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And I maybe cuss a little.
Also, there is no logical order or layout to this book. I'd like to say this is a deliberate attempt at satire, poking fun at the irrational ordering and layout of the book I'm reviewing, but it isn't. It's just that I word-vomited this review onto the page.
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Introduction
Okay, Cyberpunk v3.0 has been out for several years now. There was controversy on the boards when it came out, but I mostly ignored it because I'd never even played Cyberpunk 2020 at that point and didn't have a clue what most of the people were talking about. However, having played in a campaign of each of the above iterations of the Cyberpunk game, I'm now ready to put pen to paper and froth to chin.
Artwork
Let’s get it out of the way – the artwork in this book consists of photographs of action figures (a la Barbie or G.I. Joe), customised . It’s an interesting idea, and there’s even a few of them that aren’t crap, but that’s not really a boasting point about a book: ‘Our innovative approach to artwork isn’t entirely crap!’ Aside from the absolute lack of any emotional depth to the illustrations (a moulded face can’t even do the ‘cool disdain’ that many of the Cyberpunk 2020 illustrations had), they’ve missed a major point of Cyberpunk v3.0: all the action figures are of 1980s-style action movie stars with huge metallic cyberlimbs.
In other words, they’re Cyberpunk 2020 characters.
3.0 is set 10-20 years afterwards (yeah, that’s vaguer than the 2013, 2020 and 2027 settings of previous instalments of the game; I’ll rant about this later), where technology has moved way, way beyond pistons and myomer bundles. Correspondingly, the aesthetic implied in the text doesn’t match about half of the illustrations.
The Setting
See, Cyberpunk v3.0 isn’t actually a cyberpunk setting, in the same sense that the previous editions where. It’s more or less a post-human setting these days. And that’s where the setting falls apart. You see, v3.0 can’t decide what it wants to be, and exemplifies its inability to decide by splitting society into six ‘alt-cults’, each latching onto a particular ideology. Okay, fair enough. On the other hand, these six factions each have their own unique technology that no one else has access to… in a world where these six factions live side-by-side and overlap outside their own enclaves, and where there are also extremely powerful mega-corporations (weakened by the Fourth Corporate War, but boosted by being taken over by the Mafia and other organised crime groups, and therefore even less law-abiding and more sociopathic than they were before) who would make a killing by stealing, adapting and reselling it to the consumer masses, and a federal government desperate for a way of regaining control over the United States.
I’m drifting. Instead of talking about the alt-cults, I’m drifting into a rant about the moronic setting in general.
You see, these alt-cults have each been given a fantastic new bit of technology that makes them unique. This is courtesy of a few benevolent geniuses that were floating around during the Fourth Corporate War (aka the Third World War, where businesses stupidly decided to kill off millions of their potential customers by unleashing nuclear weapons at each other… hang on… their corporate assets were far enough away from each other that they could throw nukes at one another? Sorry, drifting again…). Logically speaking, these alt-cults would require vast amounts of money and resources to perpetuate their scientific advantage over the rest of the world. Take Corpore Metal, for example, being a group of full-borgs or, more accurately, brains in jars that can be switched between different Living Metal™ host bodies. Imagine the manufacturing and running costs involved. Or Desnai, which surrounds itself with robot servants, or Rolling State, who are not only nomadic, but also completely stuffed full of nanotechnology to the extent that if they break a bone (or lose a limb), the gap is filled with nanobots until tissue can grow back.
These aren’t nation states. They aren’t even corporations. They’re subcultures that somehow manage to have the funds to produce this stuff, as well as improve it over time, and give it away free to deserving alt-cultists (at least, according to the rules they are).
Let’s look at the worst example: the Edge-Runners, who are also the most conventional of the alt-cults. Let’s assume for a moment, as indicated in the book, that these alt-cults are subcultures, rather than the entire population of the United States of America. This means that the alt-cults are minority groups. The Edge Runners are the successors of the (in-setting) Cyberpunk movement, in that they’re the cool guys who run around doing awesome things of awesomeness while shooting smart-linked guns built into their cybernetic arms. The thing is, nowadays, their technology is just a more modern version of what they had back in 2020. So… how is it unique, in a world where the technology used to operate them is almost ubiquitous? Also, how exactly do a bunch of people who aren’t actually an organisation, but a simple ideology, enforce their uniqueness? Who is the central body that a) decides who is and isn’t an Edge Runner, and b) has the control over the development, manufacture and distribution of their ‘unique’ tech?
The corebook completely fails to answer these (and many other) questions. Instead, it takes each of the alt-cults, each of which is a potentially interesting idea, and then makes them flat and boring by giving so few details that each group is utterly generic.
*sigh*
Moving on to another ridiculous aspect of the setting: Night City.
