CY_BORG Play Report

Wow, here we are, on this D&D blog that’s not about D&D, finally with an actual honest to Betsy play report for a tabletop RPG. Did fucking pigs fly, or what?

I’ve been in a transitional stage the last 8 months and it’s so exhausting to even think about it. But context is important because as much as this is a play report it’s also something of a personal vindication.

But in the last 8 months, my bandmates and I agreed to dissolve. My game company dissolved. I went through a brief separation which was in part due to some horrible health things my wife has been dealing with, which she is just now finally being properly medicated for this past two weeks. I got a job after being on sick leave for a year thanks to some autoimmune issues I’m plagued with, and that job is 12 hour overnights, which has created a horrible kind of perpetual insomnia where I only sleep for four hours at a time. My cats died, I tried to get my D&D game back together but one of the longest running members could no longer attend. I dug through the bottom of the barrel and ate shit the whole way through.

BE THAT AS IT MAY, the work continued, whatever work that was. But for a long while now it hasn’t had anything to do with RPG’s. And now it does again, because I just finished an incredibly fun session with some Australian folks that started at 2 AM my time, and 6 PM theirs, and ended after three and a half hours, and it was a complete gas.

For as much as I talk about AD&D and Traveller5, two irreducibly complex systems, I somehow found my way to CY_BORG. I own Mork Borg as well, and I’ve run Mork Borg, but generally speaking these are not the kind of games I put a lot of stock into. Frankly, I like the books and their punk zine approach to layout and aesthetics, and the comically dark worlds they present, but they are certainly on the minimalist side of published games, and I’m not sure how I feel about it on the surface.

But if you have run enough games, some guy could write a couple numbers down on a cocktail napkin, and you’ll figure out how to make it work. I talk about that sort of thing a lot here, or have. And with CY_BORG, it was more of a no brainer because despite it’s Neuromancer on Bath Salts presentation and extremely slim set of rules, there is something inherently resonant about cyberpunk as a general rule that hits in a way D&D never has for me. I’ll get into that.

But this didn’t start as “I’m reading this game and now I want to play it.” It started from a very different place, one where I just happened to be reading CY_BORG again, mostly to look at the pretty pictures, while doing something else. Because I have a history of work in both the IT and security fields, when things get rough in IT, I can pivot to the other field, which is how I landed my current job. And it sucks. Really, at 40, I just don’t have the same resilience to grinding out night work, and while I can do it until something in my body stops working and not complain, my kids and wife are both very sick of it and want me to move back to a more human schedule. So part of doing that has meant upgrading my education, again, because in the IT world, one year of absence can set you back quite a bit. It’s a fast moving industry, and you always need to stay on top of things, and I just haven’t.

At the same time, my partner who I have been making games with came to the decision that we no longer need a company. So we dissolved that and split the IP ownership down the middle. He and I are best friends, inseparable almost, like brothers, so there was no bad blood, but having completely opposite lives, and with all the shit I was going through, it just divided the focus too much, and I wasn’t able to contribute evenly. It’s not the end of road for us, but there was a very notable gap in our experience levels, and that came on the programming side. I was too John Romero and not enough Carmack, and I decided that if I’m going to go back into IT, it’s also an asset to be good at programming, so I wanted to approach it the only way that made sense to me, and to develop a little curriculum of learning.

And it all started when I finally got my basement reorganized after months of work into a more usable space and pulled out my Commodore 128, a coveted machine I bought a couple of years ago, but that had some problems I wasn’t equipped to deal with at the time. But after a couple of weeks of multi-meters and hardware testing, I was finally able to get it working properly. And so I set up a kind of computer lab with the intention to learn how to program at a low level, and work my way up from there.

I talk about these things enough in Notes that I probably don’t need to get into them, but I was trying to find a project. Because in my experience, the worst possible way to learn programming is the way most venues online teach it, which is high level Python or something similar, and having you go through dozens of tutorials. And I don’t need that. Most of those things are teaching you the logic of how programs function, and I’m not so ignorant that I don’t understand how loops work. I’ve just never been a great architect.

But the first thing I noticed when reading CY_BORG is how slim a volume it really is. These games are skeletal in terms of content. They have more tables dedicated to what is arguably fluff than they do anything else. They present a world but barely elaborate on it. And as a would-be designer, this is just a breeding ground for ideas, but also makes them have what I think is a pretty limited appeal in terms of actual at the table play. Either way, it got my gears turning, and so I started to build…stuff.

