Cyberpunk 20??

It feels strange seeing posters advertising Cyberpunk 2077 at bus stops.

Cyberpunk was never a particularly big RPG - it was the “pure” genre game overshadowed in the tabletop market by Shadowrun which had a clearer goal structure, more adventures, and magic and elves and stuff - and now it has probably the biggest tabletop RPG based computer game ever.

(I mention this now as it’s “current events” and a new tabletop edition is out too. I wasn’t planning on picking 2077 due to various choices involved.)

Of course cyberpunk the genre is a natural for computer games, and Cyberpunk the setting is basically a mashup of the popular bits of the genre which became its own thing with some specifics and the effects of overlap.

I preferred it when Night City was a metaphor, “any city in the world - it could be yours - late night and up against the wall” to when it became a city in California founded in 1993 by a civic architect called Richard Night, but I acknowledge that the Night City sourcebook has a lot of entertaining details and useful adventure hooks and makes for easier GMing.

There are some great books for the line. When Gravity Fails adapts the setting of the George Alec Effinger novels with a thoughtful look at trans representation, sex work and the impact of scientific advances on religious cultures. Near Orbit is a very solid book about space travel and life in space stations, though it emphasises the realistic need to be careful in a fragile artificial environment so well that it seems a regular group of PCs would wreck a station as soon as they arrive. Spinoff subgame CyberGeneration ramps up the nanotech sci-fi Weird Level but focuses on the punk aspects of desperate youth and rebellion better than the core game usually did. GM guide Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads!!!! is a fascinating mix of great advice on setting and adjusting tone, suggestions for campaign premises, and GM versus player adversarial ambush tactics.

I haven’t played tabletop Cyberpunk since the second edition and would want to adjust a lot to do it now, but I’d certainly play the genre again.