Cyberpunk 2020

Cyberpunk 2020

The cover of Cyberpunk 2020 2nd edition
Designer(s)	Mike Pondsmith
Publisher(s)	R. Talsorian Games
Publication date	1988 (Cyberpunk 2013) 1990 (Cyberpunk 2020) 2005 (Cyberpunk V3)
Genre(s)	Science fiction, Cyberpunk
System(s)	Interlock System

Cyberpunk 2020 is a cyberpunk role-playing game written by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games.

Overview

This role-playing game is based on the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and other authors of the "Mirrorshades group". The game includes a number of elements now associated with the 1980s^{[citation needed]}, such as the idea of "style over substance" and glam rock.

The game tends to emphasize some aspects of the source material more than others. Much of the focus of the game is paid to combat, high tech weaponry and cybernetic modification; however, performance enhancing and recreational drug use is either played down or discouraged. Although artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and cloning are barely mentioned in the core rulebook they are reintroduced in later add-ons such as the chromebook manuals.

The range of characters players can adopt is very diverse, ranging from hardwired mercenaries with psycholinked weapons and boosted reflexes, to Armani-wearing corporate mega-yuppies who make and break national economies with the stroke of a pen.

Cyberpunk 2013

Cyberpunk 2020 is the second edition of the original game, Cyberpunk 2013, often just called "Cyberpunk." It was originally published as a boxed set in 1988, and R. Talsorian released a few supplements for this edition, including Rockerboy, Solo of Fortune, and Hardwired, the latter based on the Walter Jon Williams novel of the same name.

The second edition featured rules updates and changes, and additionally moved the timeline forward by 7 years, to 2020. The game's timeline was also retconned to accommodate the German reunification in 1990.

Game mechanics

The basic rules system of Cyberpunk 2020 (called the Interlock System) is skill-based instead of level-based, with players being awarded points to be spent on their skill sets. New skills outside their expertise can be learned but in-game time needs to be spent on this. A large part of the system is the player characters' ability to augment themselves with cyber-technology and the ensuing loss of humanity as they become more machine than man.

Cyberpunk 2020 claims to lend itself to play in the street level, dark film noir genre, but certain aspects of the basic system can influence game sessions toward a high body-count, 1980s action movie style.

Although each player must choose a character class or "role" from those given in the basic rules, there is enough variation in the skill system so that no two members of the same class are alike. Because Cyberpunk 2020 is skill-based, the choice of skills around the class-specific special ability allows a wide range of character development choices including non-combatants.

The combat system, called "Friday Night Firefight", emphasizes lethality. Several pages in the rules are devoted to discussing real combat vs. the illusions often seen on TV. Attempts are made to keep the combat as realistic as possible in a game setting. No matter who the character is, a single bullet can result in a lethal wound. This encourages a more tactically-oriented and sneaky game play, which is in accordance to the rough-and-gritty ethos of the Cyberpunk genre. Also, the amount of damage a character can sustain does not increase as the character develops. The only way a character can become more damage resistant is to either become better at not being hit, physically augment their body with muscle (trained or implanted) or cybernetics, or wear armor.

The world of Cyberpunk 2020

Location of Night City

Cyberpunk 2020, as the name implies, takes place in the year 2020. The game's default setting is the fictional Night City located between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the west coast of the United States (near San Jose, California). Later supplements to the game have contained information about the rest of the US and the world.

Following a vast socio-economical collapse and a period of martial law, the United States government has had to rely on several megacorporations to survive. This has given them a veritable carte blanche to operate as they will.

The megacorporations

• Arasaka, a huge Japanese zaibatsu, megalomaniacal CEO obsessed with making Japan into a superpower. Likely nod to World War II arms manufacturer Arisaka.
• Biotechnica, an Italian biotechnology, pharmacology, and cybernetics firm.
• Euro Business Machines (EBM), an information technology corporation (an obvious nod towards IBM).
• Infocomp, a commercial think-tank and information repository.
• Kendachi, a Japanese armament company.
• Merril, Asukaga & Finch, financial analysts. Quite probably an allusion to Merrill Lynch.
• Microtech, a computer and electronics manufacturer.
• Militech, American arms and mercenary contractor.
• Mitsubishi-Sugo, a major transportation manufacturer.
• Network News 54, an American broadcasting company.
• Orbital Air, an African corporation with a monopoly on space transportation.
• Petrochem, an energy company.
• SovOil, a neo-Soviet oil giant, controlling a vast percentage of the petrochemicals market.
• Trauma Team International, a private medical firm also dealing in medical insurance, prepaid disaster relief, prepaid CSAR, etc.
• World News Service, a worldwide news conglomerate, similar to the Associated Press.
• WorldSat Communications Network, a satellite communications giant.
• Zetatech, a computer, cyberdeck, robotics, and cybernetics manufacturing company.

Roles

The Cyberpunk 2020 equivalent of character classes are Roles, of which the main rulebook contains 9, and later supplements have expanded the number considerably. Each Role has a special ability which gives a character a unique edge.

