The Sprawl Mission 1: The Birthday Party

I decided it would be fun to run some one-shots of The Sprawl, possibly extending into future missions if all went well.  I got seven people available to play, and since PBTA games work better with 3-4 players, I decided to run two missions for two different groups.  Perhaps at some point in the future members of the two teams will work together?

If you'd like to see what happened in Mission 2, there's a player's write-up here, but here's how things went down with the first group.

The Birthday Party

It's cough years in the future and the former United Kingdom has collapsed, devolving into a number of independent city states as global warming and the urban sprawl gradually obliterated the once green and pleasant land.

Central City: a megacity covering most of what used to be called the Midlands.  While there's officially a democratically elected government, everyone knows the real power is in the hands of the multinational corporations.

But there are things that the corporations can't do - or can't be seen to be doing.  And that's where the crew comes in.

The crew all received identical messages from a Miss Smith, telling them to meet her at Raphael's to discuss a job.  A rather more upscale restaurant that they were used to, as the pizzas came with real cheese.  If nothing else, the meeting might be worthwhile for the free meal.

Miss Smith explained the job.  Jiro Nihei was turning twenty-one in a few days' time.  His mother, Kimiko Nihei, was the CEO of Nihei Industries and had planned the kind of party that befitted the heir to the corporation.  A polite affair, with cocktails, piano music and a carefully curated guest list of high level NI employees.

What Jiro Nihei wanted, however, was drugs, women and loud music, and there was a substantial payout available in exchange for ensuring that he got the kind of party he wanted without his mother finding out about it.

Once terms had been negotiated, the team got to work.  Looking into Jiro's social media gave them some ideas on what kind of party he enjoyed: illegal raves.  Not the kind of thing advertised in public forums, but a dive into the deep web told them that his favourite DJ Mesmer would be performing in an abandoned warehouse on the canalside on the night of the party.

Keeping Jiro's mother in the dark would be a bigger challenge, and while giving her food poisoning was briefly considered, they finally decided on a body double and a handler.  Trenton hit up his cult for someone prepared to get the necessary facial sculpting to impersonate Jiro for a night, and Donau recruited a skilled operative to stay with him and deflect questioning.

The night of the party arrived.  Marsh Rat jacked into the Orion Hotel's security, deftly avoiding the Black ICE, and added a few extra names to the guest list.  Trenton headed inside, and managed to locate Jiro without arousing suspicion, easily persuading him to leave for a better party.  They headed for Jiro's private suite, where Jiro got changed into some clothes more suited to an illegal rave and Trenton tried to steal his phone.  Tried, since Jiro returned while he was still holding in, and took some convincing that nothing untoward was happening.

Meanwhile, with Marsh Rat in control of the security cameras, the double and handler were brought in to make the switch in Jiro's suite.  The double put on Jiro's clothes.  Donau diverted suspicion by posing as an incompetant waiter, and soon Jiro was out of the building and on Gear's bike.

They hadn't entirely avoided detection, as became obvious when another bike in Nihei Industries colours gave chase, but Gear and his bike were practically a single entity and soon shook off the tail.  The others got in an AI taxi and left via a different route.

At the warehouse, DJ Mesmer's show was in full swing.  Jiro threw himself in with enthusiasm, while Gear kept an eye on things to make sure nothing untoward happened before the others showed up.  Only one threat stood out: a man with the glint of a cybernetic eye implant who seemed to be recording.  One quiet little chat about living in the now and he was persuaded to stop the recording and erase his footage.  Disappointed, he headed off to sample the recreational pharmaceuticals on offer.

Jiro was similarly keen to indulge, but with the team keeping close watch, he was still more or less upright when it was time to get him back to the Orion Hotel.  Word from the handler was that Fake Jiro had played his part well and got an appropriate level of drunk.  However, the hotel were concerned about a potential theft and had tightened up security, locking down all external doors.

External doors were no match for Marsh Rat, however, and the garage opened up just in time for Gear to slide his bike dramatically underneath it.  Jiro was returned to his room, and the double and handler brought out again, and the team made their exit.

They met up with Miss Smith again the next morning, and got paid.  There was still one questioning bothering them though.  Who was behind this job?  While the exact source couldn't be indentified, they were able to find out who Miss Smith was working for.  Nihei Industries.

Cyberpunk Red's lifepath in action: Armala's backstory

I love a life path system.  It was by far my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020 and I'm delighted that Cyberpunk Red has one too.  I randomly rolled my netrunner's backstory, and used it to write the following backstory incorporating everything I rolled.  One of the other PCs rolled the same childhood background living in a megabuilding, so we decided that was how we knew each other and I've incorporated some of the details of his story into mine.  In particular, the megabuilding in question, owned by a corporation with a particular fondness for alternative facts, whose residents are indoctrinated with capitalists beliefs and the values of America's greatest ever president...

---

Armala Suda was born into a homeless community in Night City.  Several families lived together under a bridge until one day they finally managed to find a way inside one of the city's megabuildings.

They hoped to find work and maybe even a home there, but the residents of Eric Trump Plaza turned out to be oddly suspicious of anyone even slightly brown.  They tried to escape the building, but their original entrance point had been cut off and attempting to leave via the main entrance without documentation resulted in a police shooting.  The only survivors were Armala, her parents, and Armala's friend Kamala Singh, thanks to one of the residents, a janitor, who risked his own life to snatch the two girls out of the line of fire.  The four of them went into hiding, making their new home in the dumpsters, constantly on the lookout for the building's authorities.

Finding she had a knack with machines and computers, Armala began to practice making the security cameras look the other way to make their foraging a little easier.  The residents were a little harder to hide from, but soon realised Armala could be useful to them too, and soon she was trading her skills for food and clothes for her family.  Dean, who worked at the gun range, started sneaking her in after hours so she could learn to shoot.  It wasn't long before they were in love, but their plans for a life together were tragically cut short.  Dean was killed when one of the range's customers accidentally shot him dead.

Armala attempted to channel her grief into something positive, answering an advert for someone to play synthesizer in a new band called Gen Sys.  While she was forced to leave when the rest of the band's infighting started to attract too much attention, it did allow her to catch the eye of a local netrunner collective.

They were working to take down the corporation owning the building from the inside and looking for a new member.  They offered to get her neural link installed in exchange for her working with them, and she accepted.  One of the first things she did with her new abilities was to hack the door code of an apartment in the hab block that she knew had recently been vacated, to give her parents and Kamala their first real home.

Initially her work for the collective was to pay off her cyberware, but soon she became friends with one of her fellow netrunners, Arch.  While she wasn't convinced when Arch insisted on setting her up on a date with her younger brother Bobby, things went better than anticipated and soon they were dating.

Life with the netrunner crew was going well.  Arch and Armala made a good team and their services were in demand.  It all went wrong one day when they started picking up chatter across the megabuilding's networks suggesting that a riot was imminent.  They tried to contact Bobby to get him away from the danger area, but by the time they got through it was too late and Bobby was killed in a fight with the police.

As a known associate of Bobby, now officially declared a terrorist, Armala (now going by the name Widow) knew it was time to get Arch, herself and her family out of Eric Trump Plaza.  Help came from an unlikely source.  Staff Sergeant James Ford had been part of the police squad that had attacked them when they first tried to leave the megabuilding.  He'd seen the corporation for what it truly was that day and finally had the chance to try to make things right, risking everything to get them out of the building.  Unable to ever return safely, he took the fake ID Arch offered him to begin a new life outside the building.

Out of the building, Arch and Widow set up a new team of freelance netrunners catering to local nomads and fixers.  Unfortunately they'd had to abandon all their old clients in the flight from the Plaza, and some of them have taken this as a personal insult.  Widow doesn't intend to let them get the better of her though.  After everything she's been through, anyone attempting to cross her had better watch out.  One day she'll get the janitor who saved her and Kamala out of there and into a better life.  And then that building's going down.

First Time Playing: Cyberpunk Red

I have a love/hate relationship with Cyberpunk 2020.  I love the incredible setting, which ties multiple classics of the genre together into one glorious whole.  I hate the godawful system where combat has so many variables you're doing algebra to work out what's happened, is so subject to min-maxing that parties can easily end up wildly imbalanced, and where you can't play one of the genre's most important character types, the netrunner, because the system is so badly designed that most GMs won't let anyone play them.

But 30 years have passed and here's a new edition.

We started off with character creation and picked our roles.  I went for a netrunner, since I'd obviously never been able to play one before, and dived into the life path generator.

The life path generator is probably my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020, and I'm glad to say that Cyberpunk Red is just as much fun.  Some details have been changed, and notably the bits that made things less fun have been removed.  With the possibility of getting unexpectedly shafted by your life path no longer on the table, it's a lot more reasonable to allow players to choose things off the lists if they don't like what they originally rolled.

So I rolled Eastern European as my ethnic origin, but since 2/3 of the CP2020 characters I've played were Eastern European I decided to make her Middle Eastern instead.  She's also a flashy dresser, with wild hair and a fondness for wearing spiky gloves.

On to personality and background.  Here things got a bit strange, as we rolled a group of antisocial and violent types who nevertheless think people are wonderful.  This would be a good point to allow some choosing off lists, but my group are who we are, so we're running with it.  I'm also a little confused where my character developed her netrunning skills, since she grew up homeless, but I'll find a way to work with it.

The family and relationships section has been trimmed down to a sensible level, with three rolls of 1d10-7 to determine friends, enemies and tragic love affairs.  I rolled three friends, no enemies, and two tragic love affairs, both of which ended in the untimely death of my partner.  The other players immediately gave my character her street name: Widow.

