PSYCHOPUNK

WHAT IS THIS?

PSYCHOPUNK is a TTRPG about being poor, being psychic, and murdering law enforcement. In order to play, you need a deck of cards, a d12, paper and pencils, and a can-do attitude. It's best with one game master [A.K.A the Scripter], and 2 to 5 players.

I'll level with you: because of it's unique card based mechanics, it's best played in person. Analog solutions are where the heart is.

WHATS GOING ON?

In 1999, a corporation won the presidency. It’s called corporate personhood. Look it up in your almanac. Anyways, things went downhill from there as the line between corporation and state was scrubbed clean off.

The year is 2022. Being poor is punishable by death- or perhaps worse- Time Prison. CRT monitors are all we fuckin’ got. Synthesizers are still half the size of cars. You’ve got a patch cable in your spinal cord. Life is bad.

You are poor. But you’re also psychic, which very few lowly peasants such as yourself are. This means that where most people in your situation are rat meat, you are (probably) alive. For now.

If you want to keep it that way, you’ll need to evade the law, keep up on your Double Dollars ($$), and scuz some fucking corpos before they scuz you.

HOW DOES IT PLAY?

Like a wild stallion. Reader, here's a promise from me to you: every mechanic in this game has its roots in my frankly unhealthy fascination with these three things:

1. 90's Cyberpunk

2. Hong Kong action

3. Analog synthesizers.

This means that the game is built from the ground up to replicate the thing that those 3 have in common. They play like being kicked in the head. As in, you should feel it. It borrows from FPSs like Dusk and Doom, card games like Egyptian Rat Screw, and movies like The Matrix, Police Story, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

If you like those movies and games, or you like being the underdog, or you just like fast-paced combat and non-gimmick hacking mechanics, this is for you.

WHAT AM I BUYING?

The rule book (20 pages). That includes:

• 12 unique life paths for your character to stitch together during their creation- totaling in over 1,000 possible histories. You could play the student turned getaway driver turned time-prisoner, or the killer turned resistance leader turned... dead. Start over.
• 10 in-game magazines for your character to browse, and get their starting equipment.
• 8 distinct and flavorful signature weapons to choose between- ranging from swords to shotguns.
• 12 powerful psychic abilities locked in secret discs for you to uncover and steal.
• Simple, novel, and engaging hacking mechanics- with driving and racing mechanics to match.
• Quick, deadly, and modern combat mechanics- with an emphasis on ease of running and maximizing of tactility.
• 19 enemy types to populate the world. The combinations and arenas you find them in are the real challenge, from lowly Jawbreakers to horrifying Escaped Product Testers.
• Anything and everything you need to run the game, except your own imagination.

Also included:

• 2 types of character sheets: a simple black and white version designed to print, and an on-brand digital colored version for docs and word.
• A quick 1 page reference sheet for important rules.
• 'Bank', a piece of flash fiction set in the world of Psychopunk to get the setting ideas flowing in your head.
• 'Junkyard', a full short story set in the world of Psychopunk, if Bank didn't get the ideas flowing quite enough.
• A copy of the base rules set with none of the images, formatted in black and white for ease of printing.

I also consider this game to be a living document. That is, feedback is invited and appreciated, as I intend to update it and add new content as time goes on, should there be a demand for it.