Quote from: yosemitemike on January 08, 2024, 08:47:16 AM

Quote from: BadApple on January 08, 2024, 08:42:17 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 08, 2024, 08:37:57 AM
Would Underground be considered a cyberpunk rpg?  I'm actually not sure.

I always thought it was more of a super hero game.  That said, I've already covered games that blend genres.  I'm fully on board with the idea that not everything needs to be in convenient boxes.  (I was the guy who started a firestorm with the idea of running a cyberpunk game in the Star Trek universe.)

It has a lot cyberpunk tropes.  It has the corporations as sovereign countries fighting ciorporate wars thing.  The characters are genetically modified soldiers created for corporate wars.  They are taught to use their powers in a vr sim that depicts them as superheroes in an ultraviolent comic book world.  They come out believing that is their actual past.  A fast food chain genetically engineered stupid people who are genetically designed to only be able to eat their food.  There's a bunch of stuff like that in it.   

Oh, totally.  It definitely blends the old comic book feel with the Philip K Dick setting for sure.  I fully recognize it as a mash up genre game.  I just thought of more of a superhero game in the sense that "you're a super hero and now you're in a shitty world."  I didn't think of it in terms of cyberpunk, but many of the main themes are there.

SibirPunk is a gopnik cyberpunk game by Red Square Games and is available as a .pdf on DrivethruRPG.
https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/465104/sibirpunk-english-edition

Mechanics

Sibirpunk uses a d6 pool system where a check is done by rolling for a number of successes.  The pool size is determined by stats and the face value needed for a success is determined by skills.

PC creation is a multi tiered point buy system.  Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of this method but it works out pretty well here.  It's hard to min-max and even then it really leaves you with fatal weaknesses. 

PC development is done by buying upgrades and improvements with in game money and meta-currency.  There's a lot to get so there's a lot of room for growth. 

Combat is well done and about as lethal as Traveller.  Aside from the somewhat novel check mechanic, combat feels and flows like many mainstream RPGs.

There's a fair bit of coverage on the subject of chases and fleeing.  It's expected that PC will run up against foes that will be much stronger than they are and they will need to get away and run up against targets that realize that they can't win and run.  A lot of RPG books and rules sets don't even lay that out as an option so it's nice to see some time spent on it.

The book also covers the fact that combat need not end with death or fleeing but often times result in negotiations and a truce.  Given that most, if not all, opponents are human then it only stands to reason that violence can cease in many ways,

Finally, in PC creation, a lot of emphasis is put on the players being part of a group, a brigada.  You start play as loyal teammates and friends. 

The book spends 75 pages on the rules, mechanics, and general guidance on how the game is meant to run.  It's well done, straight to the point, and assumes you know what and RPG is but have never played one before.  I have a lot of appreciation for game developers that make an effort to communicate their rules well.  My hat off to you, Red Square Games.

Setting

SibirPunk is a series of books previously unknown to me by Michał Gołkowski, a Polish author.  It's worth noting that this game is a translation from polish as well.  Everything I know of the setting comes from this RPG book.

Sibirpunk is modern gopnik fatalism and blends it with high tech elements in what is clearly the present day Russian Federation.  The primary location is a fictional industrial city of Neosibirsk, a fictionalized version of Novosibirsk in Siberia. 

There's 112 pages to get you and your players filled in on all the important aspects of the setting.  It's not quite as fleshed out as the Night City source book but it comes close.

The setting is as much a critique of modern Russia as it is a constructed dystopia.  There's barely enough to go around and due to poor handling by those in authority, many don't get a shot at getting what they need.  Law enforcement is arbitrary and neighbors are potential allies, enemies, and prey.  Everything is a facade and posturing until it isn't.  Life is cheap until you want to keep yours.  To survive, many people form groups that is tight-knit called brigada.  If you don't have any friends or you don't have enough friends then you're just roadkill that doesn't know it's dead yet.

It has some of the common cyberpunk tropes with netrunning, cybernetics, and electronic toys.  It actually is tucked in rather neatly to the setting.  You might be able to get your cybernetic leg but still not be able to get enough food.  If anything, the high tech elements do a very good job of laying into the weave of the more mundane elements of daily life in the setting.  It feels less fantastic and more like just another aspect of modern life.

