Cyberpunk fiction tends to focus too much on flashy tech and not enough on the dystopia, but Cy_Borg, a new tabletop RPG by Christian Sahlen, has absolutely no problem dragging your shiny character straight through the mud. The game welcomes you to a world that’s been ground down by capitalism-driven ecological disasters, mysterious infections rumored to be from outer space, and warring corporations looking to use chromed-out punks like yourself as expendable fodder to settle their violent rivalries. The city of Cy is one that’s immediately hostile to you, but it makes for one of the most compellingly vicious cyberpunk RPGs on the market.
While the game has wonderfully streamlined rules and concise worldbuilding, the first thing you will notice is the art. Like its predecessor Mork Borg, the doom metal fantasy game that provides the stylistic and mechanical basis for Cy_Borg, this book is aggressively laid out with gorgeous illustrations by Johan Nohr and some of the most unique formatting you’ll ever see in an RPG manual. Every page changes in color, font and spacing, making just the act of flipping through the book a treat for the eyes. Not only is it a visual feast, but the art acts as a perfect tone setter for the overwhelming, flashy, and brutal world contained within the text. Occasionally fonts and layouts can be just a little bit hard to follow, but it’s all part of the experience Cy_Borg aims to create.
The rules themselves are fairly simple, but still give players options to add flair to their experience. Rather than having an overwhelming amount of modifiers to add and subtract, actions are boiled down to only five stats. It doesn’t matter if it’s an attack or a rousing speech, you’ll roll a D20, add the relevant stat, and see if you cleared the predetermined challenge rating of the action. The GM never rolls for attacks, instead asking the player to roll a defense roll to see if the enemy attack hits, a small change that makes the player feel more agency. In order to keep the action cinematic and fast-paced, you never break out a map and minis to meticulously measure attack distances, but there are some optional combat rules that can be used, like suppressing fire and cover, if you want a bit more of a tactical experience.
Hacking in the game, which is often a place where cyberpunk RPGs bring the table to a grinding halt while the hacker does a series of rolls to break into specific systems, is made simple by the use of Apps, which are special abilities that can be slotted into a cyberdeck. The game also brings in a bit of a magic-like flavor reminiscent of the cyberpunk classic Shadowrun by giving players access to nanopowers, which come from a strange, possibly alien bacteria that’s infected people all over Cy. Both apps and nanopowers are particularly fun to use because they have extra effects that occur when you critically fail trying to use them, making for a fun risk-reward balance. For example, your nanopowered ability to consume something dead and relive their last moments may seem super convenient, but if you roll a one, it could make the alien crabs infesting you burrow deeper into you, paralyzing you with pain.
It’s easy for new players to hit the ground running, as character creation is extremely smooth. Making a new punk involves rolling dice to determine stats, starting equipment/weapons, and class specific benefits or details. All the classes are dark twists on standard tropes, painting genre classics with Cy_Borg’s signature apocalyptic flair. The tables used during setup ensure that you’ll end up with a crew of weirdos that have been abandoned by their gang, discharged from a corporation, or on the run for stumbling upon a secret cyber conspiracy. Sometimes the randomness of the dice can yield a party that’s not exactly balanced, but whether you’ve got an unstoppable killer or a frail gearhead, you’ll have a blast running them face first into the meat grinder of Cy_Borg.
While the art is the most immediately grabbing aspect of the game, the flavor text is what really helps complete the package. The book contains pages and pages of information about locations, corporations and threats, but it doesn’t go overboard with its details. Too many RPGs become obsessed with laying out an entire history of the world, but Cy_Borg is happy to give you just enough to give you a general vibe while letting you fill in the details. A simple sentence like “the city is a convulsing, infected leviathan” does so much more to help build the world than a dry timeline of events, and this book excels at presenting bleak and evocative prose to color the city.
The game feels like it would be great for a new GM to run, as it’s packed to the brim with useful tables of possibilities. Locations, events, and cults can all be generated easily with a couple rolls of the dice. Enemies are thoroughly outlined, stats and all, making combat encounters easy to put together. Whether you want to use Terminator-like Cydroids, weaponized beasts or just a plain old cy-raging menace, Cy_Borg has you covered. There’s also an introductory heist included that will give you a good idea of what goes into planning a standard mission, and if you’re looking for something to spark your creativity for your own misadventures, you can use their online mission generator to give you a good start.
Cy_Borg encourages you to break or bend every rule in the book to fit your playstyle at the table, but it has one immutable truth: players cannot be loyal to corporations, police or the capitalist system they are oppressed by. Cyberpunk 2077 allowed you to run missions for the cops, which always felt against the spirit of the genre, so I’m glad to see a game that wholeheartedly embraces the punk aspect. Characters are barely keeping their head above water as they drown in debt, giving them all the more reason to want to burn every corporation to the ground, a mission that will likely end with their neon and chrome corpse rotting in a gutter, surrounded by advertisements. Like a sleek sports car playing high-speed chicken with an armored vehicle, Cy_Borg is fast, flashy and dangerous as hell, making for an exciting addition to the longrunning genre.
You can get your copy of Cy_Borg at the Free League Publishing website.
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