CYBERTEETH: Things Get Futuristic with CBR+PNK
Hello, you.
As ever, this is the TEETH newsletter, articulating and hyping the creations of Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol, as well as mentioning other things we’ve liked and/or played. This week: CBR+PNK is discussed, below.
It’s been a little quiet here at TEETH towers as we’ve been distracted by other projects, but the question that preoccupies us now is how best to deliver the third one-shot adventure, in which we introduce even more of the ideas behind the TEETH TTRPG setting - this final adventure will land closer than either of the previous adventures to the core material of monster-hunting in the 18th century. We’ve actually re-written this particular piece three times, it being the basis for one of our earliest TEETH experiments, a document called PITCHFORK MOB, which we might one day end up publishing separately because the idea has evolved so, so much from the original form. We’ll continue plugging away at the latest incarnation, with all its grisly abominating, and land it in your inboxes with due haste.
Anyway, more on that soon, but first some links!
SOME LINKS
When luxuriating in the bath I have been reading my copy of The Dee Sanction. I’ve linked to it before, but I can’t quite get across how much I have enjoyed reading a book of Tudor supernatural agents. It’s just right.
I have also begun reading Chris Gosden’s The History Of Magic. Not directly related to TTRPGs but nevertheless absolutely essential reading for anyone with even half a creative toe in the ideas of magic and humans.
Did we previously link these Warhammer conversions of classic John Blanche paintings? I can’t rememeber. (But they remain so, so good.)
I urge you to look at this die. The creators explain: “The trick to reading Woodwind is adding up the eighth-note values of the notes on each face (and looking like a real-life Bard as you do so!)”
Research this week led us to… know, actually this was a reader submission which we must share with you all. An 18th century character that is closer to home than usual, The Green Man of Brighton – Henry Cope. “He is dressed in green pantaloons, green waistcoat, green frock, green cravat and though his ears, whiskers, eye-brows and chin are better powdered than his head, which is, however, covered with flour, his countenance, no doubt, from the reflection of his clothes, is also green. He eats nothing but greens, fruits and vegetables; has his apartments painted green, and furnished with green sofa, green chairs, green tables, green bed and green curtains. His gig, his livery his portmanteau, his gloves and his whips, are all green. With a green silk handkerchief in his hand and a large watch chain with green seals, fastened to the green buttons of his green waistcoat he parades every day on the Steyne, Brighton.”
CBR+PNK
This is not about the 18th century. No. Emanoel Mel’s CBR+PNK, which, yes, arrived in a timely fashion to those of us who had just cyber’d our way through computer game’s computer game Cyberpunk 2077, is rather more about yellow PVC and hacking the cyberworld that our usual waistcoat and breeches fare. Nevertheless it is very much up our street, thanks to being a superb conceived Forged In The Dark system, with some excellent thematically-coherent tweaks and conceits. We’ve run a couple of games of this now, and each one was a riot.
CBR+PNK puts the players in the position of being experienced Runners looking to perform their last job, pay of their debts, and get out of the life with their minds and bodies intact (if not their consciences). As with other Forged games it lets the players be quite inventive with this stuff, while also supplying enough backdrop - ideas for contacts and NPCs, examples of starter scenarios for the jobs - to essentially make this a zero-prep one shot.
The one challenge is in coming up with with your "cyberware”, the cybernetic upgrades which your character will take advantage of in their adventure. While Melo was clearly pressed for space in his highly-compressed documentation, I would like to have seen some more examples of these to choose from: I felt like it was the one speedbump in character creation, and not all the things players invented really came into play. (Perhaps we should have done them on the fly, as per gear!)
Our first game saw the team attempting to get an activist offworld, and fighting biker gangers as they spend along the freeway to the spaceport, before scaling their way to the top of an orbital elevator, and being double crossed. Their final scene was the freefall plunge to Earth from the exploding docking facility.
Our second outing was a breakneck assassination of a future streamer, in which hijacking his limousine and crashing into a garbage barge in the Thames became highlights. I ended this with a trip to a PS2-styled cyberworld, which didn’t really work, but at least they could pet the dog.
In both cases we found ourselves inventing and improvising our way through the game at a fantastic rate. I think that’s in part because cyberpunk tropes are so ready-to-hand for most people’s imagination that it all came quickly and fluidly. And, while we played with some stereotypes - and sure, cyberpunk as a mode is itself getting long in the tooth now - we dodged any hackneyed feelings that might have arise, and enjoyed a a couple of ferocious sessions. Our second game ended up spread across two evenings due to time constraints, but it would have been readily playable in a single normal evening’s play.
If there is one issue with their production, then it is that that dice economy ends up making things a little easy on our characters, especially if they min/maxed in a specific area. CBR+PNK takes the usual Forged format, but has the players combine an Approach (Aggression, Smartness, Caution, Empathy) with unrelated skills (Hacking, Close Combat, Piloting, etc), which is excellent for providing leaping off points for described actions, but the consequence of this was quite a lot of dice rolled with each action. Combine this with little need to worry about stress (it’s a one off, so you might as well burn ‘em!) and there really were the most sixes that I have ever seen in a Forged game.
Perhaps that’s fine, however, because these are, after all, Runners at their top of their game, and on their final mission. They should (and did) pull off crazy shit. Their actions are also somewhat (but perhaps not quite enough) balanced out by the “glitch” die, which can get added from approaches or cyberware, or stressing out, and necessarily delivers complications on a role of a 1-3, regardless of other successes.
That works well. What I am saying is: CBR+PNK is just really goood.
This is a delicously designed package, with Melo absolutely nailing the look and feel of the PDFs, while also being thoughtful enough to provide online Google Docs playbooks and low-ink versions of everything, as we have done with the TEETH games. CBR+PNK is very much an example of how to do this stuff well, and I am genuinely excited to see what Melo cooks up next.
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Right, we’re off to have a look at Laughing Kaiju’s The Zone, which looks uncommon warpy delightful. Perhaps we’ll have some thoughts on that next time.
Love you! x