How do I make my game cyberpunk as fuck? Not post-cyberpunk crap, I want that good 90s shit

For the music I recommend Synthwave artists like Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, VHS Glitch, Tokyo Rose, Megadrive, Power Glove, Noir Deco

Or you just choose to listen to some cyberpunk music like Front 242 instead.

Or Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and Front Line Assembly.

Front 242 is old-school EBM
Or you just choose digital hardcore

Poverty and drugs everywhere.

Or Japanoise like Merzbow or Violent Onsen Geisha.

Trying to post cyberpunk music without mentioning KMFDM or Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Are we even trying?

Try findin a more cyberpunk artist than Hanatarash (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanatarash).

Protip: You can't.

>how to not by cyberpunk as fuck

in other news:
youtube.com/watch?v=athjskaqAQk

This intro was badass as fuck. Thanks for posting it.

>Cyberpunk
>90s

Don't get what you're trying to say, friend.

I'd say fantasy elements can work just fine in Cyberpunk contexts, take a gander at Cybernetics Guardian, that anime is very cyberpunk and yet has a lot of fantasy elements to it(although one could argue that the supernatural elements are merely Psychic phenomenon with a mystical coating)

also it has a kickass soundtrack courtesy of the 80's J-Metal band Trash Gang;

youtube.com/watch?v=IacgoGWOi5M

I do not know that anime you're referring to, so I cannot argue competently concerning this input. My 'guide' was meant to be a quick and dirty way imagining/developing a cyberpunk setting/world without trying what usually goes horribly wrong: incorporating fantasy elements or standards into a scifi-setting with a heavy cyberpunk tone. (Because normally this produces embarrassing abominations like shadowrun and the like.)

If by fantasy you mean ghosts, demons or psychic powers, then it's ok. If you mean hobbits, dragons and cockatrix, then you're wrong.

It's the other way around, user. You could try to play with ideas like ghosts-in-the-net, psionic powers developing from highly advanced technological influences on biology of men, even undeads in the sense of a humans unnaturally being kept alive by harmful sinister technology. This all is because there is a conceptual bridge which leads from dark+gritty together with high tech/low life to the mentioned ideas. No bridge leads from there to hobbits, dragons or magic.

I dunno, I'd say a Dragon could work in a cyberpunk context, although less like how Shadowrun handled them, and more like an actual monster, an extremely deadly predator forged from flesh and steel by some immoral laboratory that's been let loose on the streets to showcase it's abilities to potential buyers

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly. Darkness, ghosts, flickering lights, psychic powers, and demons can be incorporated pretty well in a cyberpunk setting. Gnomes, hobbits, owlbears and dragons on the other hand will universally suck in a cyberpunk setting (best example is SR).

We are on the same side then. Well, to be clear: I believe it can be done, but this nonetheless makes results in a very special kind of cyberpunk setting I hardly would call the industry standard.

I disagree about Dragons not being able to work, but that's if you avoid sapient Dragons like Shadowrun

heck look at Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, the titular Blood Dragons are pretty much how I'd see dragons fitting into a Cyberpunk setting

Those combinations are mostly found in Japanese cyberpunk fiction:

Cyberpunk with ghosts: Cyber City Oedo 808
Cyberpunk with demons: Twilight of the Dark Master, Cyber City Oedo 808
Cyberpunk with psychic powers: Akira, Cyber City Oedo 808, Angel Cop
Cyberpunk with general weird stuff: Tetsuo, 964 Pinocchio, Serial Experiments Lain

ITT: Style over substance suggestions.

The core of Cyberpunk is its dystopia of unscrupulous corporations bending the world to their will. Cyberpunk is a genre that sprung forth from mounting environmental crises, corporatism replacing colonialism and imperialism, and the fear of new technology immediately being put to use to control the masses.

Cyberpunk means working stiffs cutting off their arms to get a prosthesis (on lease) that will net them a 5% raise. Cyberpunk is a world that passes on the costs to you in order to line the coffers of InterCorp X. A world where the middle class has been largely phased out in favour of increased means of coercion and ownership of the individual. You can present that shit in any light you want, as long as it's there.