LOTS of stuff.

I also decided that while I’m tinkering with low level programming I may as well do something practical with it, and that a project involving CY_BORG in some way would actually be interesting because of some nebulous meta quality of starting at machine code, and doing it in service of a tool for this game all about a nightmarish computer future.

I really like binary math. I don’t know why, I just do, and Base-16 hex is especially fun. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but Marc Miller uses a hex math system for bits of Traveller5. But anyways, I got onto this idea of making a cipher. The idea was that in my own personal implementation of CY_BORG’s city CY, which is a black box that’s intentionally sparse in detail, that everyone has a common language, and that this language is called CYpher, and that it’s numeric system is Base 16. It’s also a bit of a jab at the dumbification of language, because everyone in CY types in abbreviations, and does so in a harsh, passionless written script which is comprised of lines and dots.

They do this because in my own personal lore, simple processors are still in vogue. I created a fictional processor called the GS02 modeled after the MOS 6502 and Motorola 68,000 with the idea that someone tried to make more advanced multi-threaded processors, but in CY_BORG fashion, this summoned a demon or…something, it isn’t really clear and I don’t care, but it ensures a future where simple processors are the norm, and a data centre the size of a warehouse now has to be the size of a city and have oceans of water loop through it just to do any reasonable data processing.

It’s a bit personal, and driven by a fierce hatred and fear of AI and technology beyond 1985 I guess. But continuing to develop this and complete the cipher was driven by an interest in manipulating the character ROM on my Commodore machine, and the prospect of completely replacing the existing character ROM with one I am planning on burning myself, replacing the character set with my own CYpher language.

And look…don’t ask why. There is no why, except for the fact that for twelve hours a night all I do is listen to techno, and the only thing I have to fiddle with is a pen and a pad of paper. So I just doodle things all night. That’s how this happened.

Anyways, it was making for a fun project, and as I was doing this, I had read CY_BORG enough times in between 6502 processor books and Commodore 128 repair manuals that I was starting to put together some stuff to run a game. And at first I had no intentions whatever to actually find a group and run a game for them. I just figured I’d make some solo stuff, and run a few statblocks of characters through some meat grinders. As a treat.

This ball just kind of kept rolling, and rolling, until I was making up gangs, and characters, and all sorts of other stuff to fit into this low-fi CY_BORG interpretation.

At the same time as this is all going on, I’m exploring the C64 game library. I’m playing Jumpan, and Defender, and versions of Donkey Kong, and every Jiff Minter game I can get my hands on including Ancipital, one of my favorite of the bunch, which has some botanical meaning that sort of means “double-edged”. And of course, I’m thinking about sci-fi things, including my favorite short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and the strange but somehow acceptable depiction of AM in a radio play clip on YouTube, where AM is represented as a kind of robotic plague doctor. Double-edged, like a beak, and it all comes together, and I make this gang called The Ancipital Family.

I also pop into one of CY_BORGS active communities, and am sharing things, and just for shits and giggles there is a “looking for a game” tab, so I go there, and there are a couple of people talking about wanting to play who both happen to be in Australia.

Now anyone who has been following me long enough knows I have some fascination with Australia, probably due to this strange proximity it has to Canada in terms of some very specific regional dialect which seems very reflective, and I’m still not sure why. We also share some comedic shows that sort of dig deep into some of these tropes; Letterkenney and Trailer Park Boys for Canada, The Big Lez show and Michael Cusack’s cartoons for Australia. This is what led to me making my game AUZ, and to saying the word “cunt” far more than is appropriate in North America, which for most, is not at all, when in Australia it’s thrown around with a more casual and sometimes even affectionate frequency, at least among tradies, bogans, and derros.

But none of this had to do with me interjecting and volunteering to run CY_BORG. It had everything to do with being up all night and being completely alone. So I invited a few people to my Discord, and we planned for game night.

I’ll admit I was nervous. I’m not great at being social. I can do it, I have to do it, I’ve learned to do it, but I very much live in my own head and find I’m probably in the best space when I’m just doing shit by myself, but there’s a limit, and it comes when you are still up when the sun comes up, and haven’t really talked to anyone in several days.

