1  # Crash and Burn
  2  
  3  ## Cyberpunk Creation
  4  
  5  1. First, choose your *alias* and pronouns. Your alias can be anything.
  6  2. Next, choose your *Occupation* and *Background*. These determine which *Skills* you have. Skills increase the odds of success when taking on a task. Narratively, your Occupation indicates your role during jobs and an area of focused expertise. Your Background reveals what you used to do or be. When you choose your Background, think about what made you leave that life and why you can't ever go back to it.
  7  3. Next, choose your *Drive*. Your Drive is the reason you take on jobs. Over the course of the game, you'll be paid for jobs (measured in Cred), which can be changed over to *Liquidity* in support of your Drive. When you have converted 50 Cred to Liquidity, you achieve your drive and can retire your punk. You always start with 0 Liquidity marked.
  8  4. Next choose your *Backpack Equipment* and *Combat Equipment*, and set your *Debt*. Your Debt is the financial obligations you have, and thus how much Cred you need to earn on a job before returning home. Your Debt starts at 1, but for each piece of Combat Equipment you choose, increase your Debt by 1. You must have a weapon to participate in a Combat Roll (though some other objects, Hacks, or Cybernetics may be treated as weapons, at the GM's discretion).
  9  5. Next, choose your *Hacks*. Hacks are viruses and other software you can program on the fly. All punks with the *netrunning* Skill can learn and use Hacks, regardless of Background or Occupation. You can start with 1 or 2 Hacks. If you don't have the *netrunning* Skill, skip this step.
 10  6. Finally, choose your *Cybernetics* and mark your *Ruin*. Cybernetics are mechanical enhancements made to your body. You can start with 0, 1, 2, or 3 Cybernetics, but you must mark 1 Ruin for each Cybernetic you choose. Beware, each Cybernetic drives you one step closer to the end. You will lose yourself upon marking 6 Ruin. The Ruin you mark here is your starting Ruin; you can never have Ruin lower than your starting Ruin.
 11  
 12  ### Occupations
 13  
 14  1. Plug — connections, cryptography, netrunning
 15  2. Heavy — endurance, silence, weapons
 16  3. Getaway — navigation, speed, vehicles
 17  4. Face — artifice, consorting, mimicry
 18  5. Puppeteer — drones, multitasking, performance
 19  6. Hound — intimidation, profiling, tracking
 20  7. Spider — infiltration, poison, traps
 21  8. Archivist — cultures, language, media
 22  9. Bodyguard — observation, protection, risk
 23  10. Computer — deduction, logic, memory
 24  11. Machinist — AI, improvisation, repair
 25  12. Negotiator — double-talk, empathy, finance
 26  13. Ripper — bargaining, cybernetics, drugs
 27  14. Chiaroscuro — art, antonymy, balance
 28  15. Medic — blades, physiology, triage
 29  16. Brainer — puzzles, induction, chemistry
 30  17. Investigator — clues, pursuit, correlation
 31  
 32  ### Backgrounds
 33  
 34  1. Rogue android — imitation
 35  2. Fired salaryman — accounting
 36  3. Street preacher — faith
 37  4. Zeroed celebrity — charm
 38  5. Bankrupt entrepreneur — business
 39  6. Indebted patient — medicine
 40  7. Distrusted courier — pathways
 41  8. Bored dilettante – protocol
 42  9. Dismissed soldier – tactics
 43  10. Exposed spy – stealth
 44  11. Indebted junker – appraisal
 45  12. Obsessed zealot – argumentation
 46  13. Penniless mercenary – extortion
 47  14. Routeless trucker — maps
 48  15. Obsolescent programmer —  patterns
 49  16. Banned flamer — argument
 50  17. Jarred brain — resiliency
 51  
 52  ### Drives
 53  
 54  1. Qualify for a passport to board the generation ship Saint Chara.
 55  2. Purchase a single vote in the upcoming election of Administrator General.
 56  3. Make the last payment on your student loans.
 57  4. Prove your worth to join Helissen’s Crusade.
 58  5. Restore the memories that the hacker collective 51N357R4 stole from you.
 59  6. Burn your identity from the Citizen Registry to disappear forever.
 60  7. Do one last job for the Jackals.
 61  8. Steal the immortality chip.
 62  9. Escape the city by crossing the Skybridge.
 63  10. Kill the c-suite exec who sent your lover to a work camp.
