Cy_Borg Review (with bonus Citycrawl Events Table!)

A rotting world. Torn apart by nano-disasters and corporate gluttony, environmental collapse, and toxic holocaust. No one knows the year. Wars, depressions and kleptocracies have destroyed, rebuilt and crystallized the world into a Cyberpunk hiveworld.

Mork Borg with a Cyberpunk skinjob. To be honest, I soured on Mork Borg. The tone didn’t work with my group. Its excessive grimdarkness didn’t facilitate a genuine atmosphere, it broke immersion. The quirks and the goddamn pet monkeys turned it into the Three Stooges. Cy_Borg, I will say off the top, is much better.

The reason is obvious, if you think about it: Mork Borg is cartoon Dark Souls. Mork Borg is fast-paced and chaotic. Dark Souls is quiet, lonely, and calculated, except for when combat demands precision and talent. Mork Borg is… not that. No shade to those who love Mork Borg, but I think it’s clear why, tonally, it’s not effective, at least for me. Cy_Borg, on the other hand, is- because Cyberpunk is hyperstylized, ADHD neon chaos by default. It’s a flashing, chromed-out gang war with rampant poverty and techno-infestation. Maybe Neuromancer and Blade Runner aren’t, but Shadowrun, Aeon Flux, Transmetropolitan and the like are. Even those "serious" Cyberpunk works have most of the same stuff, just slowed down and Vangelis-scored; the toymaker and streetmarkets of Blade Runner, the Zaibatsu ninja assassins and psychedelic episodes of Neuromancer. Johnny Mnemonic has a goddamn mecha-dolphin and cyber-enhanced christian zealot hitman in it. I love it because you can generate just about any situation or tech on the fly- it operates on such a pseudoscientific plane with ubiquitous gadgets for any purpose and dense, diverse urban environments that you can improvise a citycrawl, a gang fight, a heist, or whatever with total plausibility.

So, tonally and thematically it works. Of course this is, in large part, due to the art and presentation, done by Johann Nohr of Mork Borg itself. The malware-infected, graffitied, internet ad-inspired aesthetic is a natural fit. The setting info is also fantastic. In fact, it is some of the best worldbuilding I’ve seen. Through brief, pamphlet-sized descriptions, different regions and neighborhoods come to life, and there’s something for every occasion. A gated community for the ultra-rich defended by auto-turrets. Ganglands, shady ports, corpo-zones, irradiated/nanite-consumed disaster sites. The kind of stuff you expect to find, the kind of stuff you would include yourself, but somebody did it FOR you. And they did it well.

I think its comfort zone is one-shots. Contracts for your gangers. That’s such an established trope that it feels natural to grab some haphazardly generated, disposable characters and charge into the mission du jour with little regard for the consequences because you’re thousands of credits in debt and they’re going to shut your lights off and you’ll starve and can’t afford drugs or whatever. Other systems have chosen to use debt as a motivating gimmick, and it’s pretty solid to get your hapless 1st-level misfit to head for the dungeon or whatever. It just so happens to be 100% baked into the Cyberpunk genre, so it works even better here.

Mechanically, it is kind of a palette-swap of Mork Borg. There are automatic weapons and more powerful gadgets, as you would expect, but all the rules are the same. Roll against DR12 for most tests, add your modifier, determine success. Roll your Armor die to reduce damage. Use Apps instead of Spells. Glitches instead of Omens. It’s excellent, because the Borg engine is well-designed and with the right coat of paint it’s a quick NuSR that gets the job done.

The content of the book is fairly comprehensive. The listed equipment, apps, drugs and the like are somewhat sparse, but plenty for running a light game. The bestiary feels like it has everything you want. Like other Borgs, it has an included adventure, which I think is pretty good, a heist of a grungy casino that holds a neighborhood in the iron grasp of protection dues. There are lots of interactive elements, solid atmosphere, multiple objectives. It falls a bit flat in enemies, them being of the security guard and bouncer variety, but there’s a dope cyber-samurai security chief in there at least. My group had a blast with it.

Visually, it’s a double edged nano-sword: one edge is stunningly graphically designed, perfectly thematic, and a joy to flip through even if you’re not reading it, while the other edge is that it’s goddamn impossible to navigate effectively even with an index. Am I looking for the blue page with gold graffiti, or the pink page with yellow scrawly font? Why are things in this order? Why does the busy design make it impossible to focus on the PAGE NUMBERS?! Every page looks like a chapter heading, so they’re all yelling for your attention at once as you flip through trying to find something. Were it not this way, it wouldn’t be a Borg, but Borgs are not very practical. Your best hope is to internalize all of the main rules and just flip to the equipment, apps, classes, drugs and enemies. If, like me, you can’t memorize the relative simplicity of the Borg system, you’re still going to have a bit of a headache. A good solution is to make your players find shit for you while you continue narrating/refereeing and then snatch the book to use the rule and then do it again next time you need to find something. At least that’s what I do.

There is no reason to read this review, really. If you know about Cy_Borg, you’re probably already a Borg fan and you either have it, or are going to get it regardless. If you don’t like Borgs, you don’t need me to give you reasons why, and nobody needs them anyway- you intuitively know if it’s for you or not. A third type of person exists, who buys books for inspiration or as art objects, and that person should absolutely buy this book.

Thanks for reading this unnecessary review. I wanted to gush about how much I like it. Oh, and if you own it already or are going to buy it, the Asset Pack expansion kit is fantastic as well, with a great double-sided world map, 8-bit art poster with a full adventure on the back, pad of pink character sheets, and a pad of map templates to randomly generate adventures. Very worth having.

Bonus Gameable Content:

D20 Cyberpunk Street Events

1	Floating banner ad for boner pills that loudly addresses you. By your full name.
2	A mugging. No one cares. Blood and a tooth on the pavement.
3	Automated taxi cab careens into a fire hydrant nearby.
4	A street preacher wants you to join his cult.
5	A gaggle of inebriated party animals are falling over themselves, crying and puking.
6	An ex-associate from a job recognizes you. They just got out of prison and start  thoughtlessly reminiscing the crimes you committed together loud  enough for others to hear.
7	An advertising blimp blows a propeller and crashes into a nearby  rooftop.
8	A robo-dogcatcher has just caught and is noisily euthanizing a  mangy but charming stray (or is about to).
9	A gas reaction blows a manhole out and floods the surroundings  with noxious teal/purple/neon-yellow fumes.
10	Your pager starts blowing up. You forgot it’s mother’s day.
11	A young kid is having a level-10 meltdown because dad took away  their Tamagotchi.
12	A pizza delivery guy blazes past on his hoverbike, flipping you off because you’re in his way- no matter where you are.
13	A shell-game guy will NOT leave you alone until you play his game.  He has a loudspeaker.
14	You just stepped on a lotto ticket. All the numbers on it match the winning pull, except for the last one, which is covered by the gum  stuck to your foot.
15	Free samples of a new cola flavor. You can smell it from here. It’s  “recycled” material.
16	You see a pigeon for the first time in your life.  It notices you noticing it and begins to aggressively attempt to  crap on you.
17	A feral mutant animal hybrid nuzzles up against your leg.  It wants food or scratches. Is it safe to touch?
18	A coughing nano-infected panhandler jingles his cup at you.  He swears he’s a Vietnam vet.
19	Somebody’s pushing a stroller with a brain-modded lemur in it.
20	A food truck playing a jingle is advertising Soylent Green.