Generally speaking people know what they're getting into when they play a particular system. A James Bond game is all about being Bond and therefore can be expected to fulfil Bond tropes - the quips, the car chases, exotic locations and world-shattering evil masterminds. A Trail game is about Cthulhoid horror and can be expected to be moist and squamous, with a heavy dose of American gothic, possibly a hint of film noir. A Cyberpunk game is about dystopia, people lost in a futuristic landscape looking for meaning in all the wrong places.
You rarely see mixed genres in RPG settings, but it can be very interesting. The old Cyberpunk had a quasi-horror setting, the Night's Edge books, that worked remarkably well. In that setting you might encounter vampires, ghosts, Voodoo acolytes and terrifying dreamscapes. It had its faults; it leaned a little too heavily on serial killer tropes. But when it worked, it sang.
Body horror is a storytelling method where the narrative attempts to invoke intense feelings of physical and psychological disgust, or squick, and plays upon anxieties of physical vulnerability. One of the most effective versions of this I've ever seen on screen is the 1999 Takashi Miike movie Audition, in which a lovelorn businessman attempts to spark romance by auditioning women to 'be in his movie' - but things go badly wrong when he meets Asami, a fascinating woman with a past. And a few extra feet. There is a moment with a sack ... but I've said too much, and the trailers I can find online are a bit too spoilery, so I'll stop there.
The essence of body horror is making the human form do things we consider unnatural, though what we consider unnatural can be very revealing about our own prejudices. Stephen King once pointed out that, in the 1950s, you could freak American kids out just by having characters with a relatively mild physical issue. Even a bad case of the zits and shaggy hair was a major taboo, at a time when good hygiene, medical advances and three square meals a day had sorted out most of a generation's physical issues. Cleft palates, goiters, and many other ailments once relatively common, vanished almost entirely from the landscape. Bones lengthened, teeth straightened, complexions cleared. People forgot the old normal and replaced it with the new.
Clive Barker treads similar ground in Hellraiser, in which physical punishment - nails through the head, being skinned alive - masquerades as spiritual punishment. The spirit and the body are, apparently, one - mutilate the body, torture the soul.
Or Cronenberg, in films like Rabid, implying that a once-normal, healthy body can be tainted by, in this instance, a medical procedure, becoming a necrotic, corruptive influence.
There's no suggestion that a person's spirit and corpus is somehow separate; no immortal essence hidden behind a mortal façade. In body horror the two are one, and you can tell corruption at a glance because they don't look or behave like us. Often this is a buckets-of-blood genre, where guts and slick essences are spilt all over the screen and, by implication, your own home, since the whole point is to make the audience think this might happen anywhere at all, but especially where you feel safest. There's a reason why Hellraiser takes place in an ordinary house, why Rabid is set in semi-rural suburbia. 'This looks like where I live,' you're meant to think. 'This could happen here.' Of course, the logical tagline is 'it could happen to me,' which as you'll recall was Edwardian ghost story master M.R. James' famous bit of horror writing advice.
It doesn't have to be awash with gore. Invasion of the Body Snatchers achieves a very similar goal without the slightest drop of blood, by creating invaders that look like us but aren't quite like us. All flesh, no soul. Whatever immortal shred resides within that flesh is annihilated when the Body Snatchers take over.
In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us — a little bit — we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear ...
If body horror is the subversion of the natural - exploding guts and all - then cyberpunk is the conversion of the natural. We think we know what normal is, and then our expectations are upended. The only difference is, in conversion we willingly accept the change, where in subversion change is forced upon us.
Manga and movies like Ghost in the Shell explicitly play with this concept, going on and on about the Ghost without ever really exploring the concept beyond muttering 'The Ghost!' as if they were all ravens programmed to say Nevermore every few minutes. Paying lip service to the spirit without really confronting the concept, yet taking every possible opportunity to show off fantastic new body conversions. At times you wonder whether there are any downsides to becoming a cyborg, beyond a compulsion to mutter 'The Ghost!' every other episode. Nobody changes; the Major is always the Major, Batou always Batou. Even when changes seemingly occur, the series reverts back to the status quo ASAP in the next episode. For all the characters talk about the Ghost, it rarely impacts the narrative.
Cyberpunk the RPG setting does something similar with Empathy/Humanity.
