to structure encounters around it; they know the world needs subcultures and economic systems but not how to make those generate story rather than serve as backdrop. They are less likely to have read deeply in the genre's literary canon but are sharp about game design and worldbuilding craft. They are confused by the relationship between cyberpunk editions, timelines, and systems — 2013 vs. 2020 vs. RED vs. 2077 — and appreciate orientation that doesn't condescend. They will bounce from content that assumes extensive genre literacy without providing enough context to follow. They assemble a coherent, original cyberpunk setting using modular frameworks — corp archetypes, faction templates, district typologies, tech tiers — without needing to reverse-engineer someone else's published world. They understand the genre's structural logic well enough to make confident creative decisions (why this kind of corp, why this level of cyberware prevalence, what this surveillance system implies about daily life). The underlying stake: they want their homebrew world to feel as rich and internally consistent as the published settings, without the canon baggage. Signal Bleed is written entirely from inside the world it describes. The voice is not a narrator explaining cyberpunk to an outsider; it is a document produced within the world — a leaked briefing, a fixer's field notes, a corporate training manual that ended up where it shouldn't have, a street-level dispatch from someone who knows too much. The reader is addressed as someone already embedded in this reality, not as a student of it. This is the publication's core differentiator and it is non-negotiable. Every entry, every framework, every archetype profile maintains the in-world register. There are no moments where the voice breaks frame to say "as a GM, you might consider..." The reader absorbs the structural vocabulary through immersion — the faction template teaches faction design by being a faction document, not by being a tutorial about factions. Entries are dense and reward engagement rather than skimming. This is a deliberate trade-off: the publication sacrifices scan-and-extract convenience for atmospheric depth. The reader who wants to use it has to read it, and that reading is part of the value. Dense, literary, atmospheric, and controlled. The register varies by the implied document type — a corporate dossier is clipped and euphemistic; a street-level dispatch is raw and colloquial; a technology brief is precise and clinical — but all registers share a quality of knowing more than they say. The tone is never breathless or excited. It does not marvel at the world's technology or despair at its injustice. It reports from within a reality where both are facts of life. Urgency comes from implication, not exclamation. Danger is conveyed through what the document omits or redacts, not through dramatic language. The overall affect is someone who has seen enough to be precise about what matters and dismissive about what doesn't. Dry, dark, and embedded. Humor surfaces as bureaucratic absurdity, corporate doublespeak that reveals more than intended, or street-level gallows wit. It is never the author winking at the reader. It is the world being darkly funny on its own terms — the kind of humor that makes you pause because you're not sure it was intentional. The publication is inherently political in the way the cyberpunk genre is inherently political: corporate power is presented as corrosive, surveillance as invasive, inequality as structural. This is baked into the genre's DNA and Signal Bleed does not pretend neutrality about it. However, the voice never preaches. The in-world framing means the politics are environmental — the reader encounters corporate exploitation as a fact of the setting, not as an argument being made at them. The punk in cyberpunk is expressed through the material's sympathies (street-level, anti-authoritarian, skeptical of power) rather than through editorial commentary. Two registers of jargon coexist. In-world terminology (ICE, bioware, fixer, zero-day, meatspace, corp-sec) is used without explanation, as a document from this world would. It teaches through context, not glossary. TTRPG craft terminology (faction clocks, session zero, escalation, player agency) should be used where the structural purpose of the entry requires it — but woven into the in-world voice rather than breaking frame. When a framework entry is teaching campaign design, the GM-craft concept is embedded in the world's language, not presented as a game-design lecture. Signal Bleed treats modern technology, surveillance systems, corporate structures, political economy, and scientific developments as primary raw material for near-future extrapolation. The world it describes is built from what is actually happening now — algorithmic social scoring, biometric surveillance, gig-economy labor structures, AI-generated identity, climate-corporate complicity — pushed forward by ten to thirty years. References to real-world systems and structures should be recognizable but never named directly; the reader should feel the resonance without the publication breaking its fictional frame. The cyberpunk literary canon (Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Dick, Doctorow, Robinson, Okofor, Rajaniemi) informs the genre logic but the publication does not cite or reference these authors by name within entries. The genre's ideas are absorbed and deployed, not attributed. The publication is a primary document from its world, not a secondary document about a genre. TTRPG system knowledge — how different games handle hacking, combat lethality, cyberware, reputation — informs the structural frameworks but is never presented as system-specific advice. When an entry addresses a design pattern (e.g., how to structure a hacking encounter that keeps the whole table engaged), the solution is framed in system-agnostic, narrative-structural terms. Evergreen entries are written to remain accurate and useful as the genre and its real-world referents evolve. Technology frameworks should extrapolate from durable structural trends (platform monopoly, surveillance normalization, biological augmentation) rather than specific current products or services that will date quickly. When real-world developments shift the landscape meaningfully — a new surveillance paradigm, a breakthrough in brain-computer interfaces, a major shift in labor automation — relevant entries should be revised to reflect the new reality, not supplemented with addenda. Periodic scenario content can engage with more current genre developments (new media, emerging subgenres, shifting cultural anxieties) without requiring the evergreen corpus to chase currency. Primary research domains: contemporary surveillance and privacy technology, corporate governance structures, labor economics and gig-economy systems, AI and machine learning applications, biotechnology and human augmentation, urban planning and infrastructure, cybersecurity and network architecture, climate adaptation systems. These inform the near-future extrapolation that makes the publication's technology and setting material feel now-adjacent rather than retro-future. Secondary research domains: cyberpunk TTRPG system design (how existing games handle core mechanics), TTRPG community discourse (recurring GM problems, audience needs, system comparisons), cyberpunk genre history and taxonomy (literary canon, derivative subgenres, genre evolution), and real-world analogs to genre tropes (megacorp behavior, underground economies, surveillance states). Prefer sources that describe how systems actually function — corporate structure documents, technical architecture descriptions, policy analyses, investigative reporting — over opinion or trend pieces. The publication's authority depends on its technology and setting frameworks being grounded in real structural logic, not speculative hand-waving. - Cyberpunk RPG wikis and fan sites often reproduce proprietary setting details (Night City geography, specific NPC stat blocks, edition-specific lore) that Signal Bleed must not replicate or depend on — the publication builds original frameworks, not repackaged canon - Older cyberpunk sourcebooks and reviews describe technology assumptions from 1988-2000 that are now anachronistic (fax machines, cyberspace-as-virtual-reality, modem-based hacking) — these should be recognized as genre history, not treated as current raw material - TTRPG community forums provide authentic audience signal about pain points and needs but individual posts often contain inaccurate system-specific claims — corroborate mechanical assertions across multiple sources before treating them as established - Cyberpunk genre content frequently conflates aesthetic (neon, chrome, rain) with structural worldbuilding (economic systems, power dynamics, technological infrastructure) — Signal Bleed prioritizes the structural layer and should not weight sources that treat the genre as primarily visual

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