We should have burned this city centuries ago.
CY_BORG is, as the name implies, a Cyberpunk hack of Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell's Doomsday Dark Fantasy Tabletop RPG MÖRK BORG, created by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr, and published by Free League Publishing in 2022.
Set in the sprawling corporate-dominated Mega City of Cy, CY_BORG takes the rules-light OSR allusions of MÖRK BORG and translates it via a few adjustments and updates to a formula of running dangerous jobs in a Cyberpunk setting, leaning into the "punk" aspect of Cyberpunk by raging against the aforementioned corporate hellscape everyone lives in. All the while, players end up being menaced by all manner of horrifying things including warring gangs, warring corporations, natural disasters and an alien virus that specifically infects cybernetics.
The game can be bought digitally on DriveThruRPG
, and physically on Free League's website.
CY_BORG contains examples of:
- Advert-Overloaded Future: As the blurb very specifically points out among other grievances with Cy, the skies are full of ads.
- Attack Drone: Four different varieties of attack drone are provided - the ground-based Crawler, the manoeuvrable Flyer, the stealthy Stinger, and a stationary gun turret. The Orphaned Gear Head can also start out piloting one of five different varieties of attack drone, ranging from tiny surveillance drones to a large walking weapons platform.
- Augmented Reality: All player characters start off able to experience info through augmented reality via a Retinal Com Device (either implanted or worn). This being a corporate hellscape, the majority of this AR cyberspace is dominated with advertising.
- The Bad Guys Are Cops: You will NOT find a good cop in Cy, though some third-party supplements allow you to play an ex-cop.
- The Berserker: Anyone on the drug Miura or in the throes of Cy-Rage. The latter primarily happens if you have a lot of cybertech and either get hacked into it or are put on death's door.
- Crapsack World: The world Cy occupies is every bit the crapsack that its Dark Fantasy predecessor is. The world is ravaged by ecological catastrophe, poisonous space rocks, nuclear weapons, warring nations and corporations, pandemics, tsunamis and volcanoes — and that's not even mentioning the capitalistic horrors of the city itself, the corporations, the Nanophreaks, the rogue AIs, and everything else that wants to kill and/or eat you. The areas beyond Cy consist of factory meat farms, automated agricultural machines the size of cathedrals, and armies of clear-cutter drones that couldn't care less for what or who they cut down. Even worse, the entire world, as revealed in the final Miserable Headline, is a simulation designed to reset itself upon anyone discovering this fact.
- Cult: Alongside having to contend with gangs and corporations, players have to also contend with members of one of many varieties of cult, whether as enemies or as a patron offering a job. There even exists a pair of d12 tables for generating cults on the fly.
- Cyborg: As the title's literal interpretation implies, players can receive all manner of body modifications
- Design Student's Orgasm: This being an offshoot of MORK BORG, it was inevitable that this book would have some strikingly busy artwork, changing colour schemes and styles constantly on a page-by-page basis.
- Eco-Terrorist: A group of ecoterrorists in the "Ecoterrorism?" headline are implicitly blamed for the sudden arrival of a giant alien plant appearing overnight in the middle of the city.
- Fantastic Drug: An entire D12 table of drugs with varying effects is detailed on page 66.
- Humongous Mecha: Pages 110-111 are devoted entirely to one nigh-indestructible example which serves as the pinnacle of humanity's destructive tendencies, armed with all sorts of weapons ranging from guns and rockets to laser turrets and cluster grenades.
- Made of Explodium: The Bloated, the supposed final state of those infected with the nano-virus, explode into a shower of acidic bile upon either death or a critical hit.
- Mega City: The entirety of Cy. The default setting map pays no mind to anything that might potentially lie outside of any borders it may have, and the yellow patterns overlaid over some of the districts seem to even imply danger near there.
- MegaCorp: There are fourteen of them, all dedicated to making money and profit and exploiting the people of the city.
- Microbot Swarm: Two cases show up on the nanopowers table - "Cosmic Dust Bots", which heavily impairs visibility within up to 20m in diameter, and "Swarm Trip", which transfers the user's consciousness and perception to a swarm of flying bacteria, opening up endless movement possibilities at the cost of being unable to interact with anything.
- Nanomachines: Prevalent throughout the setting, but prone to some kind of alien infection that causes those affected to develop what can only be described as nanomachine-based superpowers.
- Platonic Cave: The final miserable headline, "Are We Living In A Simulation?" reveals that the entire world is in fact a simulation - one that is designed to reset itself upon anyone discovering this fact.
- Pun-Based Title: "Cyborg" for the cybernetic enhancement aspect inherent in cyberpunk, "Cy" for the name of the city the game takes place in", and "Borg" to signify the mechanical and stylistic connections to Mork Borg.
- Serial Killer: The "Ports District Stalker", who gets unmasked in one of the Miserable Headlines, and always turns out to be someone the PCs know or have worked for.
- Techno Wizard: Downplayed - the Burned Hacker starts with one random app they built that serves the purpose of spellcasting, and any further apps acquired outside of circumstances like this require the acquisition of a physical cartridge that often require doing favours for other hackers to obtain.
- Timed Mission:
- Rolling an 11 on the complication table during mission generation gives the next job a short deadline.
- Thanks to the Miserable Headline mechanic, the entire campaign turns out to be running on limited time depending on how often the GM rolls for headlines, leading up to the world being reset.
- Urban Ruins: G0 or Ground Zero is where Old Cy once stood before the bombs fell. It's walled off from the rest of the city, with only those with a death wish daring to venture there due to the Nanophreaks, pockets of nerve gas and radioactive space rocks. Scavengers, smugglers, cultists and opportunistic scientists are the only humans you'll find out there.
- The Virus: An alien virus that crashed in the middle of the city has spread throughout the entire setting, specifically wreaking havoc on nanotechnology. And that's on top of everyone having to deal with ordinary biological illnesses.
