CY_Borg (Free League Publishing)
Written and designed by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr
You can download the CY_litary De.file_ment solo rules here
Cyberpunk is a broader genre than I typically give it credit for. In literature, you can see cyberpunk’s roots form with authors like Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and it came to fruition in the early 1990s with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Within film, some of the earliest examples are movies like Escape From New York, Tron, and Blade Runner – all wildly different takes on the idea of humanity, technology, and dystopian futures. This would eventually lead to movies like Robocop, Hackers, The Matrix, and more – again, such diverse takes on the same base genre. Cyberpunk has a strong presence in anime and manga. Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Battle Angel Alita are prominent examples. While cyberpunk is considered a subgenre of science fiction, it is even blended with other diverse subgenres. From my perspective, and I think this is the consensus, the cyberpunk element that puts it over the edge is a dystopian future world where capitalism has become an immensely oppressive force, where debt is used to make people into a new kind of slave.
CY_Borg is a cyberpunk take on the controversial rules-lite OSR game Mork Borg. I say controversial because a considerable section of the gaming community sees the Borg craze as highly superficial. Some hacks stretch credulity, but overall, the most well-done Borg games are great at one thing- evoking their settings’ atmosphere. If a tabletop RPG has a weak setting, imagining a character that would be fun to play is challenging.
As for the setting, CY provides a broad outline but leaves the details to the players to build out as they go. Several megacorporations run the show, and the city is fractured into low-income and wealthy neighborhoods that are all crammed together. There are toxic outlands where you don’t ever want to go. That doesn’t mean the city is much better as it’s full of private security forces and aberrations of technology. Players automatically roll to see how much debt they owe and to whom during character creation. There’s even a roughly sketched virtual world that can expand on the physical one if your characters go down that path.
CY_Borg takes the random, disconnected tables of Mork Borg and turns them into a more focused narrative-building engine. You start rolling on a series of connected tables, and after a minute, you suddenly have a rich vein to mine for stories. The enemy entries also contain little bits that will spark ideas about how you could integrate this into your own version of a cyberpunk dystopia. For example, the generic private security guard briefly mentions how much it would cost to bribe him. Unlike a sword & sorcery game, we now have this element added. Because everyone is in such crushing debt, your more mundane enemies can simply be bought off if you have enough credits to give them.
Like Morg Borg, this is a hopeless world. Each in-game day begins with a die roll to determine a miserable headline on the feed, which serves as a countdown to total system collapse. Capitalism has driven the eco-destruction of most of the world, and life is becoming unlivable. The authors reference locations in Mork Borg, so you can imagine this as the same place but in a different universe or perhaps the future of Mork Borg if it can last that long. The artwork accompanying the book does a fantastic job of communicating this decaying, infected cyber world where the wealthy are very slick, clean, precision killers while the dregs of society are messy, sloppy slashers.
There’s a random quest generator (which shows the designers were smartly anticipating solo players) that quickly creates hooks. Here are two examples I rolled up:
The PCs are contacted by a Washed-Up VIP acting on behalf of a Secret Society who promises nothing; you are simply the only one who can help them if you can win over a doctor who has developed an experimental cure. The target can be found in a medical facility somewhere in Galgbacken. It’s protected by way more guards than is first apparent. A miserable headline occurs along the way, complicating the mission.
or
The PCs are contacted by a Job Broker working on behalf of someone a PC owes money to who promises fame and exposure if they find some blackmail material. It can be found in a spa retreat on the water. It’s protected by a Stealth-Suit Psychopath, but rival punks interfere who are on the same contract.
Immediately, we get a sense of the kind of story these missions might play out. There’s room to develop interesting NPCs based on the limited details and flesh out the nature of the target and why your benefactor wants it. In the first scenario, we have a potential story about a cure that could change the world. The second story will take PCs into a complex environment, bringing additional challenges. Either way, there’s a strong skeleton for GMs & players to work with.
CY_Borg comes with six classes to choose from: Shunned Nanomancer, Burned Hacker, Discharged Corp Killer, Orphaned Gearhead, Renegade Cyberslasher, and Forsaken Gang Goon. However, you can also just roll up a random punk without all the class bells and whistles, which is what I did for my game.
For my solo play, I’m using the CY_litary De.file_ment rules based on Solitary Defilement, the solo rules for Mork Borg. They are a great compliment to the base game, adding more random tables to roll on to generate unique streets as my character searched for what he needed to fulfill his job.
My character is Bell, a standard punk with an elaborate hairstyle and unnatural eyes. Like most Borg games, his skills aren’t great. He has a 0 in Strength, Agility, and Presence, so he is not strong, agile, or charismatic. However, he does have +1 in Toughness and Knowledge, meaning he can take a bit of a beating and is a little smarter than average. I gave myself the maximum of 8 HP as going solo in a Borg game means a likely death, so I hope to keep Bell alive for as long as possible. As for weapons, Bell is armed with a pair of SMGs and wears Kevlar under his shirt. He’s carrying a transit pass (good for 8 trips) and a Bio ID scanner to track a target within 50 meters.
