This is SRSLY, the pop culture podcast from the New Statesman. Here, you can find links to all the things we talk about in the show as well as a bit more detail about who we are and where else you can find us online.
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SRSLY is usually hosted by Caroline Crampton and Anna Leszkiewicz, the NS’s web editor and editorial assistant. We’re on Twitter as @c_crampton and @annaleszkie, where between us we post a heady mixture of Serious Journalism, excellent gifs and regularly ask questions J K Rowling needs to answer.
This week, Anna is on holiday, so Caroline was joined by Alex Hern to talk about Netrunner – you can find him @alexhern on Twitter.
If you’d like to find out more about our topic this week – Netrunner – check the links below in the guide that Alex has put together:
- Firstly, and most obviously, the best way to get into Netrunner is to pick up a core set, which contains 165 cards, rules, tokens and everything two people need to get playing.
- The digital version of the game, which is less polished but, free and so quite good for someone curious about Netrunner, is Jinteki.net
- The latest “cycle” – a collection of six small packs – has been the Mumbad cycle, set in the sprawling megalopolis that spans Hyderabad and Mumbai. The announcement for the first pack, Kala Ghoda (named after a Mumbai neighbourhood), sets the tone for the location, and is also a good example of how the world of Netrunner evolves.
- The Tumblr writing project I ran for a year or so was The Netrunner Project. A mixture of fanfic, critical writing and play tips, it was moderately successful in the Netrunner community. The entry on Hedge Fund was the best I wrote, a short encapsulation of why I like cyberpunk in general. But Leigh Alexander’s guest post was the best overall, and led to her writing her first novel, a tie-in to the Netrunner universe called Monitor.
- If you like the sound of the setting but can’t be arsed with the actual game, just read Neuromancer.
- If you like the sound of the game but can’t be arsed with the setting, bad news: there isn’t anything quite like Netrunner in tabletop gaming. Just try not to look at the pictures on the cards, I guess.
And if you’d like to read Alex’s piece about not being good at Hearthstone, you can find it here.
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