This will be a long one, I was giving thought about how many stars i would get it. I have only been playing ttrpgs for at least 4 years, i think and of course it was D&D but moved on to Pathfinder 2e but all that wouldn't happen if a friend didn't introduce other ttrpgs like VTM 20th or COC to me, i wouldn't had branch out. So i took the plunge to being a player to a gm, first it was Pf2e and it was wonderful, it help a new gm like me. Then one day, Cyberpunk 2077 came out of nowhere then Edgerunners but i had already knew about Red and that was thanks to certain youtubers like Seth, Jon Jon, and Dice and RT themselves and others. So i took the plunge into it, Red is more streamline than 2020 but still have a little crunch to it. It has tools to help you create PC's and on the GM side, it goes into depth about the settings and the timeline and rules, and to me, that's awesome! Of course, you will hear people said the layout is a little wonky especially if you get the book but me personally i don't have a problem with it but i do just have the pdf and the hyperlinks are great! It's better to me as a pdf than book but that just me. As a newish GM, this is great, once you read and keep playing it, it will start coming together. Also the free DLCs they release for the game adds even more fun and depth to Red. Sorry for long review but i hope you enjoy Red! See you later in Night City, chooms!!

Has some good ideas but doesn't hold up to the legacy of CP2020 for me. It's gone too far into superhero territory from having the characters be cheap meat sacks in a grim world of ultra-capitalism. It's much more sanitised than the original and I don't really like it. I took most of the things I perceive as good in this book and just made my own rules based on it.

For the editing, it repeats information in various places but those repetitions don't always say the same things. It's not terribly easy to find rules in between the lore quips either and I used the PDF when I ran this RAW. The best part is probably the art and even that feel less punk to me than what many other rulebooks of this genre offer.

Lovely book, with simple, streamlined rules that are easy to understand and explain to others, a setting that feels alive and evocative and interesting to explore, great art, and some nice dark (sometimes hitting depressingly close to home in the real world) lore.

I just really wish I had waited 2 more weeks to get it because then I could've gotten the Humble Bundle with this and CP2020 + extras for the same price I paid for this book

Cyberpunk RED has quickly become a top favourite system to run and play in. If I had one complaint it's that information can be scattered over multiple sections and chapters and can require a lot flipping back and forth to find. But that's a minor complaint compared to how fun the system and setting are to play.

Well-presented and very easy to play. This is a fantastic TTRPG experience..

It's a little messy, but it's still well made, and the fake ads in it build up on the world itself. The art (both on the cover and in the book) were made with love and I can't help but to respect it and suggest it (which I clearly do seeing as I own both a hardback and a digital copy to be able to lend the book out to the players and still have all the info needed to look it up myself.)

On a sidenote my favorite piece of artwork on it is on page 52 (technically 53 on the digital copy, because the cover is page 1)

Cyberpunk Red is everything you could want out of a base sourcebook. Everything you need to start a cyberpunk game is right here as well as an incredibly developed world and hub city. I, as a GM, greatly appreciated their tools and resources included.

I will say, the Cyberpunk Red Companion App is a must for running games. It really revolutionized the GM process for me and I am happy I was made aware of it before starting my first campaign.

Back to the book though, one problem I ran into is the lack of a glossary for quick references. I found myself jumping back to main headers and then having to scan through sections to try and find what I was looking for. But, overall, Cyberpunk Red is an excellent starting point and I, also, highly recommend the expansion books, especially for GMs. Tales of the Red really helped me run the campaign as I was getting a feel for where I wanted the actual story to go, Black Chrome gave my players some preem spending goals and gave me some great bonus loot to hide for the players to find. The Interface Volumes are also a great compendium of the free DLCs with a splash of extras to really earn their price. Highly recommend all RED products.

5 sessions in, a lot of fleshed out mechanics with the end result being fast and fun gameplay. As someone who came from D&D and players who have this as either their first ttrpg or also came from D&D, they all find it quite simple (only d10s and d6s). Can be overwhelming to being with as a DM. Would reccomend the JonJon the Wise youtube channel as he has some good stuff on how to run some of the stuff I found that I skimmed over but turned out to be important. Fun game, play it.

