Rules

Concept: “Tribute — a 48-page triple-threat zine with content for Mörk Borg, CY_BORG, Death in Space. Whatever sick or sad ideas came to my mind, I banished into this cursed little booklet. [...] CY_BORG. Go dumpster diving (in CY), visit the REAKTOR, die in horrible car accidents, and play as a revolutionist chemist!
By day, you mix and cook in the corps’ polluted factories; the ¤ ¤ ¤ are much needed. Reaction kinetics are on your mind. By night, you burn the palaces. You poison the organism that feeds you. Your concoctions are august.”

Content: A zine whose focus is partially on several Cy_Borg-related supplements: a class (Revolutionist Chemist); a mini-game (Dumpster-diving) with random encounters and loot tables; and a club location (Reaktor) with related tables for drinks, NPCs, trouble, and music genres. 

Writing: An overall balance of general and atmospheric description, in-universe text (such as instant messages/social media posts), and mechanical/rules-based explanation. 

Art/Design: Distinct spreads/pages for each entry, with a variety of aesthetics and graphics (photo collage, hand-drawn illustration, simple icons, etc.). 

Usability: While spreads do vary aesthetically, each has an identifiable organization and layout that consistently presents information throughout for ease of navigation and use. 

Concept: “This zine contains a table for Animals and plants altered genetically, mechanically or both, some stat blocks and body modifications.”

Content: A collection of biological and technological creatures, parts, and modifications to bring more animalistic variety to a game.

Writing: Descriptions make use of a casual and conversational voice that makes even the more mundane entries engaging and humorous.

Art/Design: Three pages of red and blue text on a light gray hex-pattern background. Two pages use single-column text layouts, while the page of stat blocks has different NPCs’ info scattered around the page.

Usability: Each page provides a consistent visual grammar to indicate how to navigate its content. Center-aligned lists of creatures and modifications may slow down some reading of entries that span multiple lines of text.

Concept: “A small collection of optional rules for Cy_Borg. Includes variations on Experience, Dice-few Combat (with revisions to how armor, weapons and initiative work), a biological alternative to Cybertech and doing away with Cy-Rage.”

Content: A set of rule proposals to affect characters in assorted ways that can provide some intriguing variety to a game of Cy_Borg.

Writing: Text is direct and focused on explaining the mechanical differences between these rules and those in the official rulebook. No fluff, all function.

Art/Design: Single-column text with a simple heading organization. Black-and-white with one heading level provided in red/pink. Background is a light noise/speckle pattern.

Usability: Font choices are easily readable, and the page background pattern shouldn’t cause much disruption of engagement with text. A few key terms and phrases are bolded and italicized for quick identification.

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: “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: “
[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: “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.