Pyramid Review
Ex Machina: Tri-Stat Cyberpunk Genre
Published by Guardians of Order, Inc.
Written by Bruce Baugh, Rebecca Bergstrom, Christian Gossett, Bradley Kayl, & Michelle Lyons with David Pulver & Jesse Scoble
Illustrated by UDON with Attila Adorjany, Greg Boychuk, Dax Gordine, Eric Kim, Ryan Odagawa, Ramon Perez, Noi Sackda, Chris Stevens, Eric Vedder, & Jim Zubkavich
352-Page B&W Hardcover Book; $39.95
If coming to a cyberpunk RPG looking for bigger "better" guns, then this game is not for you. Look away, move on, and go find another machismo extending game, chummer. For this RPG is something different, a cut above other entries within this gaming genre. Less concerned with the bang and the whiz, let alone the golly or the ghee, it quite literally goes back to the source and takes a page out for its inspiration. Other Cyberpunk RPGs have often adversely concentrated -- if not in the writing, then in the played -- on the guns, the hardware, the electronics, and the better than human elements. Ex Machina: Tri-Stat Cyberpunk Genre from Guardians of Order includes all of those elements, but draws more directly from the literary source, the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk for its inspiration. Not just the classics like William Gibson's Neuromancer and Bruce Bethke's Cyberpunk, but also Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, along with the writings of Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod. Nor does it forget other media sources, these being acknowledged in the book's excellent introduction to the genre.
. . .This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: May 19, 2006
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