And the characters are punks. Not heroes. They can't really change any of this shit, just escape from it. If they do shit right. Honestly, idealistic wish fulfillment cyberpunk makes me puke and defeats the entire purpose of the genre. if the players defeat the megacorp, rescue the girl or guy, and retire peacefully, it's not Cyberpunk.

Far Cry isn't 1990's cyberpunk. It's a parody of how people from the 2010's imagined 1980's cyberpunk and action flicks to be. It shares about as many things in common with classic cyberpunk fiction as Monty Python's Life of Brian shares with the ancient Palestine/Judea.

and they tend to be more interesting than a lot of western Cyberpunk stuff(too much of it leans into the nitty gritty depressing aspects and end up not being enjoyable at all)

>And the characters are punks. Not heroes. They can't really change any of this shit, just escape from it. If they do shit right. Honestly, idealistic wish fulfillment cyberpunk makes me puke and defeats the entire purpose of the genre. if the players defeat the megacorp, rescue the girl or guy, and retire peacefully, it's not Cyberpunk.
don't really see the point of doing Cyberpunk in an interactive fiction context(whether /v/ or Veeky Forums related) when you put it like that, makes it feel pointless in that context

but then I'll admit my interest in Cyberpunk is like 99% from a aesthetics aspect

eh most classic Cyberpunk fiction would be terrible in an RPG context, it's telling that CP 2020 and Shadowrun, the two most popular Veeky Forums CP settings are ones that go for more fun and less serious concepts

The point is that Cyberpunk is a dystopic genre, and it immediately stops being a dystopic genre when the characters lift the veil of that dystopia.

Fixing everything wrong in the world is wish fulfillment. What you want is a more personal story. Someone wiping out their debt, so they are no longer pursued by corporate cyberninjas. Someone getting revenge on that middle management prick who demoted him down to wage slave class. Or just gathering enough money to move out of the ghetto and never have to do your shopping with a machine pistol in your pocket anymore.

The triumphs in stories like this tend to be small and personal. Have you ever seen Brazil? Because that's what tends to happen to idealists in way over their heads. I suppose some of these desires stem from the people who fashioned themselves "punks" in the 80's, chaining themselves to fences or getting into fights with skinheads, never realizing they were sanctioned by the system from the very start.

And that honestly might be a cool theme for a Cyberpunk campaign. Who's a sanctioned punk, and who's a real one?

They're also the two halfway decent systems available.

>Cyberpunk means working stiffs cutting off their arms to get a prosthesis (on lease) that will net them a 5% raise.

Is Borderlands cyberpunk?

youtube.com/watch?v=BCTBTORXPeM

in crust we grind

I'm not saying fix everything(as even in more idealistic contexts that's an impossibility), just that larger scale victories are possible

of course part of this comes down to how broad or narrow one's personal definition of Cyberpunk is, and mine is pretty broad

youtube.com/watch?v=plAr3adKbyc
meh meng

Borderlands has some Cyberpunk elements.

But what would a large scale victory be? Cyberpunk settings tend to be defined by how all-encompassing the setting is. It's a social commentary genre. I'd say a victory in Cyberpunk would be like in RoboCop. The corrupt person who wronged you (Ronnie Cox, also played Cohaagen in Total Recall, and Captain Jellico in TNG) is dealt with, and the corporation's power is retained by the CEO who is somewhat less shit. But Murphy is still a dystopian cyborg with no connection to his past, and Detroit is still owned by OCP. As is RoboCop. It's a downer ending with a small, personal triumph. But the grind goes on.

punks don't do elaborate prep work. they just wing the fuck out of a game. and cyberpunk is whatever the fuck you say it is.

Nah. Think Blade Runner - Deckard can't bring down a Megacorp like Tyrell, even though they're responsible for all this bullshit in the first place. Deckard "wins" by managing to escape the city with a Replicant he feels love for, even if she's not entirely real. In the original cinematic version, this means getting the girl and doing a runner with her. In the Director's Cut, there is the direct implication that Deckard is a Replicant himself, so being the last man standing and escaping with the girl becomes even more significant.

If OP really wants to get the 90's cyberpunk vibe, there is really only one visual reference.

You know it.

youtube.com/watch?v=a9V7rz2Dg7g

Shadowrun has as much to do with cyberpunk as it has with Dungeons and Dragons.

