I remember buying the Cyberpunk 2020 core book around the mid-nineties. By then it was already in its second edition. The first one was titled Cyberpunk 2013, and it was released in 1988, making it the first actual cyberpunk RPG (Shadowrun would arrive in 1989).

This system and its subsequent iterations remained mostly at the edges of my awareness for a long time, since I was more of a Shadowrun fan. But recently I started playing the Cyberpunk 2077 video game and I liked it enough that I decided to also check out the latest edition of the tabletop game, Cyberpunk RED.

The first thing I notice is that this is a big book. Nearly 500 pages in length, I’m sure it would be quite hefty if it was a physical copy. The first half of it is player-facing information starting with a setting overview, character creation, basic rules, combat and finally netrunning. The second half is a more detailed description of the setting, and then GM advice including a series of short adventures.

When it comes to layout and presentation, R. Talsorian definitely learned from its past mistakes with the ill-fated Cyberpunk V.3. Cyberpunk RED’s layout is pretty clean, and its sans-serif font quite readable (to me at least). Page margins have tastefully minimalistic decoration (done in red, of course) and the illustrations are gorgeous and very detailed. Very little of the text is obviously copied from CP 2020, surely another lesson learned from CP V3.

The mechanics are pretty much a new iteration of the Interlock system used by CP2020. The basic numbers are tweaked a bit, but it should be pretty familiar to anyone who played the earlier edition and pretty easy for newcomers to learn. There are some useful artifacts from FUZION that managed to sneak into the game, like the concept of “everyday skills” every character should know.

The combat rules are a bit simpler all around and should be fairly fun, but I dislike that they do the “Martial Arts Thing” that was so common in a lot of RPGs written in the 90s. You can be a pleb and learn Brawling, or you can learn one of four elegant Martial Arts styles from the far and mysterious East! They make your fists into registered lethal weapons and give you access to deadly Secret Techniques! Bleh. I dislike the exoticism implied in this view.

Armor is really good compared to gun damage, and there is a very clear “firefight meta” going on here. An unarmored character is going to go down quickly, but it’s very easy to get concealable armor that will stop most bullets at least 50% of the time. Practically every sample PC and opponent wears this exact armor and carries the only handgun with a better than even chance of getting through. The only ones who wear or carry anything lighter are those enemies whose main distinction is having shitty gear, and those PCs for whom combat is a tertiary concern.

The netrunning rules do a solid job of avoiding the pitfalls from the original set. A hacking session is still a sort of mini-dungeon-crawl, but it’s a lot more abstract and well-integrated into “meatspace” initiative. It also requires the netrunner to be on-site, so that they can participate in the physical side of the adventure with the rest of the group. My main criticism here is that these rules remain very tightly coupled to their corresponding setting elements, just like they were in CP2020. The new netrunning system comes accompanied by a bunch of cataclysmic setting changes and a technical explanation that’s pretty much just a word salad. Luckily this is extremely easy to eject.

The cyberware rules are essentially the same as always, though they carve a few important and long overdue exceptions to the Humanity Loss rules. Still, I feel they could have gone further.

As for the setting… I’ll be honest, I never knew there was so much backstory and metaplot to it. I remember the setting section in CP 2020 as a sort of “lightly flavored background soup” that was just there to explain why you had cybered-up folks being all punky in this fictional city. CP RED decides to delve way deep into it, with a huge historical section that serves as a stealth “2020 era” supplement before moving on to the 2045 narrative present of this game.

While I think the narrative presents of RED and 2077 are both very interesting, I have a lot of nits to pick with all that backstory and metaplot, and with the ways it seems to remain static for a long time or loop over itself. Personally, I’d probably move up its divergence point with the real world by a good 30+ years and condense a lot of the subsequent events up to 2077 into something more dynamic and streamlined.

Proceeding to the GM advice, I finally find out where the copied text from previous editions is this time. The first couple of pages in this section reproduce a lot of advice I remember seeing from editions past. Some of it is serious, some of it is a tongue-in-cheek parody, all of it feels very dated when read in The Actual Year of 2022. Apparently the reader is supposed to easily distinguish the real advice from the jokes, but in my experience that never really works.

After we get past this bit of cringe, we get to advice on plotting adventures. Though it talks in terms of “script-writing”, it does recognize things will go off-script and that improvisation is essential. “Just roll with it” is very basic advice but it’s still welcome.

The system for awarding XP at the end of each session recommends classifying players according to their playstyles, and evaluating them based on how well they stuck to that classification. The combat monster should get XP for fighting well, the roleplayer for roleplaying well, and so on. I’d have been all over this back when 2020 was still the distant future. These days, though, I don’t want to have to tell Player A that they got less XP than Player B for failing to live up to the way I think they should play. In my games, when someone does something worthy of a XP bonus, everyone gets that bonus. We all lift together!

Finally, just like in CP2020, there’s a section of “screamsheets”, two-page spreads containing a handful of fictional news articles on the left and a mini-adventure on the right. These are entertaining.

Final Impressions

It might seem like I’m complaining a lot, but I’d happily play Cyberpunk RED. The system is simple and very playable, and most actual groups are likely to care little about deep metaplot cuts. It’s a good game overall.

Speaking as a GM, I don’t think the CP RED system clears my personal “Treshold of GURPS”. If I had ample time to prepare and plan, I’d probably adapt its setting to that system. However I’d happily run the game as-is if I had to do it on the spot. I’d just hand out the ready-made RED iconics as PCs, and pick one of the short adventures at the back of the book.

In either case, if the setting’s timeline was important, I’d probably use the hypotethical condensed version I mentioned earlier. And I’m definitely going to ditch that advice that says a group of PCs can’t hope for anything more than their own survival and maybe doing some small good beyond that. You don’t get to say that and have a setting where Rache Bartmoss can take the whole NET and quite a few megacorps down in one fell swoop, and where Johnny Silverhand’s raids on Arasaka Tower are practically a regular event. If these clowns can have that much of an impact, then so can any PC group whose players are interested in this sort of game.