If you bought Cyberpunk 2077, you got a digital bonus you may have not collected: a PDF version of the tabletop roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020.

This classic was first published in 1988, riding the wave of Cyberpunk culture that was very popular at the time.  The iconic second edition was released in 1990, which is what you have.

The Era: What is Cyberpunk?

Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre that is a little amorphous.  There isn’t a single checklist of tropes, but if you have several of these, you’ll probably be Cyberpunk:

• Near future:  This isn’t the world of 3500 A.D. but rather the late 21st century, where there is some space exploration but the stories are still very much set on planet Earth.
• A dark, dystopian world: Definitely not the glittering future of Star Trek.  It’s a world where crime is rampant, firefights are common, gangs are ubiquitous, drugs are next level, and corporations battle each other for supremacy.
• Wetware meets hardware: The human body is an open platform for modding, and people swap organs and limbs out for all sorts of different mechanical contraptions.  Cat eyes, sleek metal hands, chips you plug into your brain to learn kung fu – the sky’s the limit.
• The Net: Everything is connected to an Internet-like network which presents itself in 3d virtual reality.  Netrunners “jack in” (literally – they have a port on the back of their heads) and enter the net, where they skulk around to penetrate corporate nets and battle each other with deadly programs.

Although “when did Cyberpunk start” is a contentious question because you can find precursors to its major themes going back decades in science fiction, there are a few books and movies that really set the tone for the era:

• Blade Runner (1982): The best-known cyberpunk film, even though it doesn’t have a net-running aspect.
• Neuromancer (1984): William S. Gibson’s tale of netrunning and the dark future.
• Hardwired (1986): Walter Jon William’s book on the orbital corporations war (and later a sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020).
• Robocop (1987): A movie which paints a picture of a violent urban world and the mechanized policeman created to handle it.
• Akira (1988): Anime film about neo-Tokyo with many iconic visuals.

Of course, there have been many more since.  William S. Gibson has continued to write more books, and many of Neal Stephenson’s books have cyberpunk themes.  Films such as The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, and others are also in the genre.

Cyberpunk 2020

I grew up playing tabletop roleplaying games.  By the early 90s, my troupe was quite burned out on D&D and while we’d had a good run with other games (particularly FGU’s), we were looking for something new.  The big Vampire: the Masquerade wave hadn’t really started yet, and we discovered Cyberpunk.  I ran that game for many years and played in countless campaigns.

The game was written by Mike Pondsmith and attempts to recreate the feel of the Cyberpunk world.  You take the role of a netrunner, a “solo” (soldier of fortune), tech, policeman, or similar and enter a seedy world where everyone wears chrome.

The universe is very open-ended.  You can engage in corporate espionage, fight in military units, battle gangs, be a gangbanger, research tech, steal tech, or do anything else that might occur to a seedy 21st century urban denizen.  If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077 you get a pretty good idea of what the world is like.  The character in the game voiced by Keanu Reeves (Johnny Silverhand) is a prominent NPC used in examples in the rulebook and a flavor-setting short story that’s included.

The world of Cyberpunk 2020 is, of course, quite dated.  It’s what Mike Pondsmith thought the world would be like in 2020 when he was standing in 1988.  Today, no one is replacing their forearms with bandsaws or plugging chips into their skulls, and there are numerous anachronistic elements to the game such as fax machines, newspapers (“scream sheets”), and the Soviet Union being among the most notable.  Smartphones, notably, are absent.

There were an astonishing number of supplements published: 28 in all, plus 6 adventures.  Most focus in on one role (e.g., Rockerboy), catalog cybernetics/gears/potential foes, or present detailed cities and places.

There were two sequels:

• Cyberpunk 3.0 (2005), which was universally panned.
• Cyberpunk Red (2020), the fourth edition, which was better received and has been termed “D&D 5e for Cyberpunk”.

Running Cyberpunk 2020 in 2026

If you want to run Cyberpunk, you first need to decide how you’re going to handle the anachronisms.  I’d recommend simply stating that the timelines diverged and you’re living in the world envisioned by Cyberpunk 2020, which allows you to use everything created for the game.  Alternatively you can advance the timelines so you’re playing in, say, 2077 but that still leaves all the Soviet Union stuff to decide what to do with. Taking that route means rewriting a lot of history.  I think of Cyberpunk 2020 as “1980s steampunk” and if you take that approach and say “this is the universe, it’s not ours,” you’ll be okay.

Cyberpunk can be challenging to run, because the world is so open.  In a typical D&D campaign, the characters are generally funneled from one location to another, with clear objectives and goals, and much of the play is focused on killing monsters.  In C2020, your characters live in a huge open world, and it’s often challenging for the Referee to anticipate everything they would want to do.

The various sourcebooks attempt to help with this, but they can be daunting to consume.  The Night City sourcebook, for example, goes block-by-block into excruciating detail.  At one point it even details the traffic signs and parking zones!

The Referee really needs to spend some time mapping out people, places, and relationships when preparing for the game, and then be ready to adapt on the spot.  You don’t say “there’s a dungeon over here” and everyone piles into it, hacking and slashing for hours.  Typically the characters are interacting with far more NPCs, following multiple plots, exploring relationships between characters, etc.

Another challenge is that the system is legendarily lethal.  It’s very easy for your characters to be killed by a single gunshot to the head.  Sure, this may be scientifically accurate, but it plays poorly in a world that is otherwise so much about cinematics.  Rolling up a new character is a 30-60 minute endeavor, and players rightfully get invested in their characters and hate to see them die so capriciously.

Grognards will say “well, that’ll teach ’em to be careful next time!” but in a world where everyone is tanked out with body mods and bristles with weapons (many of which are lovingly detailed in the supplements), gunfights are implied to be very common.  As a player you want to try out all your cool combat cybernetics, but the game is often unforgiving if you do.  There are some adjustments you can make, like not doubling damage for headshots or granting all characters a level of dermal armoring.

By far, though, the biggest challenge is around netrunning. If you have a mixed party of different roles, inevitably what happens is that the netrunning is “in the net” doing his game and everyone else is in the real world doing theirs.  The Referee faces the difficult problem of going back and forth between two groups of players.  One popular approach is simply to ban netrunning.  Alternatively, make everyone a netrunner, though this doesn’t fit the games classic “Quentin, we’re at the South Gate, disable the security bot while we sneak past” vibe.

Overall, Cyberpunk 2020 is certainly playing, though it’s demanding on the Referee.  If you don’t like the 80s crunchy mechanics, the material is a rich vein for mining.  Even the core PDF you got with Cyberpunk 2077 has tons of ideas and campaign starters.  You might also check out the Blade Runner RPG, which is by a different company but is in the same cyberpunk genre.  There’s an excellent live play session on YouTube.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.