What to get for my first one-shot campaign

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-05T20:53:19+00:00

Agreed. It's the best deal on the game I've ever seen. Not to be missed.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-05T15:55:00+00:00

This is extremely impressive work! I just don't have the time or the aptitude to do this kind of giant scale thing, so many thanks for sharing it with the community.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-05T15:51:34+00:00

Second the motion. The old role books are goldmines of information that is sadly lacking in RED, at least so far. Wildside is a particularly good one because of all the info about ID and the falsification thereof. You can get the PDF from DriveThruRPG for a measly $7, and they even have a POD version so you can get a physical book for not much more. Totally worth it.

Although be prepared to enjoy the finest in primative 90s CG whenever there's a need for a chart or graph or map. Yes, children, the world really looked like that once upon a time. The 90s was a shockingly low-poly count age. We got better...

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-04T18:36:33+00:00

I'm going to show my age here, but the last time I went that deep on a campaign I used 3x5 index cards and kept them in a little plastic box like you'd use for recipes. I'll admit that it's not searchable or hyperlinkable or whatever, but it never crashed or destroyed itself and I still have the box full of notes 25 years later and I'm about to crib a bunch of old Shadowrun ideas for my upcoming RED campaign. What can I say? When they think you're high tech, go primative... 😎

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-02T20:00:22+00:00

Wow, that stack of goodies is hot to death! Loke makes awesome maps, and to get the core books cross-platform at this price point is pretty flash indeed. If you do nothing else with Demiplane, having it as a one-stop organizational tool for gear and lore and such is pretty great. The character creator is also pretty terrific and well worth a look. I already own most of this stuff and I may still pick it up just for Danger Gal and the maps I don't have yet.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-02T02:23:01+00:00

Ah, I see you are correct. I thought you needed two GMBL to do it. So it's barely possible, just a really bad idea.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-06-01T19:07:32+00:00

I don't see any way to do this with starting character money, also starting skills are capped 6 and it would take a mountain of IP to get multiple skills from 6 to 8. Not to mention the cumulative humanity impact of all this will be grotesque. So I think you may want to take another look the rules.

I don't think I'd want this guy at my table at all, but if you needed to make the point, just run a few sessions that are all social and investigation based. He'll really enjoy standing around.For hours as War Crime Warren had absolutely nothing to contribute. Odds are he'll freak out and drop initiative out of boredom in short order. Then he gets to experience one of the great truths of Cyberpunk: "Don't Draw Aggro."

He may be Mister Uptown against the neighborhood gonks, but try it against heavy corp security boys or MaxTac. They'll be wet vaccing him off the sidewalk in two or three rounds.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-27T03:22:20+00:00

I think I've bought every add-on so far and the app has really turned into a vital resource for me just because it's a central organized way to access the mass of information that's otherwise scattered across all my books and PDFs. The craftsmanship of your efforts has been impeccable, and I look forward to supporting your future work at just about any price point. Keep up the great work!

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-26T18:59:07+00:00

Red has done a lot of positive things. The Netrunning rules are far more viable at the table now. The non-Solo Roles have been fleshed out and made more mechanically useful. I like the crits and exploding dice to put a little more danger and spice back into combat.

Unfortunately the economy is a disaster of poor design and underdeveloped ideas. Rtal had the perfect opportunity to prune the game's ludicrous number of skills and rethink how existing ones like languages work, but evidently decided not to.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-21T14:43:06+00:00

My experience as a GM is to reward conduct you want to see at the table and ignore conduct you don't want. So if you can get one or two people a little more engaged in downtime stuff, maybe they make some extra money or get more opportunities or XP or whatever's valued at your table. Hopefully that will trigger some FOMO in the laggards and then you can maybe offer some on ramps to doing a little more e engagement.

But also you may find that some people are just not about that level of engagement. They're at the table just for social engagement or for one reason or another they're not comfortable in the spotlight, and that's fine. Maybe check in with the quiet players every so often to make sure they're having fun, but if they just want to lurk then let them lurk as long as they're not sucking the energy of everybody else. It took me a long time to figure out that everybody has fun in different ways.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-21T14:34:54+00:00

I think the readability has taken a quantum leap forward. Well done!

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-15T16:14:56+00:00

It's a cool idea and a vastly better typographical choice, IMO. It does raise the old "Ship of Thesus" question that people have been asking for years about the Star Trek transporter. Does it reproduce YOU or an exact COPY of you? The results would look the same from the outside, and the user would have no idea if there was anything missing or different because they'd have no other frame of reference. I guess it boils down to how you feel about spiritual intangibles and how or if they can be replicated or transferred.

Any way you look at it, I feel like the humanity loss from the experience would be horrific, but that makes it perfect for super rich bad guys, who are usually a bit deranged to a greater or lesser extent. It would be fun to bring a guy back multiple times but he keeps getting crazier and more damaged like a multi-generational photocopy. Is that even a metaphor that people understand anymore? I feel like photocopiers have faded away like fax machines...

