CY_BORG

by Christian Sahlén, Johan Nohr (Graphic Design)

Nano-infested doomsday RPG about cybernetic misfits and punks raging against a relentless corporate hell.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Cyberpunk, Games, Science Fiction, Gaming

168 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2022

Reviews

[Apa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This RPG finally puts the PUNK back in CYBER. Rule 0 is that cops and corps are not your friend. Everything in the book oozes setting, there are no generic one-size-fits all solutions here. Even the random table entries for pocket lint can be plot hooks. As an object the book is absolutely beautiful. The over-the-top art fits the text but it's still very readable.

I haven't yet played or run the game but the system feels easy to use. The game is very much designed to do one thing and do that well.

Rating disclaimer: I'm a Kickstarter backer.

[Diz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an adaptation of the Mörk Borg system for a cyberpunk setting. To be honest, I enjoyed playing this more than I enjoyed playing Mörk Borg. The darkness and grittiness of the system is a perfect fit with this genre. It's quick to make a character and learn the rules, and the graphic design in this book is worth seeing even if you aren't planning to play the game.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another beautiful rulebook that's fun to flip through and soak in thanks to Johan Nohr's (Stockholm Kartell) graphic design. We're still looking at the exact same rules that MB (Mörk Borg) has but with more - a lot more. Despite how much more content there is it doesn't feel anymore robust. Nevertheless, there is a lot of great stuff packed into this gritty, dark cyberpunk setting.


Liked:
- Art and graphic design is top tier! Honestly, this is what I'm here for.
- Mission generators and tables that provide ideas and seeds for: events, NPCs, locations. d100 city events are fun and flavorful.
- Starting mission (dungeon, map, monsters, the works)! Yes!
- Great optional rules (many of which are suggestions from the MB community). Hits Always Hurt is a favorite rule of mine.

Disliked:
- More content + funky (though amazing) graphic design = difficult to reference. With time I'm sure it gets easier, but the learning curve feels higher here.
- Nano Powers and Infestations, I could take 'em or leave 'em tbh. There's already so much stuff with apps, drugs, cybertech, etc.

All in all, I'm looking forward to running a game of this in 2023

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes for good cyperpunk? It's a genre that brings together a lot of elements for its pulpier incarnations, a lot of things have to land for it to work.

Cyberpunk is built on a foundation of social commentary. Slavish devotion by the powers that be to corporations over humans is a common element. Some settings go so far as to have corporations essentially autonomous, governments unto themselves over fiefdoms consisting of their holdings. Their increasing control and power over the every day lives of the people provides an oppressive cloud over the protagonists.

Environmental crisis also plays a role. It's always raining in cyberpunk, and usually acid rain. Industrial pollution makes for cities with unbreathable air, reflecting the smog problem that got the most attention in the ~1970s but is still a major concern today. The climate crisis rapidly coming to a head now has grown out of that and its secondary and tertiary effects (like migration as entire areas of the earth become inhospitable to human life) also become feature is cyberpunk dystopias.

Cyberpunk punches up. Especially in the form of games. Most cyberpunk games cast you as a runner or punk or other street-level character. You have nothing. Your life is worth nothing and the coat you're wearing might be worth killing you for. Cyberpunk games cast you as plucky anarchists trying to wrench whatever payback they can get out of the systems which are failing them. Corporations and cops are the bad guys. Cyberpunk is inherently anti-authority and even if you're working for a corp or the cops, there is always the knowledge that simply disposing of you might be cheaper and preferable to paying you.

Cyberpunk is also often a vehicle for transhuman themes. You jack into the internet with the use of a port in your head. Superhuman reflexes can be yours with a few highly invasive but probably safe surgeries. Injuries and infirmities can be treated for a price. But be careful. Missing a payment on your artificial heart might result in it being turned off at the home office or repossessed entirely. Sometimes this is paired with not-great themes equating prosthetic limbs with the literal loss of humanity.

And cyberpunk has style. Its punk-influenced dress, the bright neon lights providing a colorful ambience against the drab backdrop of climate disaster. Cyberpunk characters look cool. Cyberpunk art is striking as these disparate elements come together. You can struggle against the system and you're going to look damn good doing it.

