Cybernet - Cyberpunk Roleplaying

It was shaping up to be one hell of a day. The run had gone south in a big hurry, the corp they were supposed to hit had been alerted to their strike at least an hour before hand, and half his team had been chopped to meat before they even reached the vault. Now he was stuck behind seventeen inches of case hardened steel, waiting for this idiot hacker to get through the code locks and hoping she could accomplish it before another salvo of warheads ripped the vault door off its screaming hinges.

A heavy set of impacts against the steel bulwark at his back told him that they were trying to get in without resorting to blasting. That was good; it gave them more time. It also meant they were in the real vault this time. Takoma goons were never subtle, and if he had been in one of the false computer cores, they would be hauling out the heavy artillery and picking through the pieces later. Precision from these slags meant they had orders not to hurt this chamber and that gave the good guys a chance. At least, he really hoped that was what it meant.

Even now, with every two sheet in the city calling his team renegades and bounty hunters after his hide for the two mil Takamishi had on him, Jenner still liked to think of his team as the good guys. In a city where the police were just a security force owned by the highest bidder and the sky was blocked out with skyscrapers that dwarfed the Tower of Babel, lancers like himself were the only free souls left in the system. They were outsiders, he was an outsider, in a world where being in was the only protection there was. Tank had always said they were just going to get themselves killed doing this kind of work, and a Takoma rifle with a clip full of DUDE rounds had proven him right ten minutes ago. Damn it… He’d miss that big man. He missed Tank’s big gun right now.

A weird sound emitted from the door, a high pitched whine that seemed to echo from deep inside it. “We need to hurry the hell up!’ he yelled into his net-mike. From wherever the hell she was deep inside the webworks of the corporation’s frame, Hellcat must have heard him because she zombied her left arm in the real world into a very rude gesture and her screen printed out, ‘I am not baking muffins here, Rip. It’ll be a minute.’

As the wailing of the vault door grew louder, Rip got up and pull all the weight he could off his meat leg. The other one was shot up pretty bad and if they did live through this, he saw double amputee in his future. Knowing that surviving long enough to let Hellcat shred the data she needed out of this bloody company’s frame meant holding off whatever came through the hole that was getting cut, he flipped an expensive looking office table over and struck gold- wood veneer over steel. That would absorb a few rounds. He popped the tripod out on his heavy and set it up to cover the shrieking door.

‘You need a minute, I’ll get you a minute. Sixty seconds, coming up. You take sixty-ONE and it’s closed caskets all around.’

OGL CyberNet is a complete core rulebook, released under the Open Game License, allowing players and publishers alike to set games and scenarios to the cyberpunk setting of their choice. Mongoose Publishing is releasing OGL CyberNet under a royalty-free world wide license, allowing publishers (of both print and electronic books) to use the CyberNet logo and rules to create their own settings and adventures.