Night City is a massive, ever-changing nano-constructed city a mile high above ground and stretching over most of the landmass of coastal California – in other words, it’s bigger in volume than every other city on the planet put together. The book goes on and on about how incredibly big Night City is, how incredibly massive, how incredibly sparsely-populated it is as a result of all that. The pseudo-living buildings grow, die and are cannibalised by other construction nanobots.
I’m all for impossibly big conurbations – I grew up on Warhammer 40,000, for Christ’s sake, and think Judge Dredd’s Mega City One is pretty cool. On the other hand, Night City of v3.0 is a real let-down. It's boring. It's... yeah, it's dull. This game has managed to change an ever-growing, mile-high, nation-sized city with a nuclear crater at its centre and make it suck. Aside from the architecture, it’s just like the old Night City of 2020, but stupider (and, let’s face it, any city with a club that has an annual death toll between approximately 1040 to 7300 – the Totentanz, the lower figure being if it’s open one night a week, the higher being seven nights a week – isn’t exactly a sensible setting, no matter how much fun it is to play in).
Quick logic check 1: what is one of the main reasons for gang warfare? Turf. In nano-spawned Night City, there is a near-infinite amount of space to go around. Gangs need never even meet one another.
Quick logic check 2: if your city spawns buildings exponentially, why does the book include accommodation prices in Night City Dollars? Accommodation is free for the taking.
The third bit of stupid that cripples the setting: the DataKrash.
This, alongside the Fourth Corporate War, is what makes Cyberpunk v3.0 a post-apocalyptic setting. Get this: a virus has been released that consumes, worldwide, every bit of paper produced since about 1970. That’s not all of it. Part two: the internet was, from the very programming of the Ihara-Grubb protocol, which allowed the whole ‘virtual world’ netrunning thing, booby-trapped, so that upon the death of the world’s biggest asshole, Rache Bartmoss, it would also become so virus-infested that it would have to be switched off. Virus-stricken computers rewrote their own data, so that the data couldn’t be trusted to be accurate, and now no one knows any history any more.
Thus, the world has been reduced to pockets of civilisation that barely communicate with one another and don’t know what year it is (literally). Hang on, a lack of paper means you don’t know what year it is? You mean that building that was put up last summer didn’t have ‘2021’ engraved in its wall? All those products with copyright notices printed or moulded onto them didn’t have the year on? The world’s atomic clocks didn’t all tell the time? Was every electronic calendar attached to the internet? Hell, does your secure mainframe, remote from the internet, not have a clock in it? Or, in fact, your backup data?
Just hit Earth with a fucking asteroid, okay?
Hey, if all data was corrupted, how did anyone manage to design the cool nanotech and biotech and cybertech that everyone’s running around with in 203x (as the year is now referred to in the book, since no one can agree on what year it actually is)?
Surely, although 21st century humanity would be able to skip rediscovering fire and the wheel, and go straight to internal combustion and even basic electronics, anything beyond that would be impossible in a post-DataKrash setting… unless of course the DataKrash isn’t anywhere near as awe-inspiringly terrible as the book says it was.
This Bit's Worthy Of Its Own Heading, But I Can't Think Of One
And here’s another hideous fuck-up, which is a critical difference between 2020 and v3.0, which v3.0 mistakenly wears as a badge of pride. To get a cybernetic arm, you no longer have to amputate the fleshy arm. Instead (and this is the Edge Runner schtick), you can just wear an armband around your bicep that, at the flash of a nerve ending, expands (a nanotech-wizard did it and ran away) and encases your body in a massive stat boost and Swiss army knife.
Okay, it’s an in-setting advance in technology. However, by not hacking your arm off, you just cut the setting’s balls off.
Cyberpunk 2020 got its feel from the utter sociopathy of the setting. That was a world where even the fluffy liberals are a pack of mass-murdering terrorists. It was eminently self-destructive, and there was no way that humanity would ever advance into any kind of hypothetical age of enlightenment. The human race was on the road to hell in Cyberpunk 2020. This insanity was exemplified by the idea that your character would willingly have entire limbs hacked away in a filthy, back-street ripperdoc’s, to make himself better at his job or his hobbies, in return for destroying his own ability to empathise with other people and, eventually, descend into full cyberpsychosis.
In Cyberpunk v3.0, even the full-borgs, the ultimate bogeymen of the original setting, are as rational and well-balanced as they were before they starting flicking through the adverts in Post-Humans Today magazine.
Setting Summary
In summary, the Cyberpunk v3.0 setting might not be dreadful, in and of itself, but it is very poorly thought out such that if falls over when you poke it with a spoon. It's an underdone flambe of a setting. I’d recommend picking up Eclipse Phase if you want to read a posthuman setting done well.
Mechanics
As a game, v3.0 is a mixed bag. The bits of the system that existed in previous editions have been refined and improved in many places.
- It’s still stupidly easy to dismember someone by sneezing on them. (It’s as if the rules assume everyone’s wearing full armour, yet the statistics for ballistic amputation that the author viewed assumed everyone was naked.)
