How dark can cyberpunk roleplaying get? (Cy_Borg RPG Review) 

I created new 40 characters

Ouch.

@GoodRogue it's a reference to the real world, sort of poking fun at current events compared to what they game describes.

@@natesdisturbed8719 No way! Really?

I laughed at this for way too long

NGL, I'd buy a Muppets game tied into MorkBorg

SMORGBORG, a child-friendly low-fantasy ttrpg where you play a member of a blue-skinned patriarchal authoritarian regime, hunted and tormented by a giant wizard and his evil minions. Only to discover that you are a mere fantasy trapped inside the collective memory of a post-industrial human society rendering your whole existence a painful farce.

I hate having to deal with the pledge manager stuff you have to do. I didn't realize they don't get your info from Kickstarter. But when I contacted Free League, they fixed everything really quickly. Top notch folks and a killer book

zzzzzz...snooooze fest

Right!? Why are there always 10 different ways to change your address? I moved while having backed several projects, took me so long to make the change.

Thanks I just got augmented reality because of you

So are you saying I should get both Augmented Reality as well as the Cyberpunk books? How do the two systems interact with each other (CY_BORG & Cyberpunk)?

Totally, one of the things that always kept me away from Cyberpunk/Shadowrun was the insane amount of rules.

You may be a geezer but it sounds like you truly aged like fine wine.

I've played and ran 3 MB games with friends and just ran cy_borg about 2 months ago. The only thing we got a little hung up on was the autofire feature, in true osr fashion I just hand waved it and kept going after the game I realized we did it wrong and was thinking about it too much. Everything is just as simple to understand once you actually read it through.

There's a cool Brazilian cyberpunk game you might want to check out, called "Neo Guanabara - Cyberpunk Tropicalia". It emphasises social solidarity and the power of symbolic individuals in resistance to authoritarian and economic opression, shifting the game away from the typical cyberpunk nihilism while maintaining (or even ehancing, in my opinion) the punk ethos.

Bond, Mork Bond?

I have a friend that loves the spy stuff. I could never get into it. Even with James Bond.

@@stevendavis7628 The name's Borg, James Borg 😄

My approach is to make it as metal as possible, balance out the dour tone with over-the-top goofy stuff. But I wouldn't run it all the time, myself.

…I also like Orc Borg, great homage to WH40k orks.

…oh and there’s Pirate Borg too, but I haven’t got that one yet.

…oh and check Demon Dog, it’s punk Mork Borg.

@@crowgoblin Orc Borg is an absolute delight, so many great tongue in cheek jokes about the orks (my favorite is the physical trait "BIG ARSE", commenting to the mini's having their squat butt-out pose)

Oh, do you have a link to that?

@@grahamcarpenter5135it’s on drive thru rpg, “6th world templates for cy_borg”

I feel the best way to pull that off is at the end of the game. Once the simulation resets, you explain to the players. Your characters awaken in a cold medical room. Removing the headsets from your eyes. Everything has just been a game. You've been playing to help restore your minds when you were in a deep coma from an accident, but as you all wake up and look at the window, you realize the simulation was not. A fake it was just a carbon copy of the reality that you now have to live in.Hopefully you'll retain the skills and memories that you learned during the simulation.Because you're going to need them now.There's no more second chances.

If he doesn’t, check out Seth Skorokowsky. He does a great review

I agree, Seth Skorkowsky or JonJon the wise on RU-vid.

I suppose that like with Mork Borg, they will release a text only PDF for free

@@twicedeadmage look up Mork Borg bare bones edition.

I have the same feeling. So, when I run cyberpunk I always give the PCs a chance to make a difference (even to a small community) or just get revenge!

Exactly my thoughts!

I hope you feel better soon.

My gaming group has an x card hard line against anything involving simulated corporate office cubicle slavery. Too triggering.

@@Smittumi yeah, we install a “hope” clause into every game my group plays. I don’t run games that doesn’t allow my group to feel like they are making a difference. I would end up with 0 players and I would personally lose interest, myself! 😂

no

I mean I tried to make a miniature that looked like it would belong but nothing can really capture that insane style that the art has. Like If it was made by vincent van gogh on a really really bad acid trip

I GM’d CyberPunk Red for a while and the issue I had with the system was healing. If you want to put a sense of urgency (time constraint) on the PCs and one of them gets injured, it’s almost impossible for the PCs to complete the mission. RaW unless you have a Combat Medic or a particular drug (which you can only use once a day), you can’t deal with damage in any kind of timely way. My players loved the setting and the city detail but once two of them got badly damaged and realised they needed days to weeks to heal it, we moved on.