One completely new thing is a custom life path section based on your role.  For my netrunner it filled out a few details like who she works with and for, and what her workspace looks like.  This is a great addition and helps the roles to feel unique.

Onto stats and skills.  There are various degrees of customisation available here, but despite the GM giving us options, we all agreed to ignore all that and take the 'street rat' route: roll 1d10 to select your stat block from a grid, then take a standard set of skills and equipment.  While I wasn't entirely impressed with the stat blocks (I feel if you have a set of standard arrays like this that they should all add up to the same points cost) this was a quick way of getting things done, avoiding both min-maxing and choice paralysis, and made sure we were all at similar levels of competence in our respective roles.

It was a pretty prolonged character creation process, even using the pre-built lists, so I would definitely recommend a Session 0 to anyone running this without pre-gens.  Amongst other things, the life path generator throws up a lot of backstory without fleshing out the details, and some time spent between sessions figuring out things like who my three friends are and why some of my former clients hate me would be useful.

We dived straight into an adventure, however.  I picked up the jumpstart kit from DTRPG during a sale but never got as far as reading the adventure, so I sent that over to the GM so he could run The Apartment.

Things immediately became more complicated, as the GM hasn't actually GMed in quite a while now but has been running LARPs.  When you've got 50-100 players involved, you need multiple storylines running simultaneously to keep everyone engaged.  Not so much with a normal TTRPG party of 4-6 players.  I'm not sure how far into The Apartment we've actually got, as we seem to have spent most of the session somewhere else.

What this did throw up is that it's important to talk about the setting, particularly if you're playing with veteran CP2020 players.  CP2020 was a spectacularly 1980s image of the future.  CPRed has been updated significantly, and things like pocket sized smart phones now exist, so there was a bit of adjustment at the start as we all got used to the fact that we were living in a more up-to-date future.  This won't be an issue for people new to the setting, but for my group it was definitely an important thing to bring up.

We haven't had the chance to dive too deep into the system so far, but we did have a few skill rolls, and so far my impression is that the difficulty chart seems well put together.  My netrunner does extremely well at her particular areas of competence, and is just about capable of success at something very easy in her weakest areas.

We also did a bit of practice combat at the end, just to see how it worked, and unlike CP2020, I actually understand it.  Again it looks pretty well scaled.  A weak, unarmoured opponent can be dropped in one good shot from a heavy gun, but a PC in armour is a bit more durable.  Crits happen when you roll multiple 6s on the damage dice, and there's some nice tables to roll critical injuries on.  While people aren't going to be shedding limbs all over the place like in CP2020 it's nice to see that it's still an option.

My only real qualm is that the game still uses the mechanic where cyberware implants decrease your humanity and take your empathy stat with it.  My netrunner started out with only 5 empathy, and once the neural interface that she needs to do her job was installed, that was down to 3.  The good news is that fashionware no longer has any humanity cost, so rockerboys can have their tech hair and light tattoos without suddenly becoming incompetant.  All the same, it means that empathy retains its status as the 'how much cyberware can I fit in my body?' stat, which is the source of quite a lot of CP2020 min-maxing and the reason I would not allow people to use the point buy system for making their character statblocks.

There's still a lot about this game I've yet to experience, particularly the netrunning, but so far it looks like a solid improvement on CP2020 and I'm looking forward to getting to play more of one of my favourite settings without some of my least favourite rules.

Ramos Reportage, episode 10: Going Underground

Marlon's player was absent again, but after last week's getting blown up after kicking a car we assumed he was probably in the hospital. We left the team trying to figure out what to do about Trinity...

Virtue was dubious of the team's ability to actually get into Trinity, given the vast amount of cyberwear we were using, but did feel reasonably confident of her ability to hack into their network using Angeline's tracker. Quinton drugged her (which took some work, given the amount of anti-poisoning cyberwear she had) and we went for a drive. Unfortunately Virtue wasn't able to get in. Apparently after she'd stolen several million eb from them they'd tightened up security against her a bit.

We dropped Angeline back at the hotel and began working on an alternative plan: directly access their net cables. Quinton looked into city plans around the area of Trinity's radio station to find where their data cable was likely to run and located a sewer system.

The black market was more than happy to sell us city worker hazmat suits, and despite some bitter complaining about how they weren't as well armoured as our normal fashionable streetwear, we all donned them and descended through a manhole.

Insert many jokes about man holes at this point.

For once we were attempting a stealth mission, and remarkably we were actually successful in being quiet. There was a slight hairy moment when Requiem failed to notice a trip wire (due to being distracted looking at the thief sign higher up on the walls) but fortunately Rolando spotted it and stopped everyone in time. Some careful balance was needed to get through some unpleasantly slippery bits of sewer, but everyone remained upright.

Finally the cable was located (a thick yellow coax, naturally) and Virtue got to work installing a vampire tap while the others kept a lookout. Nemo spotted someone lurking in the darkness and said over silent comms that he was going to throw a grenade at it. Requiem reminded everyone that they were supposed to be being quiet, pointed out that knives are quiet, popped her wolvers and went to track down the intruder.

The intruder stabbed her in the leg and she passed out.

Nemo discovered a sword that he'd forgotten he had. ("So that's why I've been carrying this walking stick!") Quinton decided that what Aikido really needed was more kicks. More weird underground sewer people arrived. The fight continued on fairly balanced terms until Requiem woke up again, cut one intruder's arm off and reduced another to bloody ribbons in one perfectly executed slash of her mono power wolvers.

"What happened here?" Virtue asked, seeing the carnage as she finished her own work.

"Sushi!" Requiem enthusiastically replied.

They left the sewers, remembering to avoid the tripwire again on the way out, and quickly found a fire hydrant to hose themselves down. They briefly went back to the house to get changed and make sure they hadn't been followed, before returning to Angeline and Mandy at the hotel.

Angeline's commitment to Trinity was starting to waver, and with a few hard truths about how they would remove her cyberwear, make her wear unfashionable clothes and then use her as a warrior until she was killed, she was finally persuaded that maybe Trinity wasn't for her after all. Unfortunately, Trinity weren't really the type to abandon potential converts.

Angeline wanted to go to a ranch and herd cows.

"What's a cow?"

"What's a ranch?"

It turned out that tourist ranch trips for the extremely wealthy were a thing, and the team headed out of Night City to spend some time learning to ride horses in the wilderness. They were having a pretty good time until one bright sunny day...

"Why is the sky blue? The light! I'm burning!"

And if their first experience with sunburn wasn't enough, then Trinity arrived in an AV.

Requiem fired a few rounds from her Arnos. Nemo let loose with his auto shotgun. And then a minigun began turning to face them. Requiem threw herself into melee combat, removing an arm from one man and driving the blades into the face of another. Nemo got out his plastic explosive, set the timer and threw it into the AV. Rolando, who'd been practicing his martial arts skills, went to grapple one of Trinity and instead grabbed Nemo's arm and ripped it off. And another Trinity member, armed with a mono knife, went for Requiem and neatly decapitated her.

Quinton concluded that this was a good time to leave. He grabbed Nemo's remains and Requiem's head and ran.

And so Ramos Reportage was no more.  Although perhaps, somewhere in Night City, is an unusual new gang of borgs - Quinton and the Motorbikes.

Ramos Reportage, episode 9: Bodyguarding

Marlon's player was away this week, so Rolando's player was actually controlling him this week. The band mentioned below are the PCs from a previous Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, that was if anything even more insane than this one.

We learned that one of the girls was Angeline, the daughter of one of Night City's biggest drug barons, and her friend Mandy. She was extremely worried that we might be working for her father, and was very relieved when we said we weren't. She asked to hire us as a private security team, which we weren't sure about until she offered us a daily rate of 1000eb each. She explained that she and Mandy were going to join a church called Trinity, and her father disapproved. Given that Trinity were the same people who'd shot at us and tried to steal our netrunner several weeks earlier, we weren't too impressed with the idea either.

"Aren't they run by a pervert?"
"Which one?"
"The one we saw on TV."

Requiem decided to take advantage of the fact they were now all staying in the penthouse of Night City's most expensive hotel, and ordered room service on Angeline's bill: six burritos and a bottle of WD40. Angeline was planning on a bit of a party in the room before any religion joining happened, maybe hiring some hookers.

Rolando: "They come wherever you want."

Mandy's opinion on this was unavailable as she was in the bedroom with Marlon, a.k.a. Bruce Leeroy. He had recently acquired a Jeet Kun Do martial arts chip, and while it hadn't settled into his mind properly yet, he was still quite determined to attempt to teach it to other people.

Or at least, we assumed that's what the sounds of vigorous exercise coming from the bedroom were.

Room service arrived. Real food was a bit of a novelty for the team. For Requiem it reminded her of the only other time she'd eaten real food: her first date with Ricky. She put an Adele cassette in her Walkman and sat down to cry for a while.

The night passed uneventfully, the only thing out of the ordinary being Mandy getting up in the middle of the night for a snack and being surprised to find Quinton still awake. (As an appropriately accoutremented borg, he didn't need to sleep every night.) Mandy wasn't quite so keen on joining Trinity, despite having already received the 'first blessing', and reckoned Angeline would be bored with it in about a week and they could move onto the next thing. Quinton wasn't quite so sure that was the way cults worked, and giving her a careful scan he noticed that her muscle density was significantly higher than usual.