Please kill yourselfs. Idiots like you scare me

Dark motherfucking Conspiracy

i prefer continuing to bring more fear and misery into your life though. for example by pissing on what you think cyberpunk is and/or should be.

ITT: Millenials trying to be retro

Have any of you ever saw Back to the future 2? Rembember the bar scene, with the bar desperately trying to be all about 80s and failing miserably?
You are doing the same right now.

First of all, stop playing Shadowrun. That's the easiest way to getting into cyberpunk. Dunno, try CP2020 or 3rd ed GURPS supplements for Cybrpunk. Pick example scenario from them. Play them AS THEY ARE.
If they don't suit you, you don't want to play cyberpunk, you want to play theme park version, which is Shadowrun.

It wil never cease to amaze me how this is the only cyberpunk game still around, and mostly because it caters to D&D crowd, while getting less and less cyberpunk with each ed.

So, quite a bit of imitation and a desire to cash in on that gaming crowd?

Mate, I'm in my mid 30s. I've experienced cyberpunk hype first hand as a teen.
So please, tell me more how I'm imaginging what cyberpunk is, because some millenial played latest edition of Shadowrun once or twice and will now preach about it.

Shadowrun, back when it started, was literally D&D with hottest shit around. And that shit happend to be tail-end of cyberpunk craze.
Over the years, with each edition, more and more cyberpunk elements were cut, until it became Heist Job: The Fantasy RPG.
Having cyborgs, MegaCorps and seedy underworld doesn't make you cyberpunk.
But it does score points for being cheap imitation, that's for sure.

Play Beneath a Steel Sky.

Would revealing PetroChem's unsafe relocation of a whole bunch of toxic waste to the world at the end of the CP2020 scenario Camping Out count as a large-scale victory?

I never really figured how Blade Runner became the epitome of Cyberpunk influence. The book it's based on has zero Cyberpunk themes. It's quintessentially Dickian in that it deals with the nature of reality and empathy. The replicants aren't robots. They're biological constructs, virtually identical to human beings, hence the need for the tests.

Deckard also spurns the replicant girl, and goes back to his shitty wife and life, and she only shows up to toss his fake sheep off the roof, which is the thing he needed to hunt those replicants down to pay for, in order to keep up social appearances.

And then there's the whole deal with Mercerism, a religion based on artificial empathy with its prophet, of whom no-one really knows who he is.

Christ, you're a piece of work. Drop the edge, loser.

>some millenial played latest edition of Shadowrun once or twice and will now preach about it
fine with me and i am in my 40s. there is no cpunk authority, william gibson can kiss my ass. if some bold, uneducated kid wants to grab the whole genre by its jugular and bend it to its will, it has my blessing. go rape cyberpunk, rape it as hard as you can.

>Having cyborgs, MegaCorps and seedy underworld doesn't make you cyberpunk.
and what if I claim that this makes a setting cyberpunk and that your definition of cyberpunk is shit?

>I never really figured how Blade Runner became the epitome of Cyberpunk influence.
neon lights and a lack of other, good cyberpunkish movies

>I never really figured how Blade Runner became the epitome of Cyberpunk influence.
Aesthetics

The irony of this post is how this attitude basically killed CP by mid 90s

But user, there is no "my definition". There is a dictionary one.
What is this? 1984? And you are Big Brother, declaring what's right and what's wrong today?

good

oh, appealing to dictionaries now?
>>Having cyborgs, MegaCorps and seedy underworld doesn't make you cyberpunk.
>stories about future societies that are controlled by computer technology
close enough

>go rape cyberpunk, rape it as hard as you can.
So edgy.

Oh my god! They don't know what they have started.

oh, you have a word for it? good.

Seems to be a Law of Online Forums: you know when a cyberpunk thread has turned to 100% shit when everybody is arguing about the definition of cyberpunk & what is/isn't cyberpunk.

Post some cyberpunk maps, assholes.

Did you just wake up from you nap, grampa?

>Having Object A, B and C means they are in control
Flafless logic. Maybe you will now start the meme how we are living cyberpunk now?

>cyberpunk maps
Is that even a thing?

