The Pick Up Pile. Pondering Interface Red Volume 3 & Cyberpunk Red Data Screen. [UPDATED]

Heyyyyyy Night City, welcome to another pondering post here on the Pick Up Pile! Tonight after the body lottery we’ll get right on to covering Interface Red Volume 3 for Cyberpunk Red. Then we’ll take a look at the Data Screen .pdf for the same game.

First up, Interface Red Vol.3 a book I’ve been wanting to get my grubby little mitts on as soon as I heard it had the full body conversion rules for CPRed in it. It’s a 114 page pdf, I’ll update with details of the print version when that arrives.

[UPDATE]

Now my print copy has arrived. It’s a solidly put together softcover colour book with matte finish pages. Due to the page count it feels more substantial than previous interface volumes, as it’s about the size of the previous two put together. It’s the same width and height as Vol.2, so slightly taller than Vol.1.

I did notice large areas of flat colour, such as the red in chart borders and solid black areas are a little lighter than in Vol.2, and more than in the standard print run CPRed books. This isn’t too severe and I think I only noticed it due to a once-professional background in colour matching. Also, oddly this volume has two blank white pages at the end, I guess due to the amount of pages of content being one less than the required paper for the volume.

Top left: Interface Red Vol 2. Bottom Left: Vol 1. Right: Vol 3.

Neither of the above minor issues really detract from the book in any way. It’s a well put together book, reminiscent of some of the Chrome Books for CP2020, and I’m glad I picked it up.

[END OF UPDATE]

The first chapter is Hardened Mini Bosses, for when your players have optimised their characters so well and you need a ready made ass-kicker to give them some challenge. The Hardened Pyro upgrade to the Pyro from the core book being the easiest to do a direct comparison with, and yeah, this will catch cocky players out. Just make sure your players can take it.

Next up, Digital Dating in the Dark Future, a series of lifepath like tables that simulate dating in your characters downtime. I didn’t think this would be that useful to me at first but I’ve come around on it. the main reason is that whilst the lifepath creates characters for the GM to use from a characters history, this can create someone that’s here and now in the game.

January 2022: Character Creation Challenge. Part Twenty Two

Saturday means Cyberpunk, so for our fourth character we’re back to Cyberpunk 2020, and we have the Techie Alex “Tinker” Taylor.

As I mentioned with the last CP2020 character tech skills in this edition were expensive, with many of them being double cost to learn, even basic tech. This leads to either having to dump a lot of points into them and lacking in other areas which would round them out, or spending less and not being that good at their role. Really glad that got sorted out for RED which makes a lot of the skills regular point price.

Also as I wanted Alex here to be a big cyberware user, as fits a detached tech type, I needed more cash than the starting amount so took the organised crime option. The extra really helped flesh (heh) them out gear wise, deciding on the parts fitted helped solidify their look, and who they owe the debt to offers a really useful look into their morality and provides a good roleplaying hook.

Back to RED for the last cyberpunk character next week.

Oh yeah and the names a play on the Tinker Tailor childrens’ rhyme, or the novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, whichever you prefer.

January 2022: Character Creation Challenge. Part Eight

Back round to Saturday again for day eight, and back to almost where I started with TTRPGs. This Cyber Saturday is for Cyberpunk 2020. Whilst I had played a few RPGs over the years before this, CP2020 is where I really go into the hobby in a big way, running a campaign in a consistent game world for about a year sometime in the late 90s. So this brings us to the character of Morton Backlund.

From the lifepath and events rolled I see Morton as someone who was part of a Nomad family, but operated more as a guard or outrider, hence the Solo skillset. The injury in the last year being what kept him in Night City as his family moved on. However he found that, when he recovered, it was a lucrative place for him to use his skills.

One thing I noticed going back to 2020 after spending time with RED was how much Tech based characters get shafted buying skills in this version (will be more obvious in the next 2020 character). So many tech skills have multipliers on their point cost that it really does cut down on what they can learn.

And yeah the name is a mangling of Morgan Blackhand, it was just amused by the idea of someone getting a hitman job based on a mishearing of their name.