 64  11. Upload your consciousness to The Dream.
 65  12. Own and operate a rooftop community garden.
 66  13. Spread your grandparents ashes on real earth.
 67  14. Find a new body for your sister.
 68  15. Confront the thief who stole your face.
 69  16. Unlock the paradise domes for everyone.
 70  17. Take the last space elevator to the ring colony.
 71  18. Edit out the artificial debt sequence from your genome.
 72  
 73  ### Backpack Equipment
 74  
 75  1. Nanites (heals 1 Ruin); jar of bioluminescent insects (3); vacuum creeper repellent (3 uses)
 76  2. Ashes of your grandmother; physical book, blasphemous; jettison tube, small
 77  3. Floating lights, 2 hrs dim (12)'; mirror, small magnetic; perfume (6 uses)
 78  4. Hacked cred chip (6 uses, untraceable); flashlights, 3 hrs (6); handheld geological analyzer
 79  5. Grappling gun; high tensile rope (120’); binoculars
 80  6. Flares, 3 colors (12); software decompiler; old world compass
 81  
 82  ### Combat Equipment
 83  
 84  #### Weapons
 85  
 86  1. POP! pocket blaster
 87  2. Lightray Neurospiker
 88  3. Vibrosword, gilded
 89  4. STAYBACK MK. I
 90  5. Weaponized drone
 91  6. Antique revolver
 92  7. Self-programming viruses
 93  8. Withering glare
 94  
 95  #### Armor
 96  
 97  1. Kevlar vest
 98  2. Bone density supplements
 99  3. Vantablack leather coat
100  4. Timeless sunglasses
101  5. Shield drone
102  6. Old world paperback, 600 pages
103  7. Sewn on punk patches
104  
105  ### Hacks
106  
107  1. Buffer — briefly slow time in a small area.
108  2. Cleanse — clear a small area of surveillance.
109  3. Corrupt — cause a machine to malfunction.
110  4. Divide — split something in two.
111  5. Interdict — cancel the acceleration of something your size or smaller.
112  6. Project — send an audiovisual representation of something to somewhere distant.
113  7. Crash — shut down a nearby electronic device.
114  8. Task — change one simple instruction of something automated.
115  9. Overclock — Briefly quicken time in a small area.
116  10. Lock — Close a a portal permanently.
117  11. Revoke — Force something or someone out of your immediate area.
118  12. Duplicate — Create a copy of a handheld, inanimate object.
119  13. Concatenate — Connect two unconnected areas nearby.
120  14. Redact — Cause a system to forget a concept.
121  15. Crack — Unlock any lock.
122  16. Suspend — Freeze time briefly in the area around you.
123  17. Access — See what happened in the past in the area around you.
124  
125  ### Cybernetics
126  
127  2. Figment Anonymity Suite — epidermis implants project a skin-surface, total body mask of another person’s appearance from scraped photos and videos of billions of social network profiles; fools surveillance tech and anyone at a glance.
128  3. Iron Man Epidermis Replacement — Your entire dermis has been replaced with a synthetic, impact-resistant polymer. Requires specialized cleaning. You can mark this cybernetic as armor.
129  4. Elysia Virtualizer Implants — You see digital architecture overlayed and intermingled with physical architecture. (For example, if you’re looking for a file on a computer, you know exactly which computer and where the computer is.)
130  5. G0BL1N Ocular Enhancement — You can see in lowlight, infrared, ultrasonic, 
131  
132  # Rolling the Dice
133  
134  ## Hunt Roll
135  
136  When you press ever deeper in pursuit of a specific and immediate goal, say how you are exploring your environment, then gather 6-sided dice.
137  
138  Take one light die just for exploring the world and asking the GM questions about it.
139  
140  Take another light die if you have a Skill or piece of equipment that would make your hunt easier. You only get one light die, even if multiple Skills or pieces of equipment apply.
141  
142  Roll the dice. If your highest die is a:
143  
144  - **1.** You lose all your Hunt Tokens, and encounter something terrible. Only the player rolling loses their tokens, since tokens are gained and lost individually.
145  - **2-3.** You encounter something terrible.
146  - **4-5.** Take 1 Hunt Token, but you encounter something terrible.
147  - **6.** Take 1 Hunt Token.