So, where does Cy_Borg stack up? Well, the first rule in the rules section is that "Players are not allowed to sympathize with the corps or cops." It's a lovely simplification of the "Fascists are not allowed to play this game" rule a lot of indie games are printing. Environmental issues have a bit more prominence here as the action of the main setting in the game is at a time where climate change is at a fever pitch. Corps exist and they are the enemy. The world is ending in a cacophony of blood, heat, and grease and you can but hope to grab what comfort you can as it all spirals out of control. There's plenty of hardware and software to chrome out your character with. The character archetypes one expects are all here and there's plenty of references to the media you'd expect. I award bonus points for the retractable claws modification that has variations for Wolverine and Molly Millions-style claws.

Cy_Borg has style to burn. The union of cyberpunk themes and Mork Borg's metal-influenced art is a beautiful marriage and the book is just full of striking images. Much like the Mork Borg core rulebook, buying this just for the art is wholly justifiable.

Into the nitty gritty, I had hoped climate change would be even more centered as Mork Borg has an apocalypse theme to it and many of the apocalyptic events leading up to the end of the world are environmental but the conclusion is not and if I ever run a campaign in this, that's going to be changed. Climate change will end the world, not a reset of the simulation.

Cy_Borg also understands that cyberpunk does need an element of hope to it. Your punks are the lowest rung on society but they are fighting for something greater than themselves and, with a little luck, they can throw a light into the future. They probably won't start the revolution but maybe they can help their immediate community. To that end, Cy_Borg is way more forgiving than its dark fantasy progenitor. You're hardier and it's slightly easier to not die. The game is still lethal, don't get me wrong, but it's ever-so-slightly more forgiving about it.

Cy_Borg is an incredibly worthy addition to the Mork Borg family and it's just beautiful. I can't wait to play it.

[Steve Lucido · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great adaptation of the Mork Borg OSR rules to a sci-fi Cyberpunk genre! Filled with great evocative art that can sometimes make it hard to read. The book is filled with tons of random tables much like its Fantasy counterpart and is useful for any GM even if not running a game with these rules.

[JT · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great, lightweight rules system set in a ghastly dystopian future - a great lightweight system for a group looking to jump into a cyberpunk setting. The rulesbook is designed to be loud and pages are dripping with character - sometimes the art style makes reading the pages harder than otherwise. Thankfully, the very front and back pages of the book have abbreviated rules references.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the digital copy in two sittings. Very interesting looking ruleset. Amazing art and layout. Still easy to understand. Can't wait for my physical copy to arrive to read it again. I might even play it.

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps more fun to read / view than to play, I still enjoyed the aesthetic of CY_BORG. And there are parts of it (particularly the random charts) that I plan to leverage in my Cyberpunk RED campaign.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Going to take an unpopular stance on this one, given the great press and community reception it's gotten, but as a huge fan of Mörk Borg I've found myself underwhelmed by CY_BORG. 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2 here for the sake of helping to balance out the overwhelming 5-star ratings. And lest anyone think this is an opinion formed just by reading the book and not playing the game, my nearly-weekly TTRPG group has been playing a campaign using it for 14 months now. Don't get me wrong, it's clearly good enough to play a long-running campaign in, but that has also allowed enough time to see many of its faults. I think it would be better used for shorter adventures or one-shots, as it can get a little "samey" (especially in combat) even with homebrewed additions to the weapon options, etc.

I suppose a disclaimer is still needed on my opinion, as we're not playing in the setting given in the book, which could make a difference (and it has a lot of nice easter eggs for Mörk Borg fans). Our GM wanted to run a cyberpunk campaign that was set in an AU version of the Warhammer 40k universe, and we chose this system to do it with because we're all very familiar with Mörk Borg's ruleset. The nano infestations haven't come up as much (we're more focused on demon incursions and corruption) and we're not using the Miserable Headlines. But honestly, I wish we'd gone with a slightly crunchier system (maybe a Mothership hack). The streamlined, rules-light aspect of the Borg games just doesn't jive as well with a high-tech futuristic setting, in my opinion. Sure, CY_BORG's rules do expand on the solid base ones by adding a Knowledge stat, new weapons and abilities and new rules for weapons/apps/combat. But the lack of directional improvement with intention when levelling up hurts a lot more in a system where classes should feel more specialized and prioritize specific abilities.