Gratefully these folks were very cool and very excited to play, so I didn’t have to sell myself too hard. We all just wanted to check this game out, and it worked for everyone’s schedule, so I kind of carefully imposed some expectations which was to just go into this as a single session, and see if we wanted to continue from there.

So I put together something for them to do. It all started with a BBS board for merc hires with a single job, one posted by the Ancipital Family of South Central. This doesn’t mean a lot because South Central, like most of CY, is really just another black box you are meant to extrapolate. So as a little nod to my new Aussie pals, they were going to meet by a place that sold fried witchetty grubs on a stick, be picked up by their benefactors The Ancipitals, and be sent on a deadly mission to locate something called “hot Ice”, a term I made up for sensitive software relating to nethacking, and going to be paid a tidy sum to retrieve it.

Now, they say to write what you know, and I know a thing or two about building security. And this is really where cyberpunk hits home for me. I’ve rolled with rough people, in dank bars in the music scene, and on the opposite end of that, have also worked for multiple companies in multiple capacities both in security and IT. So I’ve spent a lot of time in heavily locked down buildings inside server rooms, around alarm and camera systems, and using surveillance software.

So it really does create this interesting way of approaching scenarios like this because I understand not only the structure of these things, but where vulnerabilities are, and that’s all really useful information when you are planning a fictional heist from a data centre.

These players are brought to a church that is crumbling and meant to be a holdover from the Mork Borg age of this loosely connected universe where the Ancipital Family hangs out. The players don’t know much about them except that they are a rising force in South Central. All the Ancipitals proper are actually clones of one another, run by the patriarch just called Ancipital One, who sends them to find this hot Ice, kept ironically, in the cold storage area of a multi-tiered data centre.

So they have some info at their disposal, and this was the one and only real blunder in the whole game was that I frontloaded them with a lot of info, and didn’t quite make things clear enough initially. It got cleared up as we went what their options were, because I left it open ended. They had a diagram of the security towers and the building layout, the drone patrols outside, and they had strict windows of timing with which to get anything done.

Now, I wasn’t expecting them to do this, but the mission was kind of laid out in a manner that this was ultimately the best way to approach it. Without guiding them, they made a plan to approach this data centre from two fronts. Two of them at the back, climbing the wall to penetrate the building from the ventilation system on the roof, and another at the main entrance, where the lone guard doing surveillance duty was stationed, to distract him from his work watching camera feeds.

Even as I’m writing this I’m thinking, “well fuck maybe I overcomplicated this”. But regardless, they were sharp enough to come up with a plan and execute it.

Now, CY_BORG like Mork Borg before it is not a forgiving game. I had three players for this one as the fourth had to bounce due to schedule changes. But one of them rolled up a Nanomancer with the interesting ability to be able to turn 1.5 cubic meters of whatever was in front of him to dust. However, failing a single check doing that meant instant death, because he also rolled 1 HP to start. Ouch!

The other two were a bit more rounded. A Corp-Killer and a Renegade Cyberslasher.

Not that it would matter - by the end of the session only one of them survived, and that’s where it got real interesting.

Anyways, the Corp-Killer goes for the ol’ “I’m here to repair the monitoring system” approach. We decide at the beginning that they have an innate hatred Alliansen, and very coincidentally, that happened to be the corpo whose data centre they were trying to blag. I say this because I didn’t even look at their characters beyond what they told me until the session started, so it was this really happy coincidence that I decided Alliansen was the outfit storing this Ice. They had been training for Alliansen’s security division, so that opened up a nice little opportunity for the Ancipitals to pry them for more info, see if they knew of any “trade knowledge” that will help the infiltration effort. They rolled dismally here, and so we decided, no, they washed out before they were even properly onboarded, and knew nothing about Alliansen.

There were a few other moments that came up, but the point was to find some key aspect of each character that seemed pertinent. Because at the end of the day, CY_BORG characters are effectively disposable, so everyone agreed that they were just going to generate one and not focus on backgrounds or any of this other bullshit that keeps players attached to low level nothing characters.

The party splitting up was no big deal and added this real factor of time that created a fun pressure. The other two characters were on a short leash for time, so after they entered the building and took out the guard (by jumping out from a ventilation duct and onto his back) it was go time. The cameras wouldn’t be down forever, and the building was swarming for them.