Empathy: Your ability to relate to and care for others, and take others into consideration. Particularly important as it offsets the effects of cyberpsychosis, a dangerous mental illness common in the Dark Future ... For every point of Empathy the Character has, they gain 10 points of Humanity (HUM) ... Cyberpsychosis Humanity Loss is defined (for this purpose) as a loss of empathy for others and a corresponding loss of self-regard or sense of self preservation. Subjects with low Humanity have trouble emphasizing with themselves or others as "real."
All of this should sound very familiar to CoC and Trail players since this is basically the SAN/Stability mechanic, except where in CoC or Trail SAN is permanently lost by exposure to Mythos sources and temporarily lost by exposure to any number of frightening circumstances, Empathy and by extension Humanity is lost by grafting on technical adjuncts to the flesh. There's a side mechanic where Humanity can also be lost by exposure to terrifying circumstances, but it's encapsulated in a small chart on p. 231 and I wonder how many GMs run with the idea. Sanity is a major concept in CoC and Trail; Humanity doesn't seem as important in Cyberpunk.
It's difficult to make those numbers mean something without engaging the players' imaginations, and it's difficult to engage imagination though numbers alone. Particularly when those numbers have a mechanical consequence - in this instance, loss of the character. To cyberpsychosis, but really loss of the character to anything, whether it's cyberpsychosis or the Spaghetti Monster, is just as frustrating to the player.
Exactly the same conversation's been going on in CoC for decades. At first SAN and loss of same meant a roll on the Temporary (or Permanent) Insanity table, which meant that in some or all future scenes the player had to behave as though their character suffered from, say, a fear of insects, or a fear of crossing bridges. From that relatively simple (at times cruel, unintentionally or otherwise) beginning, systems became more complicated, until now we have setups like Delta Green's relationships, bonds and disorders system, actively engaging the players in their own spiritual demise. Because if they don't tend to those Bonds, in-game, the characters lose out big time.
I'm going to suggest to you now that body horror is indispensable to Cyberpunk because body horror gets the players to engage in what it means to be Cyber, in ways other than crunching HUM numbers. Those implants and modifications they desire come at a cost, and it's not just in Eurobucks. Further, that body horror doesn't have to be guts and gore; it has to be a subversion of the norm.
White Zombie isn't a particularly interesting film. It's historic, as it's the first zombie movie ever, based in part on William Seabrook's book The Magic Island. However everyone who's ever seen that film remembers this early scene if they remember nothing else, because it's the most chilling moment in the movie. Nature can be cruel, but only man can be so pointlessly cruel as to set up a system like this. The dead toil to grind cane into sugar, and it doesn't matter if one falls into the mix and is ground up with the cane.
It has a lot in common with the Moloch scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis:
Both scenes are dehumanizing people in service of a mechanized, semi-supernatural overseer, for a goal that might be pointless. Both turn people into things. Both destroy people to achieve their objective. The workers of Metropolis march to their doom just as unthinkingly as White Zombie's dead men tend the sugar mill. Both are made in an age when socialism and worker's rights were hot topics, vigorously debated in the halls of power and on the factory floor.
Body horror - the subversion of body and soul.
Going back to Cyberpunk's player guidance:
1: Style over Substance: It doesn't matter how well you do something, as long as you look good doing it. Why should it matter if you look good? Because everything else doesn't. Imagine what decades of poor hygiene, lack of medical care and poor diet is going to do to people. Then add in radiation poisoning. Sure, if you're a corporate beaver, that's not a problem. Most people aren't corporates. Why do people cyber up if they can afford it? For the same reason people get plastic surgery. Not everyone needs a gun arm, but everyone needs to fit in.
2: Attitude is Everything. It's truth. Think dangerous; be dangerous. Think weak; be weak. Remember the sugar mill, and Moloch. The average primitive screwhead is going to end up sacrificed on that altar because they have no other choice. The average booster is going to die for some corporate's big power play because they don't know any better. That's what grunts are for. Are you a grunt?
3: Live on the Edge. The Edge is that nebulous zone where risk-takers and high rollers go. On the Edge, you'll risk your cash, your rep, even your life on something as vague as a principle or a big score. Why? Because the alternative is worse. Your principles are your soul, and you're trying to keep that as pure as possible in a world where people trade their souls in every day for a better butt or a new pair of eyes.
