All Entries

Concept: “You are constantly jacked into your Vapestim-Pack, emitting vapor clouds. You have to stay sedated! Drugs for everyone! Down with the luxury elite!”

Content: A class for the languid lotus-eater and sedate spice fiend who wants, or needs, to constantly moderate their mood–and who wants everyone else to, too.

Writing: Class detail descriptions and mechanics explanations support one another well to present a cohesive concept through the document.

Art/Design: Two-page pink-heavy spread layout highlights a vaporslave illustration, a rendering of capsules, and an early GUI in addition to distinct sections of text framed as a cassette track list.

Usability: Class details are organized for quick identification of desired information, and different aesthetic components invite further exploration and engagement.

Concept: “Are you more human than chicken or more chicken than human? Engineered to be tastier, juicier, more finger-licking good. Implanted with a brain that was not your own, and GMOd to decay at a slower rate — so when the skies fall, only you and the cockroaches will be left ruling the roost.”

Content: A class for the egghead who enjoys fowl play, whether it’s original or extra crispy.

Writing: Since this class is an homage to the creator’s “Vat-grown Repli-clone” class, chicken-themed references and puns abound that provide the class with intriguing and unique options/mechanics. 

Art/Design: Wide spread in a yellow/orange color scheme with a graphic of a chicken embryo (much like the repli-clone class’s graphic) toward the left, while three columns of content take up the bulk of the page. 

Usability: Each column of text content has its own visual design, but each provides a consistent presentation to distinguish headings, labels, emphasized text, and so on. Searching/selecting text may cause some issues due to unexpected spacing between and clustering of characters.

Concept: “Engineered to be better, stronger, faster; implanted with memories that are not your own; and genetically encoded to degrade at an accelerated rate. Live fast, die young embodied. And your time is almost up.”

Content: A class for the discarded or obsolete duplicant who wants their maker to pay for their profane hubris.

Writing: Drawing on iconic literature and film for its inspiration, class features are concisely packed with ideas to spur introspective and destructive roleplay.

Art/Design: Sleek spread layout of class details complemented amazingly with green/pink color scheme to highlight page elements, with a large background illustration of a vat-grown fetus to underscore the character’s origins. 

Usability: While there’s a lot happening on the page, it’s eminently readable, with high contrast and bordered framing of text guiding visual navigation through the document.

Concept: “You are an artificially designed  human being, grown in a lab, who ends up finding themselves roaming in the alleyways of CY, lost and confused.”

Content: A class for the not-quite-a-person who’s trying to figure out what they are and why.

Writing: Brief and vivid character details for background and motivation complemented with terse mechanical effects/features.

Art/Design: An illustration of a runaway on the right side of a landscape-oriented spread, with white text on black (with yellow and pink highlights & headings).

Usability: Distinct typefaces and groupings of text allow for quick navigation between different content areas.

Concept: “In CY, it's easy to feel like there's nobody to trust. Everyone wants creds or drugs or alcohol or fame or whatever, and most people are willing to backstab each other for it. But you- you're secure. Your friends would never betray you, and you make friends very easily, at least, with some people. The kind of people who have greasy black feathers and pick at trash dumps, or gnawing teeth and skitter under floorboards, or slimy skin and creep through the gutters. Your friends have your back. Anyone who wants to get to you will have to go through them.”

Content: A class for the rat bastard who works best with partners, the nastier the better. 

Writing: Inspired class features that bring a feral animal-loving misfit to life, complete with mechanics for one or more vermin companions.

Art/Design: Full-color version is yellow-on-black with rat photographs with color treatments as backgrounds, while print-friendly version is black-on-white text. Both versions use single-column text content layout.

Usability: Distinct sections are immediately recognizable in both versions thanks to consistent heading/label presentation and white space. Full-color version employs an additional handwritten-aesthetic font for labels and emphasized terms/phrases.

Concept: “‘They thought you were insane, now they realize you were right. But were you? It doesn't matter, because it is too late for them. You must survive…’ An old man or woman who have spent their lives preparing for the apocalypse who now finds themselves in a perpetual never ending one. Will they survive? Even thrive?”

Content: A class for the punk who’s well-stocked for nearly any apocalyptic occasion.

