Cyberpunk Red: Agents of Desire - RPG Review
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ค. 2024
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The Player Characters are hired to find a Corpo's kidnapped fiancée. What they uncover is far different than things first appear. Written by Mike Pondsmith and Cody Pondsmith, this investigative scenario appears in the adventure collection Tales of the Red. Here are my thoughts, criticisms, and suggestions for running it.
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Guest Starring Jack the NPC
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#ttrpg #cyberpunk
00:00 Intro
01:08 Incogni
02:30 Here There Be Spoilers
03:50 Meeting the Client
06:50 La Lune Bleue
09:38 The Backstory
11:41 Apartment
14:45 Finding Aisha
15:50 Overall Thoughts - เกม
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could do without the miscegenation propaganda on the cover. but yea
I think the takeaway here is that Seth needs to upload more War Story videos so R. Talsorian has more material to homage.
saw the Scott Brown advert in CPR.
I mean... the entire game is a blatant and uncredited rip off of WIlliam GIbsons novels.. R. Talsorian's one skill is organizing well put together plaigerism.
Fun fact: Aisha could be read as Japanese for "AI person (AI sha)" or, alternatively and more conventionally, "lover (ai sha)".
That's really cool! Let's not forget Muhammad's wife is also named Aisha.
@@mr.pavone9719 *victim
The name Aisha also means something like "alive" in Arabic, which adds something of an ironic layer to the module.
@@mr.pavone9719 "wife" lmfao.... r*ping a 9 year old girl =\= marriage
@@oz_jones thanks for being normal
Serious respect to you Seth for being able to repeatedly say the phrase ‘Saturday Night Butt Kickers’ with a straight face.
Honestly, I'm kinda impressed with that, too
How many takes, though? 😉
I'm so daggy I think that gang sound cool. I appreciate that they have other things to do the rest of the week.
@@originaluddite reminds me of The Motherfucker from KickAss 2.
Seth Skorkowsky is canon in the world of Cyberpunk!
There was a reference to Scott Brown in the Core Rulebook, too
Or one of the Pondsmiths was at a larp with the same guy from Seth's story. The Bonesaw is a refrence to a drunk guy at a larp and I think Cody Pondsmith is about the right age to be into larping at the same time Seth was. Not sure if the geography makes sense, but it is possible I suppose as some folks travel quite a ways for major larping events.
Hacking the restaurant for a free meal? Now that greatly beats the free meal voucher!
In the world of Cyberpunk, we make our own free meal vouchers
To my eternal shame, when I translated this scenario in Italian I missed the peanut head reference.
When someone asks me, "Seth, what is the deep and tragic story of how you got an arch enemy and spent years seeking revenge at the cost of everything in your life?" I'll point them to this comment.
@@SSkorkowsky Sounds like a good Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades adventure?👹
@@SSkorkowsky even if I did, it would have been pretty hard to translate without betraying the reference.
Too late. I've already filed the Arch Enemy Registration Forms. I'm committed now.
@@SSkorkowsky very well (goddamned burocracy).
I'll see if I can start a redemption arc procedure.
That cut to Jack in a full suit and tie nearly made me choke on my chips!
Well played, sir. Well played.
Sadly, the medium of TH-cam couldn't let you experience how Jack was wearing way, WAY too much cologne for his meeting with Rogue.
@@SSkorkowsky - the thing is, I kinda got that anyway. I mean, it's what I'D do.
I think it was implied by the suit. 🤣
I heard the gang name and my first thought was the reaction to Tazerface in Guardians of the Galaxy 2
You were playing as a player? Bombshell! lol
I've been informed I'm not allowed to do that anymore :-(
@@SSkorkowsky Good, it is about time... for everyone's sake 😉
I ran this scenario, my runners went in the resturant after hours (they got kicked out.) They were coming off of a harder scenario, so when they saw security they were entirely ready to kill them.
Keep in mind theae weren't Militech or Lazuras agents, they were just rent a cops in flack with light pistols. They were chatting about dates and Garden Plot streams! Took em a good bit of murder plotting to realize that they're not a threat.
