RPG Reviews: Neurocity

Neurocity is a science-fiction, or perhaps better described by a term the game author uses, "Tech-Noir," tabletop role-playing game that is currently available in PDF format on DriveThruRPG. I was provided with a PDF copy for review purposes.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Neurocity is an evocative setting idea that could easily be used in a variety of different RPG systems. While the game does include a very rules-light storytelling 2d6 roll-under system, the true strong suit of this product are its setting and adventure ideas. Given its use of random tables for encounter ideas in different parts of the city, it might have been better marketed and produced as a system-neutral campaign setting supplement rather than a stand-alone RPG. However, the rules are so minimal that they can easily be stripped out. 

Those looking for a more narrative-based game that gives wide latitude to the players and referee to decide the outcome of actions may want to explore the game system, but the mechanics came across as an afterthought versus all the detail and attention put into describing the setting. 

WHAT IT IS

Neurocity is a 126-page PDF that is almost all in black-and-white, with the occasional gray box to indicate commentary on the main text. A few chapters have shaded background headers, almost in a muted tone like a very light rose pink or pale yellow. There is also some bright red used as a highlight color on some pre-gen character sheets at the back of the book. 

Much of Neurocity's charm comes from its aesthetic, such as the choice of font such as Space Mono and IBM Plex Mono, which give the text a sort of 1980's style future look. There are also in-world quotes from characters to help bring the setting to life, and some fun propaganda-style art that look like in-world posters or billboards.  These little touches help to give Neurocity an organized look and portray the style of its cold, computer-driven future. 

After the cover and some introductory pages and table-of-contents, there are about 36 pages that introduce the setting and provide a summary of the different areas of the city. Following this are about 24 pages of game rules and character creation, then three pages of random encounters, and then back to another section of rules that runs about 13 pages. This does create some confusion and affects the reader's ability to quickly understand the rules or to get into the core of the setting. 

The game wraps up with a few pages on storytelling and ideas for bringing characters together, and then ends with about 29 or so pages for referees (called "directors" in Neurocity). 

GAME STYLE & CONTENTS

The mechanics of Neurocity, as noted, take up less than a third of the book. This is best described as a story-telling type of game, without classes, levels, or skills. Instead, characters are defined by five different attributes (Logic, Personality, Technocracy, Instinct, and Violence), rated on a scale of 5-10. Scores may drop below 5 or go higher than 10 during the game due to different circumstances.  

When attempting to accomplish an action, the player describes in detail what exactly he or she is trying to accomplish, after which the director will make a determination of which attribute affects that action. The system itself uses a roll-under 2d6 mechanism, but with some rather fiddly variations that are more confusing than helpful. The rules state that if the 2d6 roll is equal to or lower than the associated attribute, then the action is successful and the director narrates the results. Then, confusingly, the text states that any 2d6 result of 8 or greater is an "outstanding success" and a result of two (which is oddly shown as a graphic icon of two dice, each with a single pip showing, instead of just the word "two") is an "insufficient success" that may require another roll. It would have been much easier to change these rules to indicate that "lower is always better" or that "rolling equal to the attribute is a success, but with consequences." Having a roll-under system, but then rewarding higher numbers while penalizing lower numbers is confusing, especially for first-time gamers. I myself have been playing RPGs for nearly 40 years and I had to read this section about five times before understanding what the author was trying to imply. 

In addition to all of the above, a roll of 12 (again portrayed by two dice icons with six pips showing on each die) is a "critical failure" with consequences to be determined by the director. 

The rules then discuss the difference between a Complex and a Simple Action; in a Complex Action, there is more at stake or the circumstances are not favorable to the character attempting the action. In these cases, a roll of "1" on either of the two dice indicates a complication, but then states that a complication cannot arise as a result of another complication, nor does a double "1 result cause a complication during a complex action." 

While the gist of the system is quite simple in theory, the presentation and the constant exceptions or variations to rules make for a system that's more complicated than it needs to be. Some rules editing and adjusting to make things more streamlined would go a long way toward making the mechanics more suitable for actual game play.

Modifiers to the die rolls come in the form of applying bonuses or penalties ranging from +3 to -3, and there are examples provided to cover a variety of circumstances in which a director might want to apply such modifiers. 

