RPG: Cities Without Number Brings Cyberpunk to Stars Without Number
Cities Without Number is a sandbox cyberpunk TTRPG that’s designed to fill out numberless worlds of digital dystopias.
One of the sleeper-hit RPG systems out there are the “…Without Number” games. This includes Stars Without Number, the sci-fi-originating title, which, among other things, includes some of the most robust worldbuilding tools I’ve ever read. As well as Worlds Without Number, the fantasy counterpart.
Now, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Cities Without Number has hit the wilds. And it brings all the fun of Cyberpunk to the forefront of your tabletop games. If you want something designed to handle all sorts of weird little subsystems, the Without Number games are perfect at this. So when the game promises to deliver hacking rules that don’t feel tacked on, it feels like they might actually live up to it.
Better still, the game is absolutely free. Or you can get the Deluxe Edition which comes with even more rules, including:
- Cyberware quirks and features for particular megacorp product lines
- Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don’t fit the baseline mold
- Optional rules for the psychological strain of Cyber Alienation
- Optional rules for cheap street cyber, for those campaign settings where every goon with a knife has some wire beneath his skin
- Spellcasting, spirit summoning, and magical items for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world
Cities Without Number
The world is neon and dust.
Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It’s both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.
In its pages, you’ll find…
- An old-school inspired game system that’s fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
- Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
- Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
- Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
- System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
- Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
- Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, selling loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere
- The default campaign setting of the City, a premade backdrop to help you get into the game as quickly as possible
It might take a neuromancer to deal with all this chrome, so try to keep your cyberware count zero, try not to go into Mona Lisa overdrive.