Role	Description	Special Ability
Cop	Maximum lawmen on mean 21st century streets	Authority
Corporate	Slick business raiders and multi-millionaires	Resources
Fixer	Deal makers, smugglers, organizers and information brokers	Streetdeal
Media	Newsmen and reporters who go to the wall for the truth	Credibility
Netrunner	Cybernetic computer hackers	Interface
Nomad	Road warriors and Gypsies who roam the highways	Family
Rockerboy	Rebel rockers who use music and revolt to fight authority	Charismatic Leadership
Solo	Hired assassins, bodyguards, killers, soldiers	Combat Sense
Techie	Renegade mechanics and doctors	Jury Rig/Medical Tech

Iconic characters

The game's backstory had a series of powerful characters that influenced the world of Cyberpunk.

"Good Guys"

• Alt Cunningham: A brilliant Netrunner and programmer, she invented the beta version of Soulkiller, a program that would make a digital emulation or copy of a netrunner's mind. Arasaka kidnapped her, extracted the information from her, and made a more deadly version that would simultaneously fry the netrunner's mind after backing it up, allowing a Sysop to interrogate it at will. They then used it on Alt since she was of no further use to them, but her digital "ghost" broke free into the Net.
• Johnny Silverhand: A famous and idealistic Rockerboy singer and guitarist with a silver-chrome cyberlimb arm who opposes Arasaka for a grocery list of personal grudges from the loss of his arm to the death of many of his close friends and family. He is Alt's ex-boyfriend. He was in the band Samurai with fellow famous rocker Kerry Eurodyne, and is most famous for the songs "Chippin' In" and "Never Fade Away".
• Morgan Blackhand: A pragmatic Solo with an anodised black-chrome cyberlimb arm. Generally considered to be a "Solo's Solo", with years of experience and ops under his belt.
• Rache Bartmoss: The most brilliant (and paranoid) hacker in the Net, he invented the Demon series of programs and was the "narrator" of the Guide to the Net and Brainware Blowout sourcebooks (posthumously edited by his rival/colleague, supreme hackerette Spider Murphy). Rache finally flatlined in 2021, either by a lucky Sysop or poor health due to repeated bouts of malnutrition and dehydration from surfing the Net too long. Fortunately he had top-of-the-line life support to maintain him. Unfortunately, he was too paranoid to trust anyone with his location or leave any means of recovering him. He spent his time deteriorating in a cryogenic freezer (disguised to look like a refrigerator) while still managing to be one of the best hackers in the Net prior to his death in the opening salvos of the Fourth Corporate War.

"Bad Guys"

• Saburo Arasaka: The devious head of the diversified Arasaka Corporation, which not only dominates most of the Third World (including America), but also Japan. He has united factions of the Japanese government, the military, organized crime and various lesser corporations under his control. Some have begun calling this era in history the "Arasaka Shogunate".

Sequels

Main article: List of Cyberpunk 2020 books

The Firestorm Series

Firestorm was supposed to be the bridge between Cyberpunk 2020 (the 2nd edition rules and milieu) and Cyberpunk V.3 (the 3rd Edition rules and milieu). Its purpose was to shake up everything and get players prepared for the new background they were cooking up.

Firestorm I: Stormfront

Set in 2023, the backstory has two deep-ocean-based megacorporations duelling for control over a third one (the period known as the "Ocean War"). When it escalates into open warfare, they each hire mercenaries. One hires the Japanese diversified technology and security services firm Arasaka and the other hires the American military technology and mercenary services firm Militech.

During the conflict, the long-standing bitter rivalry between Arasaka and Militech causes them to forget about their customers and go for each other. In the beginning they feud quietly (the phase called the "Shadow War"). But the covert war between the two heats up, becoming the Fourth Corporate War.

In the course of the adventure setting, the characters are hired to hunt down a pesky netrunner who is making their anonymous employer unhappy. Little do they realize that the hacker is the infamous (and already "dead") Rache Bartmoss. Regardless of what they do, their employer pinpoints the apartment with an orbital mass-driver and vaporizes it.

Firestorm II: Shockwave

Set in 2024, the second part of the Firestorm series sees Arasaka mobilize the Japanese Defense Force to take on Militech and the American military in a series of "proxy conflicts" (the phase dubbed the "Hot War").

Waves of cyberviruses corrupt databases worldwide, leaving the isolated Arasaka Towers arcology in Night City the last viable data storage mainframe in the world.

Militech gathers together the surviving meta-characters and a Special Forces team played by the player characters into a "super team". Their job: to take out Arasaka's Night City arcology with a tactical nuke to deny its assets to Arasaka.

Then they find out that Alt Cunningham, who was captured by Arasaka earlier, is trapped inside the mainframe. Of course, Johnny won't let Alt die a second time, so the team tries to break her out.

