INHUMAN 0: A Cyberpunk RPG


I started a Cyberpunk Red campaign last year on a whim while it was my hyperfixation of the month. I threw myself into prep, taking notes on the factions, districts, and NPCs of Night city. I helped my players expand the lifepath system into elaborate backstories for their grungy little blorbos, which I then used connected a red-string board to reverse-construct a grand Militech conspiracy that happened to overlap with Arasaka family drama during their first mission. The PCs took their MacGuffin and DMPC to the Afterlife, and snuck out just as the sun was rising and a hit squad was coming for them. And then my wedding was coming up, and a pause turned into an indefinite hiatus when another game came out of hiatus. We only played two proper sessions, but I look back on them very fondly. Those were some of the most kick-ass sessions I've ever run as a GM.

They also made me never want to run Cyberpunk Red again.

The combat was janky and slow, proceeding at a 5e speed but without gimmicky features and tactical decision making to keep it interesting, or OSR-style high-stakes lethality. The provided GM tools, preparing a daisy chains of fast and slow scenes for PCs to flow through, is so railroady that I couldn't bring myself to even try it. And the enemy stat blocks were so condensed that I had to pause the game repeatedly to even parse how they worked. Why is cyberware presented like a fucking ingredients list?

Even outside of combat, I found so many of the little things lacking. Netrunning is siloed off into a little minigame that the GM has to prep ahead of time, which means you can't just hack someone's brain and induce a seizure. Treating AI agents as background fluff that you can easily ignore makes sense from an 80s sci-fi perspective, but feels lackluster in today's polarized world. A lot of the tech felt kind of abstract, and the descent into cyberpsychosis is so controlled as to be not scary, like if you chose when to roll for Sanity in Call of Cthulhu.

Night City is an extraordinary setting, backed by 40 years of supplements and a an open-world video game. But the system just doesn't do it for me. I want combat to be fast and visceral, like the bodies in Akira collapsing into red mush as they're mowed down by machine guns. I want my eye sockets to burn for weeks after I install my kiroshi eye implants. I want it to matter if I connect to the corporate tower's NET through a wireless signal or a hardwire in my wrist. I want to feel fucking terrified that I am losing my mind as I become more chrome than meat, but keep adding new hardware anyways because I need it to keep up as a little fish in a big city.

I want to update the worldbuilding with today's understanding of AI, brain chips, and nanobots. These things already exist, and the rate of pace of change is only increasing. It feels like the opportunity to talk about the current state of the world is slipping away from me as it innovates faster than I can write about it. I want to do what Mike Pondsmith did in his time, today! Drop some of the nostalgia and think forward to how superintelligence and the singularity can all go so wrong (it's not hard...)

And I want to sink my teeth into many of the themes that this game just dances around. In a world with fully replaceable bodies and hovering usernames and pronouns, how does gender ideology change (and how does it stay frustratingly the same?) Do engrams get to vote? How do megacorps exploit the tightly restricted NET to make your life worse? How does every person having their own AI agent that can hack and code change cybersecurity at the bodega?

Lastly, I want to straight-up steal from all sorts of sci-fi post apocalyptic dark futures, serial numbers and all. Smash Replicants and Blade Runners in with brain chips and the Matrix and e-girl thirst traps. What do I care? This isn't ever going to be published. And disrespecting IP is punk!

In the 9 months since I started down this rabbit hole, I've written a lot of it down, but I have a lot more floating around in my head. Since waiting to finish a project before posting about it means that I never post, I will explore my solutions to each of these topics one step at a time. These are rough drafts. They don't all quite fit together yet. They certainly haven't been playtested. But I think I'm onto something here.

INHUMAN 1: You are two (sharing your brain with an AI)

INHUMAN 2: Core mechanics

INHUMAN 3: The world is unfair (punk needs something to rebel against!)

INHUMAN 4: An updated lifepath

INHUMAN 5: Implants shall splinter!

INHUMAN 6: Netrunning as dungeon crawling

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