I think it does a pretty good job of earning that name — just about every facet of every sort of cyberpunk (and a lot of variants have cropped up in forty or so years) has some sort of representation in the world of Night City (and, yea, its a city, but so dense and varied that it may as well be a whole world). The most common complaints I see about the game focus in on the art. I like the art! I think it does a good job of selling the mood and building the world.

The core of the system is fast and simple — roll a D10, add in modifier, beat the GM’s number to succeed. Easy! It doesn’t stay so easy, though. MY main complaint is that the more you dig into the game, the more discrete subsystems you encounter. A lot of it is optional, but some of it isn’t and it leaks into the core experience. It isn’t so pronounced as say, the complexity of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4E, but it feels more complex than it needed to be. The complexity does add depth, which is nice, but I’d be a little daunted bringing this to the table.

Which is a shame, because it fixes one of my biggest reservations about the original iterations of Cyberpunk: the callous live fast die faster ethos. That 80s style-over-substance stuff is in there, but there is also a lot more attention given to taking care of and defending folks in need. The old games didn’t care about people or changing the world, Red does, and lays down lots of suggestions, both explicit and implicit, on how to do it in play. I really dig that.

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In the episode, Stu mentions a post by Gibson about Shadowrun. If you have access to the text of that, drop us a line!Did Santa forget something? Use this promo code from Noble Knight to make it all better. Use RINGOFWARMTH in store or on the site to get 10% off whatever you’re buying. That lasts from now all the way to February 28 – a surefire way to take the chill out of the winter!Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ.Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter.Intro music by George Collazo.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Neuromancer appeared first on Vintage RPG.

So the author, Lloyd Blankenship, also ran SJG’s bulletin board system. Someone posted information about the 911 emergency system on the board, which was reported to the Secret Service, who used that as grounds to raid SJG’s offices (you have to admit, with so many conspiracy theory-centric stuff produced by SJG over there years, this is a richly ironic turn of events). When they did, they found, and seized, the manuscript of the Cyberpunk sourcebook, calling it a “manual for computer crime.” This, of course, is baloney and SJG eventually won out in court (in 1993) and got a hell of a marketing angle along the way. The really wild thing about this is this raid was similar to a bunch of others in 1990 that were freaking out internet folks out, and they led to the foundation of the Electronic Freedom Foundation — the SJG case was the first they worked on.

Anyway, the book is about what you’d expect. Sort of. A lot of the material mirrors stuff available in R. Talsorian’s game and Shadowrun and similar stuff. The aesthetic doesn’t seem quite right though. That’s not so much that they got it wrong, more that cyberpunk, like so many other things at the time, hadn’t crystallized yet in pop culture’s mind’s eye — it is a little less gritty, a little more sleek, a bit more in line with traditional sci fi visions. Rather than Blade Runner, it feels a bit like computer stuff filtered through late 80s Marvel comics — bright, bold, not really tethered to anything in reality. It’s kind of a delight!

The post GURPS Cyberpunk (1990) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

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Noble Knight is back with a new discount code for our lovely listeners. Use code LOVERPGS in store or online from now through Valentine’s Day to take $5 off any order of $25 or more!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ.Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter.Intro music by George Collazo.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Cyberpunk appeared first on Vintage RPG.

Night City is a recently constructed city of the future built on the California cost between San Francisco and LA, by a man conveniently named Richard Night. Its mix of high rises and seedy back alleys, all awash in neon, is the central location for most Cyberpunk adventures.

It has all the stuff you’d expect from a city sourcebook – jam packed with interesting locations, plot seeds and colorful characters. Where Night City exceeds expectation in its presentation. The book is, like many other Cyberpunk books, presented like screens in a dataterm, with little buttons and advertisements and a fabulous isometric map of the downtown. Reading the book, which came out in 1991, is unnervingly like falling into a Wikipedia hole.

I would love this book as a custom tablet app, with working links and the ability to scroll through the map and dig down for the data I am looking for. The format is so good you can see how it would work digitally, just by flipping through the pages. I love this book. When it gets back in print, pick it up.

The post Night City (1991) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This is very much pre-occupied with the specter of late 80s military dirty dealings like Iran Contra. The past comes back to haunt many of the patrons of the Forlorn Hope in ugly, violent ways and the various situations take PCs all over the world.

It’s a solid enough set of scenarios, if not earth shattering.

Which makes this an excellent time to bring up something about collecting Cyberpunk right now. Because of the forthcoming videogame from CD Projekt Red, there is a crazy bubble for Cyberpunk 2020 RPG books in the second hand market. As of this writing, there are copies of Forlorn Hope on eBay going for anything from 50 to 100 bucks. For the love of god, don’t pay that kind of money for this book. Just go to the R. Talsorian website and get it new for $12.

The post Tales from the Forlorn Hope (1991) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The cover art, by Mike Ebert, is the most iconic bit of Cyberpunk art for me. I was actually confused when I was looking to get the rules because I thought this was the rules. Because look at that cover. It is perfect. It encapsulates the entire 80s style over substance vibe that infuses the whole game, while also visually summarizing a lot of weird stuff going on with androids that the cyberpunk genre still struggles with.

Chromebook is an in-world document, a black market catalog. It is presented in print in a way that mirrors how it might look on Cyberpunk’s dataterm screens. It is full of stuff – weapons, vehicles, fashion, housing, software and services. Some of that had game application, some of it is just flavor.

I love catalogs. They are little historical time capsules. Find one in your house from even 5 years ago and it is a weird window into the past. Chromebook functions in a similar way, allowing readers to grok the world of Cyberpunk in a way completely different from a typical RPG equipment sourcebook. More games should take this approach.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I am still a little weirded out that there isn’t a human being named R. Talsorian. As a kid, I saw the name of the game company and just assumed it was like a designer label, some weird rich equivalent to DeLorean making RPGs. I have no idea if that was Pondsmith’s intention when he named the company that, but if not, it sure was a happy accident of a marketing strategy.

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Creator Mike Pondsmith figured out a lot about his game in the two years since Cyberpunk 2013. Everything is expanded and polished. The Lifepath system for creating a character backstory has more options. Everything fits together better. The world now feels real and plausible where in 2013 it seemed a bit indistinct. Night City gets more detail and there is a solid adventure that introduces a number of important figures in the Cyberpunk world.

I love the art here, even though a lot of it is kind of crummy (and much of it reprinted from the previous version). The best of it is clever riffs on Patrick Nagel’s style, except with sly references to technology and a lot more guns. There is a definite vibe of style over substance here.

There is a big wrinkle, though. Hacking has its own dedicated system which is…complex. 50+ pages complex. And those rules apply to only one character class, the netrunner, which creates a problem in terms of running games. It seems a shame to downplay or leave out the hacking, as it is a central part of Cyberpunk, but including it leaves non-netrunner characters sitting at the table with nothing to do while the hacking minigame takes place. Conversely, unlike deckers in Shadowrun, netrunner characters aren’t going to have a lot to do when not jacked into the net. The solution is to just split the party, but handling multiple action scenes is always a tricky juggling act for a gamemaster.  

That aside, Cyberpunk is a solid game set in a rich, well thought out world. You can see a lot of stuff getting worked out here that would eventually become a huge part of our language of urban science fiction. In that respect, I think Cyberpunk is extremely under appreciated.  

The post Cyberpunk 2020 (1990) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

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.

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