^{Originally published on Sidekickcast.com December 1, 2015}

I’ve spent a lot of time detailing fantasy RPG weirdness because that’s the genre I’m most familiar with. However, strange stuff in gaming isn’t relegated solely to D&D and Pathfinder. For example, there’s the Cyberpunk 2020 Chromebooks.

The Chromebooks were a group of four sourcebooks that detailed all sorts of new gear for use in a Cyberpunk 2020 game. In many ways, they were brilliant – they were written like real product catalogs, so every entry gave you not only something useful for the game but also a feel for the corporate-dominated setting. At the same time, these things did introduce plenty of stuff that is either hilariously weird or amusing in hindsight (remember that these things were written in the early 1990s without the benefit of a crystal ball to show what they year 2020 would really be like).

This time around, I’m going to focus on the original Chromebook. With new weapons, cybernetics, vehicles, and more, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in this 96-page accessory…and a lot of other stuff that reminds me that the future is pretty funny.

Continue reading “The Future is Weird: Cyberpunk 2020’s Chromebook” →