I’ve always loved the concept behind Cyberpunk. From the concept as simple as gang warfare to characters fully decked out with cybernetic enhancement that can rip car doors from their hinges or hack into the most advanced of computer systems, the sheer concept of having no limits and an excuse to be as devious as possible in the GM chair – what can I say, I love it. Having played D&D for many years now I found the concept good but it was lacking… something. There was no “edge of the seat” feeling with it. Yeah, a beholder might be in the next room but traps aren’t going to fly from the floor and a teammates not going to turn on you midway through a fight because they want to loot first… or could they..
After revamping a version of cyberpunk v.3.0 into a “bare bones” version, I decided it had finally come the time to do it all again. Only this time instead of just having classes, I’d give each a background class too. This would hopefully work by removing some of the generic-ness from each class. I then added a pile of new skills in from the vast selection of the original cyberpunk v3.0 so that players could choose different skills from each other and it would no longer just become a “ the medic always does X Y and Z, the mech always does A, B and C”. This was a chance to rewrite an entire book of cyberpunk with my own personal twists of film obsession, love of comics and sci-fi lore, personal thoughts and paranoia about the world and adding elements of fantasy and Shadowrun
The back-story is completely fictional, no characters mentioned by name are real… well some are in films but I’m sure you’ll all spot them. And if my story even glimpses the sheer terror about what the future could hold then I feel I’ve done my part as a game writer.
Nikoli
