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CREDITS Android Setting Created by Kevin Wilson and Daniel Lovat Clark

Editor Katrina Ostrander

Writing & Additional Gary Astleford, Owen Barnes, Development Shawn Carman, Daniel Lovat Clark, Tim Cox, John Crowdis, John Dunn, Lisa Farrell, Jordan Goldfarb, Anthony Hicks, William H. Keith, Jason Marker, Mike Myler, Mel Odom, and Joe Sleboda with Lukas Litzsinger, Andrew Navaro, Sam Stewart, and Kirsten Zirngibl

Android Story Team Daniel Lovat Clark, Lukas Litzsinger, Katrina Ostrander, and Zoë Robinson

Android Story Team Lead Michael Hurley

Graphic Design Michael Silsby with Shaun Boyke, Christopher Hosch, and Duane Nichols

Graphic Design Manager Brian Schomburg

Art Direction Zoë Robinson

Managing Art Director Andy Christensen

Cover Art David Auden Nash

Production Coordination John Britton, Jason Glawe, and Johanna Whiting

Production Management Megan Duehn and Simone Elliott

Executive Producer Michael Hurley

Publisher Christian T. Petersen

Special thanks to Nayt Brookes, Kelly Hoffman, Tim Huckelbery, Matthew Ley, Connor Osgood, as well as David Preti and Renato Sasdelli

for their expertise and insight into the not-too-distant future.

FANTASYFLIGHTGAMES

Fantasy Flight Games1995 West County Road B2

Roseville, MN 55113USA

© 2015 Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. Android is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. Fantasy Flight Games and the FFG logo are registered trademarks of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-63344-221-4 Product Code: NAD06

Printed in China

For more information about the world of Android, visit us online at

www.FantasyFlightGames.com

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The Android universe first started as a conversation in a van on the way home from a game convention with my friend and colleague Dan Clark. I had some rough ideas about a setting I wanted to pitch to Christian for a board game, but it was that conversation that crystalized those thoughts into what would later become the kernel of the setting. I wanted to do hard sci-fi—or at least use plausible science in the game. Ambitiously, Dan and I discussed a near future in the tradition of cyberpunk, where we could also address some of the current issues of our time such as the margin-alization of the labor force and rising wealth inequality. I wanted to tackle some real, serious topics in the game in a way that I’d never attempted before.

At the idea’s core were two competing corporations, both ped-dling a different form of artificial labor. On the one hand was Jinteki, a genetics company in the Eastern tradition selling cloned workers. Their logo was a bonsai, a tiny tree that’s had its growth purposefully stunted for aesthetic reasons via careful pruning. That bit of quiet symbolism still pleases me today. On the other hand, Haas-Bioroid was a stolidly Western corporation, manufac-turing robotic workers and keeping an eye firmly on the bottom line. They were cold steel and numbers as a foil to Jinteki’s deep traditions and artistic perfectionism.

Caught between these two behemoths were the displaced work-ers. An angry, powerless mob of ordinary people forced out of their jobs by a series of technological breakthroughs. They had formed a group called Human First and used sledgehammers to attack the androids, both because the robotic workers were extremely durable, and because I wanted to create parallels to the tale of John Henry and the steam engine. The story of the man who would rather die than let a machine replace him is one of my long-time favorites, and if you look, you’ll see that we ultimately named a line of mining clones in the setting after him. One of the murder suspects in the original board game, Mark Henry, is from that line of clones.

These three groups and the friction between them were the seed that everything else ultimately sprang from. Before I had thought of the Beanstalk or decided to put a colony on the Moon named after one of my favorite science fiction writers, there was this triad, with each group opposed to the other two. This appealed to me because although it was reminiscent of Blade Runner, an obvious influence on the setting, it went in a completely different direction with the same technology and allowed us to tell very different sto-ries. Android was, at its core, a setting about vast economic forces filtered down to the level of a single individual.

For the rest of the trip, Dan and I invented and fleshed out the first of those individuals. Louis Blaine, the corrupt cop on the outs with his wife, was the original Android character. Next was Ray-mond Flint, the private eye unlucky in love and still haunted by ghosts from the War. Many, many other characters have followed since, coming to life through the cards in Android: Netrunner or within the pages of the Android novels. This universe has grown far beyond my original rough ideas, and I’m amazed and proud to watch it keep growing from that first tiny seed.

Kevin Wilson, July 2015

Foreword

Imaginary FSPte Ltd

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