Absolutely brilliant, but not perfect

I have fallen deeply in love with the world of Cyberpunk because of this game, and my group has been enjoying it immensely!(we have just run The Apatment). It's my second ever ttrpg system outside D&D 5E and I have been thoroughly impressed by the system's nuance and flexibility for things like called shots and critical injuries in combat, not to mention the dizzying array of skills listed to cover just about anything you can think of. After reading through the core book and watching some great youtube videos (JonJontheWise and Seth Skorkowsky are invaluable) I feel I have a handle on the system to a competent level now and I am looking forward to exploring the Time of The Red with my group.

The art in this book is stunning and the narrative thread throughout the whole book really adds to the feeling of authenticity. I loved the stories and particularly liked how they were used as examples for other sections like the Beats Breakdown (also invalubale for any GM/Writer).

My only criticisms are that the combat system (whilst fun, exciting and deadly) is quite diffciult to understand without outside clarification like interviews with the designers or veteran players breaking it down for you. The rules for things like cover are very unclear in particular (turns out it's more like XCOM with overwatching and holding actions to shoot people popping up). Another criticism is that whilst the number of skills on offer is comprehnesive, I found it can really slow down gameplay when you are trying to figure out which skill to roll from the list if it isn't immediately obvious (isn't bribery persuasion?).

Overall this is still a brilliant game that is well worth your time and investment. The book is phenomenal both as a system and a collection of stunning art, stories and more that will transport you to Night City and make you feel like Trace Santiago himself is laying it all out for you.

P.S. The advice for GMs in this book is top notch and compatible with any system. Highly Recommend.

There are some great ideas in here and some improvements on older system, there are also some really dumb things in here.

Been playing cyberpunk since I picked up a copy of the original in 1989.

I love the new cyberspace rules.

The combat system is a joke compared to the previous systems.

2 examples:

• Suppressive fire does no damage, just makes people run for cover. No chance of anybody being hit, at all?

  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=THE+SOMME

• Shotguns - This is not how buckshot works. Diagram shows 6 yards by 6 yards from the muzzle of the shotgun.

  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=effective+range+of+buckshot+12+gauge

It seems the crit system is the fudge that makes the combat system more dangerous.

EDIT I saw a podcast with the combat desginer and the guy is a completely uneducated and has done zip research. Also I noted a flip comment about his suppressive fire rules stopping "people climbing out of trenches like in wonder woman" Ahem, how a bit of respect for the people who did in real life? Especially when you release a product that close to armastice day. Typical attitude from his type.
More proof, if needed that they let the intern do the combat system. Check out Twilight 2000 for some better ideas.

Pros:

Cyberspace rules

Item Creation

Cons:

Combat system

Information repeated too many times, including a couple of pages just after it has been written.

50/50:

Generic economy and items.

Rest of system has some small tweaks if any to previous versions.

Overall:

it moves the timeline on, handy for the 2077 tie in.

Seems like 5th Edition A&D but for cyberpunk.

Bland and weak.

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY TRYING TO POLISH THIS TURD.

I never played any earlier versions of Cyberpunk, but have been playing RPGs for 25 years. I am running a red game after watching some 2020 reviews and just know tuning red would be easier to get the books in physical form. The rules are simple to pick up and run. It is a pain to convince some players they have to find jobs. My group is used to working for guilds, so jobs are just listed. For the book itself it is okay. I love the art and it is easy to understand a rule when you can find it. The layout is a pain. You have to jump all over the book to make a character. The flow chart helps, but you have to dig to find information out about the chrome you just got.

I say this as someone who played this game religiously when it first came out, this system is an example of wasted potential.

When the corebook came out, it was a great example of a modern take on a cyberpunk TTRPG. It was simple, elegant, easy to run and captured the tone of the genre well. However, it was extremely simple, poorly balanced in some areas and had a tendency in practice to produce largely similar characters as players started to realize how unsatisfying many of the game's options are. The effect of is that if you GM for enough players, you tend to see the same character build repeated largely because it simply breaks the game in how powerful it is.

Part and parcel with this simplicity was that some of the game's features were incredibly lacklustre. Certain abilities and options, such as the lawman's backup ability, just didn't really add enough to justify their existence. The netrunning system, while commonly praised for its simplicity, is incredibly limiting to the creativity of GMs and players and by and large feels samey once you've hacked enough turrets.