Good times. Also I changed "The Saturday Night Buttkickers" to "Hell's Ancients" a bunch of cyber senior citizens who liked to scrap. They were genuinely put off when the runner went in with lethal force.
Hell’s Ancients? Is that from Judge Dread? I vaguely remember a butt kicking senior citizen gang.
Jack the NPC has good trigger discipline
I was running this very scenario today when this video posted. Crazy!
I had Khan go cyberpsycho at the end to really spice things up. And my players sold Ai to a Militech buyer because money.
Maybe it's coincidence.
Maybe I've been spying on you...
@@SSkorkowsky get out of my house!
_whispers_ You'll have to find me first
One man, one desire! **movie trailer voice**
Ending with the AI farm is really cool. I love when scenarios give the players a say in how things wrap up. My party is a morally dubious street gang, when they found the server room they fried the place, turned in the phone, and washed their hands of the scenario.
Glad Jorge finally ran you again :)
I hope you eventually do a full deep dive on this system. That'd be cool.
I believe he did.
I've done my review of Cyberpunk Red. No plans to do a separate deep-dive series. I reserve those for my absolute favorite games I can go on and on glowing about for hours.
Glad you had fun with it Seth!
Just what I needed for a long train ride.
Happy you got the Incogni sponsorship! They should be a corp in the Cyberpunk world dealing with all the data brokers there. X)
My suggestion to expand on this adventure would be to have AIsha going rogue once “freed”, with her trying to exact revenge on her murderer like some sort of AI ghost. The PCs should then choose how to deal with this new crisis, keeping in mind rogue AIs are potentially a very big deal in Cyberpunk
Something tells me 90% of groups will go with the "not our problem, he'll reap what he has sown" approach
@@leos.2322 well there could be incentives to act one way or another. A rogue AI is bad news, and there are agencies that could hold the players responsible for releasing one (or who could want them to subdue one). The AI itself could have gone mad and target the players as soon as it discovers their connection to her killer. But the AI may want to enlist the PCs help as well and have the means to grant them considerable resources. And then there is the potential fight aspect with the AI taking control of electronic devices up to the combat drone (or the killer having gone full cyber psycho if you side with the AI).
I was thinking about players encountering a crazed pre-war drone, high-tech, shooting everyone around and calling for Kodai. This is a copy of Aisha that escaped (or got escaped) into the old Net and found out a way to get back and search for her lover. They can then use this rare connection to the old Net that AIsha used in any way they see fit, until some NPC get into the mix...
There is a Gost in the Shell episode in which a guy is dying of cancer because his religious parents won't allow for him to go in therapy, so he escapes the dilemma by transferring his conscience in a high tec tank, and then he wants to go see his parents to show them he became a tank because of their zealousy, and potentially kill them too because becoming a tank is a really good way of becoming a cyberpsico
PEANUT-HEAD!
That's awesome, wasn't expecting that.
Also that adventure is a hell of a twist.
Had to dip back 3 years into the archive to double check (RPG War Stories - What Bug?), so the question is: Did you call Bombshell on George again?
Not yet.
@@SSkorkowskyHey now...Thought you had been asked Not to do that again. (grumbles softly about these out of control players)
Dude, you're over 120k, righteous 😎
This reminds me so much of all the Witcher modules. They're such rough outlines with really wonky writting. Along with a fair amount of improvisation, I generally had to do a ton of prep to shore up the story and tweak the wonky bits.
What a great in depth review, love the critiques and suggestions for GMs! Seems like a very interesting scenario, I hope I can run it for my friends one day.
I always pause on the floor plans - such fun to see the layouts (and maybe redesign them a bit - like who puts a guest room in the centre of a dwelling thus depriving it of windows).
maybe if the guest is a "prisoner"...
@@Albtraum_TDDC yes, and given the genre they could well be true.
Thanks for getting back to CPR for a review!
I laughed a bit too hard at that peanut head reference. Between that and scott brown, someone’s clearly a fan over there.