148  
149  Spend 3 tokens to achieve your goal.
150  
151  The Hunt Roll is mechanically the same as Trophy Gold, except that cyberpunks cannot spend 1 token for a treasure worth 1 Cred. Your punks aren’t scavengers and no one is hiring them to steal odds and ends to be pawned off later.
152  
153  Every job will have a payout up front, the total Cred that the group earns for completing the job. A fixer may stipulate secondary objectives to increase that payout and punks may negotiate with fixers before or after a job for more Cred.
154  
155  ## Negotiate Roll
156  
157  When you begin negotiations for a better payout either before or after a job (you can only do it once), name your price, then gather 6-sided dice.
158  
159  Take a light die if the negotiation is something you are skilled at because of your Occupation or Background.
160  
161  Take another light die if the negotiation is somehow easier due to a piece of equipment you have.
162  
163  Roll the dice. If your highest die is a:
164  
165  - **1-3.** You’re not getting more Cred and the fixer has a worse opinion of you.
166  - **4-5.** You’re not getting more Cred, but the fixer appreciates what you’re doing.
167  - **6.** The fixer agrees to pay you more.
168  
169  This is an optional roll you can include if everyone wants to skip roleplaying a better payout from missions. If everyone would rather roleplay, however, then ignore this roll.
170  
171  If the players want to negotiate after a job, then consider that an intermediary scene before they return to town to potentially meet or exceed their Debt (and so not be forcefully retired before they can negotiate for more).
172  
173  # Setting
174  
175  ## Corporate Renaissance
176  
177  Politics are dead. Long has money held more sway than any singular voice. Executive boards have replaced representatives; customers have replaced constituents. 
178  
179  The so-called “renaissance” has brought unparalleled technological advances as well as an ever widening poverty gap. The urban sprawl has reached a point of connecting cities, though geographies and imaginary political lines are now less relevant than a corporation’s own power grid. These megacities are born from mergers and hostile, corporate takeovers: Boardrooms are blood-splattered, the bodies airlifted out by their competition’s privatized medical services.
180  
181  Down below all of that, well out of the executive suite’s view, are the residents of the city. Human capital remains as important as ever, unable to be truly replaced by fully automated systems (cheaper to pay the menial laborer than the technician who has to maintain the machine). Wages continue to lower and work itself becomes more fractured, an embrace of the “gig economy” that has seen laborers reduced to temporary workers. 
182  
183  Life is precarious for most and good for only a few.
184  
185  ### Corporations
186  
187  1.	Amber Softworks
188  2.	BetterYou Pharmeceuticals
189  3.	Conglomerate Productions
190  4.	Immasedi Immortality, Inc.
191  5.	Neue Media Broadcasts
192  6.	Thermosphere REcycling
193  
194  ## Currency
195  
196  The speculative nature of the market and the dominant presence of capitalism at a global scale has rendered unique currencies moot. Instead, the nomenclature of credit and debt has become commonplace. 
197  
198  It no longer matters if the credit you are granted by your employer is distributed in dollars or yen or rupees; all citizens of all nations (whatever that means in a world of brand loyalty and corporate-owned cities) have credits. The fluctuating nature of the market also makes a conversion to old-world currency difficult, which isn’t something the average person pays attention to: Calculations are done automatically by banking software at the time of transaction.
199  
200  With the shift to universal credits, physical currency was also wholesale eliminated. Banking and transactions are all completed electronically, drawn and deposited from accounts tied to a person’s identity, which are created at the registration of someone’s birth. An account number assigned from the corporation’s hospital (and therefore with that corporation’s banking system) is as much a proof of existence as any other identification. 
201  
202  The closest to physical currency that someone can get is a time-limited, disposal card with near-field communication technology, much like a older style, single use transit card. While the electronic trail is apparent to the investigator committed to following it, there is some anonymity with the use of these cards given the billions of them in circulation at any time.
203  
204  ## Fixers
205  
206  The only reliable way to get a job is through a fixer. Fixers work the gray and black markets—making connections, figuring out what people need or what—and hire those people willing to work just to get paid and survive another day. Often, these jobs are for criminal organizations, long working outside of the already established systems, yet practically essential in the grimy foundation of the corporatized justice system. Other times, a job may be a bit of street justice, making right what corporations won’t.
