"Cyberpunk " Topic

I love shadowrun and 2000 ad, but cyberpunk seems dead now. If you like it what's your flavor? Pink Mohawk or black trench coat? Noir or run and gun? 80s retro or futuristic slick? Gangs or corps?

Depends on what I'm doing.

For tabletop run and gun, pink mohawks vs. black trench coats, basically anything goes.

For role play more noir.

For media – comics, books or movies – the best thing I've seen was the first half dozen or so issues of Ghost Rider 2099. Great cyberpunk superhero story line.

Blade Runner meets Bubblegum Crisis

Deus Ex Human Revolution/Mankind Divided. For TTGs – sorta the Infinity vibe with more grit.

My game group seemed to have 2 flavors of Cyberpunk RPG campaigns (using Cyberpunk 2020): very gritty street level where the players are dirt poor and really scrabbling to survive, and then the "higher end" type where the players are serious ultra-tier professionals (usually with at least 1 full conversion borg) that usually did extractions or espionage. Really different game types and themes, and not so much the "street samurai sticking it to the corporates" type thing that is typical Cyberpunk fare.

I'm pretty open to every flavour, though for my vague tabletop plans, more run and gun. For an RPG (also an old CP2020 fan here), the techie/net side can be fun too.

New World Disorder by Precis Intermedia is the ruleset I have that seems to work best, though I'd love to see more expansions to it. What are others looking at?

It's interesting how cyberpunk has faded the real world has caught up (or passed) with a lot of the tech, though I supposed you could say a lot of spy and superhero movies are all really cyberpunk in terms of tech.

I love some cyberpunk roleplaying. More of a Deus Ex black trench coat fan, though pink mohawks certainly have their place!

Incidentally, I downloaded a new stat-free resource from DriveThruRPG yesterday – link

It's a city kit, consisting of table after table, for on-the-fly flavour generation and it's full of some beautiful up-to-date ideas and details. I'll be giving it it's first outing this weekend with my 2020 crew.

for roleplaying, I prefer a grittier setting than Infinity. But I really don't like Shadowrun's gutterpunk (probably because I'm barely scrabbling to survive right now, don't want to RP that, too).

Though I will point out that Infinity seems to be mostly showing the brighter side of the "Tale of Two Cities".

How could I forget "Snow Crash," it is the perfect cyberpunk setting.

Always have "was really nice to a stray dog before he disappeared" as a character background :-)

Thanks for that link, Todd Mcleister.

Defintely more noir / gutter-punk. Back in the day played Cyberpunk 2013/2020. No AV's for us we had an XV-15. And spent most of our time trying to keep the damn thing fueled, still the pilot managed to out fly a couple AV9's with it!

Of course there is a massive irony in all those 'gig-economy' cyberpunks living free of oppressive zaibastu who emplyed you cradle to grave while today many people would give quite alot for that kind of job security….

When growing up, it was basically Blade Runner, but for gaming, I tend to prefer the slick-but-corrupt style of Ghost in the Shell.

Pink mohawk 80's ^,^

I see CyberPunk as a state of mind that pervades all modern RPGs, so I don't require a particular visual style.

I last played CyberPunk 2020 in the 90s, but that rulebook taught me that basically every modern-era action movie can be seen through a CyberPunk lens. The rulebook lists "Die Hard" as a reference, for example.

Of course there is a massive irony in all those 'gig-economy' cyberpunks living free of oppressive zaibastu who emplyed you cradle to grave while today many people would give quite alot for that kind of job security…

Yeah. Though you need to live in Japan for a bit to realize just how oppressive the lifetime employment zaibatsu actually are. Heard the horror stories of Amazon? Where you are expected to answer work emails at 2am, and getting a phone call at 2:15am if you haven't answered that email yet?

Imagine that, PLUS not being allowed to leave work before the boss does. Which goes all the way up to the company president. VPs can't leave before the Pres does. Senior Managers can't leave before their VP does. Junior Managers can't leave before their Senior Manager does. Joe Employee can't leave before their Junior Manager does. So Joe Employee can't leave work before 10pm. And then you must spend off-work time socializing with your co-workers, so if you're lucky you get home by the last train at 1am. If you're not lucky, you have to spend the night in a coffin hotel by the train station.

A buddy of mine worked for a pretty big Japanese company.

His view was that while things are changing veeeery slowly, there's still an emphasis on spending hours at work, without really getting that much done and people spending 12 hour days doing basically 8 hours of work.

CeruLucifus 07 Jan 2017 11:41 a.m. PST:

I see CyberPunk as a state of mind that pervades all modern RPGs

No idea about RPGs, but cyberpunk certainly is under the hood of a lot of modern ("postcyberpunk") science fiction literature. It just doesn't stick out any more like it used to back in the Neuromancer days.

"… The street found its own uses for things …"

Current state of the genre isn't the same one as your daddy's one. That said, I do love me some 2020 (Shadowrun had too much of the elfs and other pointy eared folk in it).

That said, I did do a write up on Seattle for 2020, where the bigger gangs were all into cosmetic work and looked like elves, orks and stuff. Poking the SR bear with a stick, so to speak. Was funny, because max mike had just moved to there.

I did the same thing. Assumed body mods would start making people into fantasy and sci fi races. Why just cosplay as an elf or klingon when you can body mod into one