Science Fiction | Roleplaying Games | Money

Rich People Murdered the World | Cy_Borg

Davos Man hates you, explained with a roleplaying game

“Nu-Capitalists rule from glass towers in Central. / Immortal OG Money Aristocrats in gated mansions, in gated communities, in gated enclaves in the Hills.”

- Cy_Borg, page 6

This week the Bastards of the Universe will gather in Davos for an orgy of influence formally known as the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.

In an alternate universe, President Katy Porter will order a B3 to bomb the site. Afterwards, it will be revealed that all the servers, janitors, and fake activists and government officials were really terminal cancer patients who volunteered to keep up appearances and lull the various CEOs and investors into a false sense of security. They will all receive medals posthumously.

I want to move to that universe.

Davos is full of supervillans who either think they’re heroes, or know they’re villains and don’t care. They’re just buying time and scoring PR points. This is all possible because of the clueless activists who think they can convince The Rich to actually follow through on their zillion dollar pledges.

Rich people should not run the world. They’re not that great at anything other than ripping people off.

Cy_Borg is bluntly anti-Rich and anti-Corporate

“The crimes here are white collar: financial, high yields, low convictions. The rich remain above the law.”

— Cy_Borg, page 10

In Cy_Borg, Rich People might as well be gods. They live in The Hills behind mountains of security. They are untouchable, immoral, and possibly immortal. The Rich get away with everything.

There’s no fighting the power in Cy_Borg. Unlike Spire or Cryptomancer, Cy_Borg gives no hope for getting out from under it. All you can do is occasionally work for The Man while you LOATH THEM WITH EVERY FIBER OF YOUR BEING.

Only a few of Cy_Borg’s “monsters” are corporate goons and drones and whatnot. Most are cults and gangers and sci-fi monstrosities, but that’s mostly an issue because there is no government to sort those out. The Corps ARE the government, and they feel no urge to protect anyone other than themselves or anything except their own property and interests.

The book is a shockingly gorgeous mess

The color scheme is jarring. Fonts, type size, and style radically change from page to page. Sometimes styles repeat, and more often then not opposite pages feature godlike spreads. Otherwise, anything goes.

It’s sometimes a bit hard to read, but that’s what makes it fun. Fuck user friendliness and legibility.

The superpowers are nightmarish

One of the MANY things that make Cy_Borg’s world a nightmare are the bacterial remnants of a fallen meteor. That bacteria corrupted what should be typical sci-fi nanotech. Each Nano Power comes with a Infestation: a mutation that causes anything from inconvenience to crippling pain.

Your body might be home to Benevolent Suturedroids, but also Alien Crabs that painfully burrow deeper into you whenever you roll bad. Or, maybe you can bend light like Predator, but your body temperature is so low its debilitating.

Cy_Borg illustrates Social Murder

“Locked safely behind gates upon gates, the hills and valleys away from the urban expanse of the Ports and Central crawl with fortress-like villas and mansions swallowed by private parks and frivolous splendor. The higher you climb, the greater the luxury, the tighter the security.“

— Cy_Borg, page 21

“The slums are mangled by the weight of their wounds. Gangs fight the cults, the cults fight the militias; an uncontrollable spiral of violence, drugs and destruction to determine who is in control of the detritus of Cy.”

— Cy_Borg, page 17

Cy, the city featured in the game, is the way it is because without desperation, the Rich couldn’t stay rich. Again, the Corporations are the government, and it’s actually worse than neo-feudalism. The Corps don’t actually need that many workers to stay operational. They don’t even need economic stability. They need desperate people to buy their shit.

Forget the alien bacteria. Rich people are the aliens. They have nothing in common with normal people. Elon Musk. Donald Trump. Jamie Dimon. Jeff Bezos. They are completely disconnected from you and me and everyone we know. They don’t know what our lives are like and the don’t care, unless they think they can exploit it.

And now, everything is dying. Not just the world. Not just humans. Humanity itself. The Rich killed off the very thing that makes us decent and hopeful. We are not humans anymore. We’re just animals now, locked into permanent survival mode and willing to eat each other to live one more day.

And the Nu-Capitalists have no reason to change any of it.

The rules are scrumptiously elegant

“YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO BREAK EVERY SINGLE RULE IN THIS BOOK. EXCEPT THIS ONE.

RULE #00

Player Characters cannot be loyal to or have sympathy for the corps, the cops, or the capitalist system.”

- Cy_Borg, page 37

The Combat rules take up only two pages, and optional rules to spice things up take two more. The rest of the mechanics are scattered across the rest of the book, but most of them are summarized on two pages in the back.

The game is straightforward and easy to grok. More complexity would ruin it.

If it’s not Fake News, it’s Bad News

Like it’s predecessor, Cy_Borg counts down to the end of the campaign. Every midnight, the GM rolls a die. A 1 triggers one of 37 Miserable Headlines. After 7 Miserable Headlines, the game ends, regardless of what the characters were doing.

The headlines hold a hideously twisted mirror to our own doomscrolling. “The UCS-Alliansen War Escalates”. “Ammo Prices Skyrocket!” “Tap Water Advisory!” The details are more nihilistically ludicrous than real life news, but not by much.

Cy_Borg’s creator community might kneecap D&D’s new OGL

A neo-flamewar broke out on Twitter when Wizards of the Coast tried to update its Open Game License. Third party publishers are now shopping for new rulesets to license. A few larger publishers have pledged to collectively develop an Open RPG Creative (ORC) license and a new ruleset, but I doubt it’ll happen any time soon.

A lot of creators are finding that Mörk Borg and Cy_Borg have fairly permissive third party licenses. There are plenty of creator supplements already, and more are inevitable. Mörk Borg and Cy_Borg’s footprint will get bigger over the next year.

There aren’t enough official supplements

This might be Cy_Borg’s only flaw. There’s only a handful of official supplements for Mörk Borg, and Stockholm Cartel will probably repeat that trend for Cy_Borg. Because there’s so much third party stuff, they don’t need to make much more.

While most third party Cy_Borg supplements are at least decent, the quality will tank if the game breaks out of the artpunk niche. Then the market might be flooded with half-ass pamphlets with unimaginative AI generated art, containing only one class or two guns or a boring location. This may happen after the D&D movie releases if my prediction proves out.

Aside from the alien bacteria stuff, Cy_Borg’s future is probably ours too. Black rain. Rivers and oceans full of garbage. Guns everywhere. Desperation. Starvation. Drought. Plagues. Death.

And it’s all because of Davos Man. Sure, a lot of them actually think they’re helping. Some even think they can turn all this around WITHOUT taxing the rich.

But too many are just stalling and quietly cashing out, all while they avoid paying taxes. Most of The Rich are just there to bribe whichever government official happens to cross their path. Once the sentry guns around their antarctic bunker-mansions are fully operational, they won’t bother keeping up appearances.