Greeting, GUEST.
Consulate of Greater MTL, CA.
17°
Sunny

SAFEHOUSES & FOLLOWERS

A homebrew conversion of the ideas and mechanics of MCDM's Strongholds & Followers's book to the Cyberpunk Red TTRPG system and setting.

In this article:
The Workshop
The Office
The Establishment
The Hangout
Example scenario of organizing a job

SAFEHOUSE TYPES

There are four types of basic safehouses, which can be combined into complex safehouses of many varieties. Although some character roles might have more affinity with some safehouse types, every role can build every safehouse types.

A Workshop is a tinkerer’s cave, for characters who want to have space for specialized tools and to research new items.

An Establishment is a public-facing commercial venture, which generates revenue and reputation.

An Office is a place where people work to gather information, do paperwork, and accomplish things for players.

A Hangout is a chill place where gossip is gathered, and new followers can be recruited.

The Workshop

Every Tech dreams of having a Workshop to play in. An actual Workshop, I mean, one which has those desk sized machines which are loud, difficult to use and so, so efficient at making new things. The Workshop is a place filled with machines which can be used to produce copies of products and items and to develop new innovative gadgets and gizmos. It gains this ability because the Workshop allows you to create specialized workstations, which will allow you to build items and invent new ones.

The workstations

When you open a Workshop, you must choose what type of machine you decide to bring in. The way to do this is to create a workstation.

A workstation represents a set of machines able to produce a certain type of goods or products. When you create a Workstation, you chose an associated Skill from the Tech Skill Category (The Medical Tech Skill is a Tech skill, by the way!) The skill you associate with a workstation determines what type of items it can produce and what type of objects can be invented there.

You create one workstation when you open your workshop. When your Workshop levels up, you can either choose to open a new workstation or to level up an existing workstation. When you choose to level up a workstation, you add new machines and tools to the workstation, allowing it to produce better items and improving its production capabilities.

Reorganising your workstations

You can choose to change a workstation’s associated skill to another skill at any point. However, doing this will cost you 5,000 eb., as new equipment will need to be bought and installed. The process of reorganising a workstation takes 60 days.

Production Chain

If you take a whole work week (around 40-50 hours in a 7-day period) to work at one of your workstations, you can produce copies of an item. An item, in the context of these rules, is any physical object with a Price Category. You must have a copy of that item on hand to be able to produce copies of it. To copy an item, you must use a workstation that is associated with a Skill that could plausibly be used to produce the item. For example, a Weaponstech station can be used to copy firearms, ammunition, melee weapons or weapon attachments, etc. while a Forgery workstation can be used to copy ID cards, documents, or passports, among other things.

Your workstations limit what type of items that they can copy based on their level. A level 1 workstation can copy Premium and cheaper items. Higher-level workstations can copy items of higher Price Categories. In addition, the lower the Price Category of the item that you are copying, the more copies of it you can produce in a week. A level 1 workstation, for example, can produce 5 Premium items, 10 Costly items, 15 Everyday items or 30 Cheap items during a work week.

You can only create copies of a specific item during a work week. For example, you can choose to produce 5 Heavy Pistols during a work week, but you cannot produce 3 Heavy Pistols and 2 Very Heavy Pistols during a work week, because they are different items.

This ruling is vague, agreed, but this is mostly because workstations offer an impossibly wide array of options. This resource will not attempt to categorize what item each workstation type can produce. You and your Referee should decide together what items make sense for your workstations to be able to produce with this ability.

CHAIN PRODUCTION WEEKLY ITEM OUTPUT PER WORKSTATION LEVEL

Workstation levelCheapEverydayCostlyPremiumExpensiveV. ExpensiveLuxurySuper Luxury
130151050000
2402015105000
35025201510500
460302520151050
5703530252015101

Selling item copies

Many of you probably have probably already deduced that the Workshop can be used to produce items which you can then turn around and sell. Yes, that is part of what it can do!

If you sell the items you produce with Chain Production, you only gain half of the cost you sell it for as profit. This represents the cost of the materials you needed to obtain to produce these items.

Repairing in a Workshop

When you attempt to repair something in your Workshop with a Skill Check, and when you have a workstation associated with that Same Skill, you automatically succeed the Skill check to repair the item.

Research & Development

You can use your workstations to invent new items. This generally works like the Invention Expertise from the Tech’s Maker Skill (p.148-149 in the Core Rulebook) when it comes to working with your Referee and the technical justifications you must provide to create a plausible and balanced item. The Research & Development process is different in some ways, however.

You can only invent items that can be repaired by a Skill associated to one of your workstations.

When the Price Category of the item you want to invent has been selected, your referee assigns it a number of points based on the R&D Points table. Your Referee can change the R&D points needed for the item based on its complexity.