Players take on PCs that are gopnik and can be straight up a criminal gang, guys from the neighborhood just trying to get by, or ideologues who will get themselves killed in due time.  It's expected that the PC will have to at a minimum take up a life of petty crime to get by.  It's clear that play is intended to be at the street level throughout.

The setting is so well done that it would be easy for a GM to read it and adapt it to their favorite game system, regardless of the included rules.

There is still plenty of room for source books to include all kinds of material from factions, to more locations, to a catalog of more stuff to acquire.  As it is, it's a solid base from which to run games from.  A decent GM would need little more to run a campaign for years.

Layout and Presentation

At 318 pages, this is a hefty tome for a core book.  It covers a lot but it does so in manageable pieces and all with a dry, gallows humor that keeps it tonally correct but fun.  As this was originally done in Polish, the translation team was very, very good.

The order of the book is very well done.  It flows from a brief description of the setting into generating a PC and then into the main rules very smoothly.  The rules themselves are organized in a way that makes sense and easy to parse to find that obscure element you remember.

Most of the text is black on light grey background so it's easy to read and not get fatigued.  There is some artifacts and background graphics but it's a lot more subdued so that it doesn't interfere with using the book.

The art is clearly original to the setting, most of it featuring cybergopniks or underclass Russian citizens going about their lives.  Some of it is really nice and some is a bit too cartoonish for my taste.  Most of it looks like digital work intended to look like pastels.  It's not bad and it definitely sets SibirPunk apart from so many generic games in the genre.

Final Thoughts

I find the system to be a bit clunky.  The meaning of the roll results varies from situation to situation so it slows the game down a bit.

While it does include rules for fleeing and pursuit, they don't seem to work well, in my opinion.  They are serviceable but they don't seem to work to build up the tension that a good chase scene needs.  That said, I haven't seen a set of rules yet that does it well.

With that, it seems that most conflicts will end with a couple of shots fired and one side running for the hills.  There's a lot of incentives not to get into a last stand so it's all the more important that other options work well.

These are just minor complaints, over all it's a solid system and with a couple of session in a table will use them intuitively.  There's not glaring broken parts or need for homebrew rules.  In fact, I believe that being able to pinpoint specific rubs is a testament to the game's overall good design.

Even if you weren't interested in using this book to run this game, it would make a solid source book for someone wanting to include Russia and former Soviet countries into their own game world.

I enjoyed reading the book.  I feel that a table looking for high tension street level play would find this a very attractive game.

I give SibirPunk an 8 out of 10.

Quote from: BadApple on October 21, 2023, 06:15:07 PM
Before I start going through the games individually, I'd like to talk about the genre of Cyberpunk.  I think it's relevant to both the reviews and to those looking to play a Cyberpunk game in general.  It's fairly intertwined with political and social issues but I will try to be as factual and unbiased as I can.  (Of course I have my own opinions and I'm happy to discus them openly but that would be a distraction from what this thread is about.)

First, I will talk about what the "punk" in "cyberpunk" means.  Punk, as it's used to refer to the genre, comes from the British punk counter-culture that started in the 70s.

Today, punk is most remembered for the music style that spawned out if it but of it's time it was more well known for antisocial behavior and generally being offensive.  In the early 70s, the British economy was flagging and a number of young people from working class families saw that they didn't have much of an opportunity and much less of an opportunity than their parents had when they were young.  From their prospective, the political and business elites had very observably squandered resources and mismanaged the economy so poorly that there was almost no growth in the GDP.  Both left leaning and right leaning moral custodians were exposed as hypocrites in public perception.  To top it all off, these young people of these working class communities were getting bombarded with messages about how bad the British Empire was and that they had to repent for it, even though they were too young and too powerless to have done anything about it.  The result was many disaffected rebelled out of frustration, anger, a sense of being betrayed, and resentment towards authority figures.

Much of punk counter-culture was all about explicitly not fitting in with mainstream culture and not submitting to authority.  Punk as a name for this counter-culture comes from the use the term as a pejorative about boys that misbehave. Some punks were just kids looking for a group to belong to when there wasn't place for them in mainstream society.  Some were real iconoclasts and maverick living their own life, and some were outright scumbags that could live and hide in the punk groups and places.  Some punks embraced a nihilistic hedonism with alcohol, sex, drugs, and anything else they could derive pleasure out of.  Some openly engaged in directed anti-authority activities, some merely symbolic activism and some outright criminal (some bordering on terrorism) acts.  Still others channeled their time and energy into artistic endeavors; the music is most famous now but it included painting, fashion, writing, sculpture, etc.  One of the most well known personalities from early punk is Johnny Rotten, the lead from The Sex Pistols.  A little research into Johnny will give you a well informed understanding of punk as a whole.

