Cyberpunk (role-playing game)

Cyberpunk 2020
	The cover of cyberpunk 2020 2nd edition
Designers	Mike Pondsmith
Publishers	R. Talsorian Games
Publication	1990
Genres	Science fiction, Cyberpunk
Systems	Interlock System

Cyberpunk 2020 is a cyberpunk role-playing game written by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games.

Overview

Based on the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and other authors of the "mirrorshades group". The game includes a number of elements now associated with the 1980s, such as the idea of "style over substance" and glam rock. The fictional timeline also includes some notable omissions such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the adoption of cell phones as the preferred mode of communication.

The game tends to emphasize some aspects of the source material more than others, with much attention being paid to combat, high tech weaponry and cybernetic modification, while both performance enhancing and recreational drug use is either played down or discouraged, and Artificial Intelligence, genetic engineering, and cloning barely mentioned.

The range of characters players can adopt is very diverse, ranging from hardwired mercenaries with psycholinked weapons and boosted reflexes, to Armani-wearing corporate mega-yuppies who make and break national economies with the stroke of a pen.

The game setting has been licensed twice for a collectible card game. The first time for Richard Garfield's Netrunner, published by Wizards of the Coast in 1996, and later for Cyberpunk CCG published by Social Games.

Cyberpunk 2013

Cyberpunk 2020 is the second edition of the original game, Cyberpunk 2013, often just called "Cyberpunk." It was originally published as a boxed set in 1988, and R. Talsorian released a few supplements for this edition, including Rockerboy, Solo of Fortune, and Hardwired, the latter based on the Walter Jon Williams novel of the same name.

The second edition featured rules updates and changes, and additionally moved the timeline forward by 7 years, from 2013 to 2020.

Game Mechanics

The basic rules system of Cyberpunk 2020 (called the Interlock System) is skill-based instead of level-based, with players being awarded points to be spent on their skill sets. New skills outside their expertise can be learned but in-game time needs to be spent on this. A large part of the system is the player characters' ability to augment themselves with cyber-technology and the ensuing loss of humanity as they become more machine than man.

Cyberpunk 2020 lends itself to play in the street level, dark film noir genre, although certain aspects of the basic system can make game sessions devolve into a high body-count, 1980s action movie style.

Although each player must choose a character class or "role" from those given in the basic rules, there is enough variation in the skill system so that no two members of the same class are alike. Because Cyberpunk 2020 is skill-based, the choice of skills around the class-specific special ability allows a wide range of character development choices including non-combatants.

The combat system, called Friday Night Firefight, emphasizes lethality. No matter who the character is, a single bullet can result in a lethal wound. This encourages a more tactically-oriented and sneaky game play, which is accordance to the rough-and-gritty ethos of the Cyberpunk genre. Also, the amount of damage a character can sustain does not increase as the character develops. The only way a character can become more damage resistant is to either become better at not being hit, physically augment their body with armour or muscle or wear armour.

The World of Cyberpunk 2020

Cyberpunk 2020, as the name implies, takes place in North America in the year 2020. The game's default setting is the fictional Night City located between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the west coast of the United States. Later supplements to the game have contained information about the rest of the US and the world.

Following a vast socio-economical collapse and a period of martial law, the United States government has had to rely on several megacorporations to survive. This has given them a veritable carte blanche to operate as they will.

The Megacorporations

Arasaka, a Japanese zaibatsu conglomerate whose megalomaniacal CEO wishes to realize his dream of Japanese world power.
Biotechnica, an Italian biotechnology, pharmacology, and cybernetics firm.
Eurobusiness Machines (EBM), an information technology corporation (an obvious nod towards IBM).
Kendachi, a Japanese armament company.
Merril, Asukaga & Finch, financial analysts. Quite probably an allusion to Merrill Lynch
Microtech, a computer and electronics manufacturer.
Militech, American arms and mercenary contractor.
Mitsubishi-Sugo, a major transportation manufacturer.
Petrochem, an energy company.
SovOil, a neo-Soviet oil giant, controlling a vast percentage of the petrochemicals market
Zetatech, a computer, cyberdeck, robotics, and cybernetics manufacturing company.

Sequels

Cybergeneration

Cybergeneration is a follow-up to the original Cyberpunk 2020 game. It is set 7 years after Cyberpunk 2020, in the year 2027, and is considered an "alternate" universe (independent of the general Cyberpunk timeline, see V3 below). Cybergeneration is heavily dependent on the concepts and application of nanotechnology. A nano-plague is mutating and morphing the youth of society, driving them underground, as society dramatically fears their capabilities and differences. "Cybergen" was originally published as a supplement for Cyberpunk, but later re-released as a fully featured game in its own right.

Cyberpunk 203X

Ever since the 1998 release of the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook Firestorm: Shockwave, fans of the game had been awaiting for a third edition of the Cyberpunk game, known as Cyberpunk 203X. Over the years, the entire project had at times been discounted as vaporware, its delays due to other projects and Pondsmith's involvement in the development of The Matrix Online.

The game was released first in PDF form on December 17, 2005 and as a conventional book on January 15, 2006 to generally disappointed reviews, which criticised the monochromatic presentation and artwork which was largely based around posed action figures. Later reviews of the game have been somewhat more favorable.