Writing: Brief, extremely flavorful tables and mechanics that round out assorted approaches to playing a vindicated prepper, provided in a mix of straightforward and tongue-in-cheek tones. 

Art/Design: Bright green on a red cloudy pattern background, organized mainly in a three-column format.

Usability: Consistent presentation of content sections via organization, headings, emphasized info, etc. all make for easy navigation and identification of desired details.

Concept: “The punks have a mission. Kidnap Lukas Tosk. He's traveling with just his driver today. It'll be a quick 10k¤. Or so they think. VIP Abduction is a pamphlet-sized module for CY_BORG. It includes a map of a Virid Viper safe house and everything you need to put inside to set up the abduction mission. The module includes stat blocks for new characters and page numbers for referencing the CY_BORG rule book for other stat blocks and tables.”

Content: A kidnapping mission with a bonus automotive theft component.

Writing: Job setup and preparation/site location info is provided first, followed by sections on the mission execution and target/enemy NPCs.

Art/Design: Two versions: full-color and black-and-white. Trifold brochure layout with full color outer panels (in full color version), while inner panels are black and white in both versions. An overhead map of the mission locale is also included as a separate file.

Usability: Bolded headers and key labels/descriptors help call attention to important information, and consistent spacing makes it easy to identify individual sections of content. Overall arrangement of info reduces need to jump around between panels to locate immediately useful specifics. Full-color gradient pattern background on outer panels provides decent contrast to maintain text readability.

Concept: “Embedded in ads, lurking in the top search result, loaded as a hacker’s dead hand, coursing through a derelict net node. Viruses are everywhere, infecting everyone, stealing a portion of everything. Most of them are unnoticeable, lurking in your RCD, implants, accounts, everything. These? Less so. Bisecting your consciousness. Hijacking your implants. This is the result of someone else’s malice or misconduct. It will break you down until you get rid of it.”

Content: A set of tables to make a player’s life living hell through the power of compromised technology.

Writing: Concise and powerfully thematic explanations of relevant variables, including how the virus spreads, how it affects a player mechanically, who developed it, how to get rid of it.

Art/Design: A visual overload of colors, fonts, graphics, and stylistic clashes that feels entirely appropriate given the rules’ purpose.

Usability: While overall consistency is out the window, it is possible to understand and navigate each table/element while focusing on that section.

Concept: “You hail from a world unknown to humanity, far beyond the outer bounds of the Terran solar system. All data projections point to planet Earth as the site of some great future calamity, one that will resonate throughout the entire universe—but what could it be, and why here? You’ve been stranded on Earth (what’s left of it, anyway) for a few months now, and so far, only one thing’s been made abundantly clear: this place is a shithole, and nobody’s coming to rescue you.”

Content: A class for the stranger in a strange land with no way to leave it.

Writing: Class details mix levity and bizarre sci-fi tropes for a unique class experience in a cyberpunk milieu.

Art/Design: Black-edged white text on black, pink, and gray with some green text accents. Class features are arranged around a central illustration of a visitor over a background pattern of criss-crossing X shapes.

Usability: Visually, this is a busy spread, which may make reading/scanning difficult for some, augmented by the lack of embedded text (so no searching or copying/pasting). Bold text for important info and labels consistently helps distinguish individual list items and content sections.

Concept: “It was nothing like they advertised; there were no off-world colonies, no bold unknown, no strange new worlds–only more cramped corridors and self-devouring consumerism in the name of the tourist industry. And then one night SOMETHING shocked the shuttle systems, and you began floating in a most peculiar way…”

Content: A class for those who were changed in irrevocable, horrifying ways when they walked among the stars–and who are now shackled to the earth once again.

Writing: Vivid, evocative descriptions of features and mechanics are both illuminating and unsettling in the best way.

Art/Design: Two two-page spreads with class details and a set of alien infestations, with white text on dark background throughout. An image of a void-warped freefaller emphasizes the cosmic horror at the core of this class and the effect it has on the character.

Usability: Easy to navigate, read, and comprehend, with key components visually embellished for identification of their significance and purpose.

Concept: “Meatspace decays. AR sputters. VR goes black. There are perilous chambers for those descending too deep in the THE NET. Nothing in them but shimmering entropy. Fractal pits. Voidpoints.”

Content: A set of rules for when a player fumbles an app roll while in the net, along with a set of locations to explore when doing so.