The next morning the team awoke bright and early, unlike Angeline and Mandy. There was just one issue with being a security team however; weapons. All they had on them at this point were their Arno pistols and Requiem's mono power wolvers, and while this was a pretty respectable armoury by itself, it couldn't hurt to add a few bigger guns. So Nemo and Requiem went back to the house to collect weapons, photos of Ricky, and Virtue, as the team expert on Trinity.

With Angeline and Mandy finally awake and drinking bloody marys (inexplicably without petrol or hardware), Virtue attempted to convince them what a bad idea joining Trinity would be. They were not swayed, however, and Angeline wanted to go shopping.

Several hours of torture followed, as Angeline tried on almost everything in the shop, until Requiem noticed some suspicious looking types that were staying unsettlingly close to them. She asked Nemo and Quinton to go and talk to them, and there were almost weapons drawn until we established that they were actually working for Angeline's uncle Jorje who was there to attempt to convince her to come home. He failed.

Back at the hotel, the attempt continued, with Requiem finally making some progress by pointing out that the cult would probably take her clothes away and make her wear boring stuff instead. Before we could get much further down this line of reasoning, however, she decided that she wanted to go out for the night.

Quinton booked tickets for a nearby venue that were hosting a Doomcow concert, paying a small fortune in Angeline's money for VIP tickets for all of them.

The venue was heaving with several thousand attendees, and even the VIP area involved a queue to get in, but once inside they were treated to Doomcow playing some of their greatest hits, including 'I'm On Fire' and the classic 'Bro Tube'. With the entire band being heavily addicted to sweetness and therefore subject to severe time dilation effects, it was always 50:50 whether a Doomcow concert was going to be prog-rock or speed metal, and this time it was prog-rock.

Dancing ensued. Quinton and Requiem both gave creditable performances, but the star was Bruce Leeroy whose moves quickly got the attention of most of the club while everyone else took notes. Nemo, Rolando and Requiem decided to take advantage of the opportunity to get drunk on someone else's dime, Requiem being particularly keen to get blackout drunk as her obsession with Ricky Sixx had returned full force along with her empathy. Unfortunately with her cyber liver activated she was unable to get drunk at all, and even after turning it off could only manage moderately tipsy despite a lot of vodka.

At last they left the club. Quinton had called a battle cab, but when it arrived he noticed that the driver did not match the picture on the cab's registration. He refused to get in, and we all started walking back to the hotel instead.

Part way there, we noticed the same cab was parked on the street we were walking down. We pretended to ignore it, but then it suddenly started up and drove right at us.

Requiem grabbed Angeline and dragged her out of the way. Quinton jumped onto the roof. Bruce Leeroy attempted a flying kick to the windscreen, went right through the screen guard, kicked the driver in the face and ended up stuck in the car. Requiem and Rolando shot at the car, wrecking its wheels and bringing it to a stop. Then the car exploded, as cars are wont to do in Night City. Quinton survived unscathed. Bruce Leeroy survived, thanks to emergency medical intervention from Quinton, but his right leg remained in the windscreen while the rest of him was carried away.

Will the team successfully infiltrate Trinity using Angeline as an unwitting mole? Will she decide that having to dress in religious garments is too horrible to contemplate and go home to Daddy? How will Bruce Leeroy react to having lost yet another leg? Find out in the next thrilling episode of Ramos Reportage!

Ramos Reportage, episode 8: Out On The Town

Roleplaying therapy had proved highly effective, and the team were feeling a little more sane by the end of it with some basic grasp of how to human again.

Well, most of them. Exactly what had happened to Marlon was a bit of a mystery. Bross Kemp was still popping up from time to time, but interspersed with Dick Hunter, Kirk Shatner, and a variety of other characters. Fortunately the therapy meant that Requiem was dealing with this pretty well, and had even managed to stop listening to The Smiths and switch to Adele. She had remembered the assassin who attempted to shoot at them during the gang war between Bushido and Stomp Street though. She kind of wanted to kill him, but felt that perhaps questioning him about why he had been trying to shoot them might be a good idea too, especially given that he definitely had high level trauma team cover.

Quinton, having got the assassin's ID details while treating him, looked up his details. His real name was Henry, although he went by a number of aliases inclusing Deadyeye, Heatseeker and William H. Bonny. Also, Arasaka had a bounty on him from several years ago when he supposedly stole one of their cars. A 50K bounty definitely sounded like someone worth finding.

Everyone hit the streets to try to learn more about him, where Nemo quickly discovered that Henry was currently going by the alias of Heatseeker - but more importantly (and annoyingly) the bounty was out of date. Nevertheless, Requiem was still interested in finding him, so the team took a trip to the Afterlife, a solo bar in a rather nicer part of town.

After complaining about the parking fees and the entry costs, the team got down to the serious business of complaining about the drinks. On the second level they encountered a fixer, flanked by two catgirls. He apparently knew all about Heatseeker and could tell them practically everything about him - for a price. Since the price was 50K and all they really wanted was his ICQ number or AIM screenname, they rather lost interest at this point and returned to complaining about the drinks.

"Why is my drink made of petrol and worms?"

Nemo was very keen to find a ninja, having heard there were some in the buildings, so along with Requiem he headed for the third level. It wasn't long before Requiem spotted the ghost suit clad ninja following Nemo, and sat down with a couple of other guests to enjoy the show. Instead, Nemo was invited to visit the fighting pit in the basement.

After a bit of confusion where it was established that nobody actually wanted to fight a ninja, everyone found seats in the fighting pit's spectator area and watched a fight between Average Joe and Mike the Masher. Rolando bet on Average Joe. It seemed like Mike was going to win at the point he had Joe on the floor, sitting on him and preparing to beat him to death. However, this was, as Requiem predicted, the point at which the fight got more interesting when Joe sat up and bit the end off Mike's penis.

Rolando collected his winnings. Requiem, suddenly reminded of earlier conversations, reminded everyone that she had not been on any dates before Ricky and did not have a drawer full of severed penises. Much ribbing speculation then occurred about whether she had them about her person instead. She insisted that she only had one, and it was in the shrine at home. Rolando teasing her about the shrine was not appreciated, and when Nemo backed her up, reassuring her that her pain was justified, she kicked Rolando. It was an impressive and educational display of martial arts, but despite this and her cyber legs, she only gave him a light bruise, much like when she shot Nemo.

Around this time it was decided that leaving the bar would be advisable.

Outside, they were walking back to the car when some of the team noticed something odd: two sedans about to perform some kind of pincer ram on a limosine. (Requiem for once didn't notice, being both irritated and somewhat adrift without anything to focus her obsessiveness on.) What to do? It was impossible to know who the baddies were in this situation. Before they could do anything though, the cars crashed and people got out of the sedans.

Two of them had SMGs. Remembering what happened last time they'd taken on a group involving SMGs, Requiem drew her Arnos and killed both of them. The others started taking down the rest while Marlon, who by now had settled on the character of Bruce Leeroy, attempted to communicate with the occupants of the limo.

The remaining attackers shot rather ineffectually at Requiem, causing only minor scrapes to her cyber limbs. Realising they were somewhat outgunned, some of them got back in their car and started driving away. Rolando shot at them, as did Requiem after taking out the last two people from the other car, but they were unable to stop the vehicle.

Finally, the limo door was opened (largely due to Quinton pulling until it came off). Inside were two frightened looking girls, one of whom was holding a small pistol with the safety on. Quinton went to apply first aid to the unconscious driver, and Requiem got in with the two girls.

"Call that a gun? Now this is a gun."

The girl dropped the pistol, and Requiem put the Arno away.

The girls were on their way to a hotel, and were clearly in need of an armed escort. Perhaps some sort of compensation could be arranged on arrival? Quinton, after much insisting from Requiem that he not be shoved in the glove box (she was sure that's not what Persophone Cardiff would have done), put the driver in the recovery position in the back of the limo, and drove everyone to the hotel.

Will the girls' family pay for the armed escort? Is Heatseeker relevant to anything? Will the GM remember to stop expecting us to be decent human beings and get us railroaded back to the actual plot? Find out in the next appalling episode of Ramos Reportage!

Ramos Reportage, episode 7: Group Therapy

The GM had contracted some kind of LARP plague, and wasn't able to run the game. The rest of us still wanted to play though, and one of the group just happened to have something prepared...

After seeing Bross, Rolando and Requiem standing by doing nothing while a ganger was about to beat up old people and children, Quinton Smith was starting to worry about the gradual erosion of the team's humanity. It was clear that everyone was in desperate need of some kind of therapy. He decided to try a simple roleplaying exercise.

Nemo agreed to run a one-off game of Night's Black Agents for the group, with some pre-genned characters. It was set in the present day, but in a bizarre alternate reality where nobody had any cyberware but computers were impossibly powerful. All the characters were CIA agents. It would be a good opportunity for the team to practice behaving like normal people.

Quinton selected Hung-Ke Lee, an American hacker for his character. Rolando picked Oliver “Ashcan” Quinn, Irish explosives/wheelman and former member of the IRA. He made a creditable effort at keeping the accent going.

Requiem initially wanted to play the French assassin, but this didn't seem like a particularly theraputic choice. Instead she selected Persephone Cardiff, a British analyst who previously worked for MI5. Persephone was blonde, blue eyed, and could easily pass for Scandinavian. Requiem had always wondered what it was like to be blonde.

Bross/Marlon unsurprisingly had a lot of trouble choosing a character. He also considered the French assassin and flirted with the idea of playing the Colombian thief, but ultimately settled on Mace Hunter, American infiltrator and con man. (Immediately renaming him to Dick Hunter). Dick had acting experience, and was highly skilled at disguise, enabling him to effortlessly slip into different roles.

