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February 2023.

I’m standing in front of a gigantic whiteboard in the conference room of R. Talsorian’s headquarters. We’ve just worked out a rough roadmap for the next two years of Cyberpunk. I’m just putting the cap back on the marker I’m holding and feeling pretty good when Dave Ackerman, our company nudge, nukes my parade by making an observation and asking a question.

“You’ve got two intense projects lined up back to back. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit and a new Night City book. One of them will probably slip on the production timeline. It would be smart to slot a less structurally complex book between them. What do you think it should be?”

Caught off-guard by the question, it takes a moment for my brain to reboot, but fortunately, once it does, a flash of inspiration strikes me like an FBC slamming home a panzerfaust punch. I uncap the marker and write six words on the whiteboard.

Tales of the RED: Forlorn Hope (later to be renamed Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn)

Mike smiled. Dave nodded. Lisa agreed we had the budget for it. I’d cleared the immediate hurdle. We had a solid title for this new book. Now, all I needed to do was figure out what the heck it would be about. To figure that out, I decided to start at the beginning with the original Tales From the Forlorn Hope.

Published in 1992, Tales From the Forlorn Hope for Cyberpunk 2020, was written by William Moss, based on an idea by Frank Frey. Pages 4 thru 25 told the story of The Forlorn Hope, its employees, and its regulars. The rest of the book was divided into a series of missions, each centered around one of the bar’s regulars. It was an instant classic. Also? Still for sale! I can’t recommend it enough.

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The Forlorn Hope was (and continues to be) the single best and most expansively described bar in the storied history of Cyberpunk. More than Short Circuit. More than the Atlantis. More than the Afterlife, even! For decades, it was the home base bar for Cyberpunk players worldwide. Centering a new book around such a beloved location was daunting, but I knew (with the able guidance of Mike Pondsmith and Dave Ackerman) we were up to the challenge. 

The first step was figuring out The Forlorn Hope’s history from 2020 to 2045. After all, we couldn’t tell a story about where the bar was going until we knew where it had been.

That’s a history we’re going to (mostly) share with you today – a timeline of the Forlorn Hope from its founding in 2015 to the present of 2045.

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A Brief History of The Forlorn Hope

2011: Doctor John “The Professor” Freeman and William “Dollar Bill” Dolarhyde purchase the abandoned Sierra Hotel in Night City and renovate it, modding it into The Forlorn Hope. More than just a bar, they make The Forlorn Hope a refuge and resource for veterans of the Central and South American Wars, rounding up a bunch of the walking wounded and hiring them on as staff. This plan works for more than a decade – which is frakkin’ forever in punk years – and the place earns a positive profile with the dangerous crowd.

2020: The Forlorn Hope — Back From the Far Side of Chaos by C.J. O’Reilly is published as a Solo of Fortune Special Edition. It shines a spotlight on the bar, its staff, and some of the regulars.

2022: The 4th Corporate War comes knockin’. The Forlorn Hope goes quiet as many regulars, and even some staff, pocket out to various Corporate forces to fight. Some go for the money. Some to settle old scores. A few to protect the bystanders, who always get stomped on when Corps go aggro. The Professor preps for everyone’s return, expecting this war to break a whole new generation of veterans.

2023: May 12th. War hits The Forlorn Hope as Militech and Arasaka units converge on the area around the bar. The part of The Hope’s posse that’s still in town sets up a series of diversions to draw most of the regular military away, but an Arasaka SpecOp squad tries to occupy the bar as a hardpoint. Militech can’t let that stand and follows them in. The Hope becomes a war zone. The entire top floor is fragged by 60mm mortar rounds, taking the Freeman’s apartment with it. The rest of The Hope survives, but too many souls breathe their last that night, including Solo turned Fixer Robert “Kronos” Cronenberg, local ripperdoc Andy “Needles” Chen, and co-owner Bill “Dollar Bill” Dolarhyde.

