What are the best Cyberpunk supplements?

[Wintergreen]

I've got to say that the Night City Sourcebook is a great supplement for running Cyberpunk.

I would recommend the Corporate War books - Stormfront and Shockwave. Even if you're not using the whole corporate war they are packed with scenario ideas, npcs, equipment and ideas for deadly corporate politics.

Not a cyberpunk product - actually for Cyberspace - but Death Valley Free Prison is quite fun too.

 

[kigmatzomat]

The chrome books & protect and serve are close to must-haves IMO. Solo Of Fortunes are hideously entertaining reads though they don't add much to the game world.

Maximum metal is a hoot but it pretty much has to be a campaign choice. I ran a Bubblegum Crisis/AD Police game using Max Metal (before they had their own game) and it went pretty well. The trick is to use ALL the rules and set guidelines on the campaign, primarily armor weight.

I foolishly gave the party a budget and told them to build power armor. One built a mobile tank that would shatters pavement as it walked, virtually useless in urban combat. Another was a battery of grenade launchers that we called "collateral damage"; we determined his standard barrage would likely kill him as it brought down whatever buildings were nearby. Third guy was light & fast but he had a 5.56 minigun (useless) and a tank-killer cannon (overkill) as his only weapons. The fourth guy made me happy with building-friendly stealth armor loaded with microwavers, EMP grenades, lasers, ion guns, and one electro-thermal 7.62 minigun.

I decided to turn them into cops and gave them suits of general purpose power armor of my own design, though I was tempted to kit them out with that last suit of armor. That game went much better.

I wasn't too fond of Cybergen. It had promise but it seemed to flub it up. The rules had way too many loopholes and from a gaming standpoint it seems no one could play a child any better than they could play a kender.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

Damn, you are way too nice for Cyberpunk

I limit my players to purchasing equipment with Excellent or Common availability only upon character creation. Fixers are allowed to buy 1 item of Poor availability if they so choose due to thier background. All that neat, deadly stuff in the Chromebooks...my players don't get to used it until they peel it from the lifeless cyberarm of the guy who tried to kill them with it.

And, long live the Colt AMT Model 2000

Not really - I just like to let my players THINK I am. I'll use anything from the basic book in a heartbeat, it's just the chromebooks I try and be fair. No sense in pulling out the anti-borg railguns just because they bought better ammo, right?

 

[Wilphe]

Most useful:

Wildside
The Nomad one I can't remember the name of
Blackhands Street Weapons (if you run that sort of campaign)
Night City
Chrome IV (finally has decent clothing rules that should have been core)

Most fun:
Rache Bartmoss Guide to the Net
Solo of Fortune 1 & 2

If you can get them:
Grimms Cybertales
Dark Metropolis


Avoid like the Plague:
Cybergeneration (because of the overwhelming suck)
Maximum Metal (unless you want to run that sort of campiagn)
Stormfront and Shockwave

 

[Infernal Teddy]

Why do you think Cybergen sucked? I quite liked it. Was there any reason, or is it just because you play teenagers?

 

[kigmatzomat]

I can't speak for Wilphe but the execution was poor. Too many cybergen abilities were completely unthought out, anyone with real science knowledge became dangerous, the dichotomy between kid-skills and adult-skills, the unresistable nature of many yo-gang abilities, lack of clarity on rules, and the module I bothered to buy was a Hogan's Heroes-esque incompetent attempt at fascism.

All in all, I was excited when I got the book and disappointed once I finished reading it.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Not a cyberpunk product - actually for Cyberspace - but Death Valley Free Prison is quite fun too.

I was in a crazy game of Rifts where the Coalition ran Death valley Free Prsion as a place for DBs to duke it out and get beat on by corrupt guards.

Hella fun.

 

[Barrier Peaks]

There was a series of books that allowed you to introduce Horror into the CP setting and I remember using them for a lot of different games (Cthulhpunk for example) and can't remember how good they were for the core. They weren't produced by R. Talsoarian but were desgiend for Cypberpunk 2020. Man, senility is really setting in after not playing a game for 5+ years.

The first in that line was Night's Edge, written by Justin Schmid and published by Ianus Games (which eventually became Dream Pod 9, IIRC). A series of adventures followed (the Necrology titles), as well as a slew of other alternate universe CP books (including Grimm's Cybertales, as mentioned by Primitive Screwhead).

I never did get much use out of those books, though I admit that I experimented with the psionics rules in Night's Edge. The production values of the supplements were pretty high, though, and if you can find them they're generally worth considering.

Atlas Games also produced a good number of CP2020 books, most of them (if not all of them) being adventures.

 

[JoeGKushner]

From what I remember of it, Grimm's Cybertales was fun.

 

[Wilphe]

Why do you think Cybergen sucked? I quite liked it. Was there any reason, or is it just because you play teenagers?

I think it's the cutsey right-on ness of the whole concept; the teenagers with mutant powers schtick (wow, not seen THAT before...) and the simplistic ideas about rebellion that would have looked naive in 1970.

Plus the same: the DMNPCs are behind everything and they are far more leet than you will ever be. Okay, that's not AS bad as 3rd Corporate War got, but with the exception of Bartmoss (who is the poster child for Pyschaotic Neutral and in no way a good guy) and Blackhand (who is tolerable because he kept his mouth shut) the DMNPCs are annoying self-righteous hippy wastes of space.



I always got the impression that CP2020 was suppossed to be about leading the struggle against the Evil corps and you were suppossed to play Medias and Rockers. In fact hardly anyone did, because Rockers, at least, sucked.

However most players played amoral street mercenaries of various types and were mostly interested in finding out which corp would give them the most cyberware for selling out before going on their "Extraction of the Week (TM)" followed by the "Totally Unexpected Doublecross (TM)".

In this way I view CyberGen as Maxmium Mike atoning for products like the Chrome Books, Max Metal and Blackhands by basically coming out and saying "No, you WILL fight the man, wheather you like it or not."