This is the original Cyberpunk box set from 1988, amusingly set in the year 2013.

Cyberpunk – the sci-fi sub-genre – is a slippery thing formed out of a laundry list of influences – new wave sci-fi by Moorcock, Dick, Ellison and Ballard, hardboiled detective novels by Hammett and Chandler, punk culture, the nascent hacker movement and more. It is hard to pin down exactly when it coalesced into a recognizable sub-genre, but I tend to think it was the release of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. The 1982 film Bladerunner is another arguable inflection point. Cyberpunk tends toward the dystopian, tackling themes of alienation and a technological class war between the lowlifes on the streets and the corporate elite in the penthouse towers above. Weirdly, I can’t think of any Cyberpunk that predicted smart phones and e-cigs, the two bits of real world tech in our daily lives that seem the most cyberpunk (though it did nail the increasing modern wealth gap).

Cyberpunk the RPG draws a lot of inspiration from Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley and Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired (which eventually got a Cyberpunk sourcebook). The game is actually made up of two interlocking systems – a skill system and a combat system. The skill system here is pretty standard, allowing characters to get better at skills as they use them, or to augments them with cybernetics. The combat system, called Fright Night Firefight, is straightforward, tactical and lethal – no matter how experienced a character may be, a single bullet always has a chance to snuff them. There is also a novel Lifepath system for creating a character’s history. All of this stuff is pretty rudimentary at this point and saw a significant upgrade in polish and presentation in the next iteration of the rules. Also included is a primer booklet on Night City, but more on that locale later.