I really need to do more shilling for Josh the Boyfriend’s project! Neon Divide (formerly Callous Row) is a giant VRchat roleplay, played by over a 100 players and streamed by most of them. It’s so hard to explain that. Imagine a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons, but done over a 3d chat client. So some interactions are pure improv acting, based on the players being able to speak and gesture to interact with each other realistically. But occasionally the game mechanics require a DM to roll a dice (mostly for technical skills). But also, Neon Divide has a dev team that coded a bunch of custom stuff into their maps so that they can use functional weapons and track damage and effects.
I’ve talked about Neon Divide a little, and done art for it (hmmm, I should update the tag to reflect the name change) but I can never figure out a good way to explain it. I’m not an expert; I’ve never used VRchat myself, nor do I follow any of the players other than Josh. It’s a huge setting, you can follow one player’s streams and never encounter half the other players. They’re spread out across four separate maps with their own overarching storylines, there are several factions in-world, and of course there are little cliques of characters who hang out with each other. I could probably give a good summary for Josh’s season 1 and 2 character, Johnny, but he’s DEAD and it’s TRAGIC.
For season 3, Josh is one of the DMs of the Upper City map. ND is a space cyberpunk setting, taking place in a galaxy divided up between seven megacorporations. Each corp has a branch office on the planet Hellion, which is a distant, backwater dump planet, and they’re fighting over resources and exploiting the residents in order to prove themselves to their respective main offices. The Upper City is where (most of) the corporate characters live and work, meaning that Josh is the dungeon master of villain town. Josh wrote a bunch of new systems for them to use, he calculates out their company stock prices and officiates “bureaucratic combat” (sneaky contract deals), a long with a bunch of other stuff that has yet to come. The image above is my art for his character, a mad scientist doctor dog. Every DM gets ‘DM hands,’ an avatar that’s just two sinister floating arms that can roll dice. Josh put a skull pattern on his, because that’s how he does everything.
You could watch Neon Divide through nearly any of the gajillion characters. I’m not familiar with a lot of them, but now that Josh is a DM if you watch his perspective you can see him jump around between characters who need dice rolls and lore info. Sometimes he voices NPC characters (through a phone or through a generic avatar) to push the plot. So watching him is a decent intro to the other characters on his map. ‘Episodes’ happen every Friday, and we’re two weeks in.
Ep 1 had a lot of fussing around with technical stuff and was mostly just characters introducing/establishing themselves. A slow start, as to be expected. But episode 2!!! I’m surprised by how many shenanigans are kicking off, the villains are all villaning at each other and it shows so much potential.
This is my long-winded plea to take a look at Neon Divide. I’ll probably start posting here when episodes start, so take this as the main explanation of what I’m talking about. Even if you don’t end up following Josh (we also use the Hundera account for streaming normal video games, in which I usually appear as well), check out some of the other players and see if anyone clicks for you. It’s way more interesting than I can fully explain!
