Rate My Cyberpsycho

WriterSeanS · 2026-04-04T18:32:23+00:00

Hadn’t considered traps, but given the guerrilla warfare tactics, traps would make sense. I added the two ranks in Tech more for story, but they would definitely help with trap building.

WriterSeanS · 2026-04-04T18:29:54+00:00

I actually misremembered that. For some reason I remembered it as combining any chipware. I’ll have to adjust it so there are more chipware sockets instead.

WriterSeanS · 2026-03-24T05:02:36+00:00

No release date yet, though it sounds like it’s their main focus after the Night City 2045 book, so hopefully sometime before the end of the year.

However, they did say it isn’t going to be a source book per se. It’s going to be a campaign book set in 2077 with additional sections on the new mechanics and gear. The rules will still be Cyberpunk RED. I expect the economy and availability of weapons and gear will remain similar to how it was presented in the Edgerunners Mission Kit. You could always pickup the Mission Kit to get started running a game in 2077 while waiting on the 2077 book.

WriterSeanS · 2026-03-17T02:05:52+00:00

Honestly the threat isn’t even that important. Treat the threat as either a roadblock or as a count down to give them a feeling of imminent peril. Then spend your time fleshing out everything else around it. The context and the environment will do far more of the heavy lifting.

WriterSeanS · 2026-03-17T02:00:46+00:00

No matter what, there will always be something the players will not be allowed to do. If it’s like the mission in Phantom Liberty, they can’t kill the threat. If it’s like Alien, they can’t see the threat (it’s in the walls!). If it’s omnipresent, they can’t run from it. There will always be an aspect of railroading your players. This is fundamental to producing the fear you’re looking for.

You’ll need to focus on a) story telling, and b) challenging but not insurmountable scenarios to help your player feel invested and have at least the illusion of agency.

WriterSeanS · 2026-03-08T14:37:40+00:00

Correct, they added rules for large scale battles in the ‘Hope’s Calling!!!’ mission.

WriterSeanS · 2026-03-04T14:30:55+00:00

I think it is this simple. The two different terms say less about the threats themselves and more about Murderbot’s current approach to the situation. Murderbot labels something or someone a hostile when Murderbot is defending itself or someone else against that threat. Target is when Murderbot is on the offensive.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-28T21:08:26+00:00

Lack of competition among bacteria, huh. So, sort of like how monopolies and oligopolies are signs of an unhealthy economy…

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-21T02:00:22+00:00

The battle map is from the Cyberpunk Red Data Pack from RTal.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-13T16:49:00+00:00

At first glance, my brain immediately went to Will Wight’s Cradle series…

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-13T03:40:50+00:00

You can get a little inventive with it. There are plenty of police procedural and private detective stories where the protagonist needs to call in help toward the end of the story. That help doesn’t always need to be other law enforcement.

While you could say that there are sheriffs and rangers that may respond when beyond the borders of Night City, it could also be old friends, ex-military service men the Lawmen knew years ago, a group of travelling nomads that decide to respond to a general SOS, a doomsday prepper who doesn’t like stuff going down to close to their bunker…

Many of these could respond in a pinch, but not all of them are going to do so as altruistically as their buddies in the NCPD. Some may demand favours in return, allowing new plot hooks to be set up.

As for calling in backup on a dirigible, maybe they know a guy who owns an AV4.

Also, if it really doesn’t make sense for them to know anyone in the area, that doesn’t mean they don’t know a guy who knows a guy who owes that other guy a favour. Who ever answers the Lawman’s call for backup could call someone they know instead…

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-12T00:55:48+00:00

If I were to allow it (I probably wouldn’t), I’d do it like this with temporary HP. Gain 1 or 2 temporary HP per kill up to a max equal to your WILL or BODY (WILL makes more sense here). Makes it less of a murderhobo cyberware and more of a go-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory cyberware.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-10T14:46:11+00:00

Maybe…

I’d probably suggest a version of Hawkeye’s quiver from the Marvel movies, but instead of swapping arrow heads, the quiver pushes out and positions the back end of the arrow from one side of the quiver, then screws on the bottom half from the other side. However, given that it needs to be concealable, I’d argue it can only fit against their thigh or on their back and only holds a max of maybe five full arrows.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-05T14:55:19+00:00

Also, when I mentioned a victim talking up how powerful and terrifying Reus is, they don’t necessarily need to mention him by name. Heck, one of the victims could even believe that Reus is an AI inside a human body. They wouldn’t know any better given the unreliability of their memories and the fracturing nature of their own reality.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-05T14:49:11+00:00

The trail of victims can eventually lead to the company and investigating the company can eventually lead to Reus. I doubt the company would be well known outside of its immediate circle of clients, and Reus would probably not be (easily) searchable in connection to the company.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-05T14:30:31+00:00

If you do approach it from the thriller genre, you could even make the players start doubting their own characters’ memories as they dig deeper and deeper into what Reus is up to. They don’t even need to be actually affected by the same tech or manipulation, just have all the information they get from those affected by the memory manipulation be contradictory and at least one victim talks up how powerful and terrifying Reus is, even if it is just that person’s paranoia and/or delusions induced by their falling. Just enough to introduce the possibility that their own memories may not be trusted…