I overthought the external security only because that’s kind of my thing, but frankly, they were smart about how they bypassed these defences so it is really to their credit in deciding how to deal with the problem. The real challenges for them came inside, and the two out of three character deaths that occurred were very much due to their own actions.

So I have a layout of the inside of the building, I know who is in there, and at any point if they slip up, there are going to be two armored trucks full of goons pulling up. And my whole time spent as a DM was scribbling away locations of patrolmen, and the various paths they could take to get to their objective.

The cold storage was located directly under the data centre, and there were two logical access points - a sealed duct from the data centre directly, or, by accessing the cold storage directly through the elevator. Some guards had more access levels on their cards than others, and the players had been given an access card that had a 2 out of 6 chance of having been compromised. They didn’t know about the math, they were just told that the contact the Ancipitals had bought it off was MIA. So either he went on vacation, or he had been found out by Alliansen and his privileges - and life - had been revoked.

While the one player was distracting an increasingly nervous guard shitting his pants about the cameras being down while the player “fixed” them, worried Alliansen was going to come down on him, and becoming more and more suspicious of the situation with the caveat that he really didn’t want to believe he was being had, because that would mean he had done a bad job, and then either way, would be in hot water, the other two decided to head right to cold storage via the data centre proper. They tried their card, and I rolled in the background using my new tool - the CYVTT.

I put together this software the day before, making a dice roller first, but putting in the infrastructure of a selection menu for other elements. So this was how I was rolling. And in CY_BORG, though it is player facing and players are going to roll for both attack and defence, I was still rolling quite a bit for various reasons.

The two in the data centre had an arc cutter with them, which they had used to get in through the fence outside of the building near the shipping area. But they also split up here, with one of them heading to the second floor to try and find the server rack to disable the sentry guns so that they could escape through the front of cold storage and to the elevator. Because without doing so, those guns would fire on anything within proximity, and this is a game where having more than 5 hit points feels like having a cheat code on.

So the Nanomancer finds the hatch in the data centre after sneaking past some staff, but there is no way he can cut through it quietly. So instead, he decides to use his power to turn things to dust to nullify the grate completely. And he was itching to use this, having had one other opportunity to do so earlier, but deciding against it because it was so inherently risky.

Well, I’m sure you can guess what happened.

So yeah, he turns himself into a pile of dust which blows into the ventilation system due to the cooling fans, and the rest of the people in the building are unknowingly breathing him in the rest of the time. Bummer.

As this is happening, the guard in the reception is now demanding the cameras be turned back on, but of course, the player there has just been pulling cables and doesn’t know how to reconnect them, so violence ensues. There is a dangerous firefight where they almost die, but manage to get the upper hand on the guard, tie them up, and then decides to head down to the main entrance of cold storage to meet with the others.

And while they are telling me what they are doing, I am waiting for them to remember that the second they enter that room, the sentry guns are going to turn them to paste. But they don’t remember, and on the second floor, that player has just taken out a guard and is heading to disable the guns.

So here I make them roll off. We need to figure out who does what first, and the player who forgot about the sentry guns decides its fair. Their character has been played the whole time as a kind of neurotic go getter who is ambitious and trying to impress, so the idea of them forgetting an important detail out of haste and nerves makes some sense. I tell them they are probably going to die, but we decide that if they do, it will be very funny.

And it is. Because they do. They lose the roll off, those doors open, and the guns fire. They do 1D10 damage with the possibility to fire off additional shots, but that doesn’t matter because I roll a 10, and the first round of ammunition turns them into obliterated jelly.

So now we have a player alone in the building, who can’t contact their mates. There are a lot of extra details, like them using a device they had on them to disrupt comms to buy some extra time at the cost of their short wave radios not working for awhile, but now they don’t work at all, and that’s because most of them are dead. But the mission carries on, and our remaining punk heads down to cold storage.

But how well was that guard tied up, really? This was a green, nervous kid who had strapped them up after all. So I decide there is a one out of six chance they get out of their bonds, everyone agrees, and I’m very pleased to get that result, not because I WANT the remaining player to die, but because it’s more interesting than him breezing his way through the rest of this.

I had also told him prior to this that there was a second guard somewhere on second floor patrol, which was info the Ancipitals had conveyed during the briefing. And he has remembered this, because he decides to monitor the hall for activity before he runs downstairs guns blazing. But before that, he decides to dive into the net to try and disable those sentries.

