Cyberpunk (role-playing game)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
This page needs visual enhancement.
You can help All The Tropes by finding a high-quality image or video to illustrate the topic of this page.


Cyberpunk is a Cyberpunk (duh) tabletop game written by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games that was first released in 1988.

An Earth, somewhat divergent from our own. Central American conflict, European disagreement with the US on the matter of the Soviet Union, meddling by an American Government Conspiracy, and various disasters combine to leave the world in a worse state than Real Life, albeit one with more advances in biological and cybernetic augmentation. Into the chaos and void left by collapsed societies and governments step various corporations, who are quite happy to minimise intervention in the following decades of lawlessness so long as they can turn a healthy profit.

The core of this setting focuses on "Night City", a fictional metropolis between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the US west coast. It is a Wretched Hive like a caricature of capitalism's worst excesses, where corporations and gangs thrive under a toothless government while everyone else struggles in the dirt.

One of Cyberpunk's unique features is its attempt to avert RPGs Equal Combat. Instead of all Roles (its equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons character classes) being different approaches to combat, many Roles have special abilities not directly intended for fighting (for brevity's sake, this only covers those in 2013):

  • Cop: Law enforcers using Authority to get compliance.
  • Corporate/Executive: Businesspeople using Resources to call on materiel and men.
  • Crystaljock (2013 only): Hackers using Intuition to solve problems.
  • Fixer: Brokers, dealers and fences negotiating Streetdeals between those who need jobs done and those who would do said jobs.
  • Media: Intrepid Reporters wielding Credibility to convince others to hear and act on news or gain access to info and places.
  • Netrunner: Hackers using virtual reality Interfaces to access the Net directly.
  • Nomad: Independent travelers and wanderers roaming the roads who can call on Family for aid but must give back.
  • Panzerboy: Pilots both legal and smuggling that use Vehicle Zen to work wonders with their rides.
  • Pirate (2013 and 2020 only): Aquatic counterparts to Nomads.
  • Private Investigator (2013 and 2020 only): Information gatherers who Research sources and get them to spill.
  • Rockerboy: Rebellious activists and artists who inspire fans and followers with Charismatic Leadership.
  • Solo: Hired Guns whose Combat Sense allows them to perceive and avoid threats.
  • Techie: Mechanicians and Technicians who can Jury Rig equipment and Scrounge what they need. Includes Medical Technicians specialised in the surgical ways.

There are currently four editions:

  • Cyberpunk (also 2013) (1988)
  • Cyberpunk 2020 (1990)
  • Cyberpunk V3.0 (2005)
  • Cyberpunk Red (2020)

A variety of spinoff media also exist. Among these are:

Tropes used in Cyberpunk (role-playing game) include:
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Rache Bartmoss's attempt to take down the corps with the R.A.B.I.D.S. virus had the side effect of causing many AIs to be unshackled and go rogue.
  • Brain Uploading: The Soulkiller can read a brain and convert it into an engram. Originally intended by Alt Cunningham to preserve the dying, Arasaka stole it and used the fact that early versions killed the target in the process as a weapon. However, if the target has already been dead for a while, the resulting engram is flawed, as seen with Jackie.
  • Canon Discontinuity: V3.0 was decanonised in response to extensive fan backlash over many changes, including the use of action figure photography instead of drawn artwork.
  • The City Narrows: Night City is already a standout Wretched Hive even by the standards of this Crapsack World. By 2077, the Pacifica district's Dogtown is somehow even worse, being controlled by a Dangerous Deserter's gang and something that the cops, corps, and most other gangs want nothing to do with other than to wall it off and keep the bad, crazy people in.
  • Combat Medic: Trauma Team will fly to the rescue of subscribers in armed aircraft and carry armed security specialists to protect the EMTs.
  • Divided States of America: Several Free States seceded from the old USA and are still resisting unification with the New United States.
  • Evil Old Folks: Saburo Arasaka was born in 1919 and served in World War II. Even at near to or more than 100 years old, he is still very much the quintessential Corrupt Corporate Executive.
  • Government Conspiracy: The Gang of Four were a secret alliance of the CIA, DEA, FBI, and NSA that operated as a shadow government within the US. Their meddling both domestic and foreign would have disastrous consequences for their country extending well beyond their defeat.
  • Ink Suit Actor: Johnny Silverhand (at least as of 2077) and Solomon Reed look near-identical to Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba respectively.
  • Lost Technology: Thanks to the DataKrash, a lot of pre-2020 tech has been locked behind the Blackwall created to contain the rogue AIs, out of reach to most.
  • NGO Superpower: Most of the Mega Corps have private armies at their disposal. The most noteworthy are Arasaka and Militech, who even have air forces, navies with carriers, intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, and basically supply corporate security and soldiers to everybody else. There have even been a few all-out Corporate Wars in the canonical setting. They're not completely unaccountable to their host nations - for one, the Japanese government was able to rein in Arasaka and force it to confine its operations to Japan for a few years as part of taking responsibility for the Fourth Corporate War - but they are pretty damn close.
  • Non-Indicative Name: The "Scavengers" take augmentations off still-living captives.
  • Powered Armor: They're called "Linear Frames" and grafted onto the user's body.
  • Psycho for Hire: Adam Smasher. It's hard to get more psycho than someone who demands his contracts not only allow for civilian casualties, but mandate that kind of collateral damage.
  • Razor Floss: Arm-installed monowire is one of the available implants.
  • Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: One of the ways a GM can punish a group that's getting too big for its britches is deploy Adam Smasher, who will proceed to kill them all quickly and horribly. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners provides an excellent demonstration.
  • Schizo-Tech: One source of news is "screamsheets", which are newspapers printed on demand from special vending machines with the latest happenings. Pondsmith apparently didn't put two and two together and realise that he could cut out the middleman entirely by letting inhabitants of the verse just access news directly from a website via a personal browser.
  • Twenty Minutes Into the Future: The first edition was released in 1988 and set in a then-distant 2013, one which already had viable mass-produced cybernetic augmentation.
  • Uncanny Valley: Inverted with the Maelstrom. This Gang's Hat is taking cybernetic augmentation to levels that are extreme even by the setting's standards, with a common one being replacing the upper face with a mount for more than two optics. Yet because they don't go all the way to full-body replacements that are Brain In a Jar within a fully robotic-looking chassis, but instead retain enough of the original flesh that observers can tell there Was Once a Man, they end up looking more disturbing than either the less augmented or the fully-replaced.
  • Vice City: Night City is a Hellhole even by the standards of the setting.

In 2077, they voted my city the worst place to live in America. Main issues? Sky-high rate of violence and more people living below the poverty line than anywhere else.

  • Weak but Skilled: While the fact that he does have augmentation disqualifies him from being a Badass Normal, Morgan Blackhand is otherwise lightly chromed, and still so good at what he does that he runs in the highest circles nevertheless. None less than Adam Smasher - possibly the most heavily-augmented person on the planet - considers him a Worthy Opponent.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(role-playing_game)?oldid=2034463"