Hey there, choombas! I’m back for one more, bonus developer’s log centered around Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn, a complete street level campaign for Cyberpunk RED. At this point, the book is available from DriveThruRPG as a PDF and from our webstore in dead tree format. It is filtering through the distribution chain as we speak, so check your local stores soon. If your local store allows preordering and is part of Bits and Mortar, they can grab you the PDF for free!

For this bonus dev log, I want to talk about creating. Specifically, how we created Woodland Park, a major location in Hope Reborn. For those of you avoiding spoilers, this is the time to stop reading. While I’ll endeavor to keep the spoilers ahead mild but they will exist.

In planning Hope Reborn, I knew the third mission would take place entirely in a single neighborhood, which brought up questions. What kind of neighborhood? Where would it be located? What would we find there? I started with a list.

The neighborhood would need the following elements:

• A Corporate presence of some kind.
• Housing for the Crew to move into. Specifically, the types they’d most likely be willing to rent for a month: cube hotel, cargo containers, studio apartments, and 2-bedroom apartments.
• A local shop.
• A gang presence of some kind.
• At the last minute, after watching a short on collapsing palm tree fronds occasionally trap tree trimmers in Los Angeles, I added a palm tree grove. If you play the mission, you’ll know why.

I had my list. Now, like someone playing a city simulator, I had to place the neighborhood. For fun, I booted up Cyberpunk 2077 and started wandering Night City. On the eastern edge, I walked past the Dynalar Campus and a nearby apartment complex. Perfect! There was the Corporate presence I wantedI fired off a quick email to Patrick Mills at CDPR and asked a question, “Does CDPR mind if these two locations are old enough to have existed in 2045?” It always pays to be polite when borrowing from someone else’s toybox, and those buildings originated on CD Projekt Red’s side of the timeline.

A return email confirmed I was jake to use the buildings in Hope Reborn, so I grabbed a screenshot of the in-game map, loaded it into Photoshop, and started making notes. Special thanks to R. Talsorian Games’ Media Ambassador Rob Barefoot here, by the way. I own a PS5 copy of 2077. He owns in on PC and has a number of mods loaded. At my request, he took dozens of pictures of the area in-game for me to use as reference.

(Psst. Rob here. It’s embarrassing the amount of times I got screwed over by sandstorms while taking the reference shots. Now I have weather control mods too, learned from that lesson. It’s so cool being able to use what I used to make videos on Youtube now to help with our own game design.)

I had the street names, rough ideas on distances, and a basic layout of the area. I knew where this new neighborhood, which I named Woodland Park after one of the streets (and my palm tree grove idea), was located. The next trick was rewinding the clock and creating a prototype map set in 2045. I began with the Dynalar Campus and Acorn Towers, the two buildings from 2077. I drew in the streets, changing them as needed to inversely reflect the growth and change from 2045 to 2077. Then, I began adding other buildings. A cube hotel. A cargo container park. I decided Acorn Towers was connected to Dynalar, so I drew in a second apartment building. The new location of The Forlorn Hope. A spot for the local gang to hang out. The bodega. The palm tree grove. Since Dynalar is a Corporation, I gave it a stop on the Megacorp monorail we first mentioned in the Cyberpunk RED core rulebook.

I can’t take much credit from this point on. Linda Evans, the writer on the mission taking place in Woodland Park, developed the rest. She came up with the idea for the Muses (the local gang/roller derby squad), the names of the housing options, and most of the residents, including Nana and Pop Pop, who I guarantee you’ll love. She wrote the little sidequest involving the palm tree. In other words, Linda brought Woodland Park to life. Once she’d finished, I made a few alterations to the map, then the RTG Art Director, Winterjaye Kovach, sent my scribbles to Saga MacKenzie for a makeover.

What Saga returned was gorgeous. Absolutely stunning. So much so that we gave her map a full page so you could read it in all its glory.

Which brings us to the end of the story and the end of the dev logs. If you haven’t already, please consider picking up Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn from your outlet of choice. If you have, please consider leaving us a review. Let us know what you think.

Thank you for joining me on this journey! Until next time, stay safe on The Street.

J Gray

Line Manager for Cyberpunk