REMOTE CONTROL by MATEUSZ WIŚNIEWSKI is a nifty tool for gamemasters and cyberpunk genre authors. It’s really a collection of tables for quickly generating descriptions of autonomous or remotely controlled robots. The 38 page long book is very system-neutral, so none of these drones get any stats like hit points or even speed; that’s both good and bad.
Some random drones turn out weird. These tables are all based upon entirely random rolls on ten-sided dice, so sometimes things line up in unexpected ways. It’s very possible to roll up a fist-sized taxi cab or a skyscraper-sized baby monitor. Unexpected combinations can sometimes be a good thing for priming the creative juices, but more often then not, a bad combination is just bad. When I make random tables, I try to go to great lengths to avoid nonsensical outcomes being possible, but the general thought process here is that goofy drones should justt be rerolled or better options should be manually chosen – not big deal.
What I particularly liked was the extensive list of possible primary applications. These range from brick laying to battle-parasites which attack and take control of other droids.
There’s also a collection of ten specific drones towards the end of the book which are named and given a backstory. They’re fun. There’s an incense burning droid in here which can secretly kill you if it wants.
The only part of this book which really disappointed me was the general lack of illustrations. The pictures are all limited to a few lack and white photos. I can roll up a spider-robot, but I’ll still need to go to Deviant Art in order to find a visual representation of what my players might be seeing. For the very slight price I paid, that really isn’t much for me to complain about.
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