Cyberpunk 2020. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time. Never actually played it — who does have time to play all the RPGs that one sees?* — but I mucked about with character creation with a friend’s copy. I mostly was trying to get a feel for it in relation to the Paranoia adventure Alice Through The Mirrorshades, which was a crossover adventure between the two systems. Don’t ask me why they felt the need to do that; gaming during my college years got weird, especially when it came to the campaign worlds that confidently expected the Soviet Union to be around in the future.
I have to wonder, though — and I should have thought about this before — since Cyberpunk 2077 will eventually be a thing**, then they’re probably going to finally do a new edition of Cyberpunk 2020. That makes sense, right? I mean, they’re going to want a RPG tie-in with the video game anyway. Which might explain why the Bundle of Holding is dropping: get people interested in the new game.
[pause]
I hope.
Moe Lane
*I’m sure that there are people out there with the kind of unnatural willpower needed to accomplish that feat, but I am not one of them.
**:Gritted teeth: Eventually.
I just realized how close to 2020 we are.
I feel old.
Look on the bright side: the pessimists were hysterically bad at predicting how bad things would get, weren’t they?
There was a third edition of Cyberpunk after 2013 and 2020 and Cybergeneration. It was… not good. One “feature” was getting rid of the art and instead taking photos of Barbie dolls dressed in Cyberpunk attire. That was probably the highlight of that version.
.
However, this bundle does contain “Rache Bartmoss’s Guide” which is one of the first sourcebooks that ooozes style and kinda helped start the whole splatbook thing in the early 90s. It also has “Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads” which really is one of the best GM advice books out there.
Huh. I never knew that Army of Darkness quote was a shout-out.
I own it. There are some interesting setting ideas in it, but the artwork was pretty notorious. And keep in mind that I’ve never actually run it, so I don’t know how it might have turned out in actual play.
But there are some neat ideas.
I’ve got the main book and a few supplements. It oozes style, I’m not sure just how playable it is [like, how exactly does a rock star go on an adventure with some of these other guys?] I kind of want to get it just to round things out. Dunno.
That’s the insidious lure of PDFs. You can grab all the stuff, because it won’t actually add more clutter to the house.
… and if you make a point of buying the larger capacity cell phone, it won’t even hurt *that* .. very much ..
.
Mew
For shame! There are always things to do!
The original adventure hook idea in the Cyberpunk rulebook (in the original rulebook, that came in a box – it might not have been in the later 2020 rulebook) detailed how rocker Johnny Silverhand ended up in lots of trouble because of his girlfriend, who was secretly the super programmer who had developed a particularly nasty piece of ice (anti-hacker software). Said girlfriend was kidnapped by one of the mega-corps (Arasaka, iirc, though I could be wrong).
Additionally, artist-types are usually depicted as anti-corporate people (unless they’re sell-outs, of course). So a rocker would make a good figurehead for a team’s long-term crusade against a particular corporation.
I’m sure Mike Pondsmith (the owner of R. Talsorian Games, which owns the Cyberpunk IP) wants to release a Cyberpunk 2077 rulebook.
Unfortunately, this is R. Talsorian Games that we’re talking about. They had a kickstarter for Mekton Zero (Mekton being quite possibly the best giant robot RPG every created). The estimated date of delivery was March, 2014.
Need I say more?
I like the company’s products. Mekton and Cyberpunk and very near and dear to me. And once upon a time they were a fairly prolific publisher. But more recently…
(note that I did not back the kickstarter, and so don’t have access to the updates being posted there; but the Facebook page only gets updated sporadically, and most of the updates there aren’t particularly confidence-inducing)