R&D POINTS TABLE
Price CategoryR&D points needed
Cheap20
Everyday40
Costly65
Premium80
Expensive100
V. Expensive125
Luxury155
Super Luxury210

When you take a work week to develop an invention using this ability, you roll 1d10 + your Workshop level + your Skill bonus in the Skill associated with the workstation + your Maker Role Ability Rank. You gain that number of R&D Points.

Once you reach the number of R&D Points assigned to your invention, at the end of a work week, you have completed a functioning prototype of the item. You can copy it using your Workshop’s Chain Production ability.

Creating workstations with non-Tech Skills

This section basically argues that it is ok to ignore what was said earlier about the workstations in your Workshop needing to be associated with a Skill within the Tech Category. Some exceptions to this rule can and should be made for creative players.

While Tech Skills is the Skill Category that makes the most sense for a workstation, it is possible to create a workstation for non-Tech Skills. However, it is possible that such a station would not be compatible with one or more of the abilities a Workshop grants you.

An example of a non-Tech skill that could be easily adapted into a workstation is Wardrobe & Style. Through the Chain Production ability, you could produce clothing items. While these items would also fall under the Basic Tech Skills, it feels weird to put sowing in the same category as repairing a radio, so your Referee could allow an exception for a workstation like this. The Research & Design ability could be used to invent new clothing designs and create seasonal clothing collections.

An Interface (the Netrunner Role Ability) workstation could also be interesting here. While a workstation like this wouldn’t be able to produce netrunner hardware (which would better fall under Cybertech or Basic Tech), it could produce software. A Netrunner could use the Research & Development ability to invent new Programs and Black ICE.

Another interesting idea could be to create workstations which specialize in a combat Skill. Let’s imagine a Martial Art (Kung Fu) workstation. While the workstation wouldn’t be able to produce anything using Chain Production, because uniforms, melee weapons and training manuals fall under Tech Skills (Basic Tech, Weaponstech and Paint/Draw/Sculpt, respectively), it would be compatible with the Research & Development ability because it is easy to imagine that a workstation could allow you to workshop (ah!) entirely new Kung Fu Special Moves.

Some Intelligence Skills could also work this way. For example, a Cryptography Skill could be used with Research & Development to develop entirely new cryptographic algorithms which could make your (or your client’s!) communications much harder to crack.

While some skills don’t work with the Workshop, it is perfectly fine (if not encouraged!) to see the Workshop as a place where people produce and invent new things using very precise techniques in a more general way.

The Office

An Office encompasses anything that fits the broad definition of "a fixed locations where people work for you." Every safehouse type needs employees, managers and helpers, but the employees of an Office provide a lot more benefits and are much more involved in getting work done for you. Offices encompass things like a team of journalists, an accounting firm, a garage, an electronics repair shop, and anything in between. To benefit from the work of these employees, you will need to specialize your Office by founding Departments, which will allow you to use your employees’ skill bonuses in play and give them tasks to do while you are away.

The Departments that work for you

When you open an Office, you must allow choose what type of work it can do. The way to do this is to open a Department and hire employees specialized in a specific field.

A Department represents an employee or a team of employees that together specialize in one Skill from the Skill list. A Department has a Base Skill bonus of 14 in a skill of your choosing.

You open one Department when you create an Office. When your Office levels up, you can open a new Department or grow an existing one. Opening a new Department works like founding the first department. When you choose to grow a Department, you hire more employees and allow others to improve. This increases the Base Skill Bonus in the skill that Department specializes in by 2.

There are technically no limitations to the skill you can choose for your Departments to specialize in. However, some Skills might prove difficult, if not impossible, to use in conjunctions with the benefits you gain access to by having an Office. Generally, if you can find a way to justify how the Department can help you without being in the field with you, the Skill will generally be useful in a Department.

Important note. The employees that work in your Office are not edgerunners like you. They might not be pushovers, if push comes to shove, but accompanying you in your edgerunning life is waaaaay outside of their responsibilities. Your employees can accomplish tasks outside of the Office and even come join you in the field in some circumstances, but if things get hot, they will bail. Asking your employees to put their lives in danger is a good way to get resignation letters. In gameplay terms, the workers in your office accomplish most of their work off-screen and won’t actively join you during a game session. The Referee decides when and how exceptions to this rule can be made. If you want to hire NPCs to accompany you in the field and that will actively help you during the game session, you might want to build a Hangout instead.

Reorganising your Departments

You can choose to change a Department’s Skill at any point. However, doing this will cost you 5,000 eb., as new equipment will need to be bought and new employees recruited. The process of dismantling a Department takes 30 days if the Department’s new skill is in the same Skill Category as the old skill or 60 days if the new skill is in a different Skill Category.

