Hey Veeky Forums
I've been talking to some of my friends to play Cyberpunk 2020 with some tweaks, like banning Solos and Netrunners for our first campaign.
Where can I get good campaign sources? I'll be the GM and some ideas for quests / side quests. By now, I've thought about two, one involving terrorists and a project that looks some what like Fight Club's Project Manhattan and one involving a drug that is basically crocodile.
Any ideas are appreciated
Those sound pretty good.
The core rulebook has a bunch of great adventure ideas too.
I can't recall the name, but there's a phone app that you can get to calculate gunplay, makes everything much easier.
Banning solos in 2020 is pointless. Its like banning the fighter of the party.
You're probably thinking of 2013 where they were arguably overpowered, but they got HEAVILY nerfed between editions.
Police are overstretched so they have put up bounties on gang members.
All you have to do it drive in gang territory, cap as many hoods as possible without dying and drive the bodies to the designated police station/ organ recycling center, before the gang gets you.
That's funny, I've heard that they got buffed. Or at least their Special Skill.
Banning solos and netrunners? Are you out of your mind? It's like banning fighters and mages from DnD. If you ban those two, you might as well play something else.
Depending on who the characters are and for who they're working for, getting their equipment on the blackmarket might be the "side quest" - if they do illegal stuff, they cannot just use the guns they purchased legally in gun shops. They also cannot use the same vehicles over and over.
Implying Cyberpunk 2020 combat is difficult.
The only tweak you need is to lower armor rating (SP) on soft body armor and skinweave. That's about all you really need.
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Seems complicated, but, yes, that's roughly the idea. I didn't change damage ratings.
I don't see the need to ban Solos at all. Sure, combat sense is good, but that's kind of the point of a Solo : they're good at fighting.
Netrunner on the other hand I can see why they'd be discouraged or how you might want to modify the hacking system. Entering a data fortress every time you want to open a door is BS, and keep in mind the Netrunner has 5 turns per round, so it's really slowing down everything.
These hacking rules I'd only use as major hacking points. Otherwise get a small-fry hacking skill.
As for adventure ideas... Read the news.
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The thing is: you don't need to hack a datafortress to open a door (see the CP2020 rulebook, The Menu, pages 149 to 150). This chapter is often overlooked. With LOCATE REMOTE you can detect every remote system (up to 400 meters). With CONTROL REMORE, you can take control of those systems, provided you have the required program (Open Sesame for doors, Genie for elevators, Hotwire for cars, Dee-2 for robots, Crystal Ball for video cameras, etc.).
Contribootin some art.
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>Seems complicated
Only in that there's the extra step of changing damage. Other than that, it's just an armor table to replace the one in the book, and a conversion table in case you want to convert stuff not covered there. Oh, and there's the bit about layering armor, but that simply replaces the thing in the book (see pic), giving you a formula behind the table, as well as numbers already attached to the body armor, so you don't have to do the math yourself.
I use the first Cyberpunk 2020 German edition, which is based on the US first edition. Both don't have rules for armor layering. Those got introduced later with the Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!!! supplement. Hence, why I'm unfamiliar with them.
What I did is just to lower armor ratings of some armor, remove armors that were too silly for my taste (armored lingerie and bandanas), and place restrictions on how body armor can be layered based mostly on common sense. Basically you can wear only one layer of hard body armor per hit location (you cannot wear two helmets on the head, or a door gunner's vest and a flak vest, or flak pants and MetalGear greaves) or two layers of soft body armor (you can wear a kevlar t-shirt and an armored vest).
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Here are the official rules, in case you're interested. Personally, I think they're more involved than they need to be, but then a lot of aspects of Cyberpunk 2020 are like that. The core system is pretty simple, but there are too many details stack on top of it.
I agree with you. I like to keep things simple in order to keep the game as fluid as possible - which is what my players enjoy.
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This is just good enough for a crappy South Korean MMORPG.
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Is night city a good source book?
Some ideas:
Migrants/refugees are kidnapped by gangs who put them in illegal cryo-bodybanks
Stem-cell farms where women are forcibly impregnated to harvest embryonic stem cells
People getting kidnapped to "star" in illegal braindance productions
Bunraku: people get kidnapped, their mind and personality are wiped out (modern lobotomy) and replaced by a personality implant, their appearance is changed through bodysculpture. Those empty human shells are then sold on the black market. The client who purchases them can select appearance and personality.
In some really shitty areas, police duty got outsourced to local and powerful gangs.
Digitally transmitted diseases (viruses, trojan horses infect cyberbrains when connecting to infected devices...)