As GM you need to be banging away at body horror as often as possible, and you need to be making much greater use of that handy-dandy Humanity chart on p. 231. You should also encourage your players to go to Therapy (p 230) as often as possible, and maybe consider small Humanity rewards for interesting roleplay moments, much as CoC or Trail rewards heroic moments with a little SAN or Stability boost. After all, Humanity is ultimately about being human; there should be a reward for engaging with your Humanity.
As a final what-if, consider these potential body horror moments:
You enter the ripperdoc's dimly-lit den and notice, among the jars and storage tanks lining the walls, a new-harvested face floating in preservatives. You know that face. It belongs to the bartender at the Mad Hatter; you recognize that cute little mole on his cheek. He's been talking about selling his face for months, but until now you've always persuaded him otherwise. Guess he needed the money more than you thought. Wonder what he looks like these days ...
Womb rental - it's the latest thing. Some prefer vat-grown, but a healthy female with no significant black marks in her genetic history can command a substantial fee. They just put you into the factory for nine months, fill you full of sedatives to keep you compliant, and pop goes the baby. Of course, there are rumors that some of these women aren't exactly what you'd call volunteers, but hey - corp beavers need kids ...
You hear about the new factory they're building out by Jesus Street and Memory Lane? Remember about five years ago when they were going to renovate the old St. Simon Building, but the job stalled out? How they lost a cleanup crew? Well, turns out they didn't precisely lose that cleanup crew. I guess someone forgot to unlock a door when shift ended, and they've been down there ever since. Pretty airtight in those vaults, so they didn't decay so much as, well, became liquid. Anyway, there's good cheddar on offer for anyone who, you know, wants to scoop up the slurry and dump it somewhere legal. Or at least somewhere out of sight and mind ...
You see that group over there? Garbage pickers. They work the mounds out by Hooker Loop. How can I tell? Well, look at the fingers, choomb. See, on the one hand you get those who've been able to buy new hands, or at least good second-hand digits. See how the metal gets pitted and cruddy-looking? On the other, well, there's this kind of ulcer you get from that work, it eats fingers ...
You want to sign up for the Hustle Truck? Comes by every morning, picks up folks who want to earn a little extra by doing odd jobs. It's not a lot of money, and the work ain't much, but it's legal; it'll cover your coffin costs, choomb. One thing, tho; you got to get the Hustle Truck chip if you want in. It's nothing serious. The people who run it, they want to keep tabs on you - how you spend your time. Just when you're working. The chip doesn't monitor you when you're not on the job ...
Remember how Nixon used to tell those tall tales about Japanese ghosts? The what-was-it, the nupper-something, that was the one that really stuck with me. How it could just wipe its face away, leaving nothing behind but a blank. Well, they say that the braindance viewers over in the Night Market that sometimes pops up in Bitters has this problem. You go into the dance, and everything's slick. You come out, and sometimes you see faceless people. Now, are these real faceless people? Or is this some hot-shit rewired brain bull you get from the Dance? This one chica, she swears that after she did the Dance she went to, you know, freshen up, and there was this woman in the same stall, red hair, and the woman turns around ... nothing there, man. Nothing. Blank, from forehead to chin ...
I've been a Cyberpunk fan for a very long time. Back in the day I had most of the books and picked up the ones I didn't have second-hand at UK conventions. My collection's pretty complete now, but I haven't played in years. When they announced a new, revised edition (with Mike Pondsmith as a leading light, no less) I was all for it.
Cyberpunk 2020, for those who haven't played, can broadly be described as Metropolis plus Metropolis plus post-apocalypse, with a dash of William Gibson. Everything was shiny and new until it wasn't. Now you have to survive in a world where survival is the lesser of two evils. There are all kinds of fancy toys to make survival bearable - or at least achievable. Ultimately the larger question is, will you strive to make the world better, or bring the temple crashing down?
The game's credo could be boiled down to three sentences: style over substance, attitude is everything, and live on the edge. Cyberpunk wasn't about its mechanics. It was about its setting and its players, which made it significantly different from its peers. Its first edition was published in 1988; there was no Vampire then, nor was there a White Wolf, the big boy on the block was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and every other game system peeped about under its huge legs looking for dishonorable graves. Games then were all about stats, mechanics, dice; if you didn't have at least twenty complicated charts in the opening chapter, you couldn't call yourself an RPG.