2023: August 20th. The Night City Holocaust and the Arasaka nuke. The bomb goes off and the city falls down. As the fallout settles, The Professor and his wife, Marianne, convert The Hope into a survival shelter for dozens of the injured and newly homeless. A makeshift triage center is set up in the bar area, and the kitchen gets double duty as a field surgery. Think M.A.S.H. unit with a bandstand. After the initial wave of casualties gets treated, they drop cots in every horizontal space and stock up on radiation treatments.

2026: Marianne hires Ingénue, the only survivor of the Willow Sisterhood, an all-female poser gang and assassination squad. She tasks Ingénue with setting up a support group for fellow female survivors of the 4th Corporate War. Ingénue names the group the Willows in honor of her fallen comrades.

2026:  The Hope continues to be a recovery center for the entire neighborhood and serves as a temporary home for From the Ashes, a clinic run by Phoenix Redwyne.

2028: April 21st. Kiroshi kidnaps a young Trace Santiago to use as a bargaining chip in contract talks with the Aldecaldo Clan. Santiago Aldecaldo taps the Queen of the Solos, Rogue for a retrieval. In turn, Rogue taps the Willows to help. After incurring the appropriate amount of punitive damages on Kiroshi, they get Trace back and send a message that the boy is now under their protection.

2031: After serving as a shelter and ad hoc community center for years, The Forlorn Hope reopens as a bar. Alcohol replaces antibiotics, beer nuts supplant bandages. Rebuilding on the top floors finally begins. The Freemans get their bedroom back.

2031: Petra David, a 4th Corporate War veteran who was among the first The Professor and Marianne helped in the aftermath of the nuke, signs on as The Hope’s head of security. She defines the term “haunted badass.”

2032: Renovations complete. The Forlorn Hope is now one floor shorter than before the war. Marianne takes over as active manager because The Professor has his hands full coordinating services for all the vets trailing in from the war. A fresh group of wired-up, battle-burned regulars form around the place. For a while, it almost feels like the old days.

2041: September 3rd. The Professor notices a tremble in his hands. It’s Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Treatment can slow its progress, but there’s no magic bullet. He continues his work but brings in Bill Dolarhyde’s niece, Edelweiss, to assist Marianne in running operations.

2043: Sundance, The Hope’s in-house medtech, retires after a long and exhausting career. She continues to hang around the bar (enjoying free drinks for life) but leaves patching people up to her apprentice, Doc Stoic.

2044: January 23rd. A Jodes nomad pack slides info to the Freemans about a group of squatters being thrashed by Maelstrom out in what’s left of the old Brookhaven Co-Op. Since most of the squats are vets and their peripherals, the Freemans rally the troops and, with the help of the nomad pack, fight off the metalheads long enough for the squatters to get out of town. The entire tribe rolls out with a Jodes caravan to a Reclaimer colony out in New Mexico. In the process they rescue a streetrat named Valence who was pressed into service by Maelstrom to scav in the Hot Zone. Marianne and The Professor take Valence in as one of their own. Rumor has it this seriously pisses in the kibble of Ripper, the Maelstrom underboss who was running the show.

2044: Cicely “Backhand” Feng starts working as The Hope’s in-house Tech. 

2045: Grace Steel and her band, the Soul Rebels, win a “battle of the bands” style audition and secure a position as in-house entertainment for The Forlorn Hope.

2045: “Hilaria 2045!” A flood of clown-faced doombas surge out of the sewers and attack The Forlorn Hope (and several other locations), marking the start of a Bozo civil war. Most of the clowns participating in the battle turn out to be victims forcibly biosculpted and brainwashed into attacking.

2045: The events of Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this first peek at Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn. If all goes to plan (knock on wood) we’ll be releasing it on October 15, 2024. Please join us next Monday when I’ll provide a glimpse of two different groups of people: the factions you’ll meet in Hope Reborn and the writers who made this book possible. Until then, stay safe on The Street.

J Gray

Cyberpunk Line Manager