Many people since then have tried to lay claim to punk pedigree, usually as an ideological base and usually completely wrong.  Marxists saw it as an anti-capitalist movement.  Some ardent atheists saw it as freeing themselves from structured religious beliefs.  It goes on and on.  It wasn't a political movement, it wasn't a social movement, and it wasn't an art movement.  The core tenets were simply ardent individualism and rejecting authority. The closest thing to it I'm aware of is the outlaw motorcycle culture, also a counter-culture that was misunderstood and that others tried to coop into their ideological movements until bikers rebuffed them harshly.  BTW, Johnny Rotten is a US citizen and Trump supporter now.  https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/john-lydon-looks-rotten-pro-13412209  (This article made me laugh so hard I blacked out.)

The first use of the term "cyberpunk" comes from the short story Cyberpunk, written by Bruce Bethke and published in 1983.  In the story, a group of teens are engaged in a series of escapades, mostly digital graffiti, by hacking and pulling pranks.  It ends with one of the teens is recruited by the military to assist with digital warfare.  In this particular usage, "punk" was used more in the pejorative sense as an insult to unruly kids rather than a reference to the punk movement.   

Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction where an over computerized world becomes bleak by depriving many of opportunity and spawning a punk counter-culture in a high tech world.  Johnny Rotten's antics in the 70s and 80s were the inspiration for the archetype of the Rocker Boy in general and specifically the character Johnny Silverhand.  Most people tend to think of cyberpunk in terms of heists, hacking and net running.  If you take a step back and reevaluate it, you'll see it's about punks.  Take 1984 and add bikers and The Sex Pistols and you have cyberpunk.

The background setting of a high tech dystopia wasn't created in the 1980s, it's been around a long time.  George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949) would have solidly been classified as a cyberpunk novel if it had been written in the late 80s.  Philip K. Dick is seen by many as the proto-cyberpunk author and several of his books have been turned into movies that are held as cyberpunk movies.  (Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly) 

What would be solidly recognized as Cyberpunk today was crystalized by three pieces of media; the movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick), Neuromancer by William Gibson, and the RPG Cyberpunk 2013 by Mike Pondsmith.  Nearly all of the imagery and storytelling cliches people associate with cyberpunk com from these sources.  Philip K. Dick, while not expressly a cyberpunk contributor, is the fourth creative recognized for shaping the genre into what it is.

Cyberpunk, like the punk culture before it, gets co-opted by various political and social movements and ideologies.  The four core creatives didn't believe in, and were sometimes openly hostile to, many of these ideologies. 

Mike Pondsmith said in a Q&A session once "What is Cyberpunk?  It's whatever you say it is."  It's a character or characters living their life against the background of a dystopian future and refusing to comply with the oppressive social norms.  It's not bending the knee to authoritarianism.

Thanks for all your work on this! This post in particular was great.
I've been running Cyberpunk Red for the past few weeks and I have a much more positive opinion of the game. I think the core engine is great, it streamlines CP 2020 very nicely at exactly the right crunch level for me, whereas I found 2020's combat rules pretty well indecipherable.  Red's problems tend to be around the presentation/layout, with a bunch of core material relegated to the late section "The New Street Economy". The obtuse titling of chapters, intended to be cool & edgy, makes for a terrible reference work. But as I've got used to this, the game has been fantastic in play. I'm running a sandbox set in my own timeline, mashing up Red & 2020 materials for the feel I want. Using Roll20, the work put into the Roll20 conversions has been very impressive to me, used to the lazy half-assed WotC way of doing things. Eg all the tables get input as actual rollable Macros, where WotC just gives you the same text you probably already paid for in print. All the vehicles from Black Chrome can be dragged & dropped from the Compendium. I've started using Danger Gal Dossier and its hundreds of detailed NPCs have been great, too.

Edit: Would you be ok if I reposted the above essay of yours to the Cyberpunk Red Facebook group?

THANK YOU FOR THIS AWESOME THREAD!!!

