CBR+PNK – GMs Review
The digital has consumed our communities, our sense of self, the connection we have to each other. It has become the core of our society, for good and ill. Since the dawn of the internet our reliance on the interconnectedness of our technology has increased year-on-year. We can lose ourselves in these digital worlds as they offer a distraction from the troubles of the real. The web can be a device for revolution, rebellion, suppression, and conformity. It is as varied as the humans who create and use it.
Such monumental technology impacts our culture as we imagine bright futures, and warn of silicon hell. When the new wave science fiction movement of the 60s and 70s began to imagine these futures, they were filled with ideas of robotics, artificial intelligence, and augmented humans. William Gibson’s Neuromancer solidified these ideas. His future was one of corporate control, neon lit rainy streets, and digital cowboys running through the web stealing data to make a buck however they could. It gave rise to a new genre of fiction: Cyberpunk.
The genre was embraced by gaming culture with early games like R Talsorians Cyberpunk leading the way. As our present converged steadily with the future predicted by Gibson and others, modern RPGs have also taken the Cyberpunk genre as a scaffold for play. Remember Tomorrow by my friend Gregor Hutton is an oft overlooked classic of the modern Cyberpunk RPG, but many others came out of the Forge era of design. Today we will look at a game that is futuristic in both theme and design. CBR+PNK takes the core of Blades in the Dark and twists it into a system for telling Cyberpunk tales, with mixed success. It is designed by Emanoel Melo.
A GM review means that I have experienced the game from the Game Masters chair but haven’t been on the player character side of the table. RPGs can feel different depending on the role you are adopting so I think it is useful to you, the reader, to know where my perspective is coming from.
I bought CBR+PNK with my own money. I ran a one shot of the game over two sessions.
CBR+PNK’s pitch is that your team of hackers, muscle, riggers, and face characters are here to do one last job. One last time they will go up against their enemies, call on friends, and embrace their roles in the underground. Will they get what they need to live out the rest of their lives, or will it all come crashing down around them? It is intended as a one shot though there are rules for running a longer form version of this core concept. As we will come to see, the one shot is really where this game sits both as a system, and a product.
I picked up the game a few years ago, attracted to it by its off the wall product design and its Blades association. You can buy a PDF of the game, but then you won’t be able to appreciate the truly bizarre nature of this as a product. Tucked inside a matte yellow sleeve, lies a fold out cardboard package. The cardboard package itself is a game aide, showing different augmentations that your characters can have. Inside this cardboard package is a series of what I can only describe as pamphlets, made from durable cardboard.
Five of these are character sheets that not only contain information on how to create a character, but all the space to fill that out, and the rules for interacting with the game. I am a big fan of character sheets that have rules reminders for the players on them. These aren’t one and done character sheets though, each of these has raised wipe clean areas to fill out your character details. This may seem over the top, but it feels like it fits the one shot nature of the game.
The 5 character sheets are joined by a GM pamphlet with guidance and rules. The other 6 pamphlets have a scenario called Mind the Gap, a large megalopolis setting specifically meant to evoke Neuromancer, the Framework (more GM advice and a campaign structure), Hunters you can send after the players, and two rather odd extras. One of these is called Weird and is basically what you turn to if you want to give your game more of a Shadowrun vibe. There is also a Predator themed pamphlet, well PRDTR, that feels like a very odd addition, but is a whole other scenario you can run.
The mechanical core of CBR+PNK is Blades in the Dark: roll a pool of d6 and take the highest result. 6 is a success, 4-5 success with consequences, 1-3 failure with consequences. Stress still exists allowing you to get extra dice, flashback to solve problems or justify preparation, and all the rules around leading actions and starting in the heart of the action remain intact.
There are some tweaks as you might expect. In place of the 12 attributes you get in Blades in the Dark we have 4 approaches: Aggressive, Smarts, Empathy, and Stealthy. Each of these will give 0-2 dice to a roll involving them. CBR+PNK then introduces skills, quite a list of them, in order to differentiate characters. This allows specialisation in Close Combat, Rigging, Coding, and more. There are no playbooks here offering built-in niche protection, it is down to the players to work that out between themselves.