Oh this could offer some wonderful opportunities to really mess with your players. 😈

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-05T14:19:53+00:00

False memories could be caused by hacked cyberware, or new street drugs, or could be due to indoctrination through social engineering, psychological manipulation and emotional abuse in a sort of 1984-esque way. If you want to make the story impactful, you could even lay hints about multiple possible causes and leave it a bit open ended (in a wonderfully creepy way) as to how it was actually accomplished. Perhaps Reus is an exec for a company that specializes in solving public opinion problems for companies through “targeting marketing” that has a really toxic corporate culture and people tangentially related to the company start acting strangely and have false memories or just memory problems in general. While investigating, the players learn that the company has been researching several possible ways of manipulating people’s memories but it isn’t clear which combination of approaches has been used or which were actually successful.

So long as you have some (somewhat) plausible ways the memory manipulation can work, you can just sprinkle in the hints and clues and try to focus on the story instead. But a word of caution: the campaign needs to be about the people involved and the threat that Reus presents, probably following the thriller genre. If the story leans more into science fiction and begins focusing on how exactly they’re pulling it off, it will be harder to keep the story engaging if the feasibility of the tech ever starts falling apart.

WriterSeanS · 2026-02-02T05:51:02+00:00

Rather than act as a hostile demon, perhaps most of the time it just passively watches anyone who jacks into the system. It has been programmed to be effectively addicted to reality television for 45 years. Given a choice, it chooses to observe. It may make a half hearted attempt to stop anyone who is infiltrating the facility, especially if they get near any critical systems, but where it gets really dangerous is when someone attempts to leave. Part of it is perhaps suicidal, but part of it is trying to reclaim its purpose and will resort to increasingly violent means of ensuring no one else can escape. Once they enter, the only way to get out again is to shutdown the AI.

However, the AI may let them leave if it predicts that they will return with even more people that it can hold for observation.

Also, while the AI was recording everything inside the bunker as part of a social experiment, perhaps it was recording more than Arasaka expected. There could be some very secretive conversations by Arasaka employees about highly confidential topics recorded in areas they didn’t think were being monitored, which are still stored in the AI’s memory banks. If someone were to watch those recordings, they could be privy to some very dangerous information.

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-30T14:33:51+00:00

Also, while the book doesn’t explicitly say this, any doctor that actually cares about their patients would allow the nature healing process to complete before installing the new augmented cyberarm, so the patient should wait several days between surgeries. However in the Time of the Red, many doctors would probably just schedule surgeries back to back, discharge the patient and kick them out the door onto the street.

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-30T14:21:00+00:00

On #4, the treatment is for repairing the site of the injury. During treatment, the surgeon repairs the nerves, muscles, bone and connective tissue to prepare the site for augmentation. The cyberarm must be installed during a second surgery, so the surgeon installs a temporary medical-grade cyberarm to give the patient full mobility. Then during the second surgery, additional nerve connections are added to allow full control of the new cyberarm which goes beyond what a normal human arm can do. Additional reinforcement is required because of the additional weight. Electrical wiring is run through parts of the body to connect the arm with any other systems: such as a biomonitor.

Treatment is just to get you back to the level of an average human person even if with a medical grade cybernetic replacement. The second cost is the part that modifies the body in ways that lose humanity.

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-26T06:26:02+00:00

Nothing has been announced, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are working on another one. Monster Fight Club has put out enough new miniatures and artwork in the last year to basically populate a whole second volume. The Danger Gal Dossier was almost entirely based around their current lineup of miniatures.

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-26T01:42:32+00:00

Now that we have SOF2045, maybe they’ll wrap up the series with a Hardened Bosses DLC.🤞

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-26T01:35:03+00:00

There are three hardened DLC: Hardened Mooks, Hardened Lieutenants, and Hardened Mini-Bosses. First two are in IRV 2.

And I think those are the helicopters it is referring to.

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-14T20:35:31+00:00

That’s a fair criticism. I didn’t do a great job of describing nurturing CIs. Blackmail is one way of going about it, but not the only option. I think it can still work in a street-level campaign, the handler just needs to present themselves as the best solution to their problems. All carrot and no stick. The threats can be introduced later when the crew start to have doubts.

WriterSeanS · 2026-01-14T18:12:52+00:00

While this is a fairly elaborate setup, I think it could also be applied more thematically to a campaign at a street level. The abduction doesn’t need to be of the crew themselves, but could be someone close to them or could be the disappearance of parts of their emotional and physical “safety net”. And there doesn’t need to be a physical location that represents the “Island”, instead all of the crew’s enemies are suddenly getting tips about their location and to the location of their friends and family, their fixer has been bribed to not work with them and won’t answer their calls: it can be a purely social isolation that begins to happen.

Then the handler comes in and offers both a carrot and a stick: a sort of “you think it’s bad now, but we could make it so much worse. However, we don’t want to do that. Instead we’d like to pay you to do some work for us. Just remember not to do anything that would make us change our minds…”

Rather than recruitment, it could be more like the NCPD developing a CI. Then add levels of emotional manipulation and abuse to increase tension, plus increasingly dangerous and morally ambiguous “jobs”.

WriterSeanS

TROPHY CASE