Ī choice of rules are provided for character creation, either by assigning points to purchase skills or by rolling d10s for a more random outcome. These include charismatic musicians ('rockerboys'), bodyguards and assassins ('solos'), computer hackers ('netrunners'), road warriors ('nomads'), street experts ('fixers'), investigative journalists and reporters ('medias'), mechanics ('techs' or 'techies'), doctors ('medtechs'), corporate executives, and police officers. There are ten key roles, each with their own special abilities. Character creation Īs cyberpunks, the players embrace body modification, cybertech and bioengineering. Cyberpunk was one of the first tabletop games to use this concept. In order to succeed, they must beat the Difficulty Value assigned to the task by the gamemaster. A player takes the value of their most appropriate character attribute, adds the values of any relevant skills or modifiers, and then finally adds the value of a ten-sided die roll.

Talsorian's Interlock system.Ī core game mechanic is the concept of Difficulty Values, used to gauge whether a player succeeds or fails at any given task. With a population of five million people, it presents a stratified society of gang warfare, corporate rivalries and political machinations in which the players have to survive. The main location for Cyberpunk is the fictional Night City, situated on the west coast of the United States between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Many also suffer from 'technoshock', an inability to cope with a world of synthetic muscle tissue, organic circuits and designer drugs. With the lack of government and police due to the Central America wars and economic situation, casual violence is endemic. Bioengineering, against a backdrop of warfare, has resulted in the rapid development of cybernetic prosthetics and direct human-machine interfaces.

Other disasters have included food blights causing disastrous famines, and by the late 1990s the Middle East is a radioactive desert after a nuclear conflict. This is coupled with the development of orbital habitats that become independent states and the rise of Megacorporations that fight amongst themselves for dominance. The backstory begins with the USA becoming embroiled in a major conflict in Central America in the 1980s causing a significant economic collapse ending in a military coup resulting in the European Common Market and Japan as superpowers and the Soviet Union not collapsing. The timeline has been extended with each major edition of the game, from the first edition set in 2013 to Cyberpunk Red set in 2045. Cyberpunk exists within its own fictional timeline, which splits from the real world in 1990.

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