As you might expect there is the opportunity to augment your characters with cyberware. This is represented very loosely, being an asset you can evoke for greater effect or activate to resist against the consequences of a roll gone awry. Simple, but narratively impactful. This cyberware can also Glitch as a consequence of a roll. Approaches can also suffer this fate. When you roll anything with a glitch you replace one of your dice with a different colour. Once you are done resolving the roll you check out glitch dice and may suffer extra consequences based on the result. It reminded me of the Candela Obscura system which is itself Blades inspired.
This being the last run for each of these characters, we need some motivation of course. This motivation is called the characters’ Angle. It could be upgrading their life, learning the truth, or taking a stand. These are naturally very broad strokes so some discussion around the table before you get going will help in establishing the nature of your version of the game and what the characters are fighting against. I would have liked a little bit more here in terms of generative tables or similar, but the genre is fairly well known so most players shouldn’t have a problem coming up with ideas.
I do feel like the game would have probably been better off sticking with the playbook format. It would give stronger niche protection for a starter. With 5 potential players and only 4 attributes, at least 2 characters will have crossover in the strongest attribute (you choose one of the attributes to have 2 dice, two of them to have 1 dice, and the final one has zero). I also missed the little bits of world building that are in those playbooks like the friends and enemies choice, and even the description of some of the powers implying aspects of the setting. It seems like an odd decision to blur the focus with a woolier character creation system than Blades.
I did run my game over a couple of sessions, we only really have a couple of hours at a time for gaming, and I am happy to report that wipe clean character sheets mostly stood up to being folded and unfolded a few times. I decided to try and use as much of the package as possible so I could share my impressions with you. This meant I ignored the scenario included called ‘Mind the Gap’ and I didn’t want to use the ‘PRDTR’ supplement either. I made my own job using the ‘Mona Lisa Megalopolis’ supplement. This gave me some good sparks to create a scenario around a run away tech CEO daughter, emergent AI born in the data of the web, and a chase across the waters and roads of the city. It was fun and the GM guidance for Threat, how to evaluate enemies, and Effect, how well the PCs can tackle them, gave me enough to run the game with pace. I used the Hunters and Framework supplements to spark some enemies and help fill in the ideas through its tables.
As we’ve already discussed, each character has a core motivation for taking on this job, their Angle. At the end of the game everyone makes a roll to see how their Angle comes out and informs an Epilogue each player will narrate. You choose an approach as normal, losing dice if it is glitched, you failed the mission, or have accumulated some Debt. You gain dice if you are in Cred.
Debt is accrued through flashbacks in order to obtain equipment, upgrade gear, or generally set yourself up with a cost. Cred is more nebulous being awarded for side jobs and opportunities you take advantage of along the way. I found this a little hard to work in over a one-shot. I couldn’t quite figure out a way to work in opportunities to get Cred. The included scenarios ‘Mind the Gap’ and ‘PRDTR’ don’t have any advice in this direction either. The angle roll feels so fundamental to the focus of CBR+PNK that I really wanted a bit more GM advice as to what those opportunities might look like.
I enjoyed running CBR+PNK but the game is a little hard to parse if you haven’t run Blades in the Dark before. It definitely feels like it sits in the ‘experienced GM’ part of the hobby. That is totally fine. However I do feel like it would have benefitted from the rules being less scattered around. It took me a little while to figure out what Cred and Debt were when I first read up the Angle roll because Debt is in the player facing pamphlets under flashbacks and the description of Cred is in the Angle Roll in the GM pamphlet.
That said the production is top notch, feeling futuristic while being relatively practical to use. You don’t need a lot of setting detail for the pitch of ‘one last job but Cyberpunk’. Most folk are familiar with something in the genre, and are familiar with the ideas of future technology, VR-net access, AI, and robotics. There are lots of great tables in here to get the group going and tools to make the setting feel how you want it to. It is a good package, focused on the one-shot style of game that my group had a lot of fun with. I would just caution that a little Blades in the Dark experience will go a long way to smooth over the rougher edges of CBR+PNK. If that sounds good to you, then jack-in cowboy.
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