Getting Back into the Cyberswing of Things

I have not played any Cyberpunk 2020 in well over a decade, but with Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2077, and my D&D 5e group at an odd crossroads of needing a one shot game session for just one weekend with only a portion of the party, here I am Reffing CP2020 yet again. As I am getting back into it, I am rediscovering many resources that I just did not have when I last played it, because the internet is a wonderful thing. Figured I would share some of the wonderful resources I have found as I gather them together.

Part of the new technology I find myself using in my tabletop gaming is 3d printing. About a year and a half ago, the technology (still very much in it's pubescent stage) had gotten good enough and affordable enough that I felt good about making a printer purchase. In other words, at the price point I could afford, I did not feel like I was wasting time nor money by purchasing a printer that would not perform or be unreliable or too complicated and hard to keep running. I picked up a Creality Ender 3, and have since been using it mainly to print medieval fantasy terrain for my D&D game. I do not have the time to print much for my one shot game - 3d printers are awe inspiring, but they are not fast, especially if you like higher quality prints, and mine is not just printing for me, but also for the wife - but I have already gathered quite the collection of .stl files from the 'net. By the way, when someone draws or drafts a digital object to be 3d printed, it is generally saved as a .stl file. Okay, enough technical gibberish, if you do have a 3d printer and are interested in doing some printing for a CP2020 game - search not only for "cyberpunk" but also for "shadowrun" on the usual suspects, Yeggi and Thingiverse. Yeah, yeah, I know, Shadowrun has got too much medieval fantasy in its dystopic sci-fi cyberpunk, but there are some really decent cyberpunk-ish prints out there.

In between starting this post and typing to this point, I ran the one shot with my players. We did not play for long due to some scheduling hiccups, but I had just planned a quick intro for them - chose from the Screamsheets in the core book the bad cyberware one, made up characters for them and made them roll to see who got to randomly choose first, provided them with cheat sheets stolen from Seth Skorkowsky, and even reference materials like the US history timeline from Land of the Free and the Night City map from the core book. After a brief intro to the world - you live in the combat zone of Night City, a large metropolitan complex between LA and San Francisco in the free state of NorCal, think Mogadishu from Black Hawk Down, but with more guns, drugs and technology - we were off. The players were duly impressed that combat is not serious but downright deadly and had only one combat, but many social interactions. It does show that CP2020's combat rules, at least if played straight out of the core book, does take time, and me and one of my players are looking into creating an app for ourselves that would make it much easier. Also, as none of us has grabbed the Red Jumpstart kit from GenCon (no, I didn't get to go, why didn't you pick one up for me, too?), which I have been meaning to get at least the digital copy from Drive Thru RPG, we'll take a look in there and see if there is anything useful when it comes to making combat go a little quicker. But, I was also planning on whipping together an app to generate characters, at least for all the things that involve a random roll table, so I may be doing a combat app as well, anyway.

A few notes from running the game - I did just the most minimal prep on the game, literally as little as I could get away with. No over-arching plot, no grand scheme by shadowy forces, grabbed one of the Screamsheets like I said, decided how it would go (yes, basically railroaded my characters, but it was introducing them to the world and the system, didn't have time to let them wander) and spent most of the time making up the characters I gave to them. Speaking of, I made them roll randomly, and let the highest pick a character, again at random, just held the character packets face down, so none of them knew what they were getting. I made sure the scenario was far more talk and investigation than it was combat, but this way they got more of a feel for the world and setting. That was the biggest issue, my players are used to D&D, where almost every campaign synopsis ends with "...and save the world/country/civilization", but CP2020 is far more "...and earn enough money for the next cyberware upgrade" or "a night in a coffin and kibble for the week" or "pay off my loan shark", and always "and don't piss off too many better armed people/corporations/gangs/other edgerunners". The other idea I had to disabuse my players of was the question of legality. Legal or illegal in the dark, grim future is more of a question of if you are pissing off someone with a bigger or more guns than you, hence the dystopic setting. Smaller, more personal goals, both for the PCs and the NPCs and bad guys that is what is called for in this game. It is not a bad thing, but I could easily run a game in CP2020 for years off a basic random jobs table (the columns would be which gang/corp/other entity is hiring you to do what to which gang/corp/other entity and also have a plot twist column and who likes that you did this thing and who hates you for it), I have even started up similar tables for both Champions and Planet Mercenary in the past, and now I will have to do one for Cyberpunk, either Red or 2020, or both. Yet another project, hopefully this one gets more time to devote to it and if I do complete it, enough time and interest from my players (current or future) to actually use it.

Speaking of CPRed, as I am typing this all disjointed and whenever I get a spare moment, I did finally pay $15 and got the Jumpstart Kit from Drive Thru Games. This is a very hasty, "I glanced through it, but haven't played or reffed it" review of that product, so take this with a huge grain of salt and understand I may be missing some huge issues or fixes for those issues. Things I really like so far - art is very good, liking the new Netrunner rules, as well as the simplification of the combat mechanics, the print and cutout paper minis (though I had to source my own bases, but that is what 3d printers are for, just need to wiggle them into my printing schedule). What I am not so fond of is that as a long time 2020 player, the Jumpstart Kit just is not meaty enough for my tastes. No, I don't expect them to update every supplement from the old game immediately for the new game, but I want the core book updated fully for Red. I want pages of cyberware and weapons and gear and programs and drugs. I want Screamsheets by the dozen. I want to meet this new generation of NPCs and get new, funny quotes from them. I want pages of random character generation tables. Oh sure, I know we got to wait a bit, and a beefier core book is probably in the works, waiting to come out with the video game Cyberpunk 2077, but I was kind of hoping it would be sooner. We shall see. More in depth coverage coming soon.