Could you please do a review of apocalypse world, if you haven't already? It's very beloved in some circles but I personally don't see the appeal.

First, I just want to say that I'm happy people are enjoying this thread and getting something out of it.

Second, I haven't abandoned this thread.  I have more titles to add and probably next week I'll post another review here.

S'mon, I'm glad you are enjoying your CPRed game.  My personal opinion being expressed about a game should never be construed as me imposing my view on others.  (I will, of course, try to steer a person to what I think are the better games.  I am still a human.) 

The purpose for this thread is for me to share honest reviews of games so that a purchaser can have a realistic understanding of an available product.  I try to keep the objective observations and my opinions distinct and clear in an attempt to give a well rounded review; games have an inherent subjective and emotional element to them so opinions are needed.  I openly encourage anyone to give their feedback, opinions, reviews, and observations here even when (especially when) they contradict mine.  My opinion isn't concrete truth nor is it important compared to anyone else's.  More than one perspective can only be more useful to someone on the fence about buying a game so your input only increases the value of my review.  I don't want to be a lone prophet in the wilderness but one of a chorus of voices helping GMs and players find their next favorite game.

You can repost anything I put in this thread.  I humbly ask that you credit me by my handle here and give a link to this thread.  It would be kind of nice, ya know... :">

Spinachcat, YOU'RE WELCOME!!! i'M GLAD YOU'RE HAVING A GOOD TIME!!! 

Crazy_Blue_Haired_Chick,  I have purposely avoided Apocalypse World and its derivatives in my reviews.  I picked up and read the book years ago when I was first aware of it in gaming circles.  I was switched off hard.  At first read through, it just seemed like an incomplete system.  After some followup and some forum reading, I came to realize that the game wasn't an RPG as I understood it but a game where all the players at the table are "collaboratively creating a story."  What I initially saw as a weakness of mechanics was actually a feature for the table to improv and to allow the story to be molded by the will of the players.  I feel it is too outside my frame of gaming to give a meaningful review. 

Quote from: BadApple on April 05, 2024, 07:52:00 PM
First, I just want to say that I'm happy people are enjoying this thread and getting something out of it.

Second, I haven't abandoned this thread.  I have more titles to add and probably next week I'll post another review here.

S'mon, I'm glad you are enjoying your CPRed game.  My personal opinion being expressed about a game should never be construed as me imposing my view on others.  (I will, of course, try to steer a person to what I think are the better games.  I am still a human.) 

The purpose for this thread is for me to share honest reviews of games so that a purchaser can have a realistic understanding of an available product.  I try to keep the objective observations and my opinions distinct and clear in an attempt to give a well rounded review; games have an inherent subjective and emotional element to them so opinions are needed.  I openly encourage anyone to give their feedback, opinions, reviews, and observations here even when (especially when) they contradict mine.  My opinion isn't concrete truth nor is it important compared to anyone else's.  More than one perspective can only be more useful to someone on the fence about buying a game so your input only increases the value of my review.  I don't want to be a lone prophet in the wilderness but one of a chorus of voices helping GMs and players find their next favorite game.

You can repost anything I put in this thread.  I humbly ask that you credit me by my handle here and give a link to this thread.  It would be kind of nice, ya know... :">

Spinachcat, YOU'RE WELCOME!!! i'M GLAD YOU'RE HAVING A GOOD TIME!!! 

Crazy_Blue_Haired_Chick,  I have purposely avoided Apocalypse World and its derivatives in my reviews.  I picked up and read the book years ago when I was first aware of it in gaming circles.  I was switched off hard.  At first read through, it just seemed like an incomplete system.  After some followup and some forum reading, I came to realize that the game wasn't an RPG as I understood it but a game where all the players at the table are "collaboratively creating a story."  What I initially saw as a weakness of mechanics was actually a feature for the table to improv and to allow the story to be molded by the will of the players.  I feel it is too outside my frame of gaming to give a meaningful review.

Ah that is OK! I just wanted to ask to make sure what you thought about it.

For sheer curiosity I propose adding to list The Veil by SJK Publishing.

Oooops, Wrong thread!

DELETED

Quote from: Wrath of God on April 25, 2024, 04:24:04 AMFor sheer curiosity I propose adding to list The Veil by SJK Publishing.

This one?
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/199467/The-Veil-Cyberpunk-Roleplaying-Powered-by-the-Apocalypse

Correct.