A ND NOW, A Word From The Management

So, it's 2013, and I have a problem…

See, we've all been cruising the mean streets of Night City since 1984. We've fought the Megacorps to a standstill, cybered
ourselves to the very limit of psychosis, and have even climbed to the heights of the Arasaka Towers to pimp smack old
Saburo upside his bald head.
This is one of the problems all designers who work within a self-created world face: terminal stagnation. Your players
have done everything, fought everything, and seen everything you can offer in the original iteration of your world, and
there's not much left to do.
In Cyberpunk, my solution has always been to treat the entire world like a giant comic book, divided up into roughly
ten-year story arcs. The Cyberpunk world goes to hell beginning in 1993, starting with the invention of modern cyber-
ware and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York by Colombian narco-terrorists. We start the main Cyberpunk
story (what I call the Never Fade Away Arc) ten years later in 2013 with the culmination being Johnny Silverhand's invasion
of the Arasaka Tower in an attempt to rescue his girlfriend, Alt Cunningham. Ten more years pass and then begins the
Cyberpunk 2020 Arc (which I call the Fall of the Towers Arc… starting to see a pattern here, what with me destroying
big buildings all the time?) by the end of which the Cyberpunk world is totally disrupted in 2023.
Working in story arcs is useful. It allows you to keep the main world operational while creating new storylines and
introducing new characters. You get to build on what is already there and familiar. But by the end of the 2020 Arc, I had
two big problems. First, it wasn't going to be enough simply to start a new storyline. I had to deal with the fact that much
of the existing world had been mined out and needed a reset.
And second, I'd acquired some partners. See, about the same time I started writing what would one day become this
book, a bunch of guys in Poland—you probably know them as CD Projekt Red, creators of the wildly popular Witcher
video games—showed up on my metaphorical doorstep and said, "Hey, wanna make a Cyberpunk videogame?" I
looked them over and, assured that they were more than three guys in a basement with some old Apple 2's and a goat,
agreed that this would be a cool idea.
But that also meant that, besides doing a bit of a reset, I had to preserve what made Cyberpunk Cyberpunk, while at
the same time moving the timeline forward and clearing out the deadwood. I also had to make the new version fit not just
a tabletop roleplaying game but a AAA videogame title too.
The result is the game you're holding in your hands.
Cyberpunk RED doesn't wreck the world. But it resets many of the elements of that world without having to make it
unrecognizable. The product of literally hundreds of hours of real-world research and planning, RED gives us a new arc
where almost all the elements of the Cyberpunk we all love are still present, but in new forms and with some fun new
twists. The mean streets of Night City are still there, but there are lots of new Players and new challenges walking the
shadows. In addition, RED allows us to create something unparalleled in gaming history—a tabletop RPG that serves as
the perfect onramp for the expanded and far future of the Cyberpunk 2077 arc. With threads looping forwards and
back through the timeline, my partners at CDPR (Patrick, Adam, Marcin, Amelia—let's face it, the whole damned 600+
crew at the CD studio) and our crew at R. Talsorian Games have given you a deep, complex gaming experience you
can explore on both the tabletop and the video screen.
I didn't do this by myself either. I have to give all credit to the amazing crew here at R. Talsorian Games, James,
Cody, J, Jaye, Jay, Lisa, David, and a host of other contributors who have made this thing work. We all think the result of
all our hard work is a thing of beauty, and we hope you will too.

Because we want you to join us in the Time of the Red and make it your time too.

—
­­ Mike Pondsmith
the guy who killed your cyberpunk character