Ask for help

Once per session, you can benefit from the expertise of your employees when you attempt a Skill Check. When you ask to roll for a Skill Check or when the Referee asks you to roll a Skill Check, you can choose to use one of your Department’s Base bonus for that Skill Check instead of your own.

To use this benefit, you must justify how your Department can provide assistance in the roll. You could call one of your employees and use their assistance that way, for example, or “retcon” that you gave them a task offscreen that helps you for the roll. If the use of your Department’s Skill is unjustifiable in that situation, the Referee can refuse to allow you to ask for help for that roll.

A Department specialized in the Handgun Skill cannot help you with your roll to hit with your gun, for example, because people in an Office cannot directly help you have better reflexes in the heat of combat.

For an example of this ability in action, consider this scenario. The Rockergirl Lily has a meeting with an Exec for a job. To make sure she starts her relationship with the Exec on the right foot, she asks for the help of her Department specialized in the Conversation Skill. She argues with the Referee that the employee of the Department (reflavored as her agent) contacted the Exec ahead of time to schedule the meeting, leave a good first impression and to play her up. The Referee accepts this explanation because this scenario is very plausible: her agent could have done that. Therefore, Lily rolls 1d10 + 14 (the Department’s bonus), ending with a result of 21. Because of the help of her agent, the negotiations start on the right foot.

Delegate Tasks

Once per work week, you can give your Department a task to accomplish while you are not at the Office. To accomplish the task, the Department does not roll a Skill Check. Instead, it uses a fixed number to try to beat the DV of the task. This fixed number is equal to 4 + its Base Skill bonus.

For example, you could leave a very damaged Groundcar in your Garage (a reflavored Department specialized in the Land Vehicle Tech Skill) and have them repair it during the week. When you come back a week later, the Groundcar will be repaired and ready to go.

Learning on the job

While your employees can’t teach you their jobs (you are a person of action, after all!) you learn a little bit of their trade by working alongside them. You gain a bonus of +1 in every Skill in which one of your Department specializes. For example, if you had a Department of Animal Handling (probably better known as a veterinarian) and a Department of Library Search (a researcher), you would gain a +1 to the Animal Handling Skill and +1 in the Library Search Skill for as long as you are the owner of these Departments. Growing a Department does not affect this bonus.

The Establishment

Any corpo who’s worth their salt will tell you that money is what makes the world go around, and to get money, you need to create a product people will want to buy. For your purposes, however, the product you choose is a sell is a place where people will want to spend their money in. The Establishment is one of those commercial ventures. Encompassing anything from brothels, pawn shops, nightclubs, bars and general stores, Establishments are a type of Safehouse built to provide you with the money and fame you need to finance your life on the edge.

Revenue

Every month, your Establishment generates 1,000 eb. per Establishment level in revenue. You can use this money to finance anything you wish.

Esteemed Business Owner

As your Establishment grows in popularity, you start to see the benefits of being the owner of a popular business. Your status as Owner of the Establishment has an assigned Reputation Level equal to the level of your Establishment. The Reputation Level granted by your Establishment cannot exceed 5.

Here’s my business card

As your reputation grows, you can leverage your reputation in several new ways. Each ability can be used once per game session.

  • When you meet a new person in a new situation for the first time, instead of rolling to see if they already know you, you can choose to use this ability to have them already know you. You decide why the person has heard of you before. If the Reputation Level of that person is higher than 5 and higher than 2 points above your own Reputation Level, the Referee can choose that there is no logical way that the person would know you. Saburo Arasaka does not know the night club business owners in Night City, for example. If the ability fails to work, you don’t expend your use of this ability.
  • When you enter a Facedown, you can choose to double the bonus granted by your Reputation level. You can use this ability once per game session.

Organize an event

Many people know your Establishment, and, if many people know your Establishment, it follows that many people will want to come to a party at your Establishment! Once every month, you can organize an event which can attract many important people from your area. The specific details of the event are up to you and your Referee, but you will need to give the employees of your Establishment at least a week to prepare the event.

The reason you might want to organize such an event is to attract special guests. Special guests are people with power, influence, or money that you can invite to your event and have short one-on-one meetings with. You can make 3 people of your choice come to your event. The level of influence of the people you can “force” to come to your event is dependent on the level of your Establishment. Unless these people want to kill you on sight, they will come to your event.

If something dramatic happens at the event (a major crime, a political upset or organisational problems), you lose the ability to organize an event until at least three months have passed. If the dramatic event was particularly dramatic (your most important guest died, many people fall ill, etc.), you also lose the Reputation bonus granted by the “Esteemed Business Owner” ability during those three months.