I mean any fucking metropolitan map can do, really. Just rename districts into number. Or give them names if you are French.

Futuristic-looking maps of any kind, with neon linework and shit. Or stylized extrusions, that kind of stuff.

I think he's more than aware what he started. Shame so many people fall for this.

Anyway, back to the topic:
How do you get your settings running, so there is always a medic to patch up your characters? Normally in similar game, but with regular modern world, that would be just back-alley doctor. How do you pull this in cyberpunk? I mean it's hard to have a back-alley doctor that makes a transplant for a kidney after you've got your own splattered all over the abdomen area.

...

Anyone here visit the Cyberpunk Forums?

cyberpunkforums.com/

Not shilling, I'm just a lurker there and it's a slow site but has some occasional links to new media I'd never heard of.

Corrupt hospital and clinic officials/doctors/nurses, I would imagine. Corruption is much higher in cyberpunk worlds, where even a doctor may be a wage-slave to some corporation. Look at how many doctors patch up narcos in Mexico. Threats work too.

And I would think in a cyberpunk world where they can make supermen with full body conversions growing a new custom kidney would be a mere few hours work.

I've lurk there too. Too much "MUH RETRO" for my taste.
It's funny how cyberpunk originally was over-the-top concept for a setting, but due to nostalgia factor and being mostly period related, it was recently cranked up beyond the scale with being EIGHTIES! and CLICHES! and ABSURDIDY!
Kind of how Fallout now is so over-the-top about 50s, while originally it was barely there.

What a cyberpunk setting would do with that is show the apathy people have been fed. Revealing that is a victory only in as far as the people who do it get people to notice and care about it.

In cyberpunk, the corps turn it around somehow and you're left with a bad taste in your mouth.

I'm more concerned about infrastructure required for that. So there is no big deal having a shop selling advanced prosthetics on each corner, but they are manufactured by some huge-ass factory on Moon or China or downtown Detroit, but those people are simply distributors of high-end supplier.

Original CP2020 had this problem with Trauma, which was basically a huge corporation that is somehow very eager to patch up messed up punks, solos and people that they could as easily set up for profit bigger than what they make via treatment.

This.

The entire point of cyberpunk is how your fight against The Man is lost before you even start, but at least you can show your own personal defiance instead being just another sheep in the crowd.
So your achievements are meaningless to the world and at best inconvinient for some corp, but that's all.

Having an impact is one of the core elements of post-cyberpunk, where world is no longer completely and utterly FUBAR

The assumption is that everyone has local 3D-manufacturing/fabricator capability for making almost everything short of nukes. Illegally, of course, but it's there.

Plus there's always a black market for wanted high-end parts and machinery. Ever wonder how Islamic terrorists get their hands on US SCAR rifles or SA-6 missiles? Same thing.

A wounded punk will pay through the nose for emergency treatment. That money is used to bribe middle men, even in megacorporations, and goes all the way to the supplier, many of whom are only too happy to make some side money. Look at all the counterfeiting shit that goes on in Chinese factories.

Trauma Team International doesn't patch up people. They come to get dying customers, cryo them, and deliver them to the nearest hospital who will do the patching and healing. And you better be flush because the hospital is unlikely to do anything until you or someone else can show them a debit card with a good balance or a corporate healthcare program card.

Which brings us back to the point - who does the patching?

See

Who does the patching mainly depends on who the characters are.

If they are poor gutterpunks, unless they have a medic in their team, they're going to die. If they are very lucky, they have a meditech who owns them a favor and might patch them up, this one time for free.

One the other hand, if the characters are elite corporate agents, they benefit from medevac and the corporation's own medical emergency facilities.

In between, you have the professional street ops who know the right people who can patch them up without alerting the cops. These will most likely be ripper docs operating underground clinics in the slum. They could also be corrupt doctors working in a hospital and not declaring gunshot wounds against payment.

at least read the quote in context, faggot: the claim was made that shadowrun isn't cyberpunk anymore
last time i checked SR's setting was still a world controlled by computer technology.

body clinics/chop shops are ubiquitous, especially in the barrens

you know realize that due to the prevalence of cyberware, there is a higher demand for cyberdoctors, which means there are more doctors (or body modification franchises) than today

check out the storefront at 0:43
youtube.com/watch?v=DvVjkqB3LH0

Well the way I see it Cyberpunk is composed of Cyber- eg, tech, networks, a connected world - and Punk, eg, the rebels, the miscreants, the criminals with hearts of gold, the ones sticking it to the man; especially since the man now watches everything, controls everything, deals with the lives of the poor like cards or dice in board rooms or government offices.