Perhaps this wouldn't be quite so therapeutic to Marlon after all?

Consulting their personality and relationship descriptions, Quinton and Requiem both discovered their characters were huge fans of Dick Hunter, having complete confidence and trust in him. Oddly enough, nobody entirely trusted the deranged Irish bomber. What was he doing in this CIA cell anyway?

We received our assignment. As is traditional, all rules about the CIA only operating overseas were immediately chucked in the bin and we headed for Virginia with fake FBI badges to look into a large agri-business called Bio-Novis. An extremely popular company, regarded as highly innovative and good to work for - with the slight caveat that nobody seemed to know what the company actually did. We had only one lead - someone called Eddie Joiner, who was somehow involved in financial irregularity and was supposed to be coming forward but hadn't.

Some initial surveillance at Bio-Novis HQ got us information on their security - seriously locked down. We decided the best plan was to kidnap one of the employees (preferably one who looked a bit like Dick) and use his credentials to get Dick into the building. Then we remembered that we were actual legitimate government agents with badges and everything, and were able to do stuff like question people.

Surveillance identified a suitable person to talk to, and rather than pick him up at work, we decided to be less conspicuous and go to his house instead. Dick took the back entrance (yes, jokes were made) while Hung-Ke Lee and Persephone covered the front.

Once picked up, we bundled him into the van. Lee was about to make the house look like it had been robbed, until we remembered again that we were legitimate government agents, and just left a note on his door to let his friends know that he'd had an emergency and couldn't make the game.

We questioned the man without any violence or even any threats, just showing him our badges, and he was quite willing to talk. We learned more details about Bio-Novis. The CEO was Catherine Alto. Her husband, Owen Alto, was also high up in the company. Our man worked in experimental farming, producing medical cannabis with an extremely fast yield.

He knew Eddie Joiner, and was a bit worried about him. He'd looked bad a week ago at the running club but didn't want to take time off. Now he was actually off sick. Eddie's hobbies including running, hiking and weightlifting, so he should have been very healthy. His actual job was chemical compliance and risk assessment, but like most people high up in the company, he didn't actually do much of that work himself.

Our man didn't know much else that was useful, but he did have a laptop with access to the company's VPN. That was enough to let us corroborate what he'd told us, and also pick up more information.

We learned that Bio-Novis had a data recovery pick-up scheduled, and decided to intercept it. Dick posed as an employee of the data company, and Oliver drove us to the HQ where we picked up a lot of old hard drives scheduled for destruction. The data on them was encrypted, but with a brilliant hacker like Lee on the team, we were soon able to read what was on them.

(There was a brief digression at this point on the subject of data storage. We were skeptical when Nemo started describing terabytes of data ("That's, like, more data storage than exists in the world!") and when he got onto petabytes and exabytes we accused him of making up words. Quinton couldn't believe that with all this computing power, he still had to use a keyboard and screen to access it instead of just plugging in his neuralware. And for some reason we all felt that for the hacking he really needed five additional monitors, a blowjob and someone to point a gun at him.)

What we learned from the recovered drives was disturbing. There was, as we had suspected, a pattern to the layout of the lab buildings in Bio-Novis farmland. It took Oliver to figure out what it was though. The position of the buildings matched the stars in the constellation Ophiuchus - the serpent bearer.

There was more. Cannabis wasn't the only thing the company was farming. There were also animals, and a lot of them were being born stillborn and deformed. Cows were dying of stress fractures caused by physical trauma. Security dogs had been found killed and gutted.

(Requiem reckoned it was aliens, but Quinton didn't think proper CIA agents would jump to the alien hypothesis quite that fast, so GMOs were picked as a more plausible conspiracy.)

Based on the recovered data, experimental farming was only the outside image of what Bio-Novis did. They collected data about people. Vast amounts of data.

We still wanted to find Eddie Joiner though, and having obtained his phone number, we did some triangulation and tracked him to North Dakota. We decided against a 27 hour drive to get there and decided to fly instead, remembering once again that we were a legitimate government agency and could do things like use an official CIA aircraft to get there.

We found Eddie Joiner in a farmhouse in the back of beyond. After a brief stand-off where we remembered we were legitimate government agents with badges and didn't have to go straight to shooting, we realised that the extremely unwell looking man before us bore little resemblance to the middle aged fitness addict that had been described to us.

Dick called a friend in the CDC and described the symptoms. Persephone suspected radiation, but the CDC thought organo-phosphate poisoning was more likely. Eddie was still well enough to talk though. He was able to tell us that Owen Alto (who was incidentally not being faithful to Catherine) had been kidnapped in Dubai (or at least, that's what Catherine thought.) Catherine had embezzled large amounts of company funds to allow her to pay a ransom for him. He also knew that the injured cows were due to some experiments that Bio-Novis were doing on predators.

At that point, Persephone's combat sense activated (apparently she did have one thing in common with Requiem) and she grabbed Eddie to throw him to the ground, preventing him being shot by a sniper outside. Unfortunately, the round instead went through Eddie's laptop where he had all the evidence of everything he knew.

Dick ran outside to deal with the sniper. He got shot, through and through, but brushed it off and caught the sniper. Oliver got back in the van to run the sniper over if he tried anything silly like running away any more. Persephone got a phone call from a friend, wanting to know if she was in North Dakota, and if she was in any way involved in a meth lab that local law enforcement were on their way to.

It was clearly time to leave. They all piled into Eddie's jeep, along with Eddie who didn't feel he had anything better to do with what little was left of his life at this point. For part of the drive they were pursued by a garbage truck, which Oliver easily outdrove, but more worryingly, the data signal on their phones kept cutting out. Not entirely unlikely when driving through rural North Dakota, but it seemed to be a bit more than that.

("You can do netrunning on a phone???")

Oliver took us to an airport, where we ditched Eddie's jeep and went to talk to the huge crowd of emergency services personnel who were gathered there. Our badges got us past the barriers and in for the proper briefing in the hotel lounge. Oliver and Persephone went straight to the bar to investigate the whiskey supplies.

The problems with the data signal didn't only apply to us. It was happening all over the US. We finally managed to get in touch with our contact in Canaveral. There was something in the sky that shouldn't have been there.

("It is aliens!")

Catherine Alto and Bio-Novis had thought they were collecting data as a disaster recovery project. In fact, they had been given the job by the very people who were about to bring about that disaster. Bio-Novis had played right into the aliens' appendages.

There were five days of silence before the attack came. When it did, it lasted only nine hours. Humanity surrendered.

("Sorry, guys. This was supposed to be therapeutic. I didn't expect it to get this dark.")

Has playing a tabletop roleplay game positively affected the team's sanity? Will Marlon be able to let the Dick Hunter personality go? Find out in the next bizarre episode of Ramos Reportage!

Ramos Reportage, episode 6: Making a Documentary

Back at the base, Rolando put together the footage to construct both an exciting broadcast about the gang war and an advert for Trauma Team. We contacted Trauma Team to see if they were interested in sponsoring us in further episodes of Bross Kemp On Gangs. They were interested, but on rather restrictive terms, including producing 12 episodes in the space of 26 weeks. With no guarantee that Marlon would be able to maintain this personality long enough to make that happen, we didn't agree to anything just yet.

Still, we had a job to do, and getting Bross Kemp to report on the local slav gang seemed like a good way to go about it. We recruited an old friend of Quinton's - a conman called Nemo - and got in touch with the slavs.

We met in a coffee shop. Bross Kemp talked to the slav contact about how he'd heard they were the hardest gang in Night City, and wanted them to appear in his documentary. He successfully persuaded them, and we were invited on a ride-along.

Requiem: "Would you like me to come with you?"
Bross: "Naaaaah."
Requiem: "Would you like me to pretend to be feeling really insecure so that I need to stand next to you for comfort?"
Bross: "...Yes."

All the same, by the time our contact Ivan, Bross and Rolando had all got into one car and the rest of the slavs had got into another, there wasn't much room left. So Requiem drove the team's van with Nemo and Quinton.

They arrived at a hand-made furniture shop. Rolando and Bross followed the slavs inside, with Requiem hot on their heels, while Quinton and Nemo waited in the van, listening in on comms. Inside were a family with two children, who apparently hadn't paid their protection money. Screaming ensued. Bross insisted that documentary makers did not interfere. Requiem, whose ability to human was quite diminished by this point, followed his lead. Rolando kept the camera rolling.

Nemo and Quinton had other ideas though. Beating up old men and kids wasn't their idea of proper gang behaviour. They came charging in together, and in only a few seconds had taken out every one of the slavs, one of them with a headshot that left both Bross and Requiem splattered in blood and brains.

Bross slipped over on the blood (or so he claimed), collapsing behind the sofa in the middle of all this. Requiem, struggling to deal with something that reminded her so much of Ricky's death, ducked down with him and attempted to comfort him, no easy task for someone with such a fragile grasp of empathy that it was all she could do to act vaguely human.

The sudden ambush obviously posed something of a difficulty regarding the documentary, but Bross reckoned they could pull it back if they attacked him as well. Nemo shot him and threw a chair at him, but inflicted only minor wounds. He also referred to Requiem as 'Chastity', which she felt was sufficient reason (along with adding to the verisimilitude of the attack) to shoot Nemo. Only gently though. Just a love tap really. She wasn't entirely happy about him shooting Bross's legs either, given that they used to be part of Ricky, but she managed to let that one go.

