Description
The Cyberpunk 2020 RPG is the original roleplaying game of the dark future; a world of corporate assassins, heavy-metal heroes and brain burning cyberhackers, packed with cutting edge technology and intense urban action. Within this book, you’ll find everything you need to tackle the mean streets of the 2000s; in a game system that combines the best in realistic action and playability – the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG Interlock system.
The Corporations control the world from their skyscraper fortresses, enforcing their rule with armies of cyborg assassins. On the Street, Boostergangs roam a shattered urban wilderness, killing and looting. The rest of the world is a perpetual party, as fashion-model beautiful techies rub biosculpt jobs with battle armoured roadwarriors in the hottest clubs, sleaziest bars and meanest streets this side of the Postholocaust. The Future never looked so bad.
But you can change it. You’ve got interface plugs in your wrists; weapons in your arms; lasers in your eyes; bio-chip programs screaming in your brain. You’re wired in, cyberenhanced and solid state as you can take it to the fatal Edge where only the toughest and coolest can go. Because you’re CYBERPUNK.
chadderton79 (verified owner) –
My favourite setting and roleplay game. The setting has a classic Gibsonian cyberpunk feeling to the setting.
Combat is great, my first game in 1998 rapidly taught me the difference between D&D (the only other system I was familiar with) and Cyberpunk when a tooled-up Solo got splattered by a random gutterpunk due to a bad roll. The loss of the character instantly sold me on the setting as place where life is cheap and you can’t let your guard down for a second.
Netrunning is fantastically detailed, except that the level of detail provided is too deep to be used under many circumstances and can result in a “mini-adventure” slowing the plot for everyone else. As a positive the level of detail means that you can stage entire campaigns around groups of netrunners trying to crack datafortresses around the world (or in orbit). It’s fairly easy to make it more concise, and since the release of Cyberpunk Red I’ve adapted the simplified “elevator” system they use there for the majority of hacks.
Cyberpunk 2020 biggest drawback is that the game is quite messy. R.Talsorian’s books are often quite scattered when it comes to layout and it’s not unusual that rules require interpretation, outright replacing, and in some cases missing. The IP system is quite slow though and multipliers on skills can make it very prohibitive to increase them later. My advice is to pay attention to any teachers/sensei’s that you roll up in a lifepath as you can use them to generate 1-5 IP a week through tuition.
In my opinion the work of Mike Pondsmith has created the strongest of cyberpunk rpg settings.