The setting has been heavily updated from its last event book series, Firestorm, which covered the opening of the Fourth Corporate War. The aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War has resulted in widespread corruption of the Net and major losses of hardcopied data, to the point that all data is intangible and recent recorded history is in doubt. An example that pops up in Pondsmith's demos at conventions, releases on the Internet, and in the finished game is that history has become so corrupted that many people in the world now believe Richard Nixon, instead of resigning over Watergate, committed suicide on camera and that memes such as the moon landing being hoaxed become prevalent.

The war has also lead to the collapse of nations, the world economy, and many of the staple megacorporations. This civil upheaval leads to the rise of the altcults, alternative cultures similar in vein to the phyles from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. In fact, Cyberpunk V.3 has more to do with the new postcyberpunk literary movement and transhumanism than with the Gibson-Sterling mirrorshades movement.

In addition to rules changes to the Fuzion system and background, the Cyberpunk V.3 also uses concepts taken Pondsmith's experience at Microsoft with computer and video games as well as corporate culture, such as a faster and simpler character generation system using templates, web-based active content URL links for updates, and making groups, organizations, and corporations their own "characters".

The Altcults

Corpore Metal or Cee-Metal - a society of full-body cyborgs.
Desnai' - Disneyworld-like series of amusement park arcology that strive to shelter themselves from the anarchy outside their walls and run heavily on automation.
Edgerunners - the descendants of the anti-corporation cyberpunk movement.
Reef - an undersea community whose members are heavily genetically modified to survive in the ocean.
Riptide Confederation - a flotilla of Japanese floating cities that were cut off from Japan following a nuclear civil war inside the country.
Rolling State - the descendants of the Nomad families in Cyberpunk 2020, who now use advanced nanotechnology and megatechnology to create land-based mobile cities.

In addition, there is also the Fallen Angels, space-bound scavengers, the Ghosts, people who have uploaded their minds, and the Neo-Corps, the surviving corporations of the CP2020 world that are now organized in the form of organized crime syndicates. However, the six listed above are the only ones that have been mentioned in deep detail.

Meta-Characters

The game's backstory had a series of powerful characters that influenced the world of Cyberpunk.

"Good Guys"

Johnny Silverhand: An idealistic Rockerboy singer and guitarist with a silver-chrome cyberlimb arm who opposes Arasaka for a grocery list of personal grudges from the loss of his arm to the death of many of his close friends and family. He is Morgan Blackhand's younger brother and Alt's ex-boyfriend. He also was in the band Samurai with base guitarist and singer Kerry Eurodyne and keyboardist Bes Isis. Samurai broke up after Silverhand created the the Arasaka Riot of 2013 to cover Alt Cunningham's fatal run on the Arasaka Towers arcology in Night City.
Kerry Eurodyne: A flashy Rockerboy who sold out rather than live on the run like his former bandmate Johnny Silverhand.
Bes Isis: A talented musician and technician, Bes was often caught between Johnny Silverhand and Kerry Eurodyne in their ego conflicts and personal feuds, but she continued to work with both of them on their various projects.
Morgan Blackhand: A pragmatic Solo with an anodised black-chrome cyberlimb arm who often helped his little brother Johnny out in his personal vendetta on Arasaka. He supposedly died in 2024 while battling the Arasaka full-conversion cyborg Adam Smasher atop Arasaka Towers, when Smasher's sabotaged atomic pile went critical, vaporizing the arcology and contaminating much of downtown Night City with lethal fallout.
Alt Cunningham: A brilliant Netrunner and programmer, she invented Soulkiller, a program that would make a digital copy of a netrunner's mind, allowing a Sysop to interrogate it at will. Arasaka stole it and made a more deadly version that would simultaneously fry the netrunner's mind. They used it on Alt when she tried to hack the Arasaka Towers arcology's system defenses, but her digital "ghost" broke free into the Net. She is believed to have "died" in the Net Crash of 203X.
Rasche Bartmoss: The most brilliant (and paranoid) hacker in the Net, Rasche was finally flatlined by a lucky Arasaka Sysop. Fortunately he had top-of-the-line life support to maintain him. Unfortunately, he was too paranoid to trust anyone with his location. He spent a decade or so in cryogenic freeze until he finally passed away in 203X, but his "final death" triggered off waves of system-crashing viruses he had hidden all over the Net. This destroyed the Net and fried any Netrunner who was jacked in at the time. He is the "narrator" of the Guide to the Net and Brainware Blowout sourcebooks (postumously edited by supreme hackerette Spider Murphy).

"Bad Guys"

Saburo Arasaka: The devious head of the diversified Arasaka Corporation, which not only dominates most of the Third World (including America), but also Japan. He has united factions of the Japanese government, the military, organized crime and various lesser corporations under his control. Some have begun calling this era in history the "Arasaka Shogunate".
Doctor Dreff: A psychotic programmer and neurophysiologist that invented the Zombie and Liche programs. He opposes Alt.

Novels

Two Cyberpunk 2020 novels have been published, both written by Stephen Billias:

The Ravengers (1995)
Holo Men (1996)

External links