u/Captainwhizfiz

You cannot tell me you wouldn’t want to watch 66 wolves if it were a real anime. That shit sounds incredible. I want to collect the wolf cups irl

this is an update to my previous post where I asked for ideas on how to tie my new crew together. To summarize: I’ve got a new group together. They’ve already decided what roles they want to pick. Two of them are brand new and two of them are reprising previous characters from another campaign. The party comp is Nomad, Lawman, Media, and Rockerboy. I initially felt like a classic edgerunners game wasn’t the right move here, and I got a lot of really good advice on how to tie these characters together in a way that justifies them working gigs and pursuing a plot together.

Here’s what I came up with: it’s a classic serial killer noir thriller. There’s a serial killer on the loose in Night City, but nobody knows it yet. The police have failed to identify a pattern and assumed the killings were standard Night City stuff since murder is pretty common. However our Lawman, the archetypal hard-boiled noir detective, has noticed the pattern and believes that these were not random at all but all done by the same person. This killer is methodical and extremely careful not to be caught, but like many genius killers he loves the chase. The twist? The killer is using extensive body sculpting and personality chips to shapeshift into different people. They could be anyone. (Yes I’m stealing this from When Gravity Fails)

To tie the crew together I have some ideas. The killer will begin to leave cryptic clues for the Lawman to follow. The media will naturally want to help investigate to make a story out of it, so it’s not hard to tie him in. The latest victim will be someone our Nomad is fond of, so that will tie him in. Lastly, our Rockerboy will get quite a shock to see that the killer has body sculpted themselves to look like her deceased boyfriend. She’ll naturally wonder not only how he’s alive at all but why he would he suspected of murder.

My question for you all is this: What’s the killer’s MO? One of my favorite things in serial killer media is when the detective finally figures out the commonality between all the victims and puts together the pattern. So what’s the pattern? The victims are not the same gender, age, social status, or anything like that. Nothing that obvious. And what clues is he leaving behind? What tips our Lawman off that this is the same person and not random killings? Does the killer do something to the bodies? Take something from each of them? Leave something with them? What’s the killer’s “tell”?

First, let me say that I am very experienced in running Cyberpunk: Red. I’ve got three years under my belt at this point, and I’m also very well versed in the lore.

I’ve run a 2 year campaign in the past that went very well. We had a Rockerboy, a Nomad, a MedTech, and a Netrunner. I ran it as a classical Edgerunner crew concept. The anime had just aired and I was eager to recreate its themes so I focused a lot on high stakes action, conspiracy plots, cyberpsychosis, and romance.

I am now getting a new group together to play. Two players from a previous game and two brand new people. We haven’t locked anything down yet and we haven’t had session 0 yet, but we discussed ideas and they’ve already decided what they think they would like to play. The tentative lineup is: Nomad, Rockerboy, Lawman, and Media. Media and lawman are what’s tripping me up here. The media wants to uncover corporate conspiracies and the lawman wants to be a classic hard-boiled noir detective. The nomad just wants to emulate the feeling of playing Panam’s questline in the video game, and the Rockerboy is a j-pop star recovering from a highly publicized scandal with her previous group and has gone as a solo act now.

My question is this: with the limited info here, how would you tie this group together? A classic edgerunner crew doesn’t necessarily feel right. Why would a noir detective or a j-pop star take standard gigs from fixers? I feel like we might need a spicier crew concept but I’m drawing a blank. Any ideas?

How do you GM’s determine what hackable devices there are in an environment for the Netrunner? While doing a heist on a corporate building, this isn’t so tough. But what about when the crew gets into a scuffle with some gangoons in an alleyway? How do you make the Netrunner feel useful in these situations? Not everywhere has security cameras and turrets for them to use.

Hey chooms! I had a long lunch break today and decided to roll up a mission idea using the Solo Mode tables. I liked what I came up with, so I figured I’d share it with ya’ll. Feel free to steal this idea and run it at your table. If you do, please let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on it either way.

Note: the twist was heavily inspired by the game Zero Parades for Dead Spies, the latest ZA/UM game.

Mission type: Retrieve Information
Macguffin: Valuable Art (High Fashion dress)
Fixer: Ms. Mynah
Premise: Ms. Mynah wants information about where she can acquire a one-of-a-kind designer dress worth tens of thousands of eddies.

Who owns the dress?
“The Chief of Public Relations for SecSystems, Amelia Duncan.”

What makes this dress so valuable?
“It was design and made by Armand Pélissier, one of the most prestigious fashion designers in the world. That alone would be enough to warrant a price tag in the tens of thousands, however, this dress previously belonged to Tiffany Kim, a Korean-American pop star.”