I love the Tales of Red book. Their gigs are really varied in tone and type of mission you get. My favorite is ''Haven't got a stich to wear. '' Really creavtive subject and fun encounter. I need to run it at least once.
I ran Not a Stich to Wear. There is an NPC encounter about mid way. If I ran it again, I would take that scene out. I don't think it brings any real added value to the narrative or the mission.
i could do wihtout the idiotic pronoun delarations for NPC's.
@@dgggghfhfhfg Well, you can just go into the corner and grow up a bit. Comeback to Cyberpunk Red when you grew up a bit.
@@mikaelste-marie1275 ive been GM'ing since 2020 came out and read gibsons books when they were released.
top being a predator and you wouldnt be obsessed with believing im young lol
@@mikaelste-marie1275
I have this stramgest recollection of running this adventure but not. And it was only a year ago lol. Great vid regardless Seth 😂
17:03 I think a good way could be having Kodai think it's her ripper doc
Neat, I've been wanting to see more Cyberpunk. Thanks Jorge! Oh yeah, Seth too.
I've enjoyed your channel so much over the years I didn't even fast forward through the sponser. Congrats on the sponsorship! Keep up the awesome content!
Always a good day when Seth covers RED
Awesome! Thanks a lot! I'm the GM tomorrow for this adventure and you gave me a ton of details I didn't take from the book.
You saved me a lot of GM homework.
Thank you so much, choom.
Always loved you videos Seth, thank you as always ^^ !!!
Glad to hear the bar Forlorn Hope is still in business! A friend of mine did most of the artwork in the first edition book.
Very Cool! Big thanks to Jorge for running this as I am looking to ref some Tales of the Red stuff for my table and your suggestions are, as always, invaluable.
Any chance of persuading him to run you through Reaping the Reaper next?
gotta say say seth you've increased our ttrpg library by 82% and left our poor wallet coughing dust also my we recommend the disintegrator for call of cthulhu played it some months ago wonderful game if you want to play a game of cthulhu
I've run The Disintegrator. It was fun. Plan to review it eventually.
@SSkorkowsky can wait until then my we recommend the fallout ttrpg game specifically the Winter Of Adam adventure might be something you and your players may enjoy
Fallout uses the 2D20 system. I'm not a fan of it. Pass.
@SSkorkowsky fair enough still recommend listening to the story of winter of atom it could be used to make at least 3 call of cthulhu adventures a mad man making a fungus that needs human remains to grow, a hidden city under ground where a God sleeps being used by the military who turned to worshipping it, a radiation cult set on twisting the world into madness and genetic horrors, its all pretty Lovecraft
I wonder if Lotus can become a contact or if it was a KotDT reference. That would be funny, make Lotus out to be Brian.
This adventure's structure made is so that I missed the layout of his office and a bunch of info that my players all asked for. I then had to retcon a bunch of stuff. Interesting this only took me 3-4 hours to run, though I probably take it easy on my players when it comes to stuff like this.
Love the hair! 🙂
We did this a few Months ago. We made Kodai walk a long walk to "Aisha" over a very short and unfinished Skyscrapper floor.
I LOVE ALL OF SETH SKORKOWSKY'S VIDEOS
I enjoy all of Seth Skorkowsky videos
Sounds like a great adventure, I'll have to give that collection a look.
Rogue seeing Aisha : RIGHT THROUGH THE BRAIN ZZZZT !
So cool! I love the Cyberpunk videos
Dude, Seth got a shout-out from the Pondsmiths? Good for you, mate.
Really like this scenario!
Sounds like a pretty cool scenario!
I love all Seth Skorkowsky videos.
I got tales of the red due to your review of A Night At The Opera and im running that tomorrow
You also got me into 2020 so hey thanks for the videos!
Best of luck with the game tomorrow
Sounds like a pretty interesting adventure
I love your npc costumes
I just ready this adventure a couple days ago as I know a Cyberpunk game will be my next campaign I run (no spoilers here). It looked interesting, and I am looking forward to seeing how things went at your table.