There's a general feel of tech having shat on everyone but the rich and their suckers. Eg, consider this - right now we have the capability to depose millions of truck drivers, their families, and the service jobs around them from pit-stop and gas station workers to cooks and waiters at the greasy spoon every other town, the whores and the suppliers of that thing the driver forgot all with self driving cargo trucks. Millions unemployed - thousands of settlements becoming ghost towns - all in a blink of an eye. And the government let it happen because they're in the corporate pocket which wants more efficiency and greater profit, workers be damned.

Now take a group of truckers or lot lizards or whatever in between - a trucker, a lot lizard, a cook, a small time merchant, all fucked over, working together to survive, some slipping into the underworld of crime which is flourishing in lieu of proper employment, and then they get the capability to, oh, I don't know, hack into a cargo cavaran, steal its shit or cause a major fuck up (either in the city running over the financial sector, or if they're more benign throwing them off a cliff in the middle of nowhere) just to stick it to the man or give them a warning that their tech, with the removal of a human touch, is much more fragile than it first appears.

That, I figure, is in the vein of cyberpunk. Not post cyberpunk, not solarpunk or dronepunk or whatever fuckingpunk, just good old cyberpunk.

>Not post-cyberpunk crap, I want that good 90s shit.
>posts nu synthwave arpeggiocore

The Earth is in grave trouble, Eliza

Good point. Seems that 2/3rds of the people in Cyberpunk 2020 are cybered to some extent, whether functionally or cosmetically.

Cyber clinics and chop-shops would be as common as low-grade car garages and mechanics are today. Maybe even as common as McDonald's.

AIs+robotics have put a lot of doctors and nurses out of work, so they work in the gray or black market.

>old fa/tg/uys having a hipster argument about who is more punk

loling out loud

>Decker

>prescriptivism
Fuck right off to the moon, you.

Punk died years before Green Day raped its corpse.

Speaking of it all, I always wonder how the fuck any cyberpunk setting that runs for more than two decades simply doesn't collapse completely.
I mean most of them make absolutely no sense, economy-wise. They are a modern equivalent of mercantilism - the harder you think about it, the more you realise it makes no fucking sense and is counter-productive. In the iconic works of the genre, at least that's somewhat adressed, but most of cyberpunk is either a cheap copy of Gibson or just lolsrandom with cybernetics... but somehow doesn't collapse from within.

Think about this. One of the most common cliches about cyberpunk settings (and by extension - biopunk):
MegaCorp Evil Inc. produced a disease for which they have a cure. Or just got a cure for some superplague. Instead of selling it to everyone for reasonable price, but due to huge-ass population, making sweet profit, they withhold the cure or even a relief pill fighting only simptoms or sell it for absurd price only to the richest... how is that making profit at all, if the main goal is to show them as greedy bastards?

Seriously, my biggest beef to cyberpunk usually boils down to how those settings don't make much sense internally and if the emphasis instead is on "coolness", it quickly turns to another Johnny Mnemonic.
For this reason, I just can't play Shadowrun, because it ends up with me getting angry at the setting and there is no other cyberpunk game around

>They are a modern equivalent of mercantilism
back to your rocking chair, krugman

honestly this is why I'd heavily downplay the "all controlling Megacorps" aspects of any Cyberpunk setting I'd use or make(they'd still be around and be important, but they aren't invincible or able to do anything they want without worrying about the consequences), or indeed a lot of the overly cynical concepts that are overused in the genre, really I'd basically treat it as the real world, just with a different tech level, and slightly different cultural priorities

Watch Blade Runner and Bubblegum Crisis 2033 and copy profusely.

>there is no other cyberpunk game around

Blue Planet, Nigga. Also a cyberpunk game that I think does the themes of cberpunk best

>fuck off /mu/

>ITT: No-one remembers Cybergeneration:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybergeneration