This post appeared originally on La Locanda dei GDR;  this one's a slightly modified version translated throught DeepL.

At a Con in July (Conchiusa), Alessio and I had a chance to get together in person in Bologna. There were several nice or otherwise thought-provoking gaming experiences-and to which I will return one day little by little, when I am more energetic-but in this case I would like to talk about a Cold Soldier session that we had already, a month or so, raised as a possibility.

For those unfamiliar with the game, a very brief premise: a Dark Master (whose function is in part similar to that of a GM) raises a Soldier from the dead in order to fulfill his most heinous and perverse desires (desires which, as the rules make explicit, should be morally reprehensible to the GM himself). The Soldier is for all intents and purposes unable to communicate-not even a grunt or an empathetic glance are within his range-but his mind can be enlightened by memories of his past life that, perhaps, might help him break the Master’s control.

When we met, I already had an idea of what I wanted to play: The Future as a temporal scope had previously arisen between us, and at the con I proposed A Vengeful God as Dark Master. Actually, the manual does not include the specific option of a time other than the past or the present, but the idea I had developed in the meantime was so morally disgusting that I was convinced that only this specific time could best describe it.

Here, then, is the scenario that arose: in the Berlin of 2050, a group of researchers from a Japanese corporation that has aggressively settled in the territory develops an artificial intelligence, Roko, that achieves the infamous singularity. Frightened by the loss of control over their creation, they seal the research and its schematic in a vault, isolating its virtual form in an impenetrable environment…or at least, that was the hope. Roko, on the other hand, manages to reach a hacker recently fried by an operation gone wrong, reanimating him as a galvanic frog and redirecting funds for a Trauma Team to retrieve him, installing a module on him that enhances his agility and strength. At this precise moment, Roko is isolated and not totally complete: he will use this new resource to free himself and to realize his goal, which-beyond his magniloquent speeches about “improving the human race”-are none other than to reproduce indefinitely.

A few notes are worth noting at this stage:

• we did not really play Berlin as much as celebrate the cyperpunk genre by reinscribing the elements and obsessions that interested us in an almost amorphous space. Berlin might as well have been Tokyo or Kansas City, and absolutely nothing would have changed. This was not a problem, since the spatial references of a particular place were replaced by very strong imagery, but it is worth wondering what it would have been like to play in a more familiar environment;
• on the subject of obsessions: the reason that prompted me to embrace this idea of the future is my distaste for control and manipulation by an individual, the idea that through his or her influence everyone will adapt to repeating the same phrases as him or her until they become flat copies of the original. This idea can be expressed in any time and place, but there is something even more perverse about a cybernetic invasion process that rewrites this in seconds, destroying the characteristics of the original host.

On this last point, a series of orders of growing disgust ringed together:

• free Roko by slaughtering Kobayashi security and accessing the vault, installing the chip in the Soldier’s head to gain full access to Berlin’s physical plane;
• using the new schematics to break into the home of a famous anchorman and reinscribe his personality entirely, giving Roko access to a body in a top position in the media system;
• after describing the fallout of the last conflict-Roko announcing on a series of TV shows how Kobayashi is attempting to cover up a revolutionary new IA for profit- , instructing the Soldier to torture and extract from a well-known computer virus creator the information to create a backdoor code that would reinscribe Roko’s personality whenever his name is mentioned in a conversation with at least one infected person;
• attempt to acquire the corp’s financial resources by reinscribing the mind of its formal leader, a 16-year-old Kobayashi clan girl;
• thwart the birth of a new AI by the same research team that generated Roko, nipping a new competitor in the bud;
• Invade the corp’s industrial zone research labs using the new “Roko” generated by the exponential growth of the virus;
• Going into space (!) to transmit, through orbiting station facilities, the invasion code to every part of the world.
  
  This chain of events, to be honest, was in the last parts rather tiresome. Thinking about a new depravity, a new way of pushing the bar, became more difficult as we went along, and if the Joker-signaling the end of the game-had not occurred at the last command, I probably would have asked Alessio to stop. I think this may also stem from the fact that we played very little with people, and much more with institutions, so every now and then I just found it difficult to reformulate new problems about the same big players, when I could have gone into depth about certain networks of people specifically involved with Roko – such as the project team, which was left in the shadows.

One problem I felt in this game was one related to failure, or more specifically the lack thereof. This came in two parts:

1. I think I misunderstood the rules of failure when the Soldier does NOT resist. This occurred at least twice – the attack on the Kobayashi girl and the invasion at the labs. The manual specifies:
   

“If the cold soldier fails at the task, then the GM narrates
the outcome of the scene under these constraints:

• The dark master’s intentions are denied in the
  short term, but not ultimately subverted.
• Any desires you may have had for the scene are
  also denied.
• Discard one card from your hole.”

It seems to me that I have pushed too hard on “not ultimately subverted”: in the first case, The Soldier has failed to reinscribe the mind of the girl, but the board decides to remove her from office “for safety and to help her combat the stress of the incident,” thus taking over as the actual leaders of the corp and being, at least in part, already corrupted by Roko. In the second case, we have narrated that the assault for control of the labs ended in complete success, but that a helicopter managed to relocate the facility’s top scientists in time, delaying Roko’s plans-those of creating new bodies inspired by his virtual form for his followers-by a bit. Having not explored what these impediments really were in the later commands, the whole thing became a “success with some cost,” which I don’t find to be as it should be.

2. The physical cards we played with were part of a lousy deck of paper the consistency of toilet roll taken from an “everything for a euro” shop. This was felt the moment I had to shuffle them at the beginning of the game, because I was afraid I was destroying them and evidently performed the task more crudely. In any case, Alessio was almost always faced with combinations of J,K,10 against his paltry 5. For this reason, too, I never failed to match the Soldier’s rebellion. The result is-along with the point previously made-that I never had to do any particular somersaults to retrace my steps: Roko’s plan continued perfectly to the end.

I could write about Alessio’s Soldier’s choices – which at times went into full Patrick Bateman in the situation – or the ending, but for now I prefer to stop here and leave space to him, if he’d like to report his part as the Soldier. The experience, and especially certain disgusting moments of Roko, have stuck in my mind, but I would like to explore this game more in light of these reflections as well.