Bell also has 14,000 credits in debt with Vac, the owner of Vizion, a seedy nightclub on the Ports. Vac comes to Bell with a deal to relieve some pressure if the punk can pull off something special.
Vac is obsessed with Pixel Diva, a famous singer/performer in the city. She’s the poster woman for Pandacore, where singers don animal mascot heads and adopt an alternate persona to keep their private lives hidden. Vac believes getting Pixel Diva to pop in for a surprise performance at Vizion will make his club the hottest spot in all of The CY. But he has no way to contact her. He knows who does, though.
There’s an old timer, Shade, an influencer from back in the day. She was part of Pixel Diva’s initial burst of hype, pushing the singer to the top of the feeds. While Pixel’s star rose, Shade’s faded. She now operates out of a modified RV that she drives around The CY to keep away from the authorities while she streams a bizarre mix of product placement & conspiracy theories. The RV is outfitted with some killer defenses, so Bell will need the help of a hacker who can help him override these systems.
To create this mission, I set a difficulty rating that determines how many milestones I will have. For this, I chose Depressing, which means I have four milestones. The first will be getting a hacker to help me shut down the RV’s defenses. Then, I will get into the RV and get the contact info. Finally, I will deliver it to Vac without dying. That leaves an open milestone somewhere that I will leave blank for now. Somewhere in play, I’ll figure out what it is. When I reach the end I roll 2d20 + Glitches (undos) against a 12DR. If I beat it, then it’s mission accomplished. If I get a partial success, we add one more objective. If I fail, something catastrophic occurs, and I roll d2 +1 more milestones.
Bell has heard of a hacker in Galgenbeck, so he hops on the Metro, using one of the rides on his transit pass. Heavy black rain falls, and the train suddenly stops before he can reach his destination. A voice on the PA system tells the passengers they will need to disembark as the track ahead has become flooded. Bell pushes through the grumbling crowd out into the icy, cutting rainfall.
Ducking into an alleyway, Bell comes upon a stomach-wrenching sight. The first thing he sees are the words “Everything is for Free” painted on the wall in blood that runs in the rain. Just a couple meters away, a young person with rabbit-like ear implants is hacking away at the feet of a recently deceased passerby. Once the feet are cut off by the sword Rabbit Ears is wielding, they turn around, showcasing one of the most demented smiles Bell has seen in a while. They hold the Silverglide sneakers in one hand, the latest in high fashion coming out of The Hills. Bell recognized the stare of someone dosed out of their mind on Miura.
Rabbit Ears charges at Bell, full of bloodlust, raising their katana. Bell pulls his SMGs out from under his jacket and sprays a wave of bullets that shred Rabbit Ears’s left arm, the sneakers end up in a blood pool on the ground. The drug pumping through their system seems to have left Rabbit Ears partially unaware, and they keep charging, screaming obscenities. Bell unloads another round, leaving his attacker motionless on the ground. Rain pelts their lifeless body, and Bell hightails it over to the next street, shaking from the unexpected confrontation.
Bell finds himself caught up in a dense crowd of people walking in one direction. People march in the opposite direction on the other side of a chain link fence. There are CCTV cameras mounted in multiple positions. Armed SecOp stand at gates. A few watch from a platform elevated above the crowd. Bell realizes these are the servants in Galgenbeck changing shifts. He tries to keep his head down and avoid the guards’ attention but fails to be inconspicuous.
A guard grabs Bell by his jacket collar and pulls him from the crowd. The shouting of contradictory commands and curses follows. Bell’s eyes dart from his captor to the sea of people. He dashes away, the guard too lazy to pursue, and gets lost among the people until he can dodge through another alley. He doesn’t find anything too great here, either.
A canal has overflown, and the water sloshes up over the pavement. One of Galgenbeck’s wealthy assholes is driving his motorboat around in the rain. It’s decked out in strobing LEDs that have probably caused a seizure or two. Fuzzed-out bass, heavy music blasts from the built-in speakers, and somewhere under all that noise, the man is shouting about how much he doesn’t care about this rain. Bell remembers the footage on the feed a few months ago of coastal homes slipping off into the ocean’s maw and wonders if the guy would care if that happened to his house. Just a matter of time until he finds out.
It’s one more street over, and Bell finally discovers what he wants. A holoboard advertising an entry into a new life of success and friends via Fidestic Transformations glows atop a department store. Bell finds the fire escape around back and makes his way up. Then, it’s a slightly more perilous climb to the roof, but he manages it without trouble. He approaches the holobox that is projecting the board and taps out a very particular knock on the access hatch door. The one who resides within seems to like what they hear, and the door slides away. Bell enters.
To be continued…
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