There's a section on Initiative, which is an odd addition to the game, as the rules then describe that there is no such mechanic of initiative in the game, and that combat actions happen in a "dramatic way according to a sequence set by the Director." Given the story-telling nature of the game mechanics, running combats this way is fine within the context of the game's system, but it's odd to have a whole section with a header of "Initiative" given that there is no initiative in the game. It seems that this section is there for players who are used to other RPGs in which initiative is part of the game, but referencing a rule for another type of game seems an odd choice. It would have been better to simply provide an example of a combat scenario in the game, and provide tips on how the director can narrate the action, instead of referring vaguely to a mechanic that doesn't exist. 

Another interesting section of the rules that stood out to me was the "Conflict Between Player Characters" section, which gives tips and examples for directors to adjudicate scenes in which one PC attacks another. For full disclosure, I have never played a story-telling, narrative RPG, so I'm not sure if inter-party conflict is a common part of those types of games, but it's not something I'm used to in more class-and-level or skill-based RPGs like D&D, Savage Worlds, or Call of Cthulhu. 

Another confusion example occurs in this section, during which one player attempts to push another player off a train platform. In the example, the director instructs each player to make a 2d6 roll against the appropriate attribute, and announces that in the event that they both succeed, the "superior result" will win. One character has an attribute score of 8, and rolls a 7 (a success, but barely), and another character has an attribute score of 7, and rolls a 4 (a success by a margin of 3). The text then indicates that the character who rolled the 7 is the winner. Again, for a roll-under system, I found this very counter-intuitive; I would have assumed that the result that has more degrees of success (7-4 = 3, versus 8-7 = 1) would be the "superior result." 

In the character creation section, players are instructed to give their character a name and an "axiom" (essentially, a catch-phrase), and then they are given 9 points to distribute among their five attributes, which each start with a score of 5. 

While there aren't classes per se, there are "Functions" that do have some minimum attribute requirements, including Enforcers (law enforcement), Cardinals (part of the "Ministry of Truth"), Monitors (surveillance who spy and snitch on those who go against the system), Techrunners (repairers of technology), and Vectors (individuals who hold a specific solution to a specific problem, but temporarily, and might not even be aware of it until they are called up to serve).     

A main component of the rules system is called a Tension Check, which is stress that affects a character's psyche, and is discharged through gaining a neurosis. Tension is gained for actions such as disobeying orders, witnessing a terrible event, or suffering psychologically "for some reason." To release tension, characters can engage in activities such as violence, alcoholism, sleep, or sexual relations. Neuroses that might be gained due to tension are things such as panic attacks, anxiety, or depression. 

There is a very simple wounds system, and characters who take a number of wounds equal to their limit are considered dead, but as part of the setting of the game, dead characters have to be declared dead by a Cardinal, after which either a Rebirth Order or Renewal Order is issued, allowing the player to continue playing a similar character. 

The rules section ends with a short description of storytelling games and how they are different from traditional role-playing games, and also gets into what the core of Neurocity is all about - characters may suffer and die, but the Super Computer will also resurrect them, but each time a bit of their personality slowly dissolves away. This cycle keeps repeating endless, and characters are being watched over by an omnipresent and soulless regime, never to escape the cycle. The goal is for the players to figure out if there's a way out of this awful cycle.

The Directors section of the book at the end gives tips for running the game, including ideas for different archetypes that might represent the intelligence artificial consciousness that runs the city (there's no one true depiction in Neurocity - each director is encouraged to make the setting his own by using the examples provided or coming up with his own ideas). There's also a section on Player Backgrounds for players to roll on, so it's unclear why this section was put into the end of the book rather than in the character creation section. 

Other parts of the director's rules include examples of what exactly caused Neurocity to come about in the first place (again, there is not one single answer, so each game of Neurocity will be different than other games), and some random tables of different types of events that might occur during a game.  

COOL BITS

The concept of Neurocity is quite different from more traditional science-fiction settings, and that alone makes it worth checking out. In an epilogue, the author, Gavriel Quiroga, notes that his goal was to create an "extreme existential experience that has as a central theme the struggle between the human spirit and the omnipotent technocracy of a brutal system." He mentions Orwell as an inspiration, and that inspiration does come through in the realization of the setting. 

The idea of characters being reborn into the system but losing personality (which has a mechanical affect on the personality score of the character) each time they die makes sense within the context of the setting as well. 

