Cyberpunk - V3.0 - Core Rules V3.0.pdf
Shanae Maerz
Also, there is no logical order or layout to this book. I'd like to say this is a deliberate attempt at satire, poking fun at the irrational ordering and layout of the book I'm reviewing, but it isn't. It's just that I word-vomited this review onto the page.
Okay, Cyberpunk v3.0 has been out for several years now. There was controversy on the boards when it came out, but I mostly ignored it because I'd never even played Cyberpunk 2020 at that point and didn't have a clue what most of the people were talking about. However, having played in a campaign of each of the above iterations of the Cyberpunk game, I'm now ready to put pen to paper and froth to chin.
Lets get it out of the way the artwork in this book consists of photographs of action figures (a la Barbie or G.I. Joe), customised . Its an interesting idea, and theres even a few of them that arent crap, but thats not really a boasting point about a book: Our innovative approach to artwork isnt entirely crap! Aside from the absolute lack of any emotional depth to the illustrations (a moulded face cant even do the cool disdain that many of the Cyberpunk 2020 illustrations had), theyve missed a major point of Cyberpunk v3.0: all the action figures are of 1980s-style action movie stars with huge metallic cyberlimbs.
See, Cyberpunk v3.0 isnt actually a cyberpunk setting, in the same sense that the previous editions where. Its more or less a post-human setting these days. And thats where the setting falls apart. You see, v3.0 cant decide what it wants to be, and exemplifies its inability to decide by splitting society into six alt-cults, each latching onto a particular ideology. Okay, fair enough. On the other hand, these six factions each have their own unique technology that no one else has access to in a world where these six factions live side-by-side and overlap outside their own enclaves, and where there are also extremely powerful mega-corporations (weakened by the Fourth Corporate War, but boosted by being taken over by the Mafia and other organised crime groups, and therefore even less law-abiding and more sociopathic than they were before) who would make a killing by stealing, adapting and reselling it to the consumer masses, and a federal government desperate for a way of regaining control over the United States.
You see, these alt-cults have each been given a fantastic new bit of technology that makes them unique. This is courtesy of a few benevolent geniuses that were floating around during the Fourth Corporate War (aka the Third World War, where businesses stupidly decided to kill off millions of their potential customers by unleashing nuclear weapons at each other hang on their corporate assets were far enough away from each other that they could throw nukes at one another? Sorry, drifting again). Logically speaking, these alt-cults would require vast amounts of money and resources to perpetuate their scientific advantage over the rest of the world. Take Corpore Metal, for example, being a group of full-borgs or, more accurately, brains in jars that can be switched between different Living Metal host bodies. Imagine the manufacturing and running costs involved. Or Desnai, which surrounds itself with robot servants, or Rolling State, who are not only nomadic, but also completely stuffed full of nanotechnology to the extent that if they break a bone (or lose a limb), the gap is filled with nanobots until tissue can grow back.
These arent nation states. They arent even corporations. Theyre subcultures that somehow manage to have the funds to produce this stuff, as well as improve it over time, and give it away free to deserving alt-cultists (at least, according to the rules they are).
Lets look at the worst example: the Edge-Runners, who are also the most conventional of the alt-cults. Lets assume for a moment, as indicated in the book, that these alt-cults are subcultures, rather than the entire population of the United States of America. This means that the alt-cults are minority groups. The Edge Runners are the successors of the (in-setting) Cyberpunk movement, in that theyre the cool guys who run around doing awesome things of awesomeness while shooting smart-linked guns built into their cybernetic arms. The thing is, nowadays, their technology is just a more modern version of what they had back in 2020. So how is it unique, in a world where the technology used to operate them is almost ubiquitous? Also, how exactly do a bunch of people who arent actually an organisation, but a simple ideology, enforce their uniqueness? Who is the central body that a) decides who is and isnt an Edge Runner, and b) has the control over the development, manufacture and distribution of their unique tech?
The corebook completely fails to answer these (and many other) questions. Instead, it takes each of the alt-cults, each of which is a potentially interesting idea, and then makes them flat and boring by giving so few details that each group is utterly generic.
