Through Tuesday, February 4 – for just one week! – we present the new CBR+PNK Quick Deal featuring the CBR+PNK minimalist Forged in the Dark cyberpunk pamphlets from Cabinet of Curiosities. In low-prep, fast-playing one-shot sessions, your team of Runners, living on the edge in the shadows of a gritty, ultra-violent world, make their last run. Maybe you’ll recover a payload from an abandoned AI-run hotel – or buy an encrypted Hosaka key in the corporate megalopolis Mona Rise – or search lunar habitat Biosphere-5 for the escaped APX PRDTR. The CBR+PNK core rules fit in three four-panel pamphlets; you can print each pamphlet on one legal-size sheet of paper, double-sided. Read the entire game on a lunch break, then create characters and start running one of this offer’s one-sheet adventures in 15 minutes.
Brazilian designer Emanoel Melo’s CBR+PNK is a stripped-down experience in the tradition of Epidiah Ravachol’s business card-sized Vast & Starlit and the primordial shirt-pocket RPG, Dinky Dungeons (1985). John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, source of all Forged games, presented its Doskvol neighborhoods and factions in famously terse lists of evocative names and phrases. CBR+PNK makes those writeups look verbose. You engage with these tiny cyberpunk texts less like rulebooks and more like poems. Every phrase counts. Yet, weirdly, it’s all there – exactly everything you need to run a doomed runner’s last caper, and nothing else.
See for yourself: In October 2023 Cabinet of Curiosities posted a three-minute YouTube unboxing of the Augmented Edition pamphlets. Or take a much deeper dive with the 22-minute KnightsaberZ42 YouTube unboxing. [Note: The titles in this CBR+PNK offer are all digital downloads, not the hardcopy pamphlets in these videos.]
Chase Carter at Polygon called the original version of CBR+PNK one of the best indie tabletop RPGs of 2021: “Players find their characters at their lowest, and use cinematic action to explore the how and why of a tragic end. Like other [Forged] games, CBR+PNK uses flashbacks that tend to grant characters the keys to new and unexpected doorways. Digital corruption seeping into their gear, and a breakneck pace, means groups must roll with the punches. Choices won’t get easier, and there’s only so much gritting the group’s collective teeth can take before something breaks. But that’s the whole point. CBR+PNK simply doesn’t allow itself the time to navel gaze, making it my favorite way to engage with this particular style of genre fiction.”
Emanoel Melo talked about the aptness of the Forged ruleset for CBR+PNK in a July 2021 interview with Jim Rossignol: “To me the essence of Forged is how it gives you mechanics to get the most out of fictional positioning. It encourages the negotiation of outcomes and fictional elements, and that is so important. [The popularity of cyberpunk] let me handwave the setting, asking for the players to build their own on the fly. The fact that it is meant to be a one-shot makes it easier for them to accept this sort of thing without the burden of ‘balancing’ or bookkeeping.”
This new CBR+PNK Quick Deal gives you the complete line from Cabinet of Curiosities – a comprehensive (woohoo!) twenty-page collection! Pay just US$6.95 to get all eight titles in our CBRPNK Collection (retail value $36.50) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the three CBR+PNK Core rules pamphlets along with the variant character expansion Rookie; two plug-ins (rules expansions), Cyberpunk Hunters and +Weird; and four one-sheet runs: The Ghost of Adelaide, Mind the Gap, Mona Rise Megalopolis, and PRDTR.
We presented the original 2021 version of the CBR+PNK core rules in our December 2021 Forged in the Dark Bundle. This is the 1.5 Augmented Edition funded in a March 2022 Kickstarter campaign. If you purchased the Dec 2021 Forged offer, check your Wizard’s Cabinet download page and your linked DriveThruRPG Library for the new edition of the core rules.
This CBR+PNK offer falls to a Martian MezoTuring Hosaka MNX Drone 88 grenade launcher in the hydraulic labyrinth under Mona Rise Megalopolis Tuesday, February 4.
