The original Cyberpunk boxed set was released in 1988, which puts it right around 8th grade for me. I don’t remember if I bought it in 8th or 9th grade, but I remember it was a game that immediately and completely grabbed me in a way that few others did. The Sam Liu pseudo-Nagel art on the black box had a style that really felt fresh and modern to me at the time, despite how dated it feels now. I was growing up in Northeast PA and my only exposure to glamour was MTV. So when this box came in with these Duran Duran-looking pictures and discussions of attitude and the vibe of Cyberpunk, I knew this was something I wanted to be part of. Keeping in mind that I was a nerd whose dad brought a computer into the house years before and was active on the local bulletin board scenes, it really was a no brainer that I’d fall in love with it.
What did I fall in love with? Cyberpunk came with three black books (although these were full-sized booklets, not the tiny digests of Dungeons and Dragons or Traveller) One for overall rules and characters, one for combat, and one for the world of Cyberpunk. They were written in a sarcastic and conversational tone with plenty of under-the-hood sidebars explaining how you did things from an aesthetic standpoint as much as a mechanical one. I can’t say enough about how the style of these books seduced me. I never wanted to be a dungeon explorer or an agent for the Pan-Galactic Corporation, but I damn well wanted to be cyberpunk.
The first book, View from the Edge: The Cyberpunk Handbook, contained the rules for making characters, cybering them up, and running the net. On the sidebars, you could find a background on the cyberpunk genre and slang. SLANG. It seems so commonplace now, especially in science fiction gaming, to have a glossary of words to give the world its own feel, but I really don’t remember owning a game that had that before. The characters were diverse and did things I wasn’t used to. It leads with the Rockerboy. I’ll talk about Rockerboys in a few weeks when I go over the Rockerboy supplement and the Music Monday posts, but DUDE. I was used to shooting aliens, slashing orcs, and clobbering super-villains. The fact that I could have a viable character who struts his stuff onstage, inspiring the world to revolution, blew my mind. The Lifepath system even more so. I know Traveller had been doing lifepaths since the 70s, but this is one that had a lot more meat on it, specifying the events that happened to you. While I don’t know if it was the first real event-based lifepath generator, it was certainly my first exposure to one. And all of a sudden, there were these randomly generated backstories to go with your 28-year old character’s stats. The actual lifepaths would not change very much until some of the career/culture-specific ones are published. While I went through a phase where I wanted more meat on the lifepath tables, I’ve come to appreciate their elegance. If you are making a lot of characters, you will certainly see many of the same results over and over again, but I’d be curious how many characters someone is making in a regular gameplay setting. I have definitely DREAMED about playing Cyberpunk more than I have actually played it, so I’ve made plenty of characters, but I wonder if the table doesn’t get old as fast when you’re focused on session after session.
The cyberware and gear section is pretty basic. There’s some talk about how much gear you can carry and such, but the actual gear options are not that robust here. It’s interesting to me to look back on this thirty years later understanding just how gear-oriented Cyberpunk will become. I’ll definitely have some opinions about that when I get around to the Chromebook series. Many of the options here are basic, offering a flat bonus to an ability or skill. With the exception of cyberweapons and options for the audio-visual replacements, there is usually just one type of replacement, with little nuance. I don’t think I’ll ever have the time to do it, but it might be interesting to trace the evolution of gear in Cyberpunk over the years, looking at how detailed and specialized the different replacements are.
The last key section in here is the Netrunning rules. These didn’t last too long, quickly replaced by a dramatically new system in Cyberpunk 2020 (which, itself, was replaced in the Cyberpunk Red Jumpstart Kit). The theory behind this is very firmly rooted in the computer communications architecture of the 1980s. In many ways, that architecture is still there but is much more robust and diverse and the front end and back end look very different. As someone who was an avid participant in BBS culture, back then you had much more exposure to the back end, so this doesn’t seem as wonky to me as it might look to someone who didn’t have that context. There are clear nodes and connections that need to be traversed to operate in the Net. Only certain cities were connected to each other, meaning you had to be somewhere near the action to take part in it. It’s interesting to see the U.S. Net Architecture and what cities were included and which ones weren’t. I’m sure part of it had to do with how ARPANET-focused the Internet was back then, with Fairbanks and Albuquerque as major nodes, but Denver and Atlanta are absent.
