Cybernoir in São Paulo

While you've been watching me build a comedic space repair simulator, I've also quietly been working on something entirely different. That something is Piece of Work—a cybernoir TTRPG that's been cooking for over a decade and is finally getting the attention it deserves.

From Desk Drawer to Development

I first started designing this game more than ten years ago, back when the cyberpunk future it described felt like distant speculation rather than Tuesday's headlines. Life intervened, other projects took priority, and the game ended up in the drawer every creative has—the one full of half-finished ideas to be revisited later.

Coming back to it now with multiple published games under my belt and actual business infrastructure in place is exciting. I see things in the original design that my younger self missed, and have more craft and experience to execute the vision properly. I can take this cool idea and develop it into the game it should be.

Also, the world has "helpfully" caught up to my fiction. Corporate zones carving up cities? Identity tied to database entries? Surveillance capitalism as the dominant social structure? It turns out I've been writing a near-future documentary.

Welcome to São Paulo, 2107

Piece of Work drops players into a world where mega-corporations have supplanted traditional government. São Paulo has been carved into Corporate Sanctuary Zones. Each district reflects its controlling corporation's ethos. From Panashiba's sleek and high-end tech based in Liberdade, to NovaBras' microgrid clusters built alongside the Marginal Pinheiros, each of these zones is tightly controlled and wired into the System.

Your social standing depends on a single, brutal distinction: are you a registered System Known User, or are you a Null—someone off the grid and off the books? Above it all looms the Spire, a space elevator owned by the dominant Altorra Interorbital Consortium, which serves as both a symbol of corporate triumph and humanity's potential escape route.

The tone is noir through and through but the questions are painfully contemporary: What does identity mean when it's assigned by a database? How do you maintain your humanity in a system designed to commodify every gesture? How do you rebel when even rebellion becomes a brand?

Digital vs. Tabletop

There's something fun about developing digital and tabletop games simultaneously. Running Late is a program—every interaction needs to be coded, every possibility anticipated. It's engineering as much as design.

But Piece of Work exists in the space between pages and imagination. The rules provide structure, but human creativity fills the gaps. I don't have to worry about collision detection. Instead, I'm developing frameworks for collaborative storytelling. And they're completely different tones, so I get to stretch all my creative muscles.

Current State and What's Next

From a rules perspective, Piece of Work is close to complete. The core mechanics work and I think all the systems interact cleanly. I've written new mechanics around retiring one's character. I've cleaned up character creation. I've simplified money and gear.

But I do still have a lot of polishing, as well as writing and finalizing the setting elements. I am going to have at least one more internal playtest, and then I'll consider external playtesting. And I want to design a character sheet (or find someone to do a better job than I would). The game won't be out tomorrow, but it's finally getting the touch-ups it deserves.

Sometimes you build games about fixing things. Sometimes you build games about things that can't be fixed. Both have their place.