CBR + PNK Augmented Review — big ideas almost fit in this small package

Portable, stylish, and mostly comprehensible, CBR + PNK Augmented brings a lot to the table. This set of 12 pamphlets contains resources for rules, characters, adventures, NPCs, and setting options in a Cyberpunk RPG about running heists and trying to get out alive. Pamphlets offer different strengths and weaknesses than a typical RPG sourcebook, but the designers of CBR + PNK didn’t lean into those strengths as hard as they should have. The set more than makes up for its $30 price tag with replayability and options, but it doesn’t quite manage to live up to its own potential.

The slim, transportable package contains a lot of material. Much like a job’s briefcase, the slip opens up on two sides to reveal six glossed cardboard pamphlets. Inside you will find: a rules summary, six dry erase character sheets, a set of GM advice, a set of NPC hunters and generation rules, and four settings/adventures. What art there is is lovely. Detailed without being busy, it communicates setting and tone without venturing into the much-decried realm of “style over substance” artpunk that detracts from readability. Those complaints are overblown, by the way, as style can do a lot of legwork to communicate tone and theme, but that’s a rant for another time. The one real flaw here is that the book tries to highlight useful terms, but that applies to so many words that the overall writing can get busy and cluttered. The settings cover a decent range, from Shadowrun-esque fantasy to space station disaster to faction based corporate espionage. Taken together with the basic cyberpunk staples, you have room for a reasonable number of games based on this module.

CBR + PNK is a Forged in the Dark product, basing its mechanics on famed heist-RPG Blades in the Dark. The engine runs on clocks, basically trackers for positive and negative effects that get powered by succeeding or failing on rolls. The simplest would be an alarm level versus your infiltration attempt. Successful rolls will add Effect to the infiltration, while failure adds Threat to the alarm level. Whichever fills first ultimately denotes success or failure on a given mission or task. There could be several clocks nested together, leading to a domino effect if enough things go wrong enough. Characters have four Approaches and eleven available Skills, and each roll consists of rolling Approach+Skill in d6s and checking the highest die for success, partial success, or failure. You have some options to increase Threat and Effect, pushing your luck on a given roll and Consequences come from failure, which could inhibit your character or make the situation worse. You will also accumulate stress over time, which you can try to reduce by using equipment to resist Consequences. When at maximum stress, you lose effectiveness and expose your team somehow.

CBR+PNK has rules for cyberwear, equipment, and magical abilities in one of the supplements. The main mechanical draws come from glitches, flashbacks, and angle rolls. Negative consequences could inflict glitches, making one of your dice less effective. The angle roll comes in at the end of the adventure, summarizing where your character goes next after this job. Flashbacks are a callback to FitD’s heist origins: in a bad situation, you have the option of cutting back to before the job started, to explain how you prepared for this problem. Probably the most controversial feature, this cuts out the planning phase of the heist. You start right at the action, and work your way backwards as necessary to keep things moving forward.

Overall these rules are simple and elegant, but not uniformly well communicated. It’s here that I need to digest the one real flaw of CBR + PNK: the way the writing is integrated into the product. I’ll be writing a lot on this, but that’s mostly because that problem is an interesting point to learn from, as it has a lot to say about game design and presentation. This is a good game, and one I recommend, but there’s no escaping the fact that it could have been great if the designers had reoriented their thinking a little more around the differences between a rulebook and a set of pamphlets.

You see, CBR + PNK comes in a series of pamphlets, but it’s written like it’s just a book. The base mechanics are simple, and could be communicated in a few clean lines of if/then statements, like programming. This is a problem I come across in a lot of RPGs, but it’s more pronounced here because conciseness is the entire point of a pamphlet product. Why do the mechanics get poured out over a series of paragraphs when they could more easily be delivered as a series of quick references? This could be built like a GM’s screen, as an easily referenceable summary of the mechanics. The space and word count actually make the rules harder to understand than they would be otherwise. Let me give you a quick example from D&D: for the base mechanic, I could tell you it’s 1d20+skill bonus vs. DC. I could alternately tell you:

“First, pick up the twenty-sided die and move your hand in a back and forth motion, then throw it onto the table so that it rolls. When it stops, look at the number on top of the die. Check your character sheet (under skills) for the positive or negative value, and add or subtract that from the roll. If the final number meets or exceeds the Difficulty Class set by the Dungeon Master, you have succeeded. If it is lower, you have failed. The Dungeon Master should describe the results of your actions and continue with the game.”

I know I’m being a little unfair and hyperbolic, but the above should translate what it feels like to read through this. The basics of rolling and applying Threat or Effect, maybe incorporating advantages/disadvantages, are extremely simple. Why then are they sprawled out over most of the pamphlet? Resisting Consequences is referenced multiple times in the rules explanation, but only actually explained in the character sheets. Why does this not have a single unified rules reference? I know the resistance rules are player facing, but so is basically everything. The Hunter section similarly gives you tools to modify the NPCs, but why? They are already basically pre-made and this is a system for one-shots, so how much effort will you want to spend generating NPCs? Many sections, like character generation and character rules summaries, suffer from this same verbosity. (Yes I know how it sounds for me of all people to make that complaint, but here we are.)

The back of the GM advice guide is the gold standard for what I think this could have been. It’s a quick, readable tool for making adventures and getting the game running. Perfect for something built from the ground up to be delivered in a series of short snippets.

That all said, the rules are good, the art is fantastic, and the price is more than reasonable for something that has this much replayability. It being a oneshot product, it’s a half step down in complexity than a full rulebook, but it’s also cheaper and easier to transport, and the simplicity is part of the inherent draw. If you want to carry an RPG with you and quickly get some players involved, this is a great way to go. I hope to see more experimentation with this type of product, and more refinement of its many strengths.

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