R.E.G. - Cyberpunk Random Encounter Generator

Hey! Cool news! Glenn in the comments below asked if he could make a port of it over on Chartopia. I gave him the go-ahead and here's what he came up with! Cyberpunk Random Encounter Generator on Chartopia

If you haven't noticed, Cyberpunk is cool again. With the buzz surrounding the Cyberpunk 2077 video game announcements (seriously, check these videos!), the 30th Anniversary of Cyberpunk 2020, and R. Talsorian's "Resurrection Tour" at Gen Con 2018, it's hard NOT to be excited about our favorite dystopic future genre.

Since that part of my brain is lit up, and in the same vein as the Random Loot Cards and New Tokyo Screamsheets pages I resurrected from a 2001 Cyberpunk Campaign, I give you...

R.E.G. - The Cyberpunk Random Encounter Generator!

R.E.G. started as a set of random encounter tables I put together as part of an ever expanding document of house rules for that 2001 cyberpunk campaign.

You are welcome to download the "ascii" version and make it into your own dead tree version...

Eventually, four pages of lookup tables got to be excessive and the most cyberpunk thing to do was to make it into its own application.

Being a Mac user in 2001, my boss at the time suggested I use Hypercard to make it happen. For those unfamiliar with Hypercard, it's basically a "card" and "stack" based database with a graphical front end. To be honest, I forgot what version of Hypercard I used, but I did have to include a "plug-in" so it could handle COLORS!!!

Below is a breakdown of what the Hypercard stack looked like and how it operated.

When you opened the Hypercard stack, you were presented with this main screen:

Please note this was a one-off home-built app, not shared with anyone.

You selected your encounter based on where the player characters were located in the city and the approximate time. Clicking on the corresponding sector would move the targeting reticle to that spot. (Actually, all sectors had the same reticle—it just unhid the sector you selected and hid the others behind big black squares.)

Once you hit the ACQUIRE button, it randomly generated your encounters based on your time and location seed (Ha! The app was slow enough, that I included the green bar under the button to show where it was in the lookup cycle.), and switched to the following screen:

You would actually get three encounters—one in each black box—and it randomly selected an action number from a sub-table (see the PDF) for each encounter. The SET ACTION button allowed you to "reroll" the action values. The blue buttons scrolled through the entry so you could see the full action sub-table. The ENABLE buttons just indicated what your choice of the three was—selecting one ENABLE button would light up the other two DISABLE buttons. The REINITIALIZE button would bring you back to the main screen. I believe the tiny black square above the green and red triangle buttons showed you how many individuals were present in the encounter, and you could adjust that value with the buttons.


If somebody wants to go through the effort of making this into a modern mobile app of some sort, let me know and we'll discuss!