While these downsides were very clear and understood by much of the playerbase, there always remained the possibility of improvement, and with a few changes the system could have become a masterpiece. Unfortunately, however, the developers' priorities don't seem to lie with this sort of improvement. New content for the game has largely followed two main streams: Joke options that largely add nothing to the game besides the entertainment on initially reading it, and options which, rather than fix these underlying problems, actively make them worse.

The developers have all but rejected any idea that there is aspects of the corebook that could be improved. After 2 years of errata, PDFs and their first major sourcebook, they have leaned into the idea that the best way forward is to accept these flaws and add more items the the system that are by and large either useless, or game-breakingly powerful, simultaneously doing nothing to round out weaker options while making the strongest options in the game even better.

The end result of all this is a system that, at first seemed to cleverly balance combat with social gameplay and other forms of storytelling, but now largely focuses on wargaming style combat with very little happening outside of that. This would be ok if Red had a particularly compelling combat system, but instead it is slow, painfully simple and with very few tactical options that actually consistently feel good or work effectively.

It really is unfortunate that this is the case. I was excited to see how this system developed, especially alongside RTG's other current major system The Witcher. After seeing what RTG is putting out to support this system however, I can't really in good conscience recommend it.

Incredible work from R. Talsorian games. The game flies like a bullet fired from a brand new Rhinemetall EMG-86 Railgun. Combat is fluid, detailed enough to be fun and refreshing even after becoming adept at the system but not too detailed to slow the game down. Rules are written clearly and make sense. Lots of useful information about lore, building your own cyberpunk world and preparing a session. My group ported our WoD game into the RED system and I am planning to use it in the future for any modern or sci-fi game I concoct.

This review is after reading the core rulebook and running some missions based of the Easy Mode mission and the Starter Kit adventure. Overall I like the system, I feel like I still haven't 100% "gotten" it yet.

I'm playing in Foundry VTT, and combat feels like it takes a little long, I'm wondering if I'm missing some tactics to speed things up. But I really really like the Netrunning and the Apartment was a very fun scenario.

I'll try and come back and update this review after running some more sessions.

So one of my choombas mentioned that he'd like to play some Cyberpunk one of these days, after playing Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. I was delighted. I already had the Jumpstart Kit, in fact, in an earlier Cyberpunk humble bundle I bought quite a few Cyberpunk 2020 books, but I went ahead and purchased RED. I wanted to see if the game became streamlined enough so that I could throw my friend's casual butt right into it.

Yeah, we are NOT going to play this game.

Cyberpunk RED suffers from an identity crysis. It wants to be more streamlined, but in some areas it overshoots streamlining (e.g. brandless-generic weapons, or the suppressive fire rule), and in others it doesn't go far enough (I firmly believe that the number of skills could be halved in the game by conjoining massively overlapping skills, maybe even STATs). The classes are almost all one trick ponies. I just can't wrap my head around having a gargantuan library of skills that anybody can progress in and then implementing this... this "parallel skill system", I suppose, with the dumbest stuff being arbitrarily tied to classes (roles and role abilities, sorry).

Let's take for example the Charismatic Impact role ability, which influences what kind of venues the Rockerboy can play and how many fans they possibly have, or, if they can convert people to be their fans. Why?! Why tie these to a specific ability? This is exactly the character stuff that should be roleplayed, and the game even has skills to show how awesome of a performer the charater is, or how easily they can impress masses of people or can strike deals, without this dumb "role ability."

In the end, I have found myself reading through the book, thinking "okay, I'm going to have to house rule this" and "yeah, I'm just going to leave out that entirely." I got about 3/4 through, when epiphany hit and I slammed the book shut, exclaiming "you know what, f--k you man" loudly. If I have to handweave or override half of your rules in your book, then your rules are crap.

The only reason I'm not giving it 1 star is that the art is nice, and it isn't a completely, utterly disfunctional game, so you COULD play it if you wanted. IF you wanted, that is, because the layout of the book will not make it easy on you.

For myself, I think I'm just going to grab the Cyberpunk 2077 setting and play in it with a setting-agnostic game system, accepting the fact that I the only thing I got from purchasing RED is buyer's remorse.