Monday Musings #115 🤬

Running Cyberpunk TTRPGs with Character Baggage and the Sprawl as Sandbox.

Sep 01, 2025

“The street finds its own uses for things.” — William Gibson

I’ve been thinking a lot about post-cyberpunk. As in: what comes after it? What if Gibson had started writing in the 90s or 00s instead of the 80s? In a couple of TTRPG silos I hang out in, Gen X folks are talking cyberpunk again—Gibson, Effinger, Blade Runner. Not “mission-of-the-week” play, but character-driven sessions. And the big issue that keeps surfacing is this: most games don’t give players (or the GM) enough character baggage to work with.
You know…

A green decker trying to get his foot in the door.
A chromed-up merc honoring a debt.
A smooth operator set up as the fall guy.

That baggage is the game. If the system doesn’t surface obligations, drives, and situations (Beliefs, Obligations, Pathways), then you’ve got to hack them in yourself. The game becomes about those things, not the next run- in fact, the run becomes a means to resolve some of this baggage.

Campaign Length Matters

For a short game (say, 4–6 sessions), pick a main problem and maybe a secondary one, straight from the characters’ baggage. Talk about how they overlap, or how the crew links up around them. In a longer campaign, you can scatter several “big problems” across the sprawl and let the drama come from how the PCs collide, split, and circle back together.

The Cyberpunk Sandbox

I keep stealing from Twilight: 2000 here. The war wasn’t the story—it was the backdrop. The real game was survival, scarcity, and eventually, deciding what mattered enough to fight for. (My old 50+ session group drew the line at protecting an alcohol still they’d built, and was taken. That told us everything about who those characters had become.) That’s the cyberpunk I want: the sprawl as a sandbox, tech and factions as the backdrop, and the characters running through survival and hard choices. The sandbox is indifferent, and at times hostile. I'd want all the awesome tools that T2K uses to reduce prep time.

Progression, or Not

Here’s something heretical: I don’t think cyberpunk needs leveling up, at least not in the D&D sense. Like Traveller, your stats and skills wouldn’t climb rapidly. What should evolve is your baggage. Resolving debt, escaping addiction, burning a bridge, or finally paying the rent—that’s the advancement loop. If it were me, there’d be a debt mechanic at the core of the reward cycle.

I’m leaning heavy on Gibson’s Sprawl series as I sketch this out (this year was my third re-read). Every notable character—Case, Bobby, Turner, Molly—carries baggage, and their “happy endings” are questionable at best. I read them now like re-plays of game sessions: players making hard choices because the mechanics pushed or incentivized them that way. The 'story' is the result of those choices.

How to get there.

Cyberpunk Red – Gets you there with some GM lift. The lifepaths are where the good stuff is. Lead with that.

Burning Empires – This is my pick. Beliefs and Relationships do the heavy lifting. You can have a green Bobby and an old war dog Turner in the same campaign. Some GM lift on trimming lifepaths, plenty of system support. Beliefs will drive these sessions.

Cortex Prime – Use Pathways. Use Pathways! That'll be the most GM Lift. I'd steal AW stats (Edge, Hard, Cool, Sharp) and add specialties. Some GM lift in picking other trait pools, but I want players hungry for dice and plot point spends, so I'd go with Stats, Specialties, Distinctions, maybe relationships - remember you'll have stuff from Pathways too!

Cy-Borg – Great sandbox vibe. Needs bolted-on baggage, and the default setting tossed. Great game.

Year Zero Engine (Twilight: 2000 hack) – My dream build. D6 push rolls, gear dice, and an adapted T2K sandbox structure. If I had MY druthers...

That’s where my head’s at: The sprawl as sandbox, character baggage as engine, and survival as the game.

ICYMI

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Wares Blade (Kickstarter) – A dark, ’80s-style mecha RPG long lost to time, finally being translated and printed for modern tables. Think gritty, retro-futuristic mech battles with 80’s game ethos!

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Coriolis: The Great Dark (Update) – Free League Open Sources Coriolis: The Great Dark!

And there’s Neuromancer Fan Art!!

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and thanks for supporting the strange stuff.

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