Netrunning is not really a thing in CY_BORG, or it kind of is, but it’s sort of nebulous, so I imagine it as being in a similar vein to the Lawmower Man if the Lawnmower Man was running on an Amiga 500 at 4 FPS with completely untextured polygons comprising it’s landscape. I guess it’s more like that funny internet video for the fictional game CUBE.

But the way it works in my game is that the “bare metal” which is another way of saying “the place where the data you want is”, is protected by several layers of “abstraction” that must be penetrated first. To infiltrate a layer you can attempt a hack, which will be some difficulty roll possibly followed by an encounter, and that if you fail, you can pay HP to break through to the next layer.

So they do this and get some pretty solid rolls, but ultimately end up paying just over half their hit points, disable the sentry guns, and stop just short of disabling the cameras. Too little too late since their friend has been turned to red mist already, but they aren’t aware of that, and it may help them in their escape anyways. It was a simple way to add some kind of mechanic for this since the game itself just decided not to bother with it at all really.

But while this is going on, I have two players who are doing nothing, and two guards left in the building. So I tell them, “okay, you two are those guards now.” And now there is a new conflict, a player against player conflict that has risen out of the literal ashes of their deaths.

The previously tied up guard calls in the heavies, and within two minutes two armored trucks scream over to the facility. The other guard is upstairs, and finds the body of his pal in the middle of the elevator lobby, and the remaining player rushes in for the kill.

Here, combat runs as normal, with the player getting in a hard hitting lucky shot that obliterates the guard. The player in charge of that guard laughs because he was “in the game” again for approximately fifteen seconds before dying, just to add insult to injury.

The heavies show up, and the player doesn’t know where they are going to be, I know where they will be, and I’m fair with the dice (as if I should even have to say that, look at what has happened so far) so he is able to download the Ice from cold storage, even though its a different filename than he was told it would be. Eh, whatever, time to get the fuck out of dodge.

So he worms his way back through the facility, narrowly avoiding two assault rifle wielding guards who would surely obliterate him, finds his way back to the warehouse, and back out the hole in the fence they cut open.

So much for those sentries I guess, because he didn’t even get to see them.

His ride picks him up, and Ancipital Two asks “where are the others?” He says, “I don’t know” and Ancipital Two just says “well, sucks to be them.”

They bring the Ice back to Ancipital One who eagerly asks him to transfer it over, but there is something wrong. It’s not what he was after, or at least, wasn’t what he thought it was, because it has the effect of black Ice, and it basically fries his brain on the spot. Ancipital Two pulls a gun on the player but is nonplussed, and the player reasons, why would he sabotage them and go through all that bullshit just to be in a position where they could shoot him if he betrayed them?

Well, fair dinkum.

He takes his 2000 credits and leaves, and the leader of the Ancipitals is dragged away for brain surgery.

I didn’t know if they would get the Ice back to Ancipital, look at the data first, or what, but if they had they would have noticed that it had some interesting code in it where, as soon as it was opened, it acted like a trojan horse and dumped an AI construct called Cassandra into the brain of whoever looked at the data. It’s not really important to the game proper, except that the Ancipital gang is going to run a little differently now. But they are just one gang, army, kingdom, out of many many more, and in the world of CY, are as disposable as anything.

Anyways this session was a lot of fun. The players loved the idea of taking over the role of the guards and the game changing into something with more conflict. Baby’s first step to Braunstein maybe. They felt that the mission was so open it was hard to figure out what to do, but it’s to their credit that they did anyway, though we both agreed some visual aids would have been helpful. They didn’t see anything I’m showing you here except for the outer perimeter map, it was all theatre of the mind beyond that. They found rolling off against one another fun, and the pressure of time weighing down on them kept things moving. And even though at one point they were split up completely, they were happy with how I handled pacing, jumping back and forth between them like scenes from Ocean’s Eleven or something.

So yeah, thoughts on CY_BORG…I mean, I dunno. I could have done this with any system. It’s such a non-system in that way there isn’t much to talk about beyond the scenario. It’s minimalist and fast. So, whatever. Unremarkable.

But that was irrelevant to the session. We worked together a lot to kind of decide how things were going to go and they were all amiable reasonable people so even if something wasn’t in their favour, they were willing to see it play out. Everyone had a great time, and we are planning for the next one already.