Cyberpunk Edgerunners RPG starter kit lets you roleplay in the animated series' Night City
Rip, hack and run through 2077's excellent prequel series.
The design studio behind the longrunning Cyberpunk tabletop RPG have seized on the success of Netflix’ Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, by announcing a new starter kit set in the animated series’ version of a dystopian future America.
The Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit will contain the essential rules for R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk Red, the most recent iteration designed by Mike and Cody Pondsmith and building on the previous success of Cyberpunk 2020.
Our world might not be the exact flavour of darkpunk the elder Pondsmith imagined back in 1989, as Cyberpunk Red casts its timeline forward to 2045. The Mission Kit will go even further, borrowing the setting of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 video game as a way of introducing new hackers, runners, rippers and punks to the tabletop experience.
R. Talsorian Games said in a press release that the studio is working in conjunction with CDPR on the starter set and will let players explore Night City as it appears in the animated show, which takes place about a year before the events of Cyberpunk 2077.
Animated by Studio Trigger of Promare fame, Edgerunners follows a young boy who enters a world of mercenary work, body hacking and counter-corporate espionage after a tragedy strips the life he once knew away from him. The streaming series received glowing reviews, including high marks for worldbuilding, making it an easy bridge from the existing 2077 fandom to Cyberpunk Red’s roleplay ruleset.
The mission kit will contain lore primers on Night City, who and what Edgerunners are and a broad overview of the Dark Future in which all four of the RPG’s editions have taken place. Like its genre namesake, Cyberpunk’s world is ruled by hyper-capitalist forces, oppressive wealth stratification and corruption among every level of government and society. Illicit drugs and tech flood the black market, and body modification empower would-be Cyberpunks, or Edgerunners, with the skills to pay the literal bills, at a high cost.
This will be the first time Cyberpunk Red has engaged with the 2077 timeline created by CDPR for their latest video game. Pondsmith told Dicebreaker back in March that 2077 sourcebook was always in the cards but that they wanted to focus on filling the interim timeline and exploring that narrative space first.
The Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit is currently in development, but R. Talsorian Games told Dicebreaker in an email that the studio isn’t quite ready to share more details. In the meantime, check out our review of Cyberpunk Red, along with an interview with the people behind its creation.