Writing: Brief, evocative descriptions of sensory experiences that can cause a punk to question their reality, even as digital dangers risk their annihilation.

Art/Design: Organized as a trifold pamphlet basic rules and title/credit info are provided on outer panels (in white-on-black color scheme), while voidpoint locations and a map are provided across the inner panels (in black-on-white color scheme). 

Usability: Headings and labels are visually distinct from body text and consistent in appearance. Map locations are numbered and correspond to descriptions surrounding the map image. Text is not embedded, so searching/selecting is not possible.

Concept: “War makes money, at the end of the day, and the corps of CY are interested in anything that makes money, no matter how many cadavers will be piled up alongside those heaps of cash. “

Content: An arsenal of material–enemies, squad makeups, potential job seeds, environmental tables, and more–with which to make corps even more terrifying, overwhelming, omnipresent, and all-around dangerous.

Writing: A mix of informative mechanics and in-universe flavorful commentary on each entry that balances black humor on the edge of bleakness.

Art/Design: Simple black-on-white single-column layout over fourteen pages.

Usability: Visually distinct and consistent font and text decoration choices, along with helpful whitespace use, result in an easily navigable document.

Concept: “‘Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday.’ - Marcus Aurelius

Welcome to the gas-guzzling, high octane post-apocalyptic hack of Cy_Borg, about miserable, radiated scum struggling to survive in tomorrow's unforgiving carcass!”

Content: A Mad Max-style take on Cy_Borg rules, with some new and different systems while others very closely resemble those of the base game. (Note: At the time of writing, the "Jumper Cable Edition" version of the game has been released. A fuller version of the game is set to be published in the future.)

Writing: A balanced amount of thematic description and mechanical explanation of effects/features that situate players and GMs to the game’s focus (especially in comparison to that of Cy_Borg).

Art/Design: Aesthetics of the core rulebook with some occasional pages/spreads and illustrations that break out in a different direction (such as in the more comic book-like “The world has ended” spread early in the book, or the Vast Grimm-style “lagunasuga” monster spread created by VG creator Brian Colin).

Usability: The fore/ground contrast varies significantly from page to page, as do fonts/typefaces, either of which can make some text quite difficult to read.

Concept: “Tonight, we are going to witness the most anticipated match in the history of professional wrestling---for the CY Wrestling Federation Championship Belt! Are you ready? Wrestling fans, ARE YOU READY?! For the thousands in attendance, and the millions watching from around the world, from the capital city of CY...ladies and gentleman...LLLLEEEET'S GET RRRREAADY TO RRRRRRUUUUMMMMBBBBBLLLLLEEEEE!”

Content: An opportunity for punks to up their side-hustle game by making some bank as a wrestling champion–assuming they win, of course.

Writing: Primarily informative details about the mechanics of the encounter, accented by some headings to reflect the tenor of the wrestling scene. 

Art/Design: Wide three-column layout of content with a bloody wrestling mat map in the center of the document. White text on black with yellow headings, while a bit of pink highlights the mat image and the license info.

Usability: High-contrast text and easily readable fonts facilitate reading and navigation. Skewed text may occasionally pose issues for screen readers.

Concept: “
[recruiter77@mandela ~]$ sudo project-mandela  --help
#################—BEGIN TRANSMISSION—#################
<<<<<<< Project Mandela is a collaborative effort, a beacon of hope in the ever changing face of uncertainty. Our mission is to unveil the truth behind and expose the Doppels, who silently infiltrate our lives. With your assistance, we can protect ourselves and our loved ones from the horrors of being ‘replaced’. Join now.
########################—END—########################
[recruiter77@mandela ~]$ _
“

Content: A set of rules for a secret organization that tracks down “doppels” and its secret/coded message system. 

Writing: “In-world” content speaks directly to PCks while also providing GMs and players with the details needed to work the Project Mandela organization into a given game.

Art/Design: Pages are laid out as “in-world” printed flyers (complete with tear-off tags at the bottom of one page). Three versions are provided: one spread layout and two single-page layouts, with one of these optimized for printer-friendliness.

Usability: Text is mostly quite readable, with distinct sections of content clearly identifiable visually, with consistent font choices to indicate relationships between different text blocks.