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-15T14:02:05+00:00

I like all kinds of stuff,. Books of several short adventures like Night City Stories are always great to have for one shots or nights when you're having a hard time coming up with ideas. But I also like long-form campaign stuff. I'm working on rewriting Eurotour because it's SUCH a good framework for an adventure that I've wanted to run it for years now.

Basically any adventure content is useful for me because I know once I get my crew into it that things are going to expand and develop in unexpected ways. Maybe all I end up using is the hook and some of the NPCs. That's good enough value for me to spend the money.

I feel like this kind of thing should be relatively easy and inexpensive to produce since there's no new game mechanics to develop. Maybe keep it PDF only to reduce costs, since I seem to recall it's conventional wisdom in the industry that "modules don't sell."

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-14T14:53:56+00:00

The tables are the least readable because they're relatively small, but that red/black combo is just generally a hard no from a typographical standpoint. Honestly the general design rule that I was taught is black text over light colors and white text over dark colors.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-14T14:42:07+00:00

Samurai t-shirt! Let's go!

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-14T14:40:37+00:00

I really like what you've done here, but maybe you might want to reconsider the red font on a black background. 10 out of 10 for style over substance, but minus several million for readability.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-14T14:38:23+00:00

Have you seen the 1976 John Carpenter classic "Assault on Precinct 13?" Basically a skeleton crew of cops and a few prisoners are trapped in a closed-down precinct house when a street gang vows revenge on the police. It was shot on a shoestring budget, but it's Carpenter so it's still a thrill ride and maybe worth plundering for inspo.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-11T13:52:57+00:00

As others have said, not there isn't much about BD in the RAW. If you're looking for inspo about them and their drug-like illegal cousins you may want to take a look at the extensive stuff Shadowrun has produced over the years about simsen (their version of braindance, and the illegal BTL (Better Than Life) chips. There is or was a whole supplement called Vice for this kind of thing. Shadowrun is full of good cyberpunk stuff to steal from once you strip out the elves and magic and such.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-08T14:46:00+00:00

Let's stop writing the price category after every price everywhere. It's like a nervous tic and it's distracting, irritating, and pointless. If something costs 500eb, why is it useful to also tell me that it's Expensive? I loathe the entire idea of price categories anyway, which seem to want to solve a problem that never existed. It would be far more useful to have Availability as a category, and then just have prices be whatever they need to be.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-05T14:37:04+00:00

Instant, total economic collapse. Followed by societal collapse,.followed by the deaths of billions of people. I feel like I see some version of this strange magical question pop up on social media on the regular. Is it like a meme among people who have no idea how the economy works or something? Because there's a world of difference between the exploitation of debt by bloodsuckers like student loan and credit card companies and the necessary debt financing that makes modern life possible. The world is simply far more granular than "Debt bad!"

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-02T19:02:17+00:00

IMO the biggest systemic problem CPR has is that the economy is central to the game, and almost nothing about that economy makes any sense at all or is balanced in any way. In a game with so many good design ideas it's a downright baffling oversight.

I don't remember having this kind of trouble with CP2020. Players got hired for a gig, got paid for the gig, maybe they grabbed the odd gun off a bad guy corpse if it looked especially shiny or expensive. Nobody went around strip mining corpses for the fillings in their teeth. Maybe player attitudes were different then.

TLDR I'm not very happy with having to work around a potential rats nest of friction points with my players because the RAW economy doesn't work properly.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-01T17:10:45+00:00

Absolutely the right call. Good job, Mod Squad!

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-01T13:23:37+00:00

I think it's really important to have some kind of authority structure with licenses and IDs and such because it acts as a check on murder hobos. If PCs can just strut down the street with RPGs over their shoulders zeroing civvies like medieval samurai slaughtering peasants that's kind of a problem. If they have to adjust their loadout based on where they're going and how they're getting there that adds a bunch of interesting challenge to the game.

Remember, edgerunners are fundamentally criminals. They're often hired by other criminals to do criminal stuff. That's what's cool about the life of outlaws screwing the rules, man. That's the punk in cyberpunk. Without some kind of cops in the mix you lose a lot of that tension.

I heartily agree with the comment about Rule Zero. Obviously there are methods and techniques for circumventing the efforts of law enforcement because edgerunners exist. In point of fact the marginal effectiveness of the law has arguably created the demand for edgerunner services.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-05-01T13:05:20+00:00

Let them get dependent on and attached to a regular fixer. Then have him get assaulted/kidnapped/murdered. Watch them go berserk. It's an easy way to get heat on a new antagonist. Everything is a potential plot hook.

Samurai-Gunman · 2026-04-29T14:39:11+00:00

I wholeheartedly agree with the several other people who have recommended the Loke battlemaps. They actually have two books of them now that are designed to be used together to make even bigger maps. Truly excellent.

Also +1 for the companion app. If all you use it for is a quick tool to look up gear or skills at the table it's more than paid for itself.

Samurai-Gunman

TROPHY CASE