@@zakf9287 yea. this is why i have looked into the free source material of cyberpunk in 5e. it's a 200+ page pdf file with rules, classes, subclasses and enemies. Crazy

Yeah, it's so strange when people misunderstand such a simple and core tenet of the whole genre. Sad that "don't willingly support the system that exploits you" is controversial somehow.

Nope, it's all self-contained...although, the *Borg community being what it is, there's been a steady flow of fan content ever since the PDFs went out to KS backers.

@@culturalrebel thank you so much. 🤝🏼

Yeah no kidding. “Punk” is literally fighting oppression.

I can only guess that was the authors' intent, considering everything else in the book.

@@trappleton yeah, I think it was just worded terribly 😂

Pretty sure he got that right. It’s not about being contrarian. It’s simply practicing absolute freedom. It’s rejecting what’s being forced on you and deciding for yourself what YOU want to do. I’m picking up some major authoritarian apologist vibes from you guys, including the commenter right above me. Hope I’m wrong here and there’s just a major misunderstanding. But at any rate, it’s your life. You are free to think what you like, even if it sounds like NPC language to me 🤷‍♂️

You can break every rule of the book, we even encourage it. We just don’t _encourage_ that you break this one but you’re free to do whatever you want of course.

Nah punk isn't about just breaking rules, it's about breaking clearly malicious power structures. You can argue about where punk began, but the common thread between all contenders was not just that they were rebelling -in general- but were rebelling against specific people, parties, and trends. In the UK, punk grew hand-in-hand with the rise of Thatcher's Conservatism. In the US, punk was born under Nixon and found it's place in disillusionment with both neoliberalism and the non-violent attitudes of 60s (white) counterculture. Sure, if you look at punk from 50 yards away while speeding by on a train, you might think it's just about rejection of rules, I guess. But when you look closer at the artists that made punk and punk culture, up to and including William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, the politics is specific and anything but subtle. Punk isn't against authority, full stop. It is against the authority that made the world what it is, and how that authority did it. ... Thank you for coming to my TED Talk

If nothing else, punk is not about *simply* practicing absolute freedom. If it were that, then some people would be free to become cops, empowering them and the powers they serve to limit the freedom of others. And I think anyone who had a big brother who listened to the Clash in the next room, listened to more than 2 punk songs, read a work of punk fiction or non-fiction, bought a DIY zine, or even just walked walked by an anarchist soup kitchen knows what punk has to say about that

Thank you for saying this! I was frustrated with his misinterpretation of the rule and what it means. Otherwise, solid video!

💯

That's not the point of the rule at all, though. There's a very specific reason why Rule 0 exists and I find it odd that QB and a lot of others seem to be missing it.

No, the rule is there to, very explicitly and matter-of-factly, explain the point of the entire cyberpunk genre just in case it somehow went over somebody's head in spite of the obvious themes: you are supposed to be rebelling against an unjust system, not upholding it. Otherwise you aren't playing cyberPUNK in the first place.

Christian Plogfors did the layout and design of Death in Space

@@JasonFuhrman Oh right, my apologies. Johan did some of the ilustrations... well maybe that's why it's so much more readable.

@@CptBurtReynolds Aye aye, my bad.

It's certainly a stylistic choice but I've loved the artpunk of the BORG series and its many offshoots, it's just fun and while I get people argue it's visually intense I never got an impression that information was that difficult to find or read, which could be simply due to how light the systems are. DIS is nice too however the all black pages CAN be a little tricky depending on your device or reading conditions but overall didn't have a problem there. As far as popularity goes I think it has fine buzz it just scratches a different itch as it isn't really so much scifi horror like Mothership but as one person put it "NASApunk" which I think nails the tone well. All three are very fun and glad to have them all on my shelf

@@JanStrakon yeah, Nohr I believe did on illustration on the monsters page. The layout in DiS is one of my favorites. He did a great job by both making it usable, but also full of style.

Self-reporting with that last line. Imagine considering yourself a fan of a genre and missing its central theme - fighting exploitative systems at any cost. Plenty of people in cyberpunk settings are "with the corps", but they either don't like it, or they're shitty people. Why? Because they are dehumanized, made assets of the corporations and forced to uphold the same system that abuses them. If you genuinely want to play corpo characters who defend corpo interests out of ideological zeal, you aren't even sharing the same dimension as "the point".

