#cyberrats

[das-boog]

The last of the Mutators for CR:BB- Robot! I’ve assumed that, like our world, the cyberrats dystopia never quite cracked true AI. They got closer than LLM’s though; pump enough drugs into a rat and expand its processing power mechanically and it’ll compute whatever you tell it to

[ale10ander]

The MCU normalized the practice of announcing a sequel in the middle of the credits of your movie, and I wanted to bring the practice to the world of tabletop roleplaying games.

So we did. We announced Rise of the Briny Bastards during the part of the book where we thank our kickstarter backers.

And now, the promised expansion is on its way. Coming to Kickstarter Q3/Q4 of 2023

[ninjacat64]

there are so many TTRPGs I want to try, but alas, I have no friends

Roleplaying seems like such a beautiful thing, but I'd never really had a chance. I can't connect with other people, I cant schedule, I can barely even go outside, and the very thought of using discord makes me sick.

Sometimes I read game manuals and imagine what is must be like.

[cyberpunk2077positivity]

Shout out to @cyberrats! Really happy to see their creativity grow, and excited to see where they take their Marble Hornets crossover.

[corsairesix]

Join me on Saturday on Cyberrats: Corpo-Rat Shills, a demo AP for the LUMEN game Cyberrats.

Depending on the mission, I'm either going to be playing a giant mutant demolition ratgirl or a femme fatale who is literally just a swarm of rats in a tight dress.

[jdnotjasondean]

Pictures from the past week. Several session 0s + NOVA + Cyberrrats + SCP: A Crumbling Foundation.

[cartoonistcoop]

Check out this kickstarter for Cyberrats!

[technomancergoat]

I am so FLABBERGASTED at this response that I ought to throw the book at you with my cyberpunk aesthetic side blog. How dare you not know about Shadowrun and it's many furry friendly options! (but, uh. Bonus points for Ironclaw. They do have the alternative prohibition era setting called Urban Jungle that is more of the same as Ironclaw, but they further split up species and occupation skills and gifts with a third options of an archetype, making having a personality a trait. :D the sacrifice is the loss of magic, but for that gritty 1930s/40s vibes, it's fine.)

Shadowrun

I basically made it part of my personality at this point. As the lifestyle brand of D&D never really took root in strangling me into the 5e loving fanboy it expected of me, one hit of Shadowrun, and I basically IV drip this drek directly to the veins. Sure, the rules are as dense as a college level textbook with the editing level of a college dropout writer who kept failing this class, the lore and the setting is so fragging awesome that you can't help be excuse some of the jank that happens as the rules and the lore complements each other that I yet to find better rules that keeps the essence of the game.

How do furries for into this picture?

Have you SEEN the amount of options for furries!?

Man, if you want furries and cyberpunk, this is probably one of the best ways of doing it with no homebrew. My reddit post exemplifies this by listing of the examples, but as a snippet...

You can augment yourself into looking like your fursona

You can be hit with a drastic amount of magic (cough cough radiation stand in cough) to be changed into a new feature through their SURGE mechanics

You are literally a reverse werewolf (I.e. You are the animal who can transform into a metahuman). They are called Shifters

So yeah. There's plenty of options, and most of them only really need one additional book to make that happen. There IS another path this person can go, and it's from @ale10ander 's Cyberrats. This is quite literally rats in a cyberpunk (and mix of biopunk) setting. I really want to check it out when I can catch the time to gather a few friends to try this out. I'm sure @theresattrpgforthat might have some other notes I missed. Now excuse me while I look up Hard Wire Island and Magnum Bullet to see what these have to offer.

Do you know maybe of an rpg or at least an rpg setting that combines furries with cyberpunk? Something like the Magnum Bullets music video on youtube?

I don't know of anything that specific sadly, I was hoping the people behind Ironclaw (a fantasy RPG starring anthropomorphic animals that I keep hearing good things about) would've done one but the closest they have is a film noir RPG with furries which is... you know that's actually pretty close because there's a lot of overlap between noir and the most popular cyberpunk stories. But it definitely won't be up to task here.

My recommendation would be to simply use whatever cyberpunk RPG you feel is the coolest and then simply reflavor the characters to be anthro animals. I will never stop recommending Hard Wired Island, it's by far my favorite cyberpunk RPG.

Also hell yeah Magnum Bullets is such a bop and the music video is amazing.

[das-boog]

Heya folks! If you been enjoying the latest Cyberrats art, the new kickstarter is live!

