Review: Cy_Borg

Ever since Swedish ‘art-punk’ RPG MÖRK BORG hit the scene like a particularly garish asteroid back in 2019, it has inspired a shockwave of creativity. Other indie titles since have certainly pulled in more money but it’s fair to say few have established such a vibrant community, with a veritable cottage industry springing up to publish third party content for the game. From shower curtains, comics and musical albums to single page pamphlet adventures and even substantial hacks of the game, the RPG scene has rarely looked so colourfully horrific.

After recent, lavish third party releases that have relocated the game everywhere from a sorcerous Caribbean to the trenches of an alternative World War I, CY_BORG is the first official spin-off with Johan Nohr, the game’s original artist and graphic designer, joined by fellow swede Christian Sahlén, and taking us away from the rotblack fantasy sludge of Galgenbeck and into the year 20X3 and the dystopian city of CY.

Now, just as MÖRK BORG was about as subtle as an Iron Maiden album cover, CY_BORG doesn’t exactly shy away from nailing its neon colours to the mast. CY is a miserable, megacorp infested megalopolis with what feels like every cyberpunk trope, much like Nohr’s art, turned up to 12 till it becomes a distorted howl of rage.

Is it a nuanced, subtle satire of the capitalist excesses of today? No, not even vaguely, it’s about as heavy handed as a T-800. Honestly though I’m not sure why you’d be looking for nuance from the people whose first game gave you a gore streaked femur as a starting weapon and commanded you to burn its rule book at the end of play. Anyway, have you read the news lately, or even just had a conversation online about the films of Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven? Subtlety in dystopian satire feels about as redundant as our AI tech overlords are trying to make most of us in the real world.

Much like MÖRK BORG’s setting, CY is an evocative yet shallow thing, a gasoline stained puddle reflecting a city’s sins back at it. Its many miseries blasted at you in a shotgun spray of hypocrisy and horror, just enough of a look at its stygian depths for you to push on build the rest at your own table. Likewise the rules have been kept to a minimum, if you’ve played the original game you’ll be able to get to grips with it straight away whilst those who haven’t will still be able to pick up the basics in the time it takes to roll on a few tables and create their first character. 

Either way you’ll be ready to go within minutes and once the action does start we’re very much in rules-lite, OSR adjacent territory here. All rolls are player-facing, with tests made by trying to hit a target number on a d20 plus relevant stat. Magic in all its forms is basically replaced by a combination of nanotech, hacking, drugs and cybernetics and, much like its parent game, PCs are fragile things, easy to break if you get too excited and just as easily replaced. For all that though there’s just the one inviolable rule in the book, PCs must never be ‘loyal to, or express sympathy for the corps, the cops or the capitalist system.'

And that’s pretty much it, there’s a selection of horrible things to try and kill your players with, all the tables you might need to create NPCs, locations, adversaries and adventures on the fly and a sample adventure, the casino heist Lucky Flight Takedown, but as you’d expect by now, most of the book is given over to Nohr’s anxiously glitchy artwork and bombastic use of type, all of which sets the tone with its admirable lack of restraint.

The game perhaps lacks some of the bathetic humour of its predecessor, likely fuelled by it being a somewhat closer approximation to our own benighted reality, but even if this world is nothing but a fucked up simulation CY_BORG at least offers you a chance to take a few corps down with you before the whole thing resets again.

Writing: Christian Sahlén
Art & design: Johan Nohr
Published by Stockholm Kartell

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 4 (April '23)