@@arctomoldiness9312 says I’m self reporting. Says I missed the point. Failed to even respond to what I said. Instead answered a totally different point I didn’t make. Gg

@@whitecreamymilk8436 I might be sleep deprived, but I rewatched the video, and if you're not referencing/critiquing Rule 00 in your original comment, then I have no idea what's the context for the quoted part of your comment or what's the point you're trying to make. I apologize if I genuinely misunderstood you.

@@arctomoldiness9312 yes I am criticizing rule zero.

@@whitecreamymilk8436 Good to know. So turns out I didn't misunderstand anything. I'll try to rephrase my original comment with more clarity, albeit with a lot more words. Rule 00 says nothing about what characters are or aren't in cyberpunk media. Like you say, there certainly are people who work for the system, willingly or not. But as far as players are concerned, it outlines a crucial point about the genre itself. It plainly states that the suffix "-punk" isn't there just for aesthetics. It asks of the players to, at the very least, despise the system that crushes the spirit of their characters. Even if you must work for the system, you shouldn't enjoy being stripped of your humanity while doing the same to others. Keep in mind that the cyberpunk genre as a whole, like most dystopian settings, started as a sort of warning - in this case, that if we don't change the way our societies are structured, blindly hoping that technology will solve all of our problems is a naive mistake. The result is what you've probably heard already - "High tech, low life." Even with technology that borders on magic: implants for every body part, advanced AIs capable of superhuman problem solving, sophisticated gene engineering, etc. All of that and still poverty runs rampant, violence is at an all time high, people are used up and thrown away the second they are unable to perform their assigned tasks, etc. Old mistakes (current capitalist mistakes) repeated and writ large. These are objectively bad circumstances to find yourself in. Like most people in any period of history, you're welcome to do whatever it takes to make a living and survive. You can run all sorts of campaigns with all sorts of characters and scenarios. But a squad of corpo agents happily oppressing the downtrodden masses and licking the boots of their corpo overlords just isn't punk, any way you slice it. It goes against the very essence of the setting, of what it means to be a cyberpunk. To be clear, the problem isn't that you're "evil", but that you have given up the last remaining dregs of your agency and humanity. In a sense you have reached a certain fail state - instead of dying physically, you have died spiritually/mentally. Making decisions, acting for yourself, telling your story - you can't do these things if you're a barely sentient cog in the machine, eagerly awaiting your next set of orders and barking on command. At that point the campaign ends up just generically dystopian, almost closer to 1984 than cyberpunk (yes, I'm deliberately being somewhat facetious).

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BmTZB9nuvpY.html he did! I know because I bought it after watching his review

I recently did a review of Death in Space!

@@DaggetSWG My favorite punk song, "Lets Pay The Landlord On Time"

@@QuestingBeast I know, you inspired me to buy it and run it for my group:)

@@DaggetSWG Doing what someone tells you not to do is definitionally "punk." As is saying "F you!" to any definition of "punk."

The game doesn't require hating LEOs or military; it requires hating corporate capitalist tyranny. History is full of examples of police and soldiers who rebel against authoritarianism and capitalism, I don't expect the future to be different. (Also very popular tropes in Hollywood and tv: the good honest cop vs corrupt system; the patriot solider against the sellout military industrial bureaucracy...)

You new to cyberpunk? Also what kind of bizzaro Marxism we're talking about when corporations acquire power because of it?

@@arctomoldiness9312 I don't play cyberpunk. But it's clear that significant financial interests (i.e. Rockefellers, Ford Foundation, etc., etc.) for a long time have been using their vast means to support Marxist aims that will reduce competition for themselves. Government intervention is a great tool for power because it allows for control of the populace and reduction of freedom and choice. In capitalism, by contrast, companies are under constant threat of being dethroned from their preferred position because of the spending choices of the populace; if you don't please the consumer, you're going to go out of business; businesses are therefore servants to the consumers. Marxism/collectivist interventions protect them against this threat of annihilation.

Says the guy with a Guy Fawkes mask

I think you may have missed the point of the borg books. They're rules lite, theme heavy.

All the rules you actually need are on either interior covers, everything between those two covers except the adventure is there for the presentation of mood and tone moreso than to act as a reference document. It's definitely a different approach, not unlike Super Blood Harvest, but I don't think it's unwelcome.