For once I must retreat, for there is a small chance our referee will use this adventure in our upcoming CPR campaign. XD
Hope you enjoy it when you get to play it.
Do the Saturday Night buttkickers do the "S A T U R D A Y --Night" song before they kick your butt?
I love Cyberpunk, but sometimes i really don't like the writing R.Talsorian does. Like naming an AI Aisha, it's a bit on the nose. Speaking of, in the Red Chrome Cargo, this FIRST adventure a lot of us did in CP Red, there is a Militech Hammerhead Train. And yes the engine is on sideways. SIDEWAYS! Who thought that was a good idea? How is that thing supposed to go anywhere? They would have to disasassemble the whole building to get it out of the depo. Look, I get form over function, but it doesn't even look cool, it's just stupid. And that dammed thing is basically the whole module.
Anyway, how I fixed it, is I put the engine on how a train is supposed to be, and then added two twin-linked heavy machine gun turrets to the sides at the front of the train, that bulge a bit from the stramlined body, thus making it look like a Hammerhead, and adding some sort of defensive capability to the armored train. It's a bit weird that the only turret on that thing was on the inside.
In my story the Saturday Night Butt Kickers came in a little, too agressive.
And when the drone chased them off it accidentally left the apartment unguarded, long enough for the players who kept their heads down to grab a few goodies on the way out.
Hi Seth I just wanted to ask for you to cover Regency Cthulhu, I have been eyeing it for a little now and I can't seem to find a lot of opinions on the product, and I would love to hear yours. Thanks for listening and keep up the great content!
Haven't checked it out. The time period isn't one that calls to me.
Now when 7e Cthulhu by Gaslight _finally_ releases, I'll be all over that.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤❤❤
*Kwasade against the Algorithm !!!*
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
I had setup wanted posters for the heist crew in the university district while the party did a good 5 or 6 other gigs. One of our rockerboys charismatic impacted one of the students during Night at the Opera, so I had her join the high class heist crew after he died.
A fun idea, if any of your players decide to do the right thing and turn Aisha over to the cops, the police should reward the players… with tickets to the policemen ball. It might give them pause about whether or not doing the right thing is the best thing for them
I don’t play cyberpunk but your reviews make me want to
Tell us how the all-expenses paid dinner goes.
Also out of curiosity, how did Kodai react to being faced with being told Aisha was essentially imaginary?
Loved Jack dressing the part for meeting his crush, but yeah, putting the Bonesaw's voice or even speech mannerisms into Rogue ... messes with my memory. What sort of character are you playing in this Cyberpunk campaign? Jack strikes me as a Fixer, but that might not be how Seth actually rolls.
I normally go for Fixer, but this time around I'm playing a Netrunner.
Great review as always. Makes me want to play Cyberpunk. So, you never said. What did your group do with the Aishas in the server room?
We brought her back to Kodai, planning to confront him. Problem is if you bring her for the confrontation, his seeing her pulls him back solidly into his delusions. He nodded absently at what we told him, was all, "Yeah. Yeah. OK," then thanked us for our service, sent the money to Rogue, and pushed us out the door for some alone-time with his fiancée. We put in an anonymous tip to the police after we got paid, and he's now their problem. Meanwhile, all the AIs went missing from the server farm. A text from an unknown number told us _They would take care of them,_ or something to that effect. Evidently there's a rumored population of AIs out there and they likely rescued the cloned AIs. We tipped the Philharmonic Vampires, who operate in that area, of the abandoned building with the servers. Figured we couldn't haul them away to sell very easily and we might as well earn a few kudos from them (we've maintained a good relationship with the Vampires after the Night at the Opera case). The adventure ended with us enjoying a very expensive meal at La Lune Bleue.
@@SSkorkowsky Nice. Thanks!
@@SSkorkowsky can you merge AI's like this into one big AI, if they're almost identical?
Thid sounds like a delightful scenario!
Oh dang ROGUE! I know that sidebar very well. Cool!
Did anyone else hear about the Maitre D' and immediately think of the scene from The Blues Brothers?