Finally Nemo shot Bross in his one remaining original arm, tearing it to shreds, which was considered a sufficiently serious wound for Trauma Team to deal with. (Bross had already snapped his card.) Requiem picked him up and carried him outside (being sure to get some good shakycam footage from her hat camera) ready for Trauma Team to pick him up. She would have stayed with him (apparently her obsessive personality had found a new target) but didn't want to argue with a Trauma Team armed AV, and rejoined the others.

With the help of Nemo, who turned out to be exceptionally good at producing forgeries, Rolando produced a film that carefully avoided showing faces, in order to maintain the story that the ambush had been committed by members of Stomp Street. They had killed all of the slavs, but Requiem had managed to drive them back enough to escape with Bross and Rolando.

Despite extensive use of stock footage, voiceovers, clips from the previous film and wilhelm screams, the resulting film was still convincing. Rolando added sad music where appropriate (raiding Requiem's music collection, which since Ricky's death had consisted almost entirely of The Smiths). They showed the footage to their contact with the slavs, and were able to convince them to go and start trouble with Stomp Street. Once again we were invited to ride along, despite the fact that Bross had returned from the hospital, still with only one arm.

What will Bross Kemp report on next? How will Requiem react when he inevitably gives up on this personality and goes back to being Marlon? Find out in the next disturbing episode of Ramos Reportage!

Ramos Reportage, episode 5: Gang War

We last saw our team dealing with the horrific death of one of their number in the traditional RPG party manner: dividing up his stuff.

Between the recovery from injuries and recovery from major cyberware surgery, the team took several days to rest and recuperate. Once everyone was well enough to get out of bed, a small memorial service was held for Ricky where they cremated the small amount of him left over once all reusable parts were removed. Requiem cried.

Not long after this some dubious teenagers showed up outside the house. After some questioning, they were identified as members of the Orphans, wanting to offer thanks on behalf of Dove, their leader and the sister of the woman they'd rescued. She wanted to come and thank them personally. We agreed to it, providing everybody stayed outside the house.

We were a little concerned by how easily they'd tracked us down, given how we were all dressed as Bushido members at the time, and how they recognised Requiem, given that she'd just got a new face. They didn't appear to be hostile, however, and they went away without any violence ensuing.

Rolando did a broadcast with some of the footage from the fight, carefully focusing attention on Marlon's superb performance as Shogun while avoiding showing much of the rest of us, but pointing out how Ricky Sixx was brutally murdered by the Stomp Street gang after he heroically attempted to rescue an innocent woman.

After a few more days of rest, we got word that gang warfare between the Bushido and Stomp Street was imminent. We decided this was clearly the kind of thing that our pirate news station should be reporting on. First we made a few phone calls. Marlon called his family (the Glitterboys) because he wanted a sniper rifle and they happened to have one available. Requiem called her friends in the police to let them know about the heavy weaponry amassing in the combat zone. Then the team packed up a minimal amount of kit (so as not to be in a recognisable van) and headed for where everything was about to go down.

We found a good spot to watch the fight in a warehouse. Rolando started dual-wielding: one camera in his hand and his second eye camera for backup. Requiem also activated the camera in her hat (Requicam) and started assessing the area for threats. Thanks to her exceptional combat sense and enhanced cyber vision, she managed to spot someone wearing a ghost suit in the opposite warehouse. Her initial call of 'sniper!' got a response from Marlon with his new rifle, and her further claims that it was an actual ghost and they were being haunted seemed to just confuse things further. But the Bushido were busy laying anti-personnel mines, which was definitely worth filming.

Marlon found his new role: Bross Kemp. The sniper issue seemed to finally get through to him, and he took up a position against a wall, concealed from threats, while claiming he wasn't scared, just cautious. Rolando continued filming, taking a moment to get someone else to hold the camera so he could appear in shot briefly. This was clearly due to him needing to establish his presence for credibility purposes, and not at all due to his latest cyberware additions giving him a raging ego.

But he was back to filming the scene below when he was suddenly tackled to the ground by Requiem. Initially he assumed that with Ricky gone, she'd started obsessing over him instead (after all, he was handsome and in his opinion, amazing) but the sniper round hitting him in the shoulder suggested it had more to do with her combat sense after all.

Requiem returned fire with her Arnos, hitting the sniper in the head and torso and causing them to drop to the floor out of sight. Rolando returned to filming, while Bross Kemp narrated the carnage below.

It wasn't long before an AV appeared, heading for the roof of the opposite building. Presumably the sniper had Trauma Team cover. Some of the gang fighters below started firing at the AV, causing it to crash onto the roof. Quinton decided that as a doctor, it would be a good idea to go and help out, so with the traditional shout of 'parkour!' he ran and jumped his way from our building to the one opposite. Over the radio we heard him attempt to persuade the Trauma Team members that he was a doctor and could help. We all made notes about how insulting people to their faces did not always go well when attempting to be persuasive. And also that having unconsciously started imitating the voice of Bross Kemp probably didn't help either.

In the street, heavy weapons had been brought out, and despite having brought mono-katanas to a missile fight, Bushido seemed to be getting the better of it. On the other roof, further Trauma Team AVs with miniguns arrived, while Quinton, despite the terrible impression he had made, was allowed to assist them with the patient. He resisted the urge to take out the sniper while nobody was looking, but did get a picture of him and a copy of his ID.

The carnage continued, and we decided it was time to get out of the way. Bross Kemp lead the way, continuing to insist that he wasn't scared, just cautious and reminding us that the gangers were all slags.

We returned home with some great footage to edit and broadcast. 'Bross Kemp On Gangs' sounded like a great idea for future broadcasts as well, reporting on gangs of the combat zone. Perhaps we could even use it to make progress in our actual job. What was that again?

Will the team actually remember what they're supposed to be doing and get back somewhere near the actual plot? Will Marlon be able to keep the same character long enough to film further episodes of Bross Kemp On Gangs? What does a Mr Studd implant look like anyway? Find out (or not) in the next exciting episode of Ramos Reportage!

Ramos Reportage, episode 4: One Act Tragedy

 In the previous thrilling episode, Marlon Brandroid took on the role of the great detective Cobumbo in the Case of the Missing Legs, a.k.a. The Hunt for Ping. Back at home base, he began planning his next role, considering both Doctor Quim, Medicine Man and Sean Connerdroid. However, another role was soon to fall into his lap.

With everyone finally recovered from the fight with the Bushido, the group tried to figure out their next move. Rolando wrote a truly exquisite script for the next radio broadcast as we attempted to continue framing the Bushido for the raid on Trinity, but unfortunately fluffed the actual execution.

Meanwhile, Requiem had turned the full force of her obsessive personality onto Ricky, who might or might not be regretting buying her a pretty face. Unlike Quinton Smith, who had left a trail of dead lovers behind him, Requiem had never even had a date before, let alone one with someone as stunningly handsome and charismatic as Ricky. He began planning to learn psychology, in the hope of being able to provide her with counseling and hopefully prevent the random murders of any woman who happened to talk to him.

But unhealthy relationships aside, we were a little worried. Our fight with the Bushido had been rather more conspicuous that we'd planned on, and word on the street was that the Bushido were out to get whoever it was who'd killed a bunch of their people. Ricky, as the least combat equipped member of the team, was particularly concerned. Requiem assured him that nobody was ever going to touch him again. Somehow he didn't find this particularly reassuring.

Finally, someone (it might have been Rolando) remembered why we'd ended up fighting the Bushido in the first place - to steal their gang colours. With the Bushido now gunning for us, we decided the best option was to start a gang war to keep them busy.

The plan was simple. Marlon would use his superb disguise skills to dress up as Shogun, the leader of the Bushido. We would drive the van to two of the Bushido's neighbouring gangs, the Orphans and the Gauntlet, Marlon would do a bit of trash talk, the gangs would fight each other and everything would be fine.

That's not what happened.

Marlon's Shogun disguise was impeccable. With the rest of the group dressed in Bushido clothes, we certainly looked the part. We drove the van along the edge of Orphans territory, until we spotted a group of gangers in an alley who were threatening a blonde curly haired woman.

Despite being on Orphans territory, they did not appear to be wearing Orphans gang colours. Any attempt to investigate further, however, became impossible when Marlon/Shogun decided heroics were in order, and jumped out of the van to attack.

With her enhanced combat sense, Requiem managed to beat Marlon to the fight that he'd instigated, letting loose with both Arnos into the toughest looking ganger, a man with a cyber arm and some kind of automatic weapon. While earlier lessons on the proper use of handguns such as 'don't point them at your friends' and 'don't point them at yourself' seemed to have been adequately covered, there was still an opportunity to learn a few more things about the art of shooting, such as 'point them at the enemies'.

The gangers returned fire, sending a hail of bullets into Requiem and a grenade at the others. Ricky and Rolando managed to throw themselves out of harm's way, but Marlon lost his other leg and didn't manage to remain standing this time. Nevertheless, along with the others he managed to take down several of the other gangers, and Rolando's realisation that none of them were wearing proper head protection allowed him to act a little more tactically.

But none of that was any use when the gang leader turned his SMG on Ricky Sixx, firing straight into his eye. Requiem could only watch in horror as Ricky's head exploded in front of her in a hail of brain matter and bone fragments.

Quinton, Rolando and Marlon all turned their guns on the gang leader, but he was still standing when Requiem sheathed her pistols and threw herself at him, mono wolvers drawn. He dodged her strikes, and turned the SMG on her.