Aesthetically, the choice of fonts and the artistic style, such as the graphic propaganda style artwork helps to convey omnipresent and omnipotent technological surveillance under which the characters in the world live. These "collage art" designs are by Sol Olweder, who also contributes to the other standard artwork in teh game, along with Nexus Redline. These mainly consist of black-and-white line drawings with a distinct comic book style. The credits page mentioned "interventions made on argentine [sic] comics of the 80s." I was unclear if this credit was indicating that actual artwork from Argentine comics was used in the game (the use of the "interventions" term was unclear to me), but it that's the case, it makes sense given the style of artwork. 

The random tables throughout the book are also inspired and contain fun and engaging ideas to help the setting come to life and provide directors with a lot of options to make their setting unique and inspire adventure hooks. There are random tables for things such as the condition of a Public Computer Terminal (e.g., clean and works perfectly to having a faulty screen or ruined audio), Climate, Encounters for each different section of the city, different types of System Supervisors, the results of being "Renewed" after dying, and the Backgrounds and Events tables in the director's section. These are all system-neutral types of tables that could be useful in any Tech-Noir or Cyberpunk style game, regardless of the mechanics. In particular, I could see using all or parts of the Neurocity setting in a Solar Blades and Cosmic Spells game. 

Lastly, the author also has a custom soundtrack by Espejo Negro for the game. 

PROS AND CONS

Most of the pros of the game are covered in the "Cool Bits" section above. In addition, the layout is clean and functional in most places, although I would have preferred to keep each random table on its own page rather than spilling across multiple pages (for example, there's one table with 20 entries; the first six are listed at the bottom of one page that is in a two-column format, but the remaining 14 entries are on the next page in a full-page, one-column layout format). 

The layout also does not always make good use of headers or bold type to call attention to key points or make it easy to find information quickly. This gets to my main downside of this game, which is the organization. Sections are not intuitively where they should be, making it difficult to follow how the game is played or how to create a character. While the information is all there, the presentation and organization make it very difficult to find. For example, when the attributes are explained, the rules note that every character has an attribute score of 5-10 for each of the five attributes, but it never explains how a character determines what his or her score is in the attributes. That information is not found until 11 pages later, and it's buried at the bottom of a page with no header or bold type or anything to call attention to it. Additionally, on the layout for this page, it's mainly a two-column layout, but the bit about how to determine attribute scores is instead presented at the bottom of the page in one-column layout, so it almost looks like a footnote as as opposed to an integral part of the rules. 

Then, as mentioned above, the character backgrounds are not found in the Character Creation section, but instead near the end of the book in the director's section, even though this section specifically says that "players can choose to roll d20 to obtain one of the following backgrounds" - so there's no reason this should have been confined to the director's section. 

Organizational issues like that did make it difficult to understand the game at first, including how to create a character and some of the basic concepts of how to run the game. 

Lastly, there are some language differences that do at times hinder comprehension. It's not an insurmountable issue, but there's an interesting use of the word "we" when describing rules that can be confusing. For example, in the section on making a Tension Check, the rules are written as: 

"We must use the Personality attribute if we want to avoid adding Tension under certain contexts determined by the Director. We will call these checks Tension Checks and they are always carried out using the Personality attribute." 

When first coming across passages such as this, it stuck out to me, as I kept questioning, "Who is 'we'?" After a bit, I assumed it might just be an issue in translating from the author's native language to English (it appears that Quiroga's is a native of Spain). Again, it's not a huge issue, but it does have an impact when reading the rules.  

While some of the above issues do affect the comprehension of the game system and rules, after a few readings, things become more clear. And, as I mentioned above, I am not well-versed with storytelling games, so it's possible that some of my issues wouldn't be problems for those more experienced with this genre of tabletop role-playing games. 

NEUROCITY

• Format: 126 page PDF
• Where to Buy: DriveThruRPG
• Price: $6.00 USD
• System: An original storytelling system with a 2d6 roll-under mechanic 
• This is a very rules-light system and the rules could easily be stripped out and replaced by whatever system you're using, such as Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells or Stars Without Number
• More Information: The author just ran a successful Kickstarter on this project, which you can read more about here. You can also follow the game's Facebook page here. 

Hanging: Home office (laptop)

Drinking: Fuzzy Recollection Hazy IPA with Peaches, by Indie Brewing Company

Listening: "It's Yours (Featuring E-Man) - Distant Music Mix" by John Cutler and E-Man, from the single "It's Yours (Featuring E-Man)"