Unique to the 2013 era is the concept of Interface Software—how you perceive the Net when you’re jacked in. The ‘Tronnic interface most closely resembles the cyberspace of The Sprawl Trilogy or Tron and would be the last man standing after the major Net upgrades in the next edition of the game. The other two almost make me think that the best way to conceptualize Interface Programs are as holodeck scenarios from Star Trek that are actually interfacing with the real world. Dungeon lets you experience the net through the lens of a fantasy role-playing game (I’m sure it’s photorealistic, but part of me kind of wants it to look like Ultima or Bard’s Tale) and Mega City dresses up like a 1920s pulp detective novel. It was really easy for me to dismiss these other two programs at the time and to think of them pretty derisively when Cyberpunk 2020 was released, but I think there could have been more room for these concepts if the cyberpunk genre didn’t crystallize certain aspects so quickly. The actual hacking takes place in data architectures set up as pointcrawls. The maps of the systems reminded me of the different text-based games I played growing up, from the Scott Adams cartridges I played on my VIC-20 through the Infocom games like Zork. Again, I’m curious what the different context someone 10-20 years younger than me would think of these. There are a lot of different software options, with several strengths within multiple categories. It is all very basic and, like cyberwear and weapons, would bloat considerably as the game got older.
Cyberpunk, in all of its iterations, has had a complicated relationship with netrunning. The netrunner is almost playing a completely different game than the rest of the party. I understand many referees made netrunners an NPC-only role and I can understand why. I am sure as I continue my deep dive into the game, I’ll start to develop more thoughts on netrunning and maybe explore some of the fan-based solutions.
Rereading View from the Edge, I can definitely say it’s a very rough game. Unlike Cyberpunk 2020, I’m not sure I would whip it out and play it out of nostalgia. I would say that about most games of that era, to be honest. With the exception of D&D, Traveller, or maybe Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I’m not sure there are many games where I’d willingly go back to earlier editions. The things that really appeal to me were retained in future editions of the game, while the things I dislike were pretty much all abandoned.
Next week, I will discuss the second book in the boxed set, Welcome to Night City, the book of lore that immersed me into a world like no other game did before.
What did I fall in love with? Cyberpunk came with three black books (although these were full-sized booklets, not the tiny digests of Dungeons and Dragons or Traveller) One for overall rules and characters, one for combat, and one for the world of Cyberpunk. They were written in a sarcastic and conversational tone with plenty of under-the-hood sidebars explaining how you did things from an aesthetic standpoint as much as a mechanical one. I can’t say enough about how the style of these books seduced me. I never wanted to be a dungeon explorer or an agent for the Pan-Galactic Corporation, but I damn well wanted to be cyberpunk.
The first book, View from the Edge: The Cyberpunk Handbook, contained the rules for making characters, cybering them up, and running the net. On the sidebars, you could find a background on the cyberpunk genre and slang. SLANG. It seems so commonplace now, especially in science fiction gaming, to have a glossary of words to give the world its own feel, but I really don’t remember owning a game that had that before. The characters were diverse and did things I wasn’t used to. It leads with the Rockerboy. I’ll talk about Rockerboys in a few weeks when I go over the Rockerboy supplement and the Music Monday posts, but DUDE. I was used to shooting aliens, slashing orcs, and clobbering super-villains. The fact that I could have a viable character who struts his stuff onstage, inspiring the world to revolution, blew my mind. The Lifepath system even more so. I know Traveller had been doing lifepaths since the 70s, but this is one that had a lot more meat on it, specifying the events that happened to you. While I don’t know if it was the first real event-based lifepath generator, it was certainly my first exposure to one. And all of a sudden, there were these randomly generated backstories to go with your 28-year old character’s stats. The actual lifepaths would not change very much until some of the career/culture-specific ones are published. While I went through a phase where I wanted more meat on the lifepath tables, I’ve come to appreciate their elegance. If you are making a lot of characters, you will certainly see many of the same results over and over again, but I’d be curious how many characters someone is making in a regular gameplay setting. I have definitely DREAMED about playing Cyberpunk more than I have actually played it, so I’ve made plenty of characters, but I wonder if the table doesn’t get old as fast when you’re focused on session after session.
