On the 25th Day of the 2024 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I am using the Cyberpunk Red system. I had the opportunity to play this system at SaltCON-Spring and I really enjoyed it. But I will admit that it was a one-shot where the GM guided the characters around the rough spots.
I had picked up the PDF of this game when DriveThruRPG had a sale last September. This was on the week of Science Fiction games if I recall correctly. Since I had played Cyberpunk when it first came out in the 90’s, I wanted to see how this new system stacked up.
As mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, I am trying the technique of creating the character first and then writing the blog post later.
The PDF is 458 pages long. The character creation process starts on page 40. The character sheet is three pages long. I saw the Rockerboy entry (aka Cyberpunk bard) I thought, I’ve never made a bard like character before. So this will be my first. I decided to, loosely, base him on the 80s/90s Peter Murphy with the same look.
There are three options for character creation. Streetrats, which is just take one of the ready made templates as described in the book. This was for the quickest play with those not familiar with the system yet. Next was Edgerunners (aka Fast and Dirty) where some items were selected for you, but you also had some freedom to make the character yours. The last option was the Complete Packages. This was for those very familiar with the game and wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of character creation. As tempting as the last option is, I elected for Edgerunners because I’m still learning, but I wanted more than to pick a template.
There is a very well done flowchart on page 41 that also contains hyperlinks (in the PDF) to the pages they reference. Step 1 was to pick a roll, which as mentioned above, is the Rockerboy. Step 2 is the Lifepath. This was both from your culture (where in the world you were born and raised) and role-based lifepath (Rockerboy history). You could roll randomly or select for the image of the character you had. I did a little of both.
Step 3 was the Statistics. The heart and soul of most games. Our stats included Intelligence, Reflexes, Dexterity, Technical, Cool, Will, Luck, Move, Body and Empathy. Pretty standard for most RPG. I followed the guidelines and while I still rolled, it was for a random part of the chart. This lead to step 4 where you calculated your derived statistics like hit points and humanity (which I noticed that I hadn’t transferred it to the character sheet before I scanned it).
Step 5 was selecting your skills. With the quick and dirty I already had my skills selected, but I had 86 points to spread around between them. I gave more points to those that I thought would match the punk musician that I was creating.
The next step was recording the weapons and armor. Most of it was pre-selected but I did get to make a couple of choices. Step 7 was your outfit. In cyberpunk games fashion is a major part of the game. I wrote down the clothing and lifestyle information (including the housing).
Step 8 was the cyberwear. I wrote down what was provided to me. I came up with a German sounding name (from a random name generator) and elected to use the handle of Indigo (pulled from one of Peter Murphy’s popular songs). Here are the character sheets.
Afterthoughts:
I liked how they had three different options for character creation depending upon how familiar you were with the game. I also really liked how each chart in the step had an arrow pointing you towards the next chart in line. I had read on Reddit that someone really didn’t like how the book was laid out. While I haven’t gone from cover-to-cover, I can say that I liked the character creation process and how the bookmarked sections helped lead me to the next area I needed to go to.
I wouldn’t turn down a game of Cyberpunk Red. But I don’t know if I’ve got the bandwidth to think about running or homebrewing for this system.
Additional Notes:
I posted my Crypts & Things character on the D101 Games discord channel. The publisher responded with some interesting information. They said: “Nice You’ve got a real piece of history there, in the 1st edition of the game. In answer to your question, Remastered is twice as big, with all new art. There’s lots of new content. Characters get two life events, one for their homeland and one for their character class. The magicians losing hit points was dropped, but you still gain corruption for casting black magic.” Now I really want to check out the remastered Crypts & Things book.
I really like it when the smaller game companies interact with their fanbase. DwD Games has done the same thing when I’ve posted about FrontierSpace and their other publications.
On the RPG.net Forums I had a reader that uses the handle “Hunter” respond about the use of The Breakfast Club as RPG characters. They had also used the same characters in the 2023 Character Creation Challenge in the Leverage RPG system.
Coming Up Next:
Dungeons and Dragons Essentials
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