Concept: “Megapastor Apollo Imra is in the crosshairs- his wife's, to be specific. One of his twenty-odd wives. You've been hired to take out this lecherous philanderer, right in his own temple vestry, where he's taking tonight's dose of infidelity. But beware: there's more going on here than you might think…”

Content: A mission to serve divorce papers, of a sort.

Writing: Extensive information provided about the job, the site, NPCs the punks might encounter, and more.

Art/Design: Primarily black-on-white single-column text layout complemented by illustrations of key NPC portraits and neon-colored maps.

Usability: Font choices promote readability, and heading/label bolding, italics, and highlighting are applied consistently throughout to facilitate quick navigation toward desired details.

Concept: “The world is ending, but not fast enough. Poison drizzles from the skies and mats in the gutters. Reality flickers and stutters, but doesn't go out. And the people of this spliced and plated rainsick hell can't afford to starve like ascetics, awaiting purification by the end. It could be days from now that judgement comes. Or it could be never. Their bellies still grumble in discontent. So the people of CY eat. They eat for nourishment and for distraction and to be seen in the act of specific consumptions. They eat scraps and banquets, packaged rations and homecooked platters. They eat, and they look out glitching windows, and they hope the apocalypse holds off for another day.”

Content: Myriad options for restaurants/eateries in CY, with business descriptions, menu lists, and costs for dishes. 

Writing: Each establishment is given its own flavor/style, and descriptions reflect in-universe perceptions of the place and its fare as much as they provide helpful worldbuilding notes for GMs.

Art/Design: While each page includes the same essential components, different font, color, and graphic selections contribute to unique identities for the restaurants included in the supplement.

Usability: Text is consistently readable and navigable even across a wide range of fonts, and only occasionally are there color changes (e.g., from background patterns) that might momentarily disrupt reading. Hyperlinked ToC makes for an even quicker navigating/locating experience.

Concept: “Made for The Rolled Standards Trigger Warning: Trigger Happy Jam, this adventure is a simple assassination mission in a rundown church in the heart of G0. Risk nano infestations while trying to kill off the cult leader Farther Barnos, return his head and a requested item for a fat pay out.”

Content: A job to unseat the head of a local church.

Writing: Intense descriptions of the mission’s most important locations and events/encounters.

Art/Design: A mix of analog hand-drawn and digital illustrations accompany a mostly single-column layout of white, green, and pink on black backgrounds.

Usability: Text is mostly readable and searchable (except for Barnos’ stat block, which is handwritten text) with clear visual distinctions–color, typeface, white space–between sections of content.

Concept: "Wiggly Dorpher introduces new game options for CYBORG hyperlinked to DRUGS.

Content: Sets of equipment, nano powers, a class (Wiggly Dorpher), a location, an enemy, and more--all relating to drugs in some way.
 Writing: Potently and concisely atmospheric, with rules/mechanics explanations complementing the descriptive aims.
Art/design: A mix of page/spread aesthetics and organizations that reflects the core Cy_Borg design variety.
Usability: While most pages have significant text/background contrast to facilitate reading, much of the text content is not embedded and thus cannot be searched or selected.

Concept: “There's a sickness in the streets of CY. Rain drips like a broken IV. Dying adverts flicker in sallow shades. They say the world is ending. Has ended. Will end. They say the howls at night are Cy-Ragers. NanoPhreaks. Nothing to worry about. Nothing abnormal. The water is poison, but it always has been. The air is poison, but how bad can it be? It churns through your lungs all day and hasn't killed you yet. There's nanites in the trash, nanites growing like mold on the walls, nanites in the blood and bones of regular citizens, but all of this is familiar misery. Last night you stared blearily at your face in the bathroom mirror, watching it change. Watching it become something new. As you did, your cybernetics clicked like beetle legs, like teeth shuffling in the mouth of a cannibal. They squirmed and contorted to match your new flesh. You vomited your whole stomach lining into the sink, then washed it out with a swig of cheap ethanol. But the disinfectant didn't purify you. It just made you worse. Tonight, the glitching moon hangs low over the skyline and your body is wrong. Wrong for the city. Wrong for the life that clings to it. Wrong for the alien gods that have touched its streets. You hate them all, and that hate pours out of you in a howl.”

Content: A set of rules to incorporate werewolves into CY.