With Ricky dead and Requiem stunned and bleeding, it was up to Quinton to finish things. He drew the enemy fire, bullets bouncing off the newly upgraded armour on his borg body, while Rolando and Marlon continued firing from what little cover was available in the alleyway. The gang leader was killed before he got a chance to injure anyone else, and Quinton went to attend to Requiem.

Her right arm had been destroyed and she was minutes from bleeding to death. Stabilising her would have proved near impossible for any lesser talent than Quinton, but he was not to be deterred. The cyber arm on one of the dead gangers was also a right arm, and he was not going to miss out on the opportunity to further upgrade a fleshy meatbag. He ignored her howls of grief and anguish when she regained consciousness, and with Rolando's help, loaded everyone, alive or dead, into the van.

Back at home, Quinton divided up the spoils. Spare body parts were sold to the usual clinic. The cyber arm was attached to Requiem. That just left the matter of the remains of Ricky Sixx.

Quinton briefly suggested installing a small cyber brain that could say Ricky's catchphrases, but decided against it, not wanting to get on the wrong side of Requiem. So what usable organs he had left were added to the spare parts pile, and they turned to his cyberware.

Quinton: "Who wants his Mr Studd implant?"
Requiem: "I'll take that."
Other players: horrified looks

Marlon had been complaining about the Asian leg that he'd had sewn on to replace the one he'd lost in the Bushido fight. Quinton took the opportunity to take it back and instead install Ricky's Speeding Bullet cyber legs.

What will the group do now, having lost the nearest thing they had to a sane frontman? How will they deal with Michael Weathers without their primary contact? How much grief counseling is Requiem going to need? How does Marlon feel about his new legs? Will Quinton succeed in his plan to turn the entire team into borgs? Who will they end up recruiting next?  Find out (maybe) in the next thrilling episode of Ramos Reportage.

Ramos Reportage, episode 3: We Had A Plan

Ricky got a call from Michael Weathers, wanting us to get on with our actual job of exposing the seedy underbelly of the city through pirate radio broadcasts. Specifically he wanted us to report on the recent terrorist attack on the Trinity HQ to force the police to investigate properly.

OK. So which gang were we going to frame for this? A single grainy photograph had been obtained by once of the survivors of the attack on Trinity, showing an unrecognisable Marlon Brandroid in his Ping the Merciless disguise. Based on this, the team decided the Bushido gang would be the best option.

The plan was to steal an outfit from one of the Bushido so that Marlon could dress up in gang colours and do a broadcast as Ping the Merciless confessing to the attack on behalf of the Bushido.

That was the plan.

Requiem felt she was probably up to taking on a single Bushido member to steal their outfit by herself, but decided she could use some help to actually find one of them on their own, so took Ricky with her. In a failure of streetwise knowledge so spectacular that Requiem took notes, Ricky somehow led them not into any kind of Bushido controlled area but into Sakura, a Japanese restaurant owned by the Yakuza. Realising he'd made a terrible mistake, Ricky decided the only thing to do was to style it out and invite Requiem to dinner.

With comms reporting that rather than working on the job, Ricky and Requiem were on a date, the rest of the team decided they would have to do the job themselves. Rolando and Marlon headed out to find the Bushido themselves.

Things began well, with them finding two high up Bushido members and Marlon engaging them in conversation while Rolando filmed. The man was very insistent on them coming back to his crib, however, and eventually guns were drawn.

Guns, and mono wolvers.

Thanks to some truly spectacular combat reflexes, both of them survived without getting ripped to shreds, and decided to sell the two corpses, calling Quinton to bring the van to transport them in. Unfortunately, before Quinton could get there, more Bushido members started to emerge from the shadows.

True to form, Marlon shot Rolando in the face again, and then the Bushido descended with their mono katanas. Marlon lost a leg, but nevertheless managed to remain standing, dodge multiple attacks and take down multiple attackers. Rolando lost a leg and an arm and fell over.

Quinton (along with Tiny) took a detour to pick up Ricky and Requiem, arriving in style with the van out of control, skidding along on two wheels. Balancing impeccably on her cyberlegs, Requiem fired her Arnos and took out two of the remaining Bushidos. Ricky...

Ricky jumped from the skidding van, leaving light trails from his el-wire, breathing fire from his dragon implant, firing his Arno with one hand and holding Tiny in the other as the dog's minigun sprayed bullets at the Bushido. Whether he actually hit anyone seems irrelevant; it was undoubtedly the coolest thing anyone there had ever seen.

Finally getting the van under control enough to stop, Quinton got out and went to deal with the increasingly disintegrating Rolando and Marlon. Rolando he managed to stabilise easily enough. Exactly what he did to Marlon is unclear, and there seemed to be some extra parts lying around, but he did eventually manage to get him to stop dying.

Somehow in all this chaos, Rolando and Marlon had managed to make their Ping the Merciless video.

Quinton and Requiem piled the bodies into the van (while Rolando hung on tight to his detached cyber leg with his one remaining arm to stop it going into the spare parts) and they returned to base to go through the collection. Suitable replacement limbs were sewn onto Rolando and Marlon, with the rest sold to a local clinic that Quinton had made contact with earlier. The non-organic part of the haul included some extremely illegal mono knives and mono katanas, plus the mono wolvers from the first fight.

Requiem requested the mono wolvers, and Quinton got to work implanting them. She emerged from the surgery with a major increase in egotism and a corresponding loss of empathy. Suddenly unhappy with her appearance (a 4 to Ricky's perfect 10) she decided this needed fixing. Ricky offered to buy her a new face; since they were dating he may as well make an investment. Requiem is now a 12, and has also learned to do makeup and wear nice clothes.

GM: "I had this whole chase scene planned..."

Ramos Reportage, episode 2: Taking On Trinity

The team decided they needed to do something about Trinity, the organisation who were trying to kidnap/brainwash/murder their netrunner. They came up with a plan to discredit the organisation's leader. Marlon Brandroid used his impressive disguise skills to dress up as the leader, and Rolando filmed a fake candid recording of him saying all kinds of insulting things. Then, of course, they had to actually get the recording out to Trinity's followers. Their own pirate station was not going to cut it. They concluded the only solution was to break into Trinity's local HQ and broadcast it from there.

Leaving Virtue behind to handle the remote disabling of the security systems, Requiem drove everyone to the HQ. They entered through the fire escape by leaping from the neighbouring building (a fairly easy feat when 3/5 team members were wearing MA16 Corvette cyber legs) and found themselves in the staff kitchen.

Requiem ventured out first, finding a single security guard who was easily intimidated with an Arno to the back of his head. She waved in the rest of the team, who began breaking into the broadcasting studio. Then the guard started trying to attract help by making noise, and Requiem decided if he was going to make noise then she might as well also make noise and shot him in the head.

Rolando and Marlon (who for reasons best known to himself had decided to be Ping the Merciless for this particular raid) took out the staff in the studio and got started on their broadcast. Quinton and Requiem headed for the stairs and took out the remaining guards as they attempted to climb the stairs (with Requiem taking full autofire but surviving thanks to metal gear).

Virtue warned the team that trauma team cards had been activated and they should get out fast. With the broadcast complete, Rolando grabbed some useful looking equipment and they all left via the fire escape.

Requiem drove them away in a civilised and non-dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, they were still stopped at a police checkpoint. Fortunately Ricky was in the passenger seat (Requiem liked him sitting there because he made the cab smell nice) and he had no problem charming the police officer into letting them go about their business after giving her his ICQ number.

Ramos Reportage, episode 1: A New Story

What better way to start 2020 than with the write-ups of our last game of Cyberpunk 2020?

A couple of points to note about this campaign:
Some of the group have owned this game for a very long time.  They know how to min-max.  Accordingly, all of these characters are heavily min-maxed.
We have a house rule where if you roll a critical, or see someone else roll a critical, whether it's a hit or a miss, you gain improvement points equal to the level of the crit.  Bear in mind that roughly one in five rolls result in some kind of critical - especially where fight scenes are concerned.

The cast:

• Ricky Six (Rocker) - celebrity podcaster, naturally handsome and charismatic, has devoted most of his cyberware to looking cool.
• Quinton Smith (Medtech) - a borg doctor whose ambition is to eventually replace the entire team's body parts with cyberware.
• Requiem (Solo) - equipped with pretty much every piece of defensive cyberware possible, dual wielding Arno handguns.
• Marlon Brandroid (Nomad) - an actor committed to taking on a new role every few days. Very much a method actor.
• Rolando Ramos (Media) - a news anchor more interested in getting a good story out there and fully willing to make up that good story if necessary.

Together they run a pirate radio station in Night City, with Rolando providing the credibility and Ricky and Marlon doing the more presentation type stuff, while Quinton and Requiem do their best to keep everyone alive. The team mascot is Tiny, Quinton's pet chihuahua, who's been heavily cyber enhanced to allow him to carry a shoulder mounted minigun.

The team were hired by a man called Michael Weathers to take their pirate radio station into an area on the edge of the combat zone and start reporting on the city's seedy underbelly to try to bring more police presence into the area. They were supplied with a base (an old garage), a netrunner called Virtue, and the necessary broadcasting equipment to get their stories out there.

The team had settled into their new home with only a few hiccups (Ricky had a pheromone implant that made him even sexier than usual, leading to some incidents) and were starting to look into the local gangs in search of a story when there was a knock on the door. A group of religious types who hated cyberware and the net, who were there for Virtue who had previously been part of their organisation.

They were armed. Requiem only had one response for people showing up at her house armed and trying to hurt her people and it involved two Arnos.

The resulting fight was...embarrassing. Sure, the gang of religious weirdos were dispatched fairly quickly and did very little damage to anyone. However, by the end of the fight, Marlon had shot Rolando in the face, and Requiem had shot both Ricky and herself.

