RPG Review - Cyberpunk red
Cyberpunk Red by R. Talsorian
RATING
Ease of Play: 4 of 5 stars. Pretty easy to grasp after one session and flexible enough that you can accomplish most things your character could do in this setting without having to jerry-rig something. Netrunning is the sole exception, which will be covered more below.
Ease of GMing: 4 of 5 stars. With a plethora of source material and an easy to learn system GMing is both easy and enjoyable - except for Netrunning. Unless you’re running an all-Netrunner group you essentially have to run two encounters; one within the machine, one without. It tends to take everyone a bit out of the game and really slows things down.
Originality: 5 of 5. I mean, it’s Cyberpunk. It’s essentially the original cyberpunk genre rpg. Deeply inspired by things like Blade Runner & Ghost in the Shell, it consolidated the cyberpunk genre of the 80s and early 90s into what became the archetype of the genre. Often imitated, rarely matched.
Freedom: 5 of 5. Night City is a harsh and wild mistress. Popular media of the day says if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, and the game plays it as such. You can do a lot in Night City - but not without consequence. Piss off the gangs, you’ll get jumped. Piss off the corpos, and you might be getting a visit from Adam Smasher.
Price Point: 4 of 5Like many thick ‘n’ hearty core rulebooks, Cyberpunk Red has a price to match at $84.99 through us. But! This is an absolutely jam-packed, high quality rulebook, well worth the price point. Plus, the officially-endorsed Cyberpunk Red Companion app is an absolute treat. A free app that lets you perfectly store, alter, level up, and track your character? Yes please.
TOTAL SCORE: 23/25
Imagine - you are in 1998 and you dream of the future. Not the pristine and cheery silver utopia of past ideals like The Jetsons and Star Trek. No, you see the writing on the wall. Corporations are invading into daily life more and more. Senseless, profit-driven wars and violence in the streets dominate the news. Media is all. Oh yes, there is darkness in the future if things continue going this way. Thankfully, there’s an RPG perfect for you. An RPG that perfectly encapsulates and satirizes this future. A future in the far-flung year…of 2013.
Thankfully, in the farther-flung year of 2026, our RPGs have evolved along with us. To this end, that gritty, neon-dappled future once foreseen in the original Cyberpunk has become the wildly popular Cyberpunk Red, along with other media properties like Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077. Yes, the genre is alive and well today, in no small part to its eerie precognition of things to come.
The setting, for those uninitiated, is the year 2045. You play as an Edgerunner, someone living on the fringes of society in Night City, USA. The timeline diverges from the real-world timeline around the 1980s, with a series of global wars and coups that drastically shift the power balance. Japan and Europe become global megapowers, much of the world is eaten up in nuclear fire, and the few remaining habitable zones are typically ruled over by hyper-capitalistic megacorporations. Edgerunners scrape out a living in Night City any way they can, while trying to retain at least a shred of their humanity in a world grown increasingly inhuman.
The playstyle is quite simple and easy to learn, a d10 base style called the Interlock system. You fill up your stats, add them to your rolls, and try very hard not to die. Night City won’t make that easy. You’re given a plethora of classes to play as - from the modern bardic Rockerboy to the jack-of-all-trades Fixer, capitalistic Corpos, heavy-hitting Solos, mechs, medtechs, and much more. I personally chose to play as a hard-partying, dumb as a stump Rockerboy and I loved every minute of it. You also chose a “Handle”, the alias your character goes by on the streets. Names? We don’t need no stinkin’ names!
The only major hiccup we encountered during our play was Netrunning. Netrunners are characters that hack into computer systems and use their skills to disable, modify, or outright kill security systems, monitors, and so on. It’s an extremely cool mechanic…that is an absolute slog to get through for both players and GMs. As all the events of Netrunning occur in cyberspace, it completely removes a character from the situation the other characters are encountering in many ways. The GM essentially has to run a side-mission entirely for the Netrunner.
This aside, we’ve enjoyed our sojourn into Night City. It’s fun to be a playboy Rockerboy with a big attitude and a big…guitar. It’s fun to say “fuck the man” and go in guns a-blazing against some corpo shills. Heck, it’s even fun to scrabble for odd jobs in Night City, because there’s always something to be done for Eurodollars in Night City. True, there are things that hit a bit closer to home than was probably predicted back in 1998. What was satire in the 90s becomes harsh reality in 2026. Who knows what Night City will bring in 2065? 2080? Beyond? Whatever it is, I’ll be willing and eager to roll up a character for it.