Night City is a massive, ever-changing nano-constructed city a mile high above ground and stretching over most of the landmass of coastal California in other words, its bigger in volume than every other city on the planet put together. The book goes on and on about how incredibly big Night City is, how incredibly massive, how incredibly sparsely-populated it is as a result of all that. The pseudo-living buildings grow, die and are cannibalised by other construction nanobots.
Im all for impossibly big conurbations I grew up on Warhammer 40,000, for Christs sake, and think Judge Dredds Mega City One is pretty cool. On the other hand, Night City of v3.0 is a real let-down. It's boring. It's... yeah, it's dull. This game has managed to change an ever-growing, mile-high, nation-sized city with a nuclear crater at its centre and make it suck. Aside from the architecture, its just like the old Night City of 2020, but stupider (and, lets face it, any city with a club that has an annual death toll between approximately 1040 to 7300 the Totentanz, the lower figure being if its open one night a week, the higher being seven nights a week isnt exactly a sensible setting, no matter how much fun it is to play in).
Quick logic check 1: what is one of the main reasons for gang warfare? Turf. In nano-spawned Night City, there is a near-infinite amount of space to go around. Gangs need never even meet one another.
This, alongside the Fourth Corporate War, is what makes Cyberpunk v3.0 a post-apocalyptic setting. Get this: a virus has been released that consumes, worldwide, every bit of paper produced since about 1970. Thats not all of it. Part two: the internet was, from the very programming of the Ihara-Grubb protocol, which allowed the whole virtual world netrunning thing, booby-trapped, so that upon the death of the worlds biggest asshole, Rache Bartmoss, it would also become so virus-infested that it would have to be switched off. Virus-stricken computers rewrote their own data, so that the data couldnt be trusted to be accurate, and now no one knows any history any more.
Thus, the world has been reduced to pockets of civilisation that barely communicate with one another and dont know what year it is (literally). Hang on, a lack of paper means you dont know what year it is? You mean that building that was put up last summer didnt have 2021 engraved in its wall? All those products with copyright notices printed or moulded onto them didnt have the year on? The worlds atomic clocks didnt all tell the time? Was every electronic calendar attached to the internet? Hell, does your secure mainframe, remote from the internet, not have a clock in it? Or, in fact, your backup data?
Hey, if all data was corrupted, how did anyone manage to design the cool nanotech and biotech and cybertech that everyones running around with in 203x (as the year is now referred to in the book, since no one can agree on what year it actually is)?
Surely, although 21st century humanity would be able to skip rediscovering fire and the wheel, and go straight to internal combustion and even basic electronics, anything beyond that would be impossible in a post-DataKrash setting unless of course the DataKrash isnt anywhere near as awe-inspiringly terrible as the book says it was.
And heres another hideous fuck-up, which is a critical difference between 2020 and v3.0, which v3.0 mistakenly wears as a badge of pride. To get a cybernetic arm, you no longer have to amputate the fleshy arm. Instead (and this is the Edge Runner schtick), you can just wear an armband around your bicep that, at the flash of a nerve ending, expands (a nanotech-wizard did it and ran away) and encases your body in a massive stat boost and Swiss army knife.
Cyberpunk 2020 got its feel from the utter sociopathy of the setting. That was a world where even the fluffy liberals are a pack of mass-murdering terrorists. It was eminently self-destructive, and there was no way that humanity would ever advance into any kind of hypothetical age of enlightenment. The human race was on the road to hell in Cyberpunk 2020. This insanity was exemplified by the idea that your character would willingly have entire limbs hacked away in a filthy, back-street ripperdocs, to make himself better at his job or his hobbies, in return for destroying his own ability to empathise with other people and, eventually, descend into full cyberpsychosis.
In Cyberpunk v3.0, even the full-borgs, the ultimate bogeymen of the original setting, are as rational and well-balanced as they were before they starting flicking through the adverts in Post-Humans Today magazine.
In summary, the Cyberpunk v3.0 setting might not be dreadful, in and of itself, but it is very poorly thought out such that if falls over when you poke it with a spoon. It's an underdone flambe of a setting. Id recommend picking up Eclipse Phase if you want to read a posthuman setting done well.
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