CY_BORG

We played CY_BORG as a double feature, a two act game played over back to back days. I wanted to see how the classic cyberpunk fiction narrative would work – first a group of misfits comes together as a crew to make money, then we timeskip to a time where they’ve disbanded, and get back together for a personal reason.

CY_BORG is a very high quality Borg derivative. The random character creation puts out very thematic, very dysfunctional antiheroes – punks, really – and tells a lot of story, building up the world while doing so. Great stuff.

While it’s to be expected that sometimes Borg punks are barely capable of anything, the Shunned Nanomancer feels like a bad draw. Our Nanomancer had just one power that couldn’t possibly use them in any way in the intro adventure, and failing to use it would likely kill them, having 2 HP. Everyone else was armed to the teeth and had somewhat useful abilities – potentially, that is.

Act 1: Lucky Flight Takedown

We started with the book’s intro adventure, Lucky Flight Takedown, in which the punks seek to wipe the database of a neighborhood casino to free the hood from debilitating debt. It’s a fun scenario, especially as the client asks them to avoid carnage. I’m reminded of Underground (Mayfair Games, 1993), in which the players are discarded cyber veterans in a future Los Angeles, seeking to improve their neighborhood conditions. In terms of starter adventures, this is a strong example! The NPCs could have more character and motives of their own, though.

Because the numbers are so stacked against first level characters, my players avoided doing anything risky. This was fun for a single night’s adventure, but in a longer game I’m not sure that would really work. Not a single gun was drawn, nobody was attacked, and no powers were used. It begs the question of why bother going through chargen if no one’s going to use any of the toys they received? We just rolled Presence and Knowledge all night long.

The game doesn’t really support this in any way. There are no fun social mechanics to play with. Most character abilities mean that almost every die roll in the game would’ve been the same with a coin flip.

I don’t blame the players. They were playing smart. The intro adventure was crawling with armed security (more than 20, unlucky rolls), so they decided to play it sneaky and social hacked their way through the whole thing.

It was a lot of fun! The players got employed at the casino, got in close with high-rolling clients, and managed to get on at least neutral terms with all of the scary NPCs on site. But we didn’t really use anything from the character sheets. They burned through and gained some credits, attempted to use one app (failing), did open one door with a lockpick, and did a bunch of drugs. I’m all for this punk approach, but again: what’s the point of all of these toys if you don’t (dare to) use them?

While I recognize that perhaps we were playing in an unintended way (the scenario is written like a dungeon), the game should understand that when everyone is packing so much lethal hardware and beginning characters are this frail, and the game takes place in a packed in urban setting with little room to avoid other sentients, players are just going to be cautious, and that’s going to look different from a very combat focused game.

They only received 2 points of damage, from falling on discarded syringes while having sex in the green room. (This feels poorly designed: the syringes do D4 damage while, again, one of the characters had 2 HP. That’s a random result from a “I search the room” roll, with no way to avoid.)

It feels odd that there is no way for the Nanomancer to get more powers as they level up. Cybergear you can buy, and there’s a way to get more apps, even if not off a shelf. I decided to just give them a random new power & infestation, if they wish, with a level up.

Act 2: Radiating Love

For the second act, we did a timeskip, narrating how they had gone on a number of more and less successful jobs, having a good and a bad time together, and ultimately coming undone as a crew, going their separate ways.

The character prompt cards I had made really came into play here. I’ve stolen this from the Alien RPG starter set: players are given prompts on how to play in this act, with the intent that this will result in a specific type of experience, without scripting any scenes. I write in some potential conflict and give everyone a motivation to do stuff.

What this allowed was building in history for the characters. We did the timeskip, and the character prompts briefly outlined how their lives had diverged between the two games. One of the players mentioned that they felt like they’d been playing these characters for far longer than two nights. Painting the years in between in broad strokes, we got a lot of texture and detail around the characters and the setting.

I gave everyone three level ups and plenty more toys (cybertech, apps, nano powers). Then one of them had a personal problem, and they needed the old crew to get through.

They ended up taking out a doomsday cult to protect the lover of one of them. This involved one long action scene in the cult’s penthouse base, complete with a spider mech destroying entire rooms from across the street, and plenty of gunfire, as well as a dormant nuclear device. I feel this was fine, pacing wise, as the game moved along briskly, only really slowing down in a drawn out gunfight in a restroom where everyone kept missing.

We managed to get in emotions, with one of the characters wanting to get out of the life, and resolved a love triangle. One of the players was mostly happy to vibe in the setting and do all the drugs they could get their hands on. The world came through in a way I’m not used to in such a short game, I think thanks to the richness of the source material. I know I was pulling a lot of visuals from Cyberpunk 2077.

There was a note from one of the players that it didn’t feel like the world was ending. This is a common issue I have with Borg games. Unless you’re playing a character with built-in decay and corruption, like the Nanomancer, the mechanics don’t really deliver on the apocalyptic theme. I used two “miserable headlines” to herald the looming end of the world, but thanks to their somewhat mundane nature, perhaps they didn’t spell “end of the world” in a clear voice, even if the first one was literally locusts.

I liked CY_BORG a lot, and didn’t have issues with the rules, aside from the power assignment. I liked how colorful the characters were – these are among the best random generation tables. There’s a Cyberpunk 2077 hack out there, too, that I want to try.