Most of what is good about this book is flavour, and thoughtfully constructed random tables. The "Data" chapter is full of great generators for mission ideas, locations, corps, cults, and events. Much of it could be system-neutral and used in any other cyberpunk or dystopian game quite easily, and I would return to it in future for that. The pre-written adventures are also good. Our first two missions of the campaign were modified/expanded versions of official ones: "Lucky Flight Takedown" from this book, and "Reaper Repo". Having now also read them, I can see that like Mörk Borg, the adventures are well planned out for GMing, giving just the right amount of info in a very digestible format for minimal prep and maximum flexibility.

But then there's the elephant in the room: the art and design of the book. I shelved Mörk Borg as an art book in addition to a TTRPG because it was stunning. This book tries to ape some of that style while blasting it into the future and turning everything up to 11. In my opinion, this is a failure to understand what worked about the OG design principles: consistency and a limited palette. Instead, this ends up being a technicolour vomit onto the pages that is so literally headache-inducing that one of our players flat out refused to read it because it triggered her migraines. I only finally forced myself to finish it now that our campaign is drawing to a close over a year after we started. Note that even for those willing to push through it, the text can be unreadable in places for lots of reasons: impossible style-over-function fonts plus glitch effects, colours clashing so hard it hurts to look at, and, most damnable of them all, literal white-on-white where the most important part of the white text is mostly or completely obscured by the white portion of a gradient background. It's a bit of a nightmare to try and read. Even highlighting in my tablet's PDF reader didn't make the words visible in those white-on-white pages. Which is unfortunate because it detracts from the actually pretty great style of the illustrations, which kick ass.

On the whole, it's fine. Fine seems like an insult to a Borg game, though. If I were recommending a cyberpunk game to someone for a full campaign? I'd tell them to try another system, unless they're GMing, at which point I'd tell them to steal the good flavour and tables from this and port them over to a system they'll actually want to play.

[Bill Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some slight updates. I first thought this game is super cute in a cyber-thulu kind of way if you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t. To be clear I don’t think the producers wanted to directly reference any alien minions of the Lovecraft pantheon, but that is my own personal spin. If nothing else it exposes the unity of the paradox “fantasy/sci-fi” which are really one and the same. The magical journey of the fearsome cybernauts. The enchanted wasteland of the mystical nanobots. The fatal distance between law and chaos is still zero and one. I admit I got it for Christmas even though I sense a certain Satanic underbelly from the producers, such as the miniature upside-down cross apparent yet subtle in the graphic design on both the front and back cover. What, you say they didn’t plan that?! C’mon! This is the death metal alloy future, baby! The game does obviously describe a man-made gnostic hell of VR matrix shoot ‘em up cowboys and punk rock natives, health insurance conglomerates that let no patient go uncovered and no organ go unrecycled, self-help authors pushing a diet of nothing but bugs and ultraviolence, i.e. a world utterly bereft of God. Still I think laughter is the best weapon against the anti-Christ and to me this game is like the old school fun we used to have joking around the gaming table and dreaming up crazy accidents to happen to our characters and the bad guys they fought. Personally if I were to actually get to play this (instead of merely admiring it from afar as a work of dystopian art) I might sandbox it a bit, as for years I ran cyber-thulu games using various systems in this spirit if not the letter. The name of the city is unpronounceable so who cares?! Make up your own way to pronounce it and stir in your own megacorp baddies to battle as your cy-heart desires! To really trick out this pony, I would recommend adding some Yuggothian ambassadors to the boardroom mix and checking your sanity at the security desk. What is stand up comedy like in this future? I would start my game at a comedy open mic with a hybrid man-bear-pig MC in a bad part of town on its way to being gentrified by a totalitarian home owners association. This could be fun. But after some thought and additional review I had to revisit this opinion. You can sandbox this sure, the author indicates as much — “You are encouraged to break every single rule in this book except . . . Rule #00” on page 37 — “Player Characters cannot be loyal to or have sympathy for the corps, the cops, or the capitalist system.” Gee, why’d I have to pay you jerks $50 for this slim little volume? Seems capitalism is only allowed for book publishers in this universe.

[Haakon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cyberpunk game in the vein of Mörk Borg was at the time it came out a match made in heaven it seemed to me. And the book, just like the Mörk Borg one, is a work of art. But just like Mörk Borg, to me it's a work of art first, a good set tools (mainly tables) second and a good game third.

Every page is art, and the whole thing bleeds style. From the first page until the last, it uses few words which are mostly things that evoke some feeling as much as dealing with practical stuff. The same crimes against having a good overview of the book with tables of contents and organizing and stuff is again just dropped. Except for the 3 pages, which has an industry gold standard when it comes to an index and a rules summary. The adventure that is included has also been written with another gold standard for clarity and ease of finding what you want when you run it.