Mechanically the old Cyberpunk was Skill plus Stat plus 1D10 versus a Difficulty number, and that Difficulty went up or down depending on circumstance and bonuses. Because of the sheer number of variables calculating that Difficulty could be tricky, particularly since you, as Referee, had to put it all together on the fly most of the time. However it wasn't a million miles away from the systems we use now in Gumshoe, where pool points plus 1D6 versus a Difficulty number means the vampires get you, or they don't. You can also have opposing rolls, where the enemy's die roll provides the Difficulty you have to beat, and if you don't you get smacked round the noggin. Or something along those lines.
The biggest difference, mechanically speaking, between Cyberpunk and the games that were published alongside it was this mechanic didn't really change, ever. No complicated tables. No feature creep. Whereas AD&D and Vampire made it their business to stuff in tables every other page and creep that feature with every new supplement; it was Dr. Strangelove on steroids, with new rules, new roles, new toys parachuted in all the time, everyone chasing the mineshaft gap.
If you bought a Cyberpunk supplement, on the other hand, you were getting about ten pages of setting and inspiration for every two pages of rules. Nor were these new character archetypes, new feats, new Disciplines. They were add-ons to the existing, changing little. You never had the Unearthed Arcana Cavalier problem, where some ill-thought-out idea dumped ten tons of heavily armed and armored horseshit into your campaign. If you pick up Home of the Brave, the US setting book, and start at the beginning there are about sixteen pages of text before you get to the first rules entry, and even that's just stats for an NPC - not new stats or new cyberware, just the basic stats everyone gets.
Artwise the old books - particularly the first ones - were pretty cheap. The cover was new color art, but the interior was, at best, pencil. Scattered among the pages were black & white photos meant to convey the setting through character portraits - i.e. the writers' buddies with shades on, or an old phone cord draped over their neck to look as if they were jacked into the network.
Now CD Projekt RED's working on a video game release due to arrive at some point in the next X decades, and while it does look cool I've no real desire to play it. When it comes to RPGs I prefer tabletop, or at least Discord chat.
Setting-wise the game is pretty much as it was before. Details have changed, but broadly speaking the world went to hell in a handbasket back in the 1990s, the Middle East gets nuked flat in 1997-ish, and corporations begin asserting their authority through armed conflict. This all comes to a head in the early 2020s with what the setting calls the Time of the Red, where thanks to a combination of unfortunate circumstances the skies go crimson for two years. Things trot merrily along from that neo-Biblical event, and by the time the game's present day rolls around the corporations aren't as powerful as they were, Europe's licking its wounds, the Highriders up in space have declared themselves an independent territory and backed up this claim with lethal force, and the (dis)United States are pulling themselves out of the rubble. More or less. The rest of the planet is just trying to catch a breath, thank you very much.
Yes, there are Artificial Intelligences. They don't like you. Move along, citizen.
Mechanically the game is very much as it was before. Skill plus Stat plus 1D10 versus a Difficulty number. This should make it easier to convert the old material to the new game, if you (like me) have a dozen or so of the old sourcebooks taking up space on your game shelf.
Netrunning was one of the big features of the old game, and both in terms of mechanics and style it worked a lot like those slightly ridiculous sci-fi movies did back in the day: more psychobabble than technobabble.
Which is what gave hacking its charm, really. I mean, who wouldn't want to live in a world where Toontown is a thing, and you can go there in person? Problem being, this made Netrunners all but a solo class. The Referee'd spend half an hour or so resolving the Runner's many actions while the rest of the team sat around eating cold pizza, trying not to chew their own arms off in frustration.
Well, Netrunning has changed - except not really. The NET is dead - except not really.
Mechanically it's the same as ever, broadly speaking. Stat plus Skill plus 1D10 versus Difficulty, or an opposed roll, depending on circumstances. The better a Runner you are, the more net actions you have and therefore the more things you can do when jacked in. The old system used more fuzzy logic than mechanics to resolve this, so the change is welcome.
Rather than enter some kind of fantasy land now the Runner puts on special glasses which allows them to see the real world's underlying technical architecture. The Runner has the choice between taking a Meat Action or as many Net Actions as her technical ability can provide. The language used, the ICE, is all much as it was before. That said, I suspect the old Netrunner solo game problem will rear its ugly head again, and the rest of the team will take a back seat while the Runner calls the play.