The end result is that the meta-characters go out in a blaze of glory. Johnny Silverhand dies at the hands of Arasaka's cyborg assassin Adam Smasher in order to buy Spider Murphy enough time to break Alt into a series of datapackets and downloads her into the Net. Morgan Blackhand then takes on Adam Smasher atop Arasaka Towers while the rest of the team gets extracted out. The outcome of the duel is greatly disputed because the low-yield tactical nuke the team deployed sets off the 2-kiloton "self destruct" bomb Arasaka had placed in its data core. This destroyed much of downtown Night City and contaminated the ruins and anything downwind of it with lethal fallout.

Firestorm III: Aftershock

The long-awaited third volume, Aftershock promised to tie all the loose ends together and herald the end of the old Cyberpunk 2020 (or "Cyberpunk V.2") game world and usher in the beginning of the new Cyberpunk 2030 (or "Cyberpunk V.3") game world. It was later cancelled and its material was folded into the Cyberpunk 203X rules book.

Cybergeneration

Main article: Cybergeneration

Cybergeneration takes place in an alternate future of the core Cyberpunk 2020 timeline, where a nanotech virus epidemic has resulted in a subgroup of teenagers with unusual, superhuman skills. It began as a supplement that still required the Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook, but the second edition became a standalone game.

Cyberpunk 203X

Ever since the 1998 release of the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook Firestorm: Shockwave, fans of the game had been waiting for a third edition of the Cyberpunk game, known as Cyberpunk 203X. Over the years, the entire project had at times been discounted as vaporware, its delays due to other projects and Pondsmith's involvement in the development of The Matrix Online.^{[citation needed]}

The game was released first in PDF form on December 17, 2005 and as a conventional book on January 15, 2006.

The setting has been heavily updated from its last event book series, Firestorm, which covered the opening of the Fourth Corporate War. The aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War has resulted in widespread corruption of the Net and major losses of hardcopied data, to the point that all data is intangible and recent recorded history is in doubt. An example that pops up in Pondsmith's demos at conventions, releases on the Internet, and in the finished game is that history has become so corrupted that many people in the world now believe Richard Nixon, instead of resigning over Watergate, committed suicide on camera and that memes such as the moon landing being hoaxed become prevalent.

The war has also led to the collapse of nations, the world economy, and many of the staple megacorporations. This civil upheaval leads to the rise of the "altcults", alternative cultures similar in vein to the "phyles" from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. In fact, Cyberpunk V.3 has more to do with the new postcyberpunk literary movement and transhumanism than with the Gibson-Sterling mirrorshades movement.

In addition to rules changes to the Fuzion system and background, Cyberpunk V.3 also uses concepts taken from Pondsmith's experience at Microsoft with computer and video games as well as corporate culture, such as a simpler character generation system using templates, web-based active content URL links for updates, and making groups, organizations, and corporations their own "characters".

The Altcults

• Corpore Metal or Cee-Metal - a society of full-body cyborgs that use Livemetal technology, where a modular braincase unit is inserted into a variety of purpose-built body frames.
• Desnai' - Disneyworld-like series of amusement park arcology that strive to shelter themselves from the anarchy outside their walls. It is run heavily on automation and uses telepresence-piloted drones for travel, security, maintenance, labor, etc.
• Edgerunners - the descendants of the anti-corporation Cyberpunk movement. Integral cyberlimbs are replaced by Neo-Cyber technology, in which detachable articulated frames called "bracers" worn over the body can be modified to perform all the functions of dedicated cybertechnology.
• Reef - an undersea community whose members are heavily genetically-modified to adapt and survive in the depths of the ocean.
• Riptide Confederation - a fleet of Japanese floating arcologies that were cut off from their country following a nuclear civil war. They use bio-engineering to make living "tools" to aid them.
• Rolling State - the descendants of the Nomad families in Cyberpunk 2020, who now use advanced nanotechnology and megatechnology to create land-based mobile cities.

In addition, there is also the Fallen Angels, space-bound scavengers, the Ghosts, people who have uploaded their minds, and the Neo-Corps, the surviving corporations of the Cyberpunk 2020 world that are now organized in the form of organized crime syndicates. However, the six listed above are the only ones that have been mentioned in deep detail.

Novels

Two Cyberpunk 2020 novels have been published, both written by Stephen Billias:

• The Ravengers (1995)
• Holo Men (1996)

Collectible card games

Two different, independent collectible card games have been licensed and produced based on the Cyberpunk setting. The first, called Netrunner, was designed by Richard Garfield, and released by Wizards of the Coast in 1996. The second was called Cyberpunk CCG and was released in 2003. It was designed by Peter Wacks and published by Social Games.

References

• Michael Pondsmith. Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future. Talsorian Games, Incorporated. ISBN 0-937279-13-7. 
• Will Moss; Mike Pondsmith; Lisa Pondsmith. Cyberpunk v3.0. R. Talsorian. ISBN 1-891933-03-5. 

External links

• Homepage of R. Talsorian Games, publisher of the game
• RPG.net review of Cyberpunk 2020