Everyone learned a lot about how not to use handguns that day.

First time running The Sprawl

Today's post was supposed to be about how my Christmas cyberpunk game went, but since due to lack of numbers/interest it didn't go, here's a previous cyberpunk game instead.

We started out with four players last week. A hunter, a reporter, a tech and an infiltrator. I sent them off on the sample mission from the book (The Kurosawa Extraction) which they carried out rather efficiently.

However, having borrowed an armoured limosine from a contact, they decided to keep it. So this week's mission began with Boone the hunter getting an email from Kendall the limo driver contact, saying that he'd been fired and the only way back into Weyland Yutani's good books was an email full of names. Or Boone and his team (now down to 3 as the reporter was off sick) could do him a little favour...

Over soy chicken substitute and worm burgers, they discussed the job with Kendall. He didn't want to work for Weyland Yutani any more anyway, but he did need a job. There was one going at Peppa Pig Pharmaceuticals, but there were a few issues, including the front runner candidate, the reference from WY which would no doubt have something about how he'd totally lost a limo, and the drug test that Kendall was definitely not going to pass.

"Why do you think you're not going to pass the drug test?"

"Why do you think?"

Boone's initial idea for dealing with the frontrunner candidate, one Radislav Braelynn, was to kill him. Kendall didn't mind what happened to Braelynn so long as he got the job, and ultimately another plan was hatched.

Some initial research revealed that while PPP had some pretty decent security, their IT was terrible, with computers running on Vista.

Loe Qi the infiltrator and Topper Harley the tech both headed into PPP's lab facility, with the help of some forged passes, claiming to be temps. Topper went to the server room to 'fix' the computers while Loe Qi headed for the labs, where he was sent to work by the supervisor technician to process 300 lab samples through the mass spectrometer.

He was able to find Braelynn's sample pretty fast, and got in contact with Topper. With the help of some YouTube tutorials they were able to figure out how to use the mass spec and run Braelynn's sample. As they suspected, he was completely clean of drugs.

Now they just needed Kendall's sample. Topper managed to figure out which lab it was in, but the nurse on duty was unconvinced by Loe Qi's requests and told him to come back with proper authorisation.

With nothing else he could do until the supervisor came back, Loe Qi got to work on the samples. By lunchtime, he'd processed all 300, and was told to take a lunch break while the supervisor got the next batch. He hung out in the cafeteria listening in on conversations for half an hour, then went back to work.

Kendall's sample was in the second batch. He'd been right to be concerned, with the test revealing a truly horrific amount of drugs for someone who was supposed to be responsible for a moving vehicle. Still, it wasn't their job to make moral choices, and soon the RFID tags on the samples had been updated so that Braelynn's clean sample now registered as belonging to Kendall.

Loe Qi got back to work running samples, while Topper dug deeper into PPP's computer systems. While getting into the security systems had been a cinch, the database was apparently rather less incompetantly programmed, and it wasn't long before he'd attracted the attention of the system's blue ICE and was kicked out of the system. Getting in for the second time was more of an effort, but at last he managed to get into the HR database and change Kendall's reference. Rather surprisingly, it was largely positive - Kendall had apparently been an excellent employee up until the limo incident. Soon the reference was suitably glowing.

Topper took one last dig into the database and managed to hit paydata - the formula for an oncology drug that had proved pretty useless for treating cancer but which did get you high.

Topper and Loe Qi left the facility (with Loe Qi leaving his paypal account details so that he could get paid for the day's work he'd done). There were no further incidents, except that the cameras that were no longer under Topper's control all seemed to be moving to look at him as he left.

Back at the bar, they met with Kendall again, who'd got the job and was willing to pay them in addition to not sending any emails. Things were looking good - although they did now owe a favour to Miss Smythe the forger, and had drawn a certain amount of heat from PPP in the process.

---

We got to use the matrix moves in this session. It went pretty well - Topper is a tech, not a hacker, so doesn't have access to all the stuff a hacker can do, but with his cyberdeck he can still get stuff done in the matrix, and it didn't drag things away from the main game the way netrunning apparently does in Cyberpunk 2020 (I've never played in a game with a GM who allowed netrunners so I've never seen this in action.)

The biggest challenge running this game is keeping the spotlight balanced across the players. The hunter had plenty to do in the legwork phase, but as should be obvious from the above, didn't get to do much in the action phase. But last week I didn't feel I involved the tech and reporter as much as the hunter and infiltrator, so a mission that called for tech skills wasn't a bad call - things just worked out with less for a hunter to do than I'd hoped.

I thought running the book mission would be a nice easy start for me. No; things got easier once I was doing my own material. To the point where I'd be up for continuing this campaign some time if I've got enough interested players. The fact I was able to run it despite having been literally offline from Thursday to Tuesday bodes well.

Why not Cyberpunk 2020

I'm hoping to run my cyberpunk one-sho, The Riot Before Christmas, using my Lasers and Feelings hack rather than actual Cyberpunk 2020.  When I mentioned this on Tuesday, someone asked me why I didn't like Cyberpunk 2020 as a system.

There are a number of reasons, but the primary one is combat algebra.

When you play D&D or Pathfinder, combat is pretty simple.
Roll d20, add my attack bonus.  Did I beat the opponent's armour class?  Yes?  Then I hit.
Roll damage, let's say it's d8+2.  I rolled 5 so that's 7 damage.  The opponent takes 7 damage.

In Cyberpunk 2020 however...
Roll d10, add appropriate skill.  Did I hit?
Roll to see where I hit.
OK, the head!  Cool.  Now roll to see if it was the face, because the target is wearing a helmet but not a visor.
Not the face.  OK, now they've got skin weave as well, plus kevlar under the helmet so how much of that stacks?  Right, there's the final armour value of that location.
Roll damage.  Was I using dual purpose bullets?  (When would I ever not be using dual purpose bullets?)  Does my katana have a monoblade?  Was the target wearing metal gear?
Crank everything through the algebraic formula, taking into account multiple variables, to finally arrive at some amount of damage that seems to be entirely unconnected to the initial value.
Roll to see if they're stunned.
Roll to see if they're dead.

I'm told that Friday Night Firefight is one of the most realistic combat systems out there, accurately recreating the level of injuries and fatalities that take place in real gunfights, according to the FBI's own records.  And I'm absolutely looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077, where there's a computer that will do all the combat algebra in a matter of microseconds and I can be a transhuman badass carving people up with monobladed power wolvers without having to take a full inventory of everybody's clothing and equipment before the fight.

But when I'm at the table with my dice and character sheet, I don't want combat algebra.  I want to know if I hit, and if so, how much damage I did, and D&D had that nailed down from the start.

This is why I'm keen to see reviews of Carbon 2185.  So far all I've seen is a quick look through someone else's copy, but knowing it's based on the D&D 5e system means that it should have enough crunch to be interesting for my friends who enjoy crunch, enough balance to avoid the min-max issues that plague 2020, and still leave room to tell the kind of stories that I want from a cyberpunk game.  I hope I'm right.

Two games, one genre: Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk as a genre seems to come and go in popularity.  Right now it's firmly on the way up, with recent adaptations like Ready Player One and Altered Carbon, and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game, which I will absolutely be playing.  So it's not surprising that more cyberpunk RPGs are appearing, although as yet I haven't played many.

Cyberpunk 2020

The second edition of the original cyberpunk RPG and apparently the only one people still actually play, this game is intended to let you play characters who've walked straight out of a William Gibson novel.  The world is detailed and evocative, and the gear list includes pretty much anything you could want to carry or implant.

It's brilliant, and it's no surprise people are still playing it now.  But, as I said after I played Shadowrun for the first time, it's no surprise it's nowhere near as popular as Shadowrun.  Because this game has aged spectacularly badly.

The combat system, Friday Night Firefight, is apparently one of the most realistic systems out there for modern combat, using actual FBI data on gunshot injuries as the basis for damage levels.  Gunfights have the potential to be extremely dangerous, and getting shot in the head without a helmet is pretty much a death sentence.  Sounds good in principle, but in practice it means abandoning the principle of style over substance that's supposed to define cyberpunk as everyone either cowers in the face of danger or tools up to the max.  And while the rules for armour and armour stacking might be realistic, they are absolutely not easy to understand.  I've given up trying.  I just make sure the GM knows what armour I've got, and refuse to engage beyond marking off however many hit points I'm told to.  And I'm not stupid, or even particularly stubborn - I just can't get my head round this insanely complex system when all I want to do is wear cool cybernetics and destroy corporations.

Which brings me onto gear.  Between the original rulebook and the giant pile of Chromebook expansions, there's a vast amount of gear available to a Cyberpunk 2020 character.  And in a more narrative based system this could be amazing.  Of course you'd consider getting the smart mirror shades instead of the smart goggles, even though they have fewer add-on slots and cost more, because they look cool and it's your signature style.  But in the heavily stats and rules based world of early 90s RPGs, that just doesn't fly.

It gets even worse when you get to the cyberwear, because at that point you aren't just paying money, you're paying humanity.

My first Cyberpunk 2020 character was a Rockerboy.  I wanted to give her a ton of cool looking implants, but once she'd got skinweave, a nu-throat and tech hair, she'd already lost enough humanity that adding many more implants was going to start tanking her empathy score.  And with the rockerboy being Cyberpunk 2020's biggest face class, she really needed a decent empathy stat.

