CYBERPUNK!!!!!!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 30, 2012

R. Talsorean Games’ Cyberpunk has been one of my favorite pen-and-paper RPGs for years. I was still a fan of the game long after the genre was no longer “hot.” As a child of the 80’s, I was attracted to the flavor of the genre, which naturally changed over the years, but to me always felt to me a little like it was also a child of the 80’s – sort of a dystopian mixture of high-tech and the worst excesses of the era. It took the cultural shocks of the “microcomputer” era and projected it into the future with the visionary style of the movie Blade Runner, then packaged them into not-too-distant visions of individual authors. It was very cool, heady stuff in the early 1990s, and many of the aspects of those stories have actually come to pass – or been exceeded.

It was fun to weave these stories with my players, in  backdrop where corrupt, underpowered governments were at the mercy of rampant corporatism, where individual life was cheap, but technology was cheaper, giving the common man with guts and savvy the ability to resist and fight back in a way that had been impossible in the modern era. While everyone else was mixing their cyberpunk with fantasy via Shadowrun, I was taking it straight with the rules system by Mike Pondsmith of R. Talsorean Games.

Now CD Projekt Red has announced their newest big RPG project, following the success of The Witcher and The Witcher 2. It’s  based on the Cyberpunk rules system, and they are even collaborating with Mike Pondsmith on it. Pondsmith, the original creator of the rules system, is no stranger to making video games himself, as he formerly worked on several games with Microsoft Games Studio, including one of my favorites – also licensed from a game system – Crimson Skies.

This makes me so very, very happy. I hope that the rules and ‘style’ of the game more closely mirrors those of the original or 2.0.2.0 version of the game, rather than the “Cyberpunk 3.0” rules that came out a few years ago. I did feel like those were something of a misstep – not the rules themselves, but the world overhaul.

But no matter what, I can’t wait to see what they do with it. I have high hopes.  I don’t think I would trust any other developer to do the system “right” more than CD Projekt Red. This is Good News to me.

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Mainstream Games - Comments: Read the First Comment



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