Wednesday, August 30, 2023

First Impressions & Review of Cities Without Number Rpg by Kevin Crawford

 "The world is neon and dust.

There is nothing more than the flesh. There is nothing greater than the wires. There is nothing to dream that is not sold and nothing to worship that is not made. It is a mirrorshade world of human reflections, every red hunger and every black passion worshiped in cathedrals of glass and greed. The great love their sins like children and the least want only to be great. Who could hope for more?"





























Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It's both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.


Cities without Number rpg has finally been released to the public but the backers of the Kickstarter have been watching this rpg's evolution for sometime now. And it's a beast of a pdf clocking in at two hundred & fifty six pages of pure Cyberpunk rpg. Cities without Number  pretty much does it all, Cities has great layout, excellent fonts, and a solid B/X OSR  tool box approach to it's material. 
Cities is completely cross compatible with Worlds Without Number, Stars Without Number, and Godbound as well as other Sine Nomine publishing rpg product. And Cities has been in development for months now. As a Kickstarter backer for this project we've been at ground zero for development. Take note other OSR publishers this is how you run a kickstarter. You get your gamer's feed back, take on board opinions, and more then turnout a great product. 
There's already a Cities Without Number: Free Version rpg which has the following in it by Kevin Crawford: 

  • An old-school inspired game system that's fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
  • Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
  • Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
  • Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
  • System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
  • Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
  • Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, selling loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere
  • The default campaign setting of the City, a premade backdrop to help you get into the game as quickly as possible
And Cities does exactly what it says on the package able to deliver the goods in no time. And does it in style. And Cities can easily be combined with Worlds Without Number to bring you a Shadowrun style Cyberpunk fantasy with little issue. 
And the paid version is even better with more tools and cybernetic goodness;"

In the deluxe edition of Cities Without Number, you'll also be getting...

  • Cyberware quirks and features for particular megacorp product lines
  • Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don't fit the baseline mold
  • Optional rules for the psychological strain of Cyber Alienation
  • Optional rules for cheap street cyber, for those campaign settings where every goon with a knife has some wire beneath his skin" 
  • Spellcasting, spirit summoning, and magical items for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world
This also means that Cities can be used to turn any of your favorite B/X 'World's Most Popular' Rpg adventures into cyberfantasy adventures. And this goes a long way towards getting incredible mile out of modules such as 'B4 The Lost City' where perhaps the other levels contain more then merely a lost race but city blocks of lost cybernetics and net running to thier favorite old school adventure modules! 
Anyone whose been reading this blog knows we've been running Trey Causey's Strange Star campaign setting books. Cities is a perfect supplement to use with Strange Stars because of the transhumanistic elements of this OSR campaign. 



So is Cities without Number rpg worth getting?! In a word, 'oh yes!' if your looking for a solid set of Cyberpunk rpg OSR tools that is capable of creating a campaign to call your own? In a word, yes. This book is worth every penny! 


 

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