Ever since you clued me in to Cyberpunk 2020 and Datafortress, my group and I can't go back to RED. It's just so... stripped down and basic compared to 2020, I have no idea why they did that. The only two things that felt like an improvement was differentiating the corpo career skill from the cop and nomad career skills (2020 the all do the same thing more or less: You just roll to see if your family/department/company gives you free shit or shows up to help you) and RED netrunners don't require and entirely separate game to play.
Lol turn him into the cops and then file a suit in small claims court. No way his lawyer doesn't just pay out of his client's account to avoid the distraction when preparing for a murder trial
If you wanna give Aisha a snappy nickname but don't wanna say "Ai" do what they did in Saints Row and call her "Isha" :)
The Saturday night WHAT Kickers?
Haha... I JUST finished running this last week!
I find it hilarious that Rogue follows Cyberpunk RED Seth Skorkowsky's channel in-universe.
Seth, I want you to know your reviews of the Tales of the Red adventures has directly led to me getting the book in both physical and Roll20 formats so I can run them for my next RPG campaign.
The Saturday night BK is actually a prefect name.
I very much enjoy the idea of the players and gangers in a knockdown dragout fight then the great equalizer walks in and everyone has to scrabble for cover to get out of the fight.
When i ran this I actually let Kodai keep his 10 year old "personal" phone, while the business one he let them "borrow" is brand new.
I had it in my head that when the players saw the security footage of the waiter stealing it that if they examined it or rolled that seeing the old phone could be a clue.
Sadly they never bothered to look close enough at it.
Obviously the borrowed work phone was spying on them just as much as they were using it to spy on the "kidnapers" what kind of corpo would just hand over a potential security leak like that to a bunch of mercenaries?
Kodai's phone in my version was just routing all the calls that came from Aisha while allowing a corporate netrunner to watch everything the party did through its microphone and camera.
This mission when I first read it seemed interesting. Then I thought, it's an interesting story but might not be a good mission for players. But after watching it. I'll consider running it.
Having not played any Cyberpunk I find it interesting that someone went cyberpsycho and WASN'T some bloody lunatic...
Naming alone and the various stories I hear I just assumed everyone goes on a murderous rampage
Well, he did murder his girlfriend and lost track of reality :P
I liked this one. my players nearly pissed themselves at the end when they got the text from Ai's new friends.
Butlerian Jihad when?
2:55 *ROGUE?!!* OMG
Im stealing this for traveller
Wow, that scenario sounds like an Harlequin Novella.
That is Seth’s real hair.
I think it's kinda funny that the Japanese guy who hires you doesn't have a Japanese name, it's just the Japanese word for Ancient, which may be a hint about his age.
Also I assume calling Aisha Isha would also work for a nickname instead of calling her 'Ai'
Name of gf is a bit of a giveaway. Any reasonably experienced group is going to be looking for hidden meanings in names.
I'm going to borrow the voice of that one antique store owner from that Call of Cthulhu you ran, but make the accent slightly French.
Based Jack calling out stupid. Keep being based.
THE PEANUTHEAD!!
No dilema, take money and then call police
I strongly suspect the 500 eddy dinner and the 1,000 eddy reward is the result of Red's economic system being so wonky. It's really bizarre and one of the reasons my group shy away from the game.
Ran this game for my PCs. They ended up killing Kodai and becoming friends with the former Arasaka techie.
I like these kinds of things but my luck makes me not play this kind of thing and just stick with mostly fighting. in a fight I can at least laugh at two or three bad rolls but flubbing diplomacy or any spy stuff always makes me mad.
Next War Story to become canon- Bombshell appears in the new streetslang glossary.
(Bug? What bug?)
I'm curious if this session changed Seth's opinion on Cyberpunk Red vs 2020.
Nope
@@SSkorkowsky Lol thanks! I would love to see your take in what makes a great RPG firefight, what are important mechanics / tactics that should be present. Not many GMs have experience with modern combat like you. Anyway, great video as always!
Yeah I think a bigger payday would add more to the moral dilemma. Especially if the players have been struggling for the whole adventure.