PWYW

Concept: “Each year, during October, Exeunt Press hosts Mörktober. A 31 day event that encourages creators to make something each day for MÖRK BORG or other BORG games, in this case Cy_Borg, based on a prompt list and then share it with the community. More about Mörktober.

Thirty One Dark Nights is a compilation of the 31 Cy_Borg compatible creations I made for the 2024's Mörktober event.”

Content: A collection of enemies/threats, equipment, locations, drugs, viruses, surgical options, and more with which to make a game of Cy_Borg vividly fucked up in fantastic ways. (Note: individual entries are PWYW, with a paid option for a fully compiled set of the entries.)

Writing: Mörktober’s purposefully morbid and eerie atmosphere is mixed with pitch-black humor, while unique abilities/rules/effects situate each concept for game rulings.

Art/Design: White/gray on black with a different accent color (and heading typeface) and accompanying illustration for each entry/page.

Usability: Consistent body text and label emphasis/decoration allows for navigation to and recognition of desired info elements, while distinctions in entry accent colors and headings orient the reader to the essence of that entry.

Concept: “On an expedition into the subways of G0, beneath an ancient foundry, the punks are infected with the IRON VIRUS a nanovirus that turns flesh to metal, hair to wire and nails to scalpels. The subway screens flicker to life. The metal tyrant Wodan announces the countdown of sacrifices to priming the Iron Egg. If not stopped, it will destroy everything in a Nearby District. STOP THEM”

Content: A body horror-centric race against the clock to stop a virus-wielding tyrant.

Writing: A disgustingly fascinating adventure, complete with a set of viral nano-infections to make one’s skin crawl (perhaps literally).

Art/Design: Two-page spreads of the scenario setup (and impressively vivid depiction of the virus in action), GM notes, infection list, adventure locations and creatures, and a map.

Usability: Easy to navigate and text (primarily white on black) is readable–the opposite end of the “unsettling” spectrum of document’s content.

Concept: “Run. Shoot. Steal. Lie. It doesn't matter what you do, just find Tim! He's the key to something bigger than all of us. The corpos want him quieted. He's gotta be in the Negapike. I know, I know. The hell hole in between Cy and the NegaCity. Don't worry, you'll be fine, I left you the keys to the B34S7. Fire it up. Be quick about it, you only have 2 hours.”

Content: A mission to extract your pal Tim from an armored carrier somewhere on the tangled roadways of the Negapike. 

Writing: A simple premise with inspired contours and complications to make the rescue attempt all the trickier. Tables provide variety in mission background and random events.

Art/Design: Mix of layouts reflects different general purposes: target vehicle, job specifics, Negapike details, tables. Mostly light-on-dark color schemes, with blueprints of armored carrier and Negapike aerial view serving as primary graphic elements. With tables rendered as UNIX man pages on a CRT display.

Usability: Organization facilitates understanding the relationship of different pages’ content. Most text is visually readable (font choice, text size, contrast) and searchable/selectable, although the latter is not so for text on pages with a CRT display aesthetic.

Concept: “If your name is Tim and you bought the physical version of A$$HOLE$ & ELBOWS in the last couple of weeks, SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS! You didn't fill out the form you were prompted to on itch. You haven't responded to my emails. I don't want a bad review or rating because I didn't send your pamphlet, but I literally can't. I don't have your address! Get in touch.  Unless you were legit just trying to be nice and don't want the physical reward you paid for. But the uncertainty is KILLING ME!  Thanks, hugs and kisses, Rugose Kohn”

Content: Includes NPC enemies, cultist and high priest for “The Cult of Tim,” whose practices revolve around the enigma that is Tim. 

Writing: Tongue so far in cheek for this material that the two have fused together into a new Cronenberg-esque anatomy. 

Art/Design: Black single-column text presented on the left page of a two-page spread with a tan background, with illustrations of NPC shadows combating one another across the spread.

Usability: Text contrast and font choices are very readable, with headings and labels visually distinct from main body text. The question of Tim’s existence/identity remains unanswered, however.

Concept: “A self-improvement cult headed by a mad NET influencer has kidnapped a brilliant biochemist. Independent entrepreneurs all over CY are scrambling to break him out and use his talents in their shady business ventures.”

Content: A job to “liberate” a scientist from one sketchy situation so they can serve a different one.

Writing: Terse, conversational descriptions of important NPCs and location details are complemented by even briefer relevant stats/mechanics.

Art/Design: Black-and-white text and images presented in both a pamphlet format and as standard portrait-oriented pages. A map of the target location and illustrations of some NPCs accompany the text (along with a cover image of a hairy or veiny individual being assaulted from all sides). A player-facing map is also included.

Usability: High-contrast text and consistent use of specific fonts/embellishment for headings, body text, emphasized info, etc. helps with easy visual navigation and identification of desired details. Room descriptions in each relevant map room similarly allow for quick reference/atmosphere notes.

Concept: “Become a trauma team member today.”

Content: A class for the broke med student who wants to chase endorphins via battlefield surgery.

Writing: Brief descriptions and explanations of class features/mechanics that feel appropriately “clinical” and at home in CY.

Art/Design: Two-page spread, with a left-side column of text (reddish pink on white) and a right-side digital illustration of a gun-toting medical specialist.

Usability: Class details are easy to read and navigate, with distinct headings that indicate the scope of each section.

Concept: “It's a real easy gig... Just taste test T-G Labs new Infini-meat and participate in a quick focus group! You'll soon be on your way with a fistful of kreds. Where's the meat come from you ask? I'm afraid we can't share that proprietary information.”

Content: A mission to survive a marketing research meeting.

Writing: Brief bursts of flavor and mechanics (including an intriguing set of maze/escape tables) directed to both GM and player.

Art/Design: Landscape-oriented black-on-white spread (with yellow, pink, and blue highlights) includes a hand-drawn illustration of a cryptid in the top right corner, and two main columns of text content (the left of which has two columns of tables within it).

Usability: Consistent presentation of content, with visually identifiable headings, labels, and marginal notes. Layout makes referring to specific info easy, especially stats for NPCs appearing in maze room encounters.

Concept: “An eerie chill sweeps the streets of CY, and the shadows between the neon lights seem ever darker this time of year. Within creep seven frightful ghouls to haunt the sewers, stalking any pvnk so foolish as to roam the dreadful night.“

Content: A collection of high-tech terrors, from the data spectre to the flesh debtor, with which to haunt a table of punks as they try to survive life in Cy.

Writing: A colorful set of descriptions and mechanical abilities that paint vivid possibilities for each NPC’s uses in a game.

Art/Design: Two versions available: one black-on-white printer-friendly version and one orange-on-maroon version with occasional illustrations to complement the ambience of the writing. Both use single-column text layout.

Usability: Consistent page organization, font usage, and presentation of NPC mechanics to make reading and navigating through the document easy and helpful.

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: “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: “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: “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: “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: “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.