207  
208  All fixers rely on and carefully curate relationships. They won’t hire just anyone; first, they need to notice a potential asset and then they reach out first. Often, the first job is inconsequential, yet dangerous. If whomever they hire can survive, then there can be a working relationship. But it’s the relationship that matters: Something that often feels foreign in a society built on the alienation of individuals through labor. This relationship needs to be maintained and fixers are quick to dispose of potential threats.
209  
210  After all, a spider’s web is more fragile than it looks.
211  
212  ### Fixers
213  
214  1.	**Appleseed** — Always listening to old world country music, runs a mutual aid fund that pays out for community jobs, never works for corps. Feeds any punks who drop by and sells secondhand anything he can grab that “falls off the back of a truck.”
215  2.	**DopIO** — Corrupted AI let loose by a netrunning collective, notorious for killing punks in spectacular ways…but paying out a lot of Cred to the ones that surivve. It can only be communicated with via chatrooms, in which it does the equivalent of mumbling to itself in between messages meant for punks.
216  3.	**Helena** — Preening, plays favorites, always wears sunglasses, rarely rehires punks, works for corps. She has a well deserved attitude and won’t put up with any bullshit. Responds well to “yes, ma’am.” Frequents a members only club that hires jazz musicians.
217  4.	**John Smith** — Never meets in person, uses a voice scrambler, wants to take down corps in high risk jobs with low payout. Notorious for starting political arguments on anonymous message boards. No one knows where he operates out of.
218  5.	**Mouse** — Wears suits, old world eyeglasses, smokes a pack of real tobacco cigarettes a day, only works with established punks. He’s terse and talks about some guy named Hemingway way too much. Any punk who has worked with me only has good things to say.
219  6.	**Sturmund Drang** — Activist always in and out of prison, missing an eye, works for anyone but the government, cops, and corps. Tempermental and often runs jobs with whomever they hire. Extremely likable, to most people’s detriment; they have a way of talking you into anything they want.
220  
221  ## Technoself
222  
223  In the hyper capitalized city, systems of belief and identification are quickly converted to market demographics and usurped in the pursuit of profit: Churches become megachurches preaching standardized sermons; Buddhist practices become packaged as “transcendental retreats,” sold to the ruling class; and even philosophical pursuits, like trans-humanism, become co-opted, a total lifestyle suite that replaces meals with optimized nutrition and healthcare with genetic therapies. However, senses of self emerge, adapt, and change and, while some buy in to these commercialized practices, most still find their own meaning when the average person is barred from practices by their prohibitive costs. Everyone, after all, has to contend with what it means to live in a society divided by labor and enmeshed in the technological.
224  
225  Particularly for punks, this malaise of commercialization is part of what drives them to be cyberpunks: Iconoclasts who co-opt the ruling class’s systems of belief and living. They ignore the consequences of debt—sometimes even the danger to their lives—in order to enhance their bodies and minds with limb replacements, emotion suppression, or data bridges that blur the already faint line between the unaugmented and augmented realities in order to tear down that very ruling class who live with these enhancements without cost. 
226  
227  Societal change does not come overnight, however, and these same enhancements do make their jobs easier, especially when death—by police or by a rogue artificial intelligence—is always a looming threat.
228  
229  ## Weapons
230  
231  Despite urban sprawl, the density of the city forced the executive board to swiftly ban sales and ownership of weapons for residents…not, however, for corporations’ own security forces and private companies operating within the city. Lethal force is common, as there is little oversight and people within security forces are privileged just enough over the wage worker that a class division exists. However, black markets are all but encouraged under the economic system; a booming, unregulated trade happens just underneath the official channels that is inevitably shut down and then reborn elsewhere under a new name.
232  
233  People have the means to defend themselves and communities often do, at costs both personal and financial to the communities and individuals.
234  
235  ### Arms Manufacturers
236  1.	Cerberus Products
237  2.	CommandLine
238  3.	CQB by Lord
239  4.	Home and State Co.
240  5.	Open Field Thermodynamics
241  6.	Symmins-Riide
242  
243  ---
244  
245  This text is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
246  
247  This work is based on [Trophy](https://trophyrpg.com), product of Jesse Ross and Hedgemaze Press, and licensed for our use under the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Trophy is adapted from Cthulhu Dark with permission of Graham Walmsley. Trophy is also based on [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com), product of One Seven Design, developed and authored by John Harper, and licensed for our use under the [Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).
248  
249  This work is AI-Free. It does not include content or media that was AI or Machine Generated. Supporting this work means supporting real people.