Writing: Matter-of-fact explanations and descriptions of a variety of factors pertinent to affected characters (transformation rules, clothing options that survive transformation, a “Festering Wolfborg” class, etc.) as well as several lycanthropic foes and their stats.

Art/Design: A mix of black-and-white splash images with brightly colored sections of content, each with its own bold color scheme. 

Usability: Single-page, single-column layouts make for quick perusal and identification of desired content, assisted by a hyperlinked table of contents.

Concept: “Hello Operator! The X-Ware Repository for Techno-Anarchists is a collection of random tables that offers some extra 'ware to spice up your game.”

Content: A set of ten apps, ten cybertech, and ten nano options that offer intriguing variety to GMs and players looking to expand their gear.

Writing: Brief descriptions of fascinating and creative mechanics, often with references to material found in the official rulebook.

Art/Design: Two pages dedicated to each category, and each pair of pages has a distinct color scheme, with a high-contrast color choice and set of fonts for the single column of text laid over the background image/pattern.

Usability: Headings/labels are provided as a distinct font from the main body content in each section to help readability. Background image in the ‘Apps’ section might slow down reading for some (there’s just a bit of noise working against contrast), but text is easily searchable/selectable.

Concept: “Hello Operator! This second volume of the X­Ware Repository for Techno­Anarchistsis brings more random tables of new content for your game.”

Content: A set of six weapons, six booster mods, six drugs, six gangs, and six nano-phreaks to bring even more variety and danger to a Cy_Borg table.

Writing: Bite-sized bullet points and descriptions indicate mechanical effects, flavorful qualities, and other quirks that might spur a GM or player to innovative integration of a subject into their game.

Art/Design: Single-column organization of text, with distinct layout features and color scheme for each category’s page(s), complemented by thematically appropriate illustrations and background images.

Usability: Despite a variety of headings/labels across category layouts, text throughout is easy to read thanks to high contrast on background and size/color choices to assist with recognizing characters and kinds of content.

Concept: “You Died, Dumbass is a profile for another shitty subscription company, some rules for near death organ transplant (inspired by https://zordvil.itch.io/horrible-wounds) and related headlines made for the new-times-dumbass game jam.”

Content: A set of rules to complicate life when a punk at the table comes back from near death with a biosynthetic organ–complete with 4d4 additional relevant headlines to roll when a miserable headline is rolled. 

Writing: A focus on the bleakly absurd atmosphere of a world where biosynthetic organs (and the late capitalist approach to their supply) is common, with brief mechanical features/effects supporting that focus.

Art/Design: Mix of black-on-white and white-on-black spreads/pages, using different layouts and aesthetics, with consistent appearance of red accents and highlights throughout. Several illustrations of NPCs and a location appear along with a silhouette to underscore our equally bleakly absurd reality

Usability: High-contrast text is consistently provided and page/spread layouts offer visually recognizable organizations of similarly presented and distinctly marked content.

Concept: “Zip guns are sold everwhere, as multipacks in bodegas and as singles in vending machines. These mass-produced deadly toys are made of the cheapest materials in the cheapest way possible and designed to break after a single shot, but that's all you need, right?”

Content: A class for the venn diagram intersection of firearms fanatic and gashapon addict.

Writing: Concise, approachable descriptions of class features and mechanics with a dash of thematic flavor to glue the concepts to the setting.

Art/Design: Plain text format with whitespace between paragraphs and lists. 

Usability: The file format allows for incredibly easy resizing/formatting content in one’s preferred text editor or word processing program. 

Concept: “This is a double feature, 2 one shots for 2 different Borg Systems. One is "Moonshine" for the Cy_Borg system. It features players robbing a rich senator's house to steal his supply of crypto-moonshine. The other is called Zwyntar Pass for the MorkBorg system. It features players trying to hunt a troll at a pass at Graven-Tosk. Both scenarios were inspired by a Ukrainian band called Zwyntar.”

Content: A job to steal a bunch of crypto-moonshine from a senator’s home.

Writing: Concise details that cover important elements for the score and how different approaches might lead to different results.

Art/Design: Eye-blistering neon purple, pink, and yellow (with a bit of green-on-black) across two pages: one text-heavy GM-focused page and one player-facing page with a map of the job location.

Usability: Headings and different blocks of content are visually distinct from one another thanks to font size choices and whitespace use.