When was the last time this dress appeared in public?
“At Tiffany Kim’s final show in Seoul where she was killed by a crazed fan. The dress is priceless because of this. Witnesses say that, miraculously and despite Kim’s head exploding from a 12mm round, not a drop of blood stained the dress.”

Where should we start looking for it?
“If it was transported to night city, it would most likely have been taken by sea on a Thelas nation nomad vessel. I would start by sniffing around the port.”

Why is the dress so hard to acquire?
“Ms. Duncan no doubt paid a fortune for the dress. She’ll have it under lock and key at all times, and it’s not like she’ll have it hung up in in closet. She’ll at least have it guarded or monitored, and it’s possible she left it in the hands of someone she trusts to protect it. It’s not clear to me what she plans to do with the dress, to keep it or to fence it.”

How aggressive we be in pursuing this?
“I only need the information on where the dress is and who or what is protecting it. Don’t push your luck too far. If Ms. Duncan catches wind that someone is sniffing for it she’ll squirrel it away somewhere even harder to find. Don’t let that happen or we’re back to square one.”

The Twist?
Tiffany Kim is alive. The woman who died on stage was a body double, and the killer a paid actor. Amelia Duncan is a super fan that offered to help Kim fake her death so she can get out of her predatory life contract with her agency.

Hey chooms. I’m an experienced referee and I love the system dearly. It’s looking like I may be able to wrangle my personal dream team of players into a campaign: my younger brother and sister. But neither of them are ttrpg players or have much knowledge of the setting. My brother has seen edgerunners s1 and played some of Act 1 of 2077 but that’s about it. I wanted to pose a question to the hive mind: what material would you give someone to consume as a crash course in Mike Pondsmith’s vision of the dark future? It could be movies, shows, books, music, etc. For the sake of the question, let’s assume that your prospective acolyte won’t consume more than 3-5 of your chosen pieces of media. What would you shove down their cyber-gullet to give them the best possible vision of what 2045 is like?

I’ve been reading Neo-Tribes, the 2020 nomad sourcebook, and came across this passage:

“Nomads are, to a degree, defined by their families, clans, tribes and nations; so taking nomads out of their normal environment and forcing them into an urban game opens the possibility of abuse of a nomad's family status. At the other extreme, some referees feel that the Family special ability's unique qualities can unbalance the game, and so limit the nomad to being a sec-ond-rate solo or (even worse) a chauffeur. In short, nomads should be run in nomad campaigns.
Nomads work best as the focus of a team, rather than as an aspect or team-member. Having a nomad in an urban team encourages the down-play of nomadic goals for the benefit of the team's greater play enjoyment. It is hard to put pressures on a team if they can call for their nomad member's family to pull them out of a bind, and a nomad's responsibility to the family can also put unwanted strings on a team that can ruin playability. Having both a nomad and a fixer in a team can put such responsibilities on a play group that other goals simply cannot be addressed; and while this effect may be true to reality, it makes for lousy gaming.”

What do y’all make of this? I had a nomad player in my group for about a two year campaign and I definitely felt like the story was constantly having to sacrifice his being a nomad for the sake of being an edgerunner and he was typically just a chauffeur. What have any of you done to remedy this? Is it just a simple conversation about setting expectations with a player? Is it more of a restructuring of the story? Most of all, how do we feel this take has aged into 2045?

I got a little heated in traffic, punched the steering wheel. Now there’s something rattling around in there when I turn the wheel, like it’s rolling around in there. Sounds like a bit of plastic idk. Any way to get it out of there?

Been thinking about the nature of social roleplaying with dice mechanics. It’s a topic that’s been discussed at length, mainly by D&D slop-tubers and even some more respectable individuals (such as Brennan Lee Mulligan, my hero). But no one seems to have a definitive answer. So, I wanted to ask the community!

When you or your players are roleplaying a social encounter and something occurs that would require a check, do you roll before or after saying it?

For example: The crew’s PC fixer is speaking with the client about the job, and the fixer can tell that the client is hiding something. They analyze their body language and their tone of voice, succeed a Human Perception check, and are told that their intuition is on point. Then the fixer wants to persuade the client to spill their guts. Would the fixer (if you were the GM here) need to roleplay what they say to the client to convince them, THEN roll to see if it works? Or would they roll first, see if it works, then roleplay accordingly?

Imagine that they roleplay first and make a very convincing argument that you, as the GM, really like. But then they roll and it fails. Feels bad.

But also imagine they roll first and they roll badly, now they have to roleplay accordingly and intentionally make a bad argument?

I’m curious what the approach ya’ll take to social encounters and dice rolls looks like.