You could always make an Initiative skill, barring it to solos. Makes it so non solos can at least have a change in initiative rolls. Would be based on Reflex. Interlock Unlimited has it, but that's the extent that you probably want to pull from that system. That and maybe vehicle combat.
I don't really like it because it makes Night City feels too small to my taste. By this I mean that I don't really get a huge urban sprawl vibe from it. There's a defined city center where all the action happens, south of it is a large but not really detailed slum, and around all that you have suburbs. That's ok for an average modern 100k city, but not for a cyberpunk urban sprawl.
Enclosed you can find a vague map I did, where I tried to make a urban sprawl, using infos from the Night City sourcebook, but expanding it. You have eight different municipalities (Night City, Del Coronado, San Morro, Heywood, North Oaks, Westbrook, Rancho Coronado and Pacifica). Each municipality has its own downtown and districts, and all municipalities are more or less connected together by industrial, commercial or residential areas (the areas marked with a skull are what the Combat Zones).
As much as I hate to say it, for an initial campaign I always advocate banning Netrunners. It's a core mechanic of the system, yes, but it adds a hell of a lot on the GM.
That and custom drugs, fuck that section with a rake.
If someone lands in NCX airport and takes the shuttle to go to Night City, he will cross the slum of "Brick City" and Red Light District. When this happen, the windows of the train become opaque and start displaying advertising. Once you crossed the Lower East Side, the windows become transparent again.
>eels too small to my taste. By this I mean that I don't really get a huge urban sprawl vibe from it. There's a defined city center where all the action happens, south of it is a large but not really detailed slum, and around all that you have suburbs. That's ok for an average modern 100k city, but not for a cyberpunk urban sprawl.
>Enclosed you can find a vague map I did, where I tried to make a urban sprawl, using infos from the Night City sourcebook, but expanding it. You have eight different municipalities (Night City, Del Coronado, San Morro, Heywood, North Oaks, Westbrook, Rancho Coronado and Pacifica). Each municipality has its own downtown and districts, and all municipalities are more or less connected together by industrial, commercial or residential
Neat, thanks user.
Get the drug rules from the Black Hammer Cyberpunk Project. They are much better than the ones from Cyberpunk 2020.
Drug production: ambient.ca
Drug abuse, mixing and overdose: ambient.ca
Drug list: ambient.ca
Could be part of a gang that moves boosted cyberware - after a few sessions their clients try to track them down and kill the PCs; turns out they were being hired by an undercover member of the Inquisitors (read: rabid anti cyberware zealots) that has been giving you bad 'ware, causing damage/death to their clients.
Here's an interactive city map I used for my 2020 campaigns. Thinglink is utter shit, but it works for the most part.
Also one thing that I would do is to get rid of ridiculous gang looks - unless you absolutely want to keep this 1970s The Warriors style.
I ran a cyberpunk one-shot one time in a setting where I had thrown together maybe 4 pages of history and culture notes. Shit like the African Border Wars, the China Sun radicals, the (rather limited) AI revolt, and Escher(ville), where nanotech assemblers malfunctioned in New Korea and just kept building shit in a crazy, out-of-control manner. It was a short session, but I think I ended up tying in everything I had come up with (preparing for cyberpunk is difficult, because it's so intensely based on culture and setting that you really need a ton of shit to do it right).
Anyway, in this one-shot, the players were agents in a special police force that dealt with serious shit (I don't remember exactly what agency they were with). They were tracking... uh... arms dealers, I think, and the session started out with a bust and accompanying firefight. But this was just to provide them leads for what the main plot would be. Following up on clues, they came upon something far more dangerous.
After Escher, strict international restrictions had been put on the development and use of nanotech, but at least one of the megacorps nevertheless persisted in its attempts to develop military-use nanotech disassemblers, colloquially referred to as "slayers". Essentially, these things were designed to quickly and efficiently strip anything you pointed them at into its component molecules. They were designed to be self-replicating and to work on a massive enough scale to disassemble an entire armored division (optionally including the people). But their super-secret research facility in the middle of the desert was hacked, and the disassemblers breached three out of four security barriers before they called in a nuclear strike to end the threat.
Another thing that I didn't like in Night City sourcebook are the "ethnic" districts. In Cyberpunk 2020, the EU is the major superpower and an economic behemoth. There's a Little Italy in Night City - are we in 1960???
Also, if there's a Japantown and a Little China, then there should be a Little Odessa, New Karachi, and Neo Lagos.
Sounds pretty cool.
