You know when you watch a movie or TV show and it just gives you an idea for a RPG? Well, that happened to me. Spoilers for the Netflix series Edgerunners in the following article.

The Edgerunner Funnel Adventure

The new anime series on Netflix, Edgerunners, is pretty, entertaining, and incredibly violent. It follows the career of a young edgerunner as he rises in skill and reputation until he meets his bloody end. It has action, killer music, great animation, and a rarity for a series these days, a definitive ending. Obviously, the RPG for choice for running a campaign based on this series is Cyberpunk Red, but I had another idea.

A running theme in the show is the brief life of an edgerunner. In only 10 episodes, we see Night City in its all end-state capitalist glory, as people live and die for a few bucks. It’s worth watching and the ending has stayed with me for the last few weeks. Not many series really nail the emotional intensity required for a good ending, but it also committed to actually ending a story. So often these days everything is a setup to the next season, the next show, the next movie. This actually ended and it left me wanting more. That feeling of heartache from seeing a fully realized world with interesting characters and seeing it end is so rare now. I had missed it. I want to feel that more - wanting more but knowing that feeling just meant the story worked and it ended at the right spot. So many stories are left dragging on forever, so corporations can squeeze another product out of it.

David, the protagonist, meets a lot of edgerunners and almost all of them die horrible deaths. It reminded me of Dungeon Crawl Classic’s peasant funnel adventures. In a funnel, each player controls a group of four peasants, each a level 0 weakling with 1d4 HP and perhaps one item to their name. It would be fairly easy to reskin the funnel rules to fit a cyberpunk setting.

The central idea for a cyberpunk funnel game is the ultimate run for all edgerunners in the entire city, so each player controls a team of 4 cyberpunks. However, they’re going against the most powerful corporation in the world, in their deadly security complex, so no matter how cool or well-equipped the cyberpunks are, they’re the equivalent of peasants compared to the guards and traps of the corporation. Use the stats of DCC peasants but let the player rename their occupations and starting item to be whatever they want, but leave the game mechanics mostly unchanged.

The security complex is the dungeon and the goal of the scenario is to get a MacGuffin at its core and get it out of there. Add some side rooms with prototype weapons and items so the PCs have a chance against the guards. It’s relatively easy to remap some classic fantasy items to experimental weapons. The Wand of Wonder becomes an AI-controlled nanoswarm control device - the AI still hasn’t figured out how to interpret human commands so its effect is random each round, for example. An apparatus of Kwalish is a concealable mecha. Intelligent swords become AI-assisted firearms and so forth.

Once the surviving cyberpunks gear up and head into the final room to fight the boss, throw in a classic cyberpunk twist, like their employer has betrayed them or the facility is set to explode. Let the players make heroic last stands until only a few escape with the MacGuffin.

Episodes

​RPPR Episode 194: Game Design in Horror Movies - A fun discussion of game design concepts that pop up in horror movies. We hit on Saw, Phantasm, and a lot of other iconic films.

​RSS feeds for campaigns - I figured out a way to download specific campaigns from RPPR Actual Play. If you just want to re-listen to God's Teeth or Know Evil again, here's an easy way of doing that!

​Exploring the Witch House: An episode on Night Clerk Radio discussing a spooky genre of music, Witch House. Never heard of it? Don't worry, we explain what it is and include some samples of it.

Links

​The Black Tower: A folk horror British short film from 1987 about a sinister tower stalking the narrator.

​FIST Mad Science Game Jam: A recent game jam themed around mad science for the paranormal action RPG, FIST. Lots of cool submissions!

​2400: lo-fi sci-fi RPG that can fit on a pamphlet with many variations, including some free ones if you look around.