The tables the game has are also very evocative, and are also useful. The mission generator especially is really good. Those tables can be used elsewhere, so it's a treasure trove no matter if you are playing this or Cyberpunk Red or a bunch of the other options out there these days.

After playing with the Mörk Borg system several places I am somewhat lukewarm on the game itself. The core bit of rolling a stat + d20 against a TN I like a lot, the same with all the player facing stuff like only players rolling dice, how armor works and all that jazz. The classes are again pretty funky and evocative. But the amount of extra fiddly bits in this game (like with Mörk Borg and even more so Pirate Borg) goes from OK with starting characters in a one shot, to spiraling out of control once characters starts getting stuff. Perfect for the odd one shot with dark synth on max and players ready to mess things up and treat their characters as shoddy plastic cutlery, but that's about the limit of my interest here.

I am also not a fan of how the horror part is here. The setting is *hopeless* but doesn't make much sense. So the whole thing just gets comical rather than dark. But that might just be personal subjective opinion of what horror should have.

And the book is very expensive if you consider word count and/or time use as a metric for value of your money. It's a short read and doesn't really have much substance or help to make it work, it's mostly style/inspiration and a few rules. I like it that way, but in a Skyrim/Starfield/D&D 5e world it seems worthwhile to point out.

[Pádraic]

Mörk Borg hacked, pun intended, transforming the engine of that doom-metal apocalyptic fantasy game into filthy frenetic cyberpunk. Look, there's a lot to like about this, first and foremost continuing to be the absolute gold standard for random tables.

But one of the things I like about the base game of Mörk Borg is how simple and stripped back it is. To reflect the new setting and genre here, some things have been changed (some of which is inspired; miseries into headlines especially) but many other things have been added. Many, many things, too many, I'd say. It feels overstuffed, bursting, too many pieces crammed in at the expense of detailing any of those pieces. Too much world to keep track of, too many mechanics to learn.

Maybe it's just that I don't have the same grounding in cyberpunk that I do in fantasy. While I've read Neuromancer, etc., my favourite text in the genre is Tsutomu Nihei's Blame!, so perhaps this game simply isn't my particular flavour.

[Zoe S · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite part of this book was a massive fridge joke. Basically in Mork Borg there’s a two headed basilisk that’s a big part of the lore. In Cy Borg, there’s a super powerful AI called the Two Headed, which is a fun nod. Unrelatedly, the world ending scenario is that the world is a simulation and it gets reset. About an hour after finishing I realized that that was all an incredibly dense gag about Roko’s Basilisk. 10/10

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like its source, Mork Borg, the mechanics of Cy_borg and other OSR games are more sparse than I generally prefer. However, Cy_borg is the one of the only cyberpunk styles and designs which leans into a twisted absurdity to really drive the point home. Currently the closest we have to a Cruelty Squad RPG.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid hack of the Mork Borg system which goes out of its way to put the punk attitude back into cyberpunk. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...

[Ben Gutteridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely cool RPG sourcebook. Every cyberpunk trope mashed together. Can't speak for the rules, but they look nice and light and hackable. Gorgeous art and production. Setting excellent, oozing with lore, and with an insanely high ratio of plot hooks to word count.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I’ll probably use the combat system as my default for modern or futuristic RPGs. Dead simple but still has a crunch that satisfies.

This and MB before it are basically the only non-5e TTRPGs I’ve had regular success convincing friends to play. It’s too cool not to arouse curiosity.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful cyberpunk re-skinning of the king of heavy metal role playing games.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful book. Looking forward to playing a game. A few of the graphic elements did take a moment to decipher.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than just a setting change for Mork Borg, this is actually a whole upgrade in term of the amount of content, random tables, etc.

[Jonathan Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of the imagination of Mörk Borg with nanobots!

[Roque Romero · Rating 4 out of 5]

The light but bold streamlined horror cyberpunk ttrpg we were waiting for. It is built over the chaotic basis of the polarising but super tasteful Mork Borg, si be aware!

[Reggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will be frothing at the mouth until I can get a group to play this 🤖

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the read, it looks simple and easy for the player and the GM. Looking forward to tabling it.

[Chad Hoblitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smokes. Love it all