CYBERPUNK: The Role-Playing Game of the Dark Future

[ritt]

At a local con auction on Saturday I scored a good-condition complete box set of the 1988 first edition of R. Talosorian's Cyberpunk (Plus the gun book and three of the chromebooks). TEN BUCKS. I made out like a bandit at that auction, it was sweet. My classic RPG collection is growing at such a pace that I need new shelves.

I played CP a couple of times back in the day (Dumb, goofball games with fellow teens, mostly focused on gunfights) but never actually read it. I never used to think of CP as "Old-School", but reading through this game (Set in the dark future year of 2013) is strangely really nostalgic and bittersweet. The setting book starts right off with a paragraph about how the America of 2013 is more divided than ever before and income inequality has reached new heights...it could have come right from a real-world newspaper op-ed of (The real) 2013 and is genuinely chilling to read. Then you get into the meat of the book and you have advanced cyborg limbs with guns hidden in fingers right next to cell phones "...about the size of a walkie-talkie". We learn that the Soviets landed the first man on Mars (Even as late as 1988 we though the USSR wasn't going anywhere and that space exploration would only grow). The art is a weird combination of Patrick Nagal and Masamune Shirow -it's very,very 80's but striking and it does a great job of setting the game's tone.

I picked this up on a lark but I'm really getting enthralled by it (And the copy of GANGBUSTERS that I got as well). I got some great stuff in this year's haul of old games. Now I'm gonna crack open that copy of IT CAME FROM THE LATE, LATE, LATE SHOW that I found for two bucks and see if my winning streak continues...

[Finarvyn]

Jul 23, 2014 10:52:36 GMT -6 ritt said:

Set in the dark future year of 2013)

Well, 2013 was a dark year.

Cyberpunk was a tough one for me. I bought a copy of the rules booklet way back in the day (didn't realize there was a boxed set) and thought it was pretty cool -- awesome concept, nice artwork, reasonably decent rules, and so on -- but no one I knew at the time had any interest in playing. I kept it for maybe 20 years and finally got rid of it a few years back.

I'll be interested to hear if you get around to playing it, and what your impressions are about the game.

[Vile Traveller]

While I love the cyberpunk concept I've never come across a game that could handle the deck-running part well. It tended to split the group, so you had the "physical" team doing its bit and then the hacker taking a turn. Someone was always sitting around with not much to do. Hmm, maybe two referees would work, one for each?

I think the concept could still be brought up to date (Matrix did a passable job in its time), but near future SF always runs the risk of that future being very different when it happens. At least with far future SF no-one is going to live long enough to get that weird experience of remembering how you thought about it back then and simultaneously knowing what the world actually turned out like.

[vladtolenkov]

One of the great things about the early boxed set is that it has the separate Friday Night Firefight rules. This booklet is one of the best modern combat systems ever. We had tremendous fun with it. Direct automatic fire against a single target is extremely nasty-- especially with high caliber bullets!!

The second edition is superior in some ways, but we never had as much with it as we did with the rough around the edges first edition of Cyberpunk.

[Merctime]

Oh my fricken goodness I so remember the amazing fun I had playing and running this game back in the days. Now, unfortunately, I never really had any experience with the original 2013 rules as vladtolenkov has stated, even though one of the players had a boxed set. But... Man... This game was tons of fun! R. Talsorian hit the ball out of the park with this one. Great score, ritt!

I might recommend hunting down a copy of the GM book, "Listen up you primitive screwheads!" and possibly the first corporation book to assist you. Also, I'm sure a bit of hunting around on google will score you some great maps that you can use for your games if you like using maps. Another great utility item, at least it was for me, is the "Night City Sourcebook", if you can find that. Even if you don't choose to run your games in Night City, there is a lot of valuable stuff in there for the devious GM!!!

[kesher]

I love this game! The life paths give you all the books you need to live on the edge, whether player or GM. Screwheads is an awesome book, and you can get the PDF from somewhere official (RPGNow? Warehouse 23?)...

[tec97]

I had this game back in 1988 when it came out, and played in a couple of pretty cool campaigns at that time. I've thought about picking it up again for my collection. I saw the rule book and Night City source book at a gaming store in Anchorage this past spring, however they were asking something like $75 ea for them (I assume prices driven by looking at Noble Knight) - too rich for my blood for a novelty.

[Malcadon]

I hear you about how it quickly became an futurist, alternative-history setting. I still hear "Would you play the original Cyberpunk game with a straight face?" LOL I totally would!

While I'm not a fan of the rules, I really like the style and vibe of the setting. Take the assorted works of classic cyberpunk novels (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and so on), then infuse it with the esthetics of Bladerunner, Max Headroom, Patrick Nagel, Hajime Sorayama, and a random assortment of gaudy '80s music videos, and you got classic Cyberpunk (2013 & 2020) how it was meant to be played!

That was a great find! I hope you find some gamers who enjoy such a setting.
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If you want some cool, useful (and free) CP supplements, then check out Datafortress 2020.

If you want a reversal of the CP2013 concept, then I recommend checking out ModemPunk. It is an alternative-history that puts the Information Age in a disutopian 1980s where technology is slightly better than what it was for the time, and characters play out like kids form Hackers.