Trivia / Neuroshima

• Back from the Brink: The game singlehandedly saved Portal publishing house from bankruptcy, being the "death or glory" move by the publisher and its owners. The company was generating nothing but a net loss thanks to a string of financial failures, and other than the deal with a team behind Wild Fields to create a new, exciting post-apo game called Necropunk, had zero financial perspectives. Should the project that ultimately became Neuroshima fail, Portal would croak back in 2003 rather than becoming one of the main tabletop game (but mostly board games) publishers in Poland.
• Creative Differences:
  • A very messy one, to boot. Originally, Portal joined the team of people working on Necropunk and they were brainstorming ideas together. However, it very quickly devolved into Ignacy Trzewiczek (Portal's owner) and Maciej Jurewicz (Necropunk's head designer) exchanging passive-aggressive e-mails on who's the bigger dickhead and why, terminating any cooperation. From that moment on, both teams were on their own, trying to be the first to release and thus be the ones to make money out of the project. Notably, everyone else in both teams was perfectly fine with continuing to work together, but for their leaders, it became a matter of one-up-manship.
  • According to just about everyone involved, including Trzewiczek himself, he was an incredibly stubborn jackass to work with, insisting on whatever ideas he came up with. And no matter how absurd and/or impractical they would be, Trzewiczek would make each of them a hill worth dying on. This scared away the more moderate people from the team, ultimately reducing the crew to people that were both capable of enduring him and his questionable input, while at the same time having enough monetary gain (or perspective of loss) if the project is never finished.
  Ignacy Trzewiczek: In general, I feel a very strong love for my own creations and writing. I think everything I ever wrote is awesome. And it's a very, very hard task to convince me to drop something I've already made or come up with.
• End of an Age: This was the last Polish TTRPG published to capture any lasting fanbase. It is also the last non-homebrew game that got published to date, as all games after it were nothing more than home-made games published in very limited print, with the sole exception of Wolsung.
• No Budget: One of the most distinctive elements of the game was the almost complete lack of funds for production and, most importantly, playtests outside the creative team. It shows. After its initial success all the money was pumped into a remastered edition, but it again only managed to cover printing and distribution.
• No Export for You: Even if Neuroshima Hex! is a wildly successful game (both the tabletop and video variety), there are no plans for original tabletop translation or export.
• Spin-Off:
  • The More Popular Spin-Off board game Neuroshima Hex!.
  • A country-building card game 51st State.
  • The Polish edition of the Last Aurora board game was released under the Neuroshima brand and slightly rewritten to fit in its universe.
  • A miniature wargame Neuroshima Tactics. Unfortunately the combination of even more focus on the infamously clunky combat rules and the average quality of models prevented it from gaining popularity and it was quietly discontinued after about a year.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game, initially known as Necropunk, was a joint project with people behind Wild Fields, with significantly different tone and creative input. Should the Creative Differences never happen, an entirely different game would come to fruition. And knowing the more practical approach from the Sarmatian team, it would most definitely have a functional crunch.
  • For years, there were rumours of an expansion or a variant game set in Europe, for sake of simplicity usually dubbed "Euroshima". Nothing ever came out of it, save for some fanwork and perhaps a few rules on playing characters of specific non-American ethnicities.
• Word of God: According to Marcin Baryłka (originally in the Necropunk team, later working on Neuroshima directly), the reason why the setting is such a horrendous hodgepodge of ideas and themes was to prevent any kind of comparison to Necropunk, should it be published (which, as we know now, never happened). Necropunk was intended as a more straightforward Mad Max-like setting, with the extra layer of references to specific media^note Salute Of The Jugger, A Boy and His Dog, Steel Dawn and a handful of Albert Pyun's post-apo movies, so Neuroshima, by being all over the place and including wildly clashing ideas and references, along with extensive mechanics to weird and exotic things, could sell itself as a wholly original project that stands on its own, rather than being a mere copy-cat.

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