Quote:As part of the insanely ambitious What Lies Unseen datamined development history of The Witcher 3, the project's creators made an amusing discovery: A script for an early version of the quest "Through Time and Space" where Geralt and Avallac'h teleport to Night City from Cyberpunk 2077.

Through Time and Space is one of my favorite quests in The Witcher 3: In order to reach the homeworld of the Wild Hunt, the Witcher and sage have to skip from world to world in a dimension-hopping chain of portals. They find themselves braving a desert planet that was once the bed of a sentient ocean, a toxic swamp, an underwater cave, and a world already ruined by the White Frost. It's this bracing, exciting, and surprising bit of high-concept sci-fi in The Witcher 3 that I just really dig.

The draft script for Through Time and Space is markedly different from the final one, with Geralt and Avallac'h finding their first portal in a Redanian garrison instead of Novigrad, and they get teleported to, among other places, the court of King Radovid but weeks in the past. The first jaunt, though, would send them to Night City, with Geralt and Avallac'h exchanging the following dialogue:

- Geralt: "What... What is this place? Is this the afterlife?"
- Avallac'h: "No. Just another of the realities the Spiral leads through... Technologically advanced, but broken. Dying."
- Geralt: "Disgusting. This stench, noise... How can you live here?!"
- Avallac'h: "You should know better. This world is inhabited by humans, not elves."

The What Lies Unseen team also stated that CD Projekt Red developers have talked publicly about wanting to implement a scene like this. It's unclear what district of the city the two would have found themselves in, or what it would have even looked like. At this stage of The Witcher 3's development (circa 2012), CDPR had not even put out that legendary/infamous first pre-rendered trailer announcing Cyberpunk 2077.

According to the What Lies Unseen team, developers from CDPR have also said in interviews that they had wanted to have Geralt give some Novigrad coins to a panhandler during this scene, with the same character showing up rich and prosperous as an easter egg in Cyberpunk 2077.

This would have been sick to see in-game back in 2015, but I think I'm happy with the version of the quest we got. CDPR has instead adopted more subtle ways of implying a shared multiverse connection between The Witcher and Cyberpunk, most notably a long-running, cryptic in-game puzzle in Cyberpunk 2077 that corresponds to a hidden room in The Witcher 3. Having Geralt just show up in Night City and say "This place stinks!" would have precluded those more subtle later efforts.

I do love that The Witcher's dimension hopping rules mean that every promotional tie-in involving Geralt and Ciri could just be a canon example of them teleporting between worlds. Geralt in Monster Hunter and Soul Calibur? You better believe it's canon, baby. For more Witcher 3 secrets, we have an overview article about the other new information revealed so far by the What Lies Unseen team.

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April Fool’s! This is a real thing though.

You all might’ve heard of the CD Projekt Red game Cyberpunk 2077, I heard they recently released a big revamp and DLC, actually. Or you might’ve heard of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime by Studio Trigger of Inferno Cop fame.

In fact, considering the sheer amount of fanart of Edgerunner’s Rebecca with our very own homegrown Becky, I know for a fact most of you know the latter.

Well, both of those are based on Cyberpunk, the Tabletop RPG by the good folks at R. Talsorian Games.

Yes, just “Cyberpunk”, it was so groundbreaking in its time that it didn’t need any further clarifications.

Clarifications of a sort were eventually added to the title as editions of the game came and went. Cyberpunk was followed by Cyberpunk 2020 (in 1990) and its current iteration is called Cyberpunk RED.

For this latest one the folks at R. Talsorian have taken to releasing what they call “DLC”. As they explained it to me when we first talked, they’re the sort of additions and supplements that would’ve been published in magazines back in the day. Quirky and small but usable, the sort of thing to spice up your gaming sessions.

And for this one, we have the immense honor to be at the core of an April Fool’s joke. Unironically the biggest honor one can have.

No, I’m not being sarcastic. How dare you even think that.

Mixing Drinks–Changing Lives: A Cyberpunk RED/VA-11 HALL-A Crossover is a 20 page PDF that gives ideas and stat sheets to be able to add the VA-11 Hall-A cast to your gaming sessions.

And if they had stopped there it would’ve been more than enough.

But they didn’t stop.

You see, the worlds of Cyberpunk and VA-11 Hall-A are slightly incompatible despite being part of the same genre. So the R. Talsorian peeps went to work and created wholesale concepts that maintain the spirit of the wackier or softer sci-fi of VA-11 Hall-A while making them perfectly compatible with the style of sci-fi that Cyberpunk prefers.

It’s so smooth in fact that you’d swear it’s canon… but it isn’t.

Paperwork is a messy thing, if we had to make things proper canon to each other’s settings that would be a massive headache, at the very least it’s not the sort of thing you leave to just a simple supplement like this one.

As it stands this is just two companies that think what the other did was mad cool and decided to have fun together.

Of course, anything can be canon in your own gaming session! Not even the all-seeing judgment of God can reach you there.

Two questions surely remain at this point. So let’s address them:

“Where do I get this?”

Click here for the supplement.

Honestly, even if you don’t play Cyberpunk RED, you should check it. It’s such a labor of love that it’s sure to bring a smile out of you just like it got one out of us.

If you do decide to give Cyberpunk RED a try, first of all: Good choice! Second of all: You can get the Core Rulebook from their website too.

I also heard that their supplement book Black Chrome has a nod to VA-11 Hall-A for those that look carefully.

You might also be asking yourself “How did this happen? What steps had to happen for this to occur?”

They asked.

That’s it, they asked and we said “Hell yeah!”.

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