My second character was a Solo.  This time I was going full min-max, with the empathy stat being the 'how much cyberwear can I fit in without going insane?' stat.  She was tooled up with muscle and bone lace, corvette legs and mono wolvers.  Her empathy was tanked - down to 4 by the end of the game, I think.  But all her cyberwear was 100% practical, fully devoted to making her better in a gunfight.  Read about Cyberpunk 2020 and there's all this cool stuff about creative uses of various implants - things like using implanted video screens to disorient your opponent - but I couldn't use anything like that because I'd rolled so much humanity loss on the practical gear there was no room left for anything imaginative.

In short, while the game wants you to be able to play cool William Gibson style protagonists, the rules constantly hinder your ability to do that.

The character classes are also a problem.  Some of them, like the Cop and the Corporate, leave me wondering what on earth these respectable people with proper jobs are doing hanging around with a bunch of street punks.  Fixers make far more sense as NPCs than as PCs.  Netrunners are so badly designed most GMs won't even let you play them, as they're basically playing a whole different game to the rest of the party.  Media and Rockerboy can both work as face classes but you've really got to design the campaign around them.  There are some solid options in the Solo and the Med-Tech but overall if you're trying to create a coherent team it's just a mess.

As a 30 year old futuristic game, it's unsurprising the whole thing is smothered in zeerust.  This isn't all bad.  There is a certain charm to playing in the 80s version of the future, where phones are huge and wifi barely exists and somehow the only music is hair metal.  But if you want to play a modern cyberpunk game, you're going to have to do some major updates to make the setting feel like the actual future.

So it should be obvious that the only reason I play this game is because I love cyberpunk as a genre so damn much I'll put up with this game's many drawbacks to make it happen.  However, there is one thing that Cyberpunk 2020 does absolutely brilliantly.  The life path.

Sometimes my characters show up with fully formed backstories.  More often, they don't.  But in Cyberpunk 2020 you can grab your dice and generate yourself a full character background, detailing their origins, family status, siblings, sense of style, and significant life events from the age of 16.

Which meant that Requiem, the solo I mentioned above, wasn't just a practically tooled up solo.  She was the child of Hispanic gang members who sent her away at a young age for her own protection.  Scarred by this, she grew up eschewing human company beyond befriending members of law enforcement for her own protection and training in combat.  Embracing this background meant that even with the game's rules constantly getting in the way, I had a well realised and unique character to play, and I still have happy memories of the strange tale of love and obsession that played out in that game.

I suspect Cyberpunk 2020 holds out more due to nostalgia than anything else, and while I'm interested to see if the new Cyberpunk Red rules fix any of the enormous problems, I'm not holding my breath.  But the life path generator?  I'd use that any time.

The Sprawl

I immediately loved The Sprawl, because this Powered By The Apocalypse game strips away so much of what I don't like about Cyberpunk 2020.  No spending ages trawling through Chromebooks to try to work out what equipment you're going to have - your playbook gives you a few options to pick from, and you decide for yourself which corporation's branding is on your gear.  No concerns about tanking your empathy - your cyberwear comes with other, more narratively interesting drawbacks.  Combat is the usual PBTA combat - fast and narrative driven.  And with the game only a few years old, there's nothing dated here, although at the same time there's nothing to stop you playing it in the 80s future if that's what your group enjoys.

Digging a bit deeper though, I still found problems, and one of them is the playbooks.  The Sprawl could really have done with taking less inspiration from Cyberpunk 2020 here.

The Media character is still here, as the Reporter, and once again doesn't really fit in unless you structure the campaign around them.  The Rockerboy is also back, as the Pusher, and has the same issue.  The Fixer, again, makes a better NPC.  What the game really could do with instead of these is a solid Face class like Shadowrun has.

Over-specialisation might be a theme, in fact.  The Hacker is a vast improvement on the Netrunner, but in the game we played the Tech was able to do plenty of hacking without dominating the session and still having other options.  The Driver doesn't have the flexibility of Shadowrun's Rigger.

There are some solid options in the Infiltrator, Soldier and Tech, but overall a smaller number of more flexible playbooks would make for a better game.

I also wasn't entirely sold on the planning and action phases.  While I can see that the planning phase that consists pretty much entirely of making some dice rolls to acquire the Gear and Intel currencies is intended to prevent the game turning into a strategic planning meeting, the way Shadowrun seems prone to doing, it's difficult to get your head around as it doesn't seem to involve any actual roleplay, and isn't that why we're all here with our pencils and dice?  The way Blades in the Dark handles this with flashbacks is in my opinion a much better way to avoid extended planning sessions.

All the same, a well run game of The Sprawl can easily hit all the cyberpunk notes and tell a fun story without the rules getting in the way too much.  It brings some of the Cyberpunk 2020 nostalgia with significantly less mathematics to work out if you're dead or not.  A lot of love has been put into this game.  It's just not as good as it could be.

Conclusion

I love cyberpunk enough to overlook the flaws with both these systems, and would enthusiastically sign up to play The Sprawl if I saw it offered at a convention.  What I'd actually recommend though...

There's not a huge amount of cyberpunk games out there.  I've never played Corporation or GURPS Cyberpunk (although I am familiar with the story of how the latter was the target of a Secret Service raid, and if that's not a plot hook I don't know what is.) The only other game I've played is Shadowrun, and while I'm not personally a fan, if you don't have the same, "Ew, you got elves in my dystopia" reaction to the urban fantasy elements of Shadowrun, it's a better game than both of these.

But the cyberpunk game I really want, the one that I hope is going to fix everything that's wrong with every other cyberpunk game I've encountered, is Null Vector.  It's the cyberpunk hack of Blades in the Dark that everyone and their dice have been waiting for since 2015.  It was apparently in alpha at the end of 2018, and according to people who can see the backer-only kickstarter updates there's going to be a preview available in November.

While I've had a bunch of fun with PBTA games, for mission-based gaming I've found the Forged in the Dark system to be absolutely superior, and I can only hope that John Harper won't keep us all waiting too much longer.

But that life path generator?  Still gold.  Use it.

My first game of Shadowrun

I've always thought of Shadowrun as 'cyberpunk, but with elves,' and having played it, this is entirely correct. And I'm not a fan; crossing cyberpunk with urban fantasy doesn't work for me. I didn't feel like the fact that we had an elf, dwarf, orc and troll in the party made any real difference to what was happening, beyond a bit of cool character art. Having a wizard in the party did have a mechanical effect, allowing us to do a few things that wouldn't be possible in a conventional cyberpunk game, but the whole magic thing still felt a bit stapled on alongside all the hacking and stuff.

So on the whole I'm with William Gibson on this. I don't want elves in my cyberpunk.

That said, Shadowrun is an immensely popular RPG that's been running consistently with a bunch of spin-off material for the last 30 years in a way that Cyberpunk never quite managed, and I think I can see why.

It's so much easier to play.

To be fair, I've only seen 5th Edition, and I don't know how it compares to the earlier versions, but despite being in my first ever game, I felt like I knew what was going on each time I rolled dice.  Compare with Cyberpunk, where the moment combat started I was completely lost. Each time I've basically just given a number to the GM, who then performs some complex calculations to determine if the person I shot is dead or not. And getting shot back? Here's my armour on that location (and dear gods that's some maths by itself), don't tell me anything else, just tell me how many hit points to cross off.

Add to this the fact that Cyberpunk's character creation is horrifically unbalanced and strongly favours min-maxing if the GM doesn't set some arbitrary limits in advance, while Shadowrun seems to have at least some common sense applied to the matter. Shadowrun's archetypes are far more playable and RPG-appropriate than the Cyberpunk classes, with our little gang of five working way better as a team than the bizarre bunch of weirdos I've encountered in Cyberpunk games. (The most recent game I've played where most of the group are Solos is really the best team I've played with.)

It's also moved with the times.

While being stuck in an absurdly 80s future can be pretty entertaining, there's a certain frustration in Cyberpunk when you look at the price and capabilities of a phone and compare it to the actual phone you are holding right now. Whereas Shadowrun has kept bringing out new editions and adapting to real world changes like the ubiquity of wifi. Elves notwithstanding, the Shadowrun future feels like it's the actual future future, rather than the 80s future.

And some people just like elves.

We were using pre-gens for this one-off game, and I picked my character based on a totally awesome bit of character art. (Ms Myth, should you want to google her.) I would totally LARP as her, because I love urban fantasy as much as I love cyberpunk, and while the two together doesn't really work for me, I can see why other people might enjoy it.

It does, however, include far too much planning.

Blades In The Dark has introduced me to a whole new way to do mission-based gaming. One with absolutely minimal pre-planning, where you just jump straight into the action and use flashbacks to explain how you got there. It's a complete paradigm shift in gaming, and takes some getting used to, but the result is the feeling that you're in a heist movie rather than a strategic planning meeting. The Sprawl, a PBTA cyberpunk game, still has the planning phase but heavily abstracts it down to a form of currency (gear and intel) that you acquire to spend in the action phase, with said action phase being the focus of the game.

Shadowrun makes it far too easy to get bogged down in the planning phase, and while our GM did a great job getting us to nail things down so we could actually get on with the heist, these newer systems that aim to kick you into the action at the first possible opportunity are in my opinion, the way to go with this kind of gaming.

So in conclusion, Shadowrun's setting doesn't quite work for me as it crosses two genres that I prefer individually, and it would benefit from the innovation that recent indie darlings have brought to this style of game. But it's a vastly better game than Cyberpunk 2020, and I wouldn't be adverse to playing it again.

At least until I find a decent Forged in the Dark cyberpunk game, anyway.