Supplements

Cyberpunk Red

	Technical data
	Role-playing game (3rd edition of Cyberpunk 2013), published by Talsorian Games (2020)
	Theme	Role-playing game taking place in the middle of a technological, decadent and dark 21st century.

	Background quality	4 / 5
	Scenario quality	2 / 5
	Rules quality	4 / 5
	Artworks quality	5 / 5
	Writing quality	4 / 5

Review

Introduction

Let's first go back briefly to the history of the role-playing game. Because if Cyberpunk Red is officially the 3rd edition of Cyberpunk, in fact it is rather the 4th or 5th edition :

Cyberpunk (commonly called Cyberpunk 2013), published in 1988.
Cyberpunk 2020, published in 1990.
Cyberpunk 3.0, published in 2005 but no longer considered canon, due to its unpopularity. On the whole, this edition had moved too far away from Cyberpunk and was mostly Science-Fiction.
Cyberpunk 2020.2 was originally scheduled for release in 2010 but eventually became Cyberpunk Red.
Cyberpunk Red, published in 2020.

To publish a new edition of a role-playing game more than 30 years after the first one is therefore a challenge, because it is necessary to both meet the expectations of veterans without tiring them while welcoming new players. Mike Pondsmith explains all the difficulty in the first few pages. We could summarize Cyberpunk Red by saying it's the same as Cyberpunk 2020 but better. Everything is better, the general presentation, the illustrations, the game system (except the fighting but we will come back to that), the writing, etc. We can feel that this edition has benefited from both more budget and technological advances. For this last point, the simple fact of having a searchable PDF is for example a big plus.

Darius Kalinauskus

The game system

Overall, the only major changes are the statistics and the system of combat. Cyberpunk Red therefore remains very compatible with its elder and the house rules that have been developed over the years. Players now have ten stats instead of nine. Beauty has disappeared because some players used them as dump since it is easily upgraded with cosmetic surgery, among other things. Two new features have therefore appeared, Will and Dexterity, bringing Cyberpunk Red a little closer to standard role-playing games. This change seems judicious but we will obviously have to see in use.

Generally speaking, the rules have been made more fluid and more accessible to newcomers. For example, the creation of characters is possible in three different ways, one by templates for beginners, a quick one for one-shot scenarios and finally the complete one close to Cyberpunk 2020. Too bad we didn't get rid of the classes, even if I imagine they were kept to guide beginners.
Nevertheless we should not confuse simplified and simplistic and this is what I criticize about the new rules of combat.

The rules of Friday Night Firefight were aimed at realism, and while it is always illusory (and potentially boring) to aim for total realism, it is probably one of the closest systems to it in a RPG. The flip side of the coin is that it was long and possibly onerous for players who didn't favor action. So Mike Pondsmith and his team decided to simplify it, too much for my taste. I'm not going to go into details, but the veterans may be disappointed. And frankly being able to dodge bullets ? Thank you, but this is not The Matrix.
Luckily the combat system, like other rules, is highly compatible with the Cyberpunk 2020 one.

Finally, netrunning has also undergone a facelift, which was not a luxury given the mediocrity of the old rules. Mediocrity such that I can't decide on improvements or not, having always played with home-made rules.

Anselm Zielonka

Scenario & illustrations

As far as writing is concerned, it's better, but it wasn't difficult. And I'm not talking about the abominable French translation. Most of the important events are summarized there, as well as those of the famous Time of the Red. There is little doubt that more details will come with future supplements, since this is not the purpose of the basic book.
As in Cyberpunk 2020, there are embryos of scenarios on a few pages but frankly nothing very exciting. A bit of effort at this level would have helped beginners but I guess the supplements will take care of that as well.

Last point, the illustrations. They are very good, with a few exceptions. On the other hand, there are no illustrations of equipment, weapons, vehicles or cybernetics, and that's a shame. I hope this will be made up for in the future Black Chrome supplement which will take over from the Chrome Books.

Conclusion