Cyberrats is a rules light, tactics heavy LUMEN system game inspired by xcom, teenage mutant ninja turtles and shadowrun. Players are mutant rats and interns for one of three evil, world-spanning megacorporations when aliens invade the earth. Not so bad, on paper. A good disaster now and then is good for your bosses bottom line. The issue is that a rival megacorp, Valdivian, has the issue well in hand and refuses to share the alien-fighting market. An unacceptable scenario. Your job is to sabotage the "real" heroes, secure the contract, save the world, and clock out of your shift.

Cyberrats: Rise of the Briny Bastards expands on ideas introduced in the first game, expanding both tactical options AND downtime actions to flesh out who your mutagenic operative is, what their relationship is to their team and what they're really fighting for when their checks are cashed and the dust settles. We've also introduced a bunch of new mutators and classes, a toyetic submarine, and a new enemy faction in the form of an ocean that hates your player characters personally.

Cyberrats gameplay is designed to contrast risky, dangerous missions with the personal stakes of the characters. You'll watch your helpless intern slowly build out a 90s-action-figure's worth of extra weaponry, powers and relationships with other players and npcs that can synergize for more and more impressive combat strategies. The numbers are stacked in the enemies favor, and you're encouraged to find unique ways to break the game balance to survive!

If you're like me, and like the crunch of a game to add weight to its emotional stakes but ALSO don't want to have to memorize 4 different chapters on how to grapple someone, I highly recommend it! You can find the kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2018387307/cyberrats-rise-of-the-briny-bastards

[ale10ander]

XCOM and the perils of adaptations

Many video games have been adapted into board games: Slay the Spire, XCOM, and This War of Mine are three of the most prominent. But there's a challenge to making a good adaptation.

The Faithful

This War of Mine is extremely faithful; it feels exactly like one playthrough of the game. While the video game is single-player, the board game plays up to six, a concession for the medium. Even with six players, the players take turns reading emotional prompts, and act as one. The best way to play the game is with as few people as possible, in an intimate setting.

The Vibes

Compare that to the XCOM board game. This isn't an attempt to port the video game to tabletop space (that's been done with games like Level 7: Omega Protocol, which is an N-Vs-1 combat game in the same vein as the board games DOOM (2016), Imperial Assault, or Descent). Invariably, these games end up with a lot of dice rolling and complex line-of-sight rules, things often labeled as hallmarks of the "Ameritrash" genre of board games.

No, the XCOM board game takes a different approach. Instead of adapting the gameplay, it emulates the FEEL of an XCOM game: not having enough resources, having a time crunch to make difficult decisions, and choosing whether its better to lose one country over another. In some respects, it's not a very faithful adaptation, as it's a completely different experience to the video game. In other respects, it succeeds at its goal, and gives an experience of the stress and genre of the modern XCOM games.

What about RPGs?

Tabletop roleplaying games (a la Dungeons and Dragons) are an a similarly weird bind to XCOM. Some people play them as romance simulators, while others play them as combat simulators. There are those who argue that the 4th edition of D&D is the best version, because it lays bare what the game is "really" about (beating up monsters and taking their stuff) and makes that core loop fun. Others argue that it's the worst edition, because it only has rules for combat and eschews the "roleplaying" part of roleplaying games.

So what would an XCOM adaptation look like? Just like with board games, there are multiple possible approaches you could take. You could flesh out the combat system and have a slow-moving, tense game of tactics, where the chance to roll is determined entirely by swingy dice, or you could let the combat take a back seat and focus on the resource management side of things.

My take, or The part of this post that's closest to being an ad

Two years ago, I released an RPG called Cyberrats. Mechanically, it was inspired most heavily by the modern XCOM games, as well as Shadowrun (an RPG famous for being incredibly "crunchy"). Here's how I chose to handle various aspects of the adaptation. In my mind, the six most important aspects of an XCOM adaptation are:

Combat

Basebuilding

Resource Management

Specializations

Lethality

and a campaign.

I want to be clear: my goal was not to adapt XCOM, but to create a tabletop experience that feels similar to XCOM, while being its own thing. Here's how I tackled these elements.

Combat

I wanted combat to be tactical, but quick and fun. Many RPGs with heavy combat systems end up spending hours in a single encounter. I didn't want that. I used a modified version of the LUMEN system, which means that players get a number (usually 1-3) of six-sided dice (d6), roll them, and keep the highest. A 5-6 is a full success, a 3-4 is a success with consequences, and a 1-2 is a failure with consequences.