The cyberware and gear section is pretty basic. There’s some talk about how much gear you can carry and such, but the actual gear options are not that robust here. It’s interesting to me to look back on this thirty years later understanding just how gear-oriented Cyberpunk will become. I’ll definitely have some opinions about that when I get around to the Chromebook series. Many of the options here are basic, offering a flat bonus to an ability or skill. With the exception of cyberweapons and options for the audio-visual replacements, there is usually just one type of replacement, with little nuance. I don’t think I’ll ever have the time to do it, but it might be interesting to trace the evolution of gear in Cyberpunk over the years, looking at how detailed and specialized the different replacements are.
The last key section in here is the Netrunning rules. These didn’t last too long, quickly replaced by a dramatically new system in Cyberpunk 2020 (which, itself, was replaced in the Cyberpunk Red Jumpstart Kit). The theory behind this is very firmly rooted in the computer communications architecture of the 1980s. In many ways, that architecture is still there but is much more robust and diverse and the front end and back end look very different. As someone who was an avid participant in BBS culture, back then you had much more exposure to the back end, so this doesn’t seem as wonky to me as it might look to someone who didn’t have that context. There are clear nodes and connections that need to be traversed to operate in the Net. Only certain cities were connected to each other, meaning you had to be somewhere near the action to take part in it. It’s interesting to see the U.S. Net Architecture and what cities were included and which ones weren’t. I’m sure part of it had to do with how ARPANET-focused the Internet was back then, with Fairbanks and Albuquerque as major nodes, but Denver and Atlanta are absent.
Unique to the 2013 era is the concept of Interface Software—how you perceive the Net when you’re jacked in. The ‘Tronnic interface most closely resembles the cyberspace of The Sprawl Trilogy or Tron and would be the last man standing after the major Net upgrades in the next edition of the game. The other two almost make me think that the best way to conceptualize Interface Programs are as holodeck scenarios from Star Trek that are actually interfacing with the real world. Dungeon lets you experience the net through the lens of a fantasy role-playing game (I’m sure it’s photorealistic, but part of me kind of wants it to look like Ultima or Bard’s Tale) and Mega City dresses up like a 1920s pulp detective novel. It was really easy for me to dismiss these other two programs at the time and to think of them pretty derisively when Cyberpunk 2020 was released, but I think there could have been more room for these concepts if the cyberpunk genre didn’t crystallize certain aspects so quickly. The actual hacking takes place in data architectures set up as pointcrawls. The maps of the systems reminded me of the different text-based games I played growing up, from the Scott Adams cartridges I played on my VIC-20 through the Infocom games like Zork. Again, I’m curious what the different context someone 10-20 years younger than me would think of these. There are a lot of different software options, with several strengths within multiple categories. It is all very basic and, like cyberwear and weapons, would bloat considerably as the game got older.
Cyberpunk, in all of its iterations, has had a complicated relationship with netrunning. The netrunner is almost playing a completely different game than the rest of the party. I understand many referees made netrunners an NPC-only role and I can understand why. I am sure as I continue my deep dive into the game, I’ll start to develop more thoughts on netrunning and maybe explore some of the fan-based solutions.
Rereading View from the Edge, I can definitely say it’s a very rough game. Unlike Cyberpunk 2020, I’m not sure I would whip it out and play it out of nostalgia. I would say that about most games of that era, to be honest. With the exception of D&D, Traveller, or maybe Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I’m not sure there are many games where I’d willingly go back to earlier editions. The things that really appeal to me were retained in future editions of the game, while the things I dislike were pretty much all abandoned.
Next week, I will discuss the second book in the boxed set, Welcome to Night City, the book of lore that immersed me into a world like no other game did before.
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