R. Talsorian Games is at it again, expanding their interface series of books for Cybeprunk RED. Time for the review of Interface RED Volume 3! Let’s dive in!
Notice: an electronic copy of this work was provided to me for review by R. Talsorian Games at my request.
Background
R. Talsorian Games has taken a unique approach to expanding Cyberpunk RED. They release regular free DLC, and at regular intervals, they bundle it in print and add a print exclusive element, and release it on the world. Interface RED Volume 2 brought back Exotics, the extreme body sculpts and cyberware mods that make walking the street in Night City truly unique. And Volume 1? It brought us a bunch of new drones! So, carrying on in that tradition, Volume 3 is bringing full body cyborg conversion. And more.
The Contents
The last review in this series was mostly about the return of the Exotics. This one needs to be bigger, because there’s more than one thing that needs to be covered. This volume brings us:
Hardened Mini Bosses
Digital Dating in the Dark Future
Woodchipper’s Garage
Salvaging Night City
Midnight With the Upload
Must Have Cyberware Deals
Collecting the Ransom
Elflines Online the TCG
Spinning Your Wheels
12 Days of Cybermas
Going Metal
That’s a lot happening. So to keep this short, I’m going to look at the three that hit home for me.
San Andreas Memories
One of the things I noted recently on Bluesky is that Night City’s popular representations in Cyberpunk 2077 and Edgerunners aren’t nearly as crowded as they should be. At 24 square kilometres, Night City is low on space for its ~5 million (2020) and ~7 million (2077) population. Ironically, the roads and comparative low traffic is probably accurate, because vehicle ownership and parking would be prohibitively expensive for the average person. What the place does have though are tonnes of walkways, alleys, and other spaces that are perfect for bikes.
Bikes aren’t something you usually associate with the genre of cyberpunk, but in my opinion, it fits. Spinning Your Wheels appeared as DLC, and its inclusion in the book is fantastic. Bikes, skateboards, and inline skates are all there, ready to add something to your game; complete with quick mechanics for tricks. So why is this so great? Simple, it adds to the game with detracting anything.
Bikes, skateboards, and inline skates are effective ways to move through a city as closed and congested as Night City. They’re comparatively inexpensive, portable, and there’s upgrades available. The pic used in the book doesn’t give them justice. Get a bike.
Adding to the Punk
Cyberpunk RED suffers from the same issues that a lot of cyberpunk games do; it loses its punk pretty quickly as corporate and organized crime jobs are the most lucrative, and there’s no significant development of revolutionary organizations or counter-status quo jobs as an alternative. Collecting the Random addressed this, and more. The section claims that these rules/mechaincs/guides were too small for a DLC on their own individually, and couldn’t be fit in larger books. I disagree here. Someo fthem needed to be in the core book. They’re important and do a lot of heavy lifting for what was (and still is) a free DLC. Specifically, there’s three pieces in it that stood out to me.
Reskinning Roles is something we saw live in the Danger Gal Dossier, where the Lawman role was reskinned to reflect a ganger boss that could call in backup. R. Talsorian Games seems hesitant to expand the role list in the RED edition, so guides like this are invaluable because not everyone automatically connects those dots. And Multiclassing Ideas falls into the same category. It’s a laundry list of how to bend and blend the games existing roles together to achieve character design and narrative structure desires that a core role by itself can’t support.
The third is the most important. Ten Punk Campaign Ideas is where some of the “punk” is gets re-injected into the game. Fully half of the listed ideas, like Guerrilla Gardeners (in a world of synthetic food…), Librarians (Knowledge is power…), or Do-Gooder Clinic (Doing “preventative medicine”…) are great starts to fighting against the status quo. And for a genre with known issues around aesthetics drowning out the political message, this is key.
Metal is Better than Meat
This is it. There were three things missing from RED in a big way on release. Exotics, ACPA, and full body conversion cyborgs, and this book brings the last group to us! This stuff is where heavy hitters like Shaitan and Adam Smasher come from. And damn are they good! First though, we need to lay some groundwork. Full body conversion is the most extreme thing a person can have done short of being soul killed and uploaded. The next is that if you’re a Cyberpunk 2020 fan, this section is going to seem like a 90% update from Chrome Books 2 and 3.
All 13 of the conversions presented are from 2020. There’s 2.0 versions, and upgrades, but for the most part, they’re familiar. And within the 2045, Cyberpunk RED context, IT MAKE SENSE. Had to go loud there, but there’s a reason. It’s been just over 20 years since the Datakrash, and frankly ludicrous amounts of information, knowledge, and work remains lost or is functionally inaccessible. So it tracks that the surviving lines make and modify what they have until R&D and the world’s academic establishments literally reinvent the wheel because they have to. All that understood, this is rock solid stuff. It’s mechanics the game has needed and will need to support the upcoming 2077/Edgerunners boxed set.
What’s interesting are the missing chassis from the list. The Burroughs and the Wingman. The latter kind of makes sense at the moment, because vehicle combat, and specifically air combat, isn’t really a thing that Cyberpunk RED is supporting, so omitting this chassis makes sense. The Burroughs though? That’s some world building questions raised, because it was the worker chassis made for Martian operations. Now, we know that Mars is a developed operation in 2020, so this missing chassis makes me wonder what they’ve got planned, as it could be taken to indicate that the chassis is only made on Mars now…
But here’s the big thing. These cyborgs bring options. Good options. Creepy options. I talked on social media about soul killed people coming back as AIs being implanted into Gemini units. That’s a great antagonist or patron right there. And there’s some great opportunities for challenging high level operators with the Eclipse, Enforcer, and Spyder.
Final thoughts
The Interface RED series is one of the best supplementary series out there right now. Each one has been carefully tied into the core book or other supplements, and they’ve all added to the game in ways it’s needed. Yes, they’re mostly compilations of stuff you can get for free, but their low cost makes them worth it for the print (and pdf) exclusive content. Interface RED Volume 3 carries on the tradition established by the earlier books. It adds to the game, is relentlessly diverse in the best ways, and it’s easy to digest the information in it. This is another Rank S, and it’s currently available online from the R. Talsorian Games store and DTRPG.