Additionally, enemies are simple (having attacks and non-combat 'moves', like inflicting status effects or activating their allies) and drop loot when defeated. Range bands are abstract (close, near, far), and missions have objectives (hack this computer, defuse a bomb, capture the VIP, and so on).

Basebuilding

My favorite part of XCOM is investing in the base to unlock new powers and abilities. In the base game of Cyberrats, there are 17 total rooms that can be built. These rooms improve healing (the clinic), offer new psychic powers or weapons (Auguary, Detonatorium, Engineering Lab), improve player characters ("Operatives") (Gym, Training Grounds), or otherwise affect gameplay. Players can choose which builds are important to them, and build them as a team in whatever order they'd like.

Excavation

The base is a 4x4 grid of rooms. The first two rooms are clear, the next tow cost 1 to clear. The second row costs 2 each to clear, and so on. In addition to clearing a space, rooms cost money to build.

Campaign and Resource Management

As fun as the missions in XCOM are, it's not a game I would play indefinitely. I play to win, with a strong probability of losing. Similarly, I know a lot of RPGs are designed to be played indefinitely, as a forever campaign. With Cyberrats, I wanted a short campaign, one that can be beat in ~10 sessions.

And I did that by tying it into resource management. The premise of Cyberrats is simple: the world is being invaded by aliens. You are interns at a megacorp, and a rival megacorp has the situation under control. Unacceptable!.

You have to sabotage the rival megacorp, fend off the alien invasion, and make sure your boss gets all the credit.

Mechanically, it looks like this: there are two "Victory Meters". One for the Interlopers (the aliens), one for Valdivian, your rival Megacorp. If either of those Victory meters reaches 10, you lose. In the first case, the aliens win. In the second case, someone else fended them off.

Players are presented with 3 missions. They choose one to fail, one to settle with dice rolls, and one to play out. Failing a mission targeting a specific faction increases that faction's victory meter. Succeeding against a faction lowers it.

There's also a third faction, the military. They don't have a victory meter, but do have some of the best loot in the game, making them a lucrative target.

In order to win the campaign, players must win a mission against each faction 3 times, and then go on a special story mission to fight the big boss form each faction. The final story mission is blowing up the mothership and saving the day.

Specializations

In XCOM, you start as raw recruits. After your first mission, you are assigned a specialization based on actions you took. After that, as you gain experience, you choose between two powerful abilities corresponding to your specialization.

In Cyberrats, you start as interns. You have very little health, and only one power. After your first mission, if you live, you choose a Career. As you gain experience, you choose between 3 abilities for specializations of that career. The careers are Vector (hacker), Trenchy (weapons specialist), Mindjob (psychic), and Ratter (mutated freak).

Lethality

In Cyberrats, you create two Operatives to send on missions. Partially, this is so you can send one on the backup mission (resolved with dice rolls based on the prowess of the assigned Operatives), and partially this is because there's a good chance your Operatives will get Injured.

Hit points are small (even the brawniest Career only starts with 9), and nothing is guaranteed. But, it's very hard to die in Cyberrats: it just becomes increasingly expensive to recover.

Conclusion

There's no wrong way to adapt a game to a new medium. I once read an article about 6 different ways to adapt a book into a movie, and these thoughts have been stewing in my mind ever since. I made some choices in bringing an XCOM-like experience to table, but I can easily imagine several other, equally valid approaches. It's all about what you want to emulate, baby.

[arrestedforhomestuckcrimes]

Is there any relationship as beautiful as an author/artist and the person who wants 2 hand them money every month... I doubt it.

[mallratsys]

Forgot we installed mods for Merrill waaah She's so cuteys

Mods; x/x

[corsairesix]

Going live!

[corsairesix]

@ale10ander

you can't spell QED without RAT DEMON

[jdnotjasondean]

The past 24 hours have been a time. Picture one taken before Lancer. Picture two taken between Call of Cthulu and Cyberrats today. Picture three taken after Cyberrats. I'm gonna hop into bed in just a few minutes and just vibe with a book.

Lancer with The Lost Caravan: https://www.twitch.tv/lostcaravanrpg

Cyberrats with RPGsUncovered: https://www.twitch.tv/rpgsuncovered

[arcturusgeneral]

Cheezbot has liked only my first post. Not helping their case right now.