It was unclear whether the hack was terrorism or an attempt to expose what was being done (some even speculated that it was the renegade AI Solomon, who had disappeared after cyber-enforcement claimed to have destroyed it, but rumors nevertheless persisted that Solomon just went into hiding). But there was a massive investigation with some very high profile arrests, and with the government scrutiny and the project shut down, everybody thought that was the end of it. But in actuality, another megacorp had gotten its hands on the technology (possibly suggesting that the incident in the desert had been corporate sabotage to cover their tracks).
However, this second corporation decided against actively pursuing the project, viewing it as too dangerous (both it terms of the devastation it could wreak, and in terms of legal and PR trouble should it ever get out what they were doing). But somebody involved with the actual theft of the technology had secretly kept some of the nanites, and later sold them to the radical terrorist group China Sun.
China Sun didn't have the technology to reverse engineer the slayers, but they could rig them as a disassembler bomb, essentially letting loose self-replicating disassemblers to take apart everything they encountered until a prearranged cutoff point was reached. China Sun had decided that disassembling a major city would be the best way to forward their political message, and the PCs got involved as the pieces of this plan were beginning to come together.
Their investigation led them to the corporation who had stolen the technology, though they only knew that they were somehow tied up in all of this, and, of course, nobody admitted anything. As a result of this meeting, however, the PCs were later delivered a briefcase of nanotech assassins, designed specifically to cannibalize those particular slayers before destroying themselves.
The adventure contained a fair bit of jet-setting and trying to squeeze information out of various different important people who had information about what was going on. It wasn't until the end that they fully understood what was going down. The finale was a firefight with the terrorists who were trying to strategically plant the nanotech bomb,* and "assassinating" the slayers in the nick of time as the bomb was activated.
*I think there might have been some other reason why location was important, though it's been a while, and I can't remember the particulars now.
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Lovely color scheme. I'm a bit sick of neon actually.
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Aight, thanks, gonna look into it.
I've got like, a link to a reddit post with a shitton of links and one of them might be this one, but thanks for the heads up
Well, one of the guys I'm playing with said they read somewhere that banning Solos was a thing for the first campaign because they were overpowered or something, but I will look into it
About Netrunners, I'm not completely sure about banning them. We'll start the campaign in early December so we kinda have time to figure it all out. Even though Netrunners seams cool af, I'm just not sure if I can GM my way through one of them being in the party.
Okay, thanks a bunch.
Thanks, will save this for expanding on them later on
Actually, this seam nice
Will get, thanks for the links
Already talked to the group, we'll be using a more Akira / Blade Runner look to environment. Futuristic + Round stuff for me is just weird.
Okay, I will be messing with it.
Sounds amazing
Sorry for any English bullshit, even though I understand you guys, I get kinda messed up when building sentences.
Also thanks for Pics, downloading them
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My nigga!
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Problem with Solos is that they go first and will have put everything into making it count. Problem with Netrunners is they start doing their thing and then everyone else get to do their clapping seal impersonation.
This could be said of any other role.
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Ah, Syndicate. I don't know why everyone hated it so much. Sure it was nothing like the original but gameplay was ok and world building was excellent.
Isn't that one of the hooks from the core? One if the Screamshhets, maybe?
Solos are overpowered in that one with any reasonable level of Combat Sense will kick the shit out of anybody without it (Like the other roles). This is intentional.
Up until they pulled that bullshit twist you could see coming from 12 galaxies away.
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Technically, the cop can make them surrender with COOL + Authority vs. COOL + Intimidation. And Intimidation isn't in the solo's starting skills.
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Not really. Say the Runner is doing his thing, helping out the team, getting into the target’s security and SUDDENLY A NETRUN and no one else can do jack shit.
Sure, it can be mitigated by having everything happen simultaneously like when you’ve breached the target perimeter and the Runner is running while the team does other stuff. But generally a when a runner runs the other players sit on their ass, and when he doesn’t the character isn’t very fun.
Thought it was appropriate!
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But what game comes without one nowadays?
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>SUDDENLY A NETRUN
If it can't be done via the Menu, it should have been done before you went in.
That was trying to do it first.
Thing is, the Netrunner (and a lot of similar characters, not necessarily about cyberpunks) is a character that disrupts play when the player tries to do their part, and I don’t like that.
This. It's not once the security strike team is arriving with ACPAs, aerodyne assault vehicles and heavy weapons that you must start netrunning.
This happens in other games, too. I spent hours in CoC waiting for the archeology professor to read its books and decipher scrolls, while the detective and my journalist had jackshit to do.
In Pendragon, the virile knights also have to wait while the courtesan is doing his fine amore stuff with the duchesse.
If you're a good DM, netrunning will take less than 10 minutes.
when trigonometry is required, yes it's fucking difficult