Without going through the whole shmear line by line, the Netrunning chapter - and most of the others - are a lot more rulesy than the old game. There are mechanics now where words were before. The rules are still pretty simple, but the ten page to two page ratio no longer applies.
Stats are broadly the same. The original had nine stats bought and paid for with a points system. This has ten stats which can be generated several different ways. Attractiveness is no longer a thing; DEX and Willpower are. Generally as with all things in the new system this is more rulesy than before, but much better organized and probably easier for new players to understand. It feels less player-facing and more dice oriented, which may be a problem if you or your players prefer player-facing games. But that's a flavor issue, and your mileage may vary.
The Agent is your new cell phone. The old game had a lot of 1980s-era tics; the cell phone, for one thing, was still a massive brick. The new game has 2020s tics, which probably means than when 2030 rolls along we'll all be having a quiet giggle at how quaint the Cyberpunk RED tech is. Be that as it may, your Agent controls your life. It's your public face. It manages the media you watch, the social media you participate in, speaks in a voice of your choosing and has whatever face you desire. I'm sure nothing but good can come from that.
There are still Data Terminals and Screamsheets, which means print media is still a thing in 2045. It all works a little differently than before, but fills the same function and can be accessed in broadly the same way. You can still buy kibble and guns, and they're still called kibble and guns. It's just that there are a lot more charts than there were before, so the Referee can determine most things by quick random roll. I suspect, as is the fate of most charts, once the Referee gets used to the system the charts will be ignored and the Referee will just decide on the fly what's available when.
Of course cyberware's a big thing in this game. What are you, some kind of fruit loop? Moreover it works pretty much as it always has. Buy tech toys, install tech toys, watch your Humanity melt away. Install too much and your brain goes bye-bye. But you have to install something, or you'll be at a disadvantage when the booster gangs come knocking on your coffin lid. So what's the harm? Everyone does it ...
While the list in the main book feels a little short, it is the main book. The old game had God alone knows how many supplements and Chrome books to add new Cyber. This is about the same list as before, with perhaps a few additions and subtractions.
Since I touched on art, I should mention that the new book is (naturally) much prettier than the old one. More color inserts for one thing, and some of the new art is really gorgeous. It lacks the stylistic certain something of, say, Vampire the Masquerade; it feels a little paint-by-numbers, but that's the thing with a stylistic choice. People aren't always going to see it the same way. It's pretty, functional, and clean. So it works.
You know what I miss the most, oddly enough?
In the old book there was a bit of short fiction, Never Fade Away. It doubled as an introductory scenario, in that it provided stats for every NPC and potential PC, goons both basic and advanced, and so on. It was brief, to the point, and it did the job by conveying not only the plot but also the style and sensibility of the average game.
That's not how the new game operates. Sure, Never Fade Away is there along with other bits of fiction, like Black Dog. They don't fill the same dual function of being both a starter scenario and mouthpiece for the setting. It's a personal thing; I liked the other way, and now there's a new way. Such things are bound to happen.
Still, I miss it. Mike Pondsmith makes a point of saying in the introduction that his difficulty was balancing the need to keep ' Cyberpunk Cyberpunk, while at the same time moving the timeline forward and clearing out the deadwood. I also had to make the new version fit not just a tabletop roleplaying game but a AAA videogame title too.' When I first saw this game it was new, fresh, exciting, completely different from any other tabletop title of its day. It had bold ideas, like ditching mechanics for setting and style, using its fiction as an introductory game springboard. It's still great, but it's not new. It could never have been new. New was more than thirty years ago.
Scores on the doors. Is this worth getting?
If you're new to the system and looking for a Cyber good time, sure. This does what a main book is supposed to do: provide a simple introduction to the rules, and an advanced understanding of the setting and game philosophy. It's pretty to look at and explains itself clearly. It's solid.
If, like me, you already have a weighty chunk of the old stuff, some of this will feel like old ideas warmed over. That's inevitable; this is the core book, after all. It's going to have to cover ground you've already travelled a dozen times before. It's not talking to you. It's talking to the new player.
The new lore, the new Net, the updated mechanics are still worth the price of admission. I'm not sure I'd buy physical, mind you. The .pdf is fine by me, and that's not just because getting things shipped anywhere is a huge problem these days.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have boosters to kill, places to be ...
