Neon Sunset - A Cyberpunk Roleplaying Game - Playtest v1 (Auric Alligator)

So much for new posts as I complete sections--seven weeks after my last post about it, here's a very dirty first draft sitting at about 12.7k words. Behold:

NEON SUNSET: A CYBERPUNK ROLEPLAYING GAME

Playtest v1 (Auric Alligator)

Neon Sunset is a cyberpunk roleplaying game about career criminals doing jobs for and against their corporate overlords.

Players generate characters by picking a Focus (Combat, Social, or Tech) and an Approach (Institutional, Self-Reliance, or Community) to determine baseline abilities, spending stat and skill points, and determining their starting Professional Reputation. Prior Jobs are randomly generated to determine your history, your starting gear, and--perhaps most importantly--favors owed to and by you from other underworld figures.

You can use these rules to make characters, generate criminal histories and debts to dubious patrons, buy guns, build guns, get shot, bleed out, and die a horrible, postmodern death in the gutter. There's a sidebar for using magic as a weapon if you want to use this to play Shadowrun. There are guidelines for purchasing and modifying cyberware. There are reasonably decent hacking rules that can be resolved in a single dice throw.

I think you could use this to play Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun. That was the goal, after all.

~

You'll notice that there's a lot of [TODO] in there and [SEND THIS TO WORD JAIL]; if I don't put a pin in this, I'm gonna pull all my hair out and never write anything else until this project is perfect, which is sort of the antithesis of what I want to be doing with my time and this blog. So. Presented as-is, pending playtesting and feedback.

If you give this a read, please comment! If you opt to play it--and it's ugly, but I believe it's definitely playable--then I'd LOVE to hear how your experience went.

The PDF linked above is the automatic output of the markdown editor I was using to write it, and is very poorly arranged. If you want to look at the current work-in-progress text (which is FULL of messy TODO elements and half-written sections), you can find that here.

Having posted this, I'm going to keep my eyes and ears open for any feedback from curious readers, but I'm going to get a little distance between myself and this project so I can get back to writing that roguelike thing and trying to sketch, start, and finish smaller units of game writing--finishing stuff is a skill I'd like to hone.

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My current todo list on this thing when I eventually return to it, separated out by estimated time-to-complete:

• 1 minute
• Consider rewriting melee attacks entirely so there's less roll-and-response
• 10 minutes
• Write a "Starting Cash and Gear" section
• Finish detailing the different money currencies (Scrip, Coin, and add Cash)
• Rewrite the armor purchase rules to just accept that there are only three relevant breakpoints worth buying armor at
• Clean up the layout of how I explain Heatblock ammo tech, and expand on the practical use of it in the setting
• Clean up the presentation of melee attacks
• Cull the HELL out of the Hacking explanation because it's full of wordvomit that implies mechanics without actually indicating they exist, which was the cardinal sin of Shadowrun's stuff
• 1 hour
• Examples of Tech/Institutional and Tech/Community characters
• Write examples of what 7+ stats physically look like (as high-end and low-end augs)
• Give more than a bare framework for handling Cyberware/Bioware, including deciding if I want a humanity loss/drawback system
• Clean up the weapon customization system.
• Write a lifestyle/upkeep system to drive the need for players to do jobs and maintain their expensive toys
• Write retirement benchmarks to create more player goals
• Write about gear licensing re: HEAT
• Write literally anything about vehicles and chases
• 1 day
• Figuring out the awkwardness of how I'm describing Approaches ("Institutional/Self-Reliant/Community")
• Write more examples of what Grace/Grit/Charm/Lore can accomplish at 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 10 (I already have Might done)
• Write about Drones
• Write about Drugs/Toxins
• Write anything about gear that isn't guns, actually
• Write an entire police/corpsec HEAT system based on my notes
• Write about jail time and breaking people out of dystopian brains-as-CPU farms
• Write statblocks for more than just "regular person" and "melee-focused gang member"
• Make a character sheet
• 1 week
• An explicit setting, rather than an implied one.