- Armour-piercing ammunition is still less useful than normal bullets, except for when firing through something akin to a concrete wall.
- Lasers and other high-tech weapons are still included in the rules, despite being utterly useless in comparison to a good old gun. Even the fancy cybertech-frying effects of microwavers have been made redundant by having no effect against the modern cybertech most people apparently wield in the setting.
- Hang on, caseless ammunition is notably smaller and lighter than normal bullets, on account of not being made up so much brass (take a look at the real-world Heckler & Koch G11's 45-round magazine compared to the average 20-30 of most similar-sized rifles). So why are all the assumed-to-be-caseless guns in this game still holding the same amount of ammunition as their modern day equivalents?
- Why exactly are the ‘typical’ weapons available to members of each alt-cult so much more devastating than their equivalents in the open market? Why would anyone in an alt-cult pick up an open market weapon when their own variants are so much better? (And again, how the hell did a subculture develop such devastating weaponry, given their poor economic clout and, in many cases, knowledge base?)
- On the plus side, all combat, including shooting, is based on opposed rolls, so that a trained soldier can make himself more difficult to hit than a civilian, rather than target numbers based on what range you’re firing at (a factor now dealt with by modifiers to the roll). In general, the entire combat system (except the idiotic armour-piercing bullet rules) have been given a good solid overhaul. It's nothing special or snazzy, but it's functional and it works.
- A mixed thing – there’s now hit points in the system. Not a bad thing, in and of itself, but why throw away the distinctive damage system from 2020? The old way worked, even if it could have benefited from a little streamlining.
Editing and Production Values
The book itself, in terms of production values… *sigh* The book itself is a piece of shit.
It is a piece of shit.
I think I need to repeat this, once more, for emphasis: it’s a piece of shit.
Much of it is cut and pasted from 2020 in a horrendously lazy fashion. Remember the sidebar tirade about the myth of bullet knock-back from 2020? It’s still referenced in the main body of the text as being ‘nearby’, but the actual sidebar no longer exists. Whole swathes of rules are missing, including lots of stuff about Corpore Metal full-borgs, such as how they heal/repair damage (the main healing rules tell C-Metal players not to bother reading the chapter, because it doesn’t apply to them). In the stats for Rolling State’s weapons, about half of them haven’t been written, instead displaying the default template stats for a submachine gun.
(Note, these issues may have been fixed in later print runs - I have no idea. The copy I borrowed from my GM was bought as soon as the game was released.)
Character Creation
Character creation is spread through the entire book, to the extent that, if you want to create a character, you have to read virtually the entire goddamn rules section of the book in order to do so. This is the result of a misguided attempt to have ‘quickstart’ character creation, like video games do for newbie players, where you just pick a ‘template’ for the character and then tweak it to fit. Pages upon pages of the book are taken up by duplicated information or by the aforementioned templates for characters from each alt-cult, as well as a few ‘unaligned’ characters – a social group that is then almost completely ignored for the rest of the book. Why not just stick with a random character creation system that includes rolling for alt-cult and generating a role within that group, thus saving us loads of space that could be spent rationalising the idiotic setting?
On the plus side, it’s no longer a class-based system of Solos and Cops and Rockerboys and Corporates etc. The alt-cults replaced that. I’m not sure which version of character classes was worse. Probably the alt-cults, because it’s easier to ignore the character classes in 2020 and at least there was an assumption that not all Solos think alike, whereas this game seems to ram the genericity of each alt-cultist down your throat. It is a close run thing though. At least v3.0 removed the class-ability nonsense (“What, I can’t be both a cop and have decent reflexes in a gunfight? But I kill rogue solos for a living…”) and replaced it with a points-buy thing where you can mix and match the special abilities, plus a nice array of other character traits.
Overall
I don’t want to dislike Cyberpunk v3.0, because it’s got some nice little rules bits in there. However, I’m more inclined to just steal those rules bits (such as what there is of the C-Metal variant of full-borg, perhaps as a far more expensive alternative to the cyberpsychosis-inducing 2020 variant, or the refined combat system) and run a game in the Cyberpunk 2020 setting, albeit with my own tweaks – the Totentanz, for example, rather than having 20 murders on a good night (for fuck’s sake – there are insurgencies that are safer!), more like a single murder making it a good night for the kind of people the club attracts (‘Whoa, dude, did you see that guy get his face shot off at Tot’s last week? Cool, huh?’ – see, psychotic setting, but minus the demographic dip).
For now, I’m going to sit back and wait for my hardcopy of Eclipse Phase to arrive from the States, so that I can fully appreciate how posthumanism is meant to be done. (I've skimmed the e-book version, but I can never read them properly.)
Update: Actually, since writing this review, I’ve purchased Eclipse Phase via the US Amazon site, and from a first read, admittedly without having played it, it gets 5 Style, 5 Substance. It is beautiful. It is what Cyberpunk v3.0 fails to be like in the slightest.)
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