Establishment LevelPower of potential guests
Level 1City gang bosses, minor politicians, Corp Execs and people of note in your neighborhood
Level 2Mob underbosses, city politicians, neighborhood celebrities
Level 3CEOs of small corporations, city managers and local celebrities
Level 4Megacorporation Directors, the Mayor, state and national politicians, well known celebrities
Level 5Megacorporation CEOS, world leaders, world-famous celebrities

The Hangout

The Hangout is the bread and butter of the Edgerunner world. When you want to get the best Solos for a job, you don’t post a job offering online, you go to the Afterlife! If you want to meet the Maelstrom, you don’t go see their street thugs, you go to the Totentanz and make friends. In Night City, there are places to party, and there are places where you party after doing business.

Broadly speaking, a Hangout is a location where a certain type of people go to meet and discuss. If the Establishment is the busy, loud and packed nightclub you finish your night in, the Hangout is the small bar you and your friends go to to have a beer and complain about life. Hangouts are seedy bars, bowling alleys, small cafés, speakeasies, garages or even skateparks that attracts a certain crowd of people. When you build a Hangout, you choose which crowd you want to attract, which will then allow you to gather gossip about that group, recruit powerful NPCs from among them and gather crews to do your dirty work.

Attracting a crowd

When you build a Hangout, you choose what type of people your Hangout will attract. This choice of people is called a crowd. To create a crowd, you choose which roles your Hangout attracts. You can choose up to ten roles this way. Then, the size of the crowd is decided by the number of Roles you have chosen to target.

Crowds can be niche, narrow, small, or large.

A niche crowd is very narrow and is composed of a set of very specific regulars who fit your criteria and a few outliers who happen to have passing interest in the niche.

  • A niche crowd is composed of 1 role

A narrow crowd is a bit broader but still feels very exclusive. Very few people feel comfortable spending time at your Hangout. Your regulars will stare down those who don’t fit in, for sure.

  • A narrow crowd is composed of 2 or 3 roles

A small crowd is much more palatable to the common person but still has an edge. There are slightly too many regulars to remember them all, but it is still a very small community.

  • A small crowd is composed of 4 to 5 roles.

A large crowd is basically like when marketers target “men aged 18-27”: it contains a bunch of people who do, in some ways, have things in common, but also have a wide variety of interests among them. There are new faces every night at your Hangout.

  • A large crowd is composed of up to 10 roles.

You probably think that targeting as many roles as possible the best option. Not so.

If you target every Role, you attract people who are starting their careers or even people so green they won’t realize that your Hangout is run by a criminal. If you target too few people, you’ll get the best of the best, but you will not have many options to pick from when it comes to recruitment.

Crowd sizeJob Roll Modifier
Niche4 + Hangout Level
Narrow3 + Hangout Level
Small2 + Hangout Level
Large1 + Hangout Level

For example, Able decides to open a level 1 Hangout and try to attract Techs and Fixers. This means that she attracts a narrow crowd. This makes it so she will be able to recruit Sidekicks from those roles and that she gets a bonus of +4 when she organises jobs at her Hangout.  

Targeting non-edgerunner roles

What happens when you want to attract a crowd of non-edgerunners? After all, civilians sometimes know a lot of things that can be very useful to you. If you want to attract non-edgerunners, you will need to define the group you wish to attract. For example, if you want to attract scientists, you should consider “Scientist” as if it were a Role. Then, you need to establish the Primary Skills of what that role could plausibly be good at. After you define your non-edgerunner roles, you add them to the total number of roles you attract, which will allow you to determine the size of the crowd you attract.

Changing the crowd of your Hangout

You can choose to change the roles you target at any point. However, doing this will make you lose the benefits of your Hangout for 30 days as your regulars start going elsewhere and your new crowd start adopting your Hangout as their new meeting spot. Any change you make to the roles in your crowd causes this shift.

Rumors

During a job or in the lead-up to one, you can spend some money to collect some rumors from your Hangout about that job. This costs 500 eb.

You roll a Rumors check against a DV set by your Referee. To roll this check, roll 1d10 and add your Hangout level and the number of roles your crowd contains. If you succeed, you learn roughly how many enemies you might face, what their most damaging weapon is, and you learn if they have vehicles.

In addition, the Referee can choose to reveal additional information, if they judge that the crowd you attract would have heard of those details. These additional details can be things like:

  • The location of a secret entrance
  • The type and number of vehicles your target has
  • A password or a description of the type of locks that the building uses
  • The most expensive piece of equipment your target has
  • The automated security systems your target has in place
  • The presence and number of levels of a Net Architecture

As a sidenote, while this seems to be taking the fun out of the game, it is not! Your players worked hard to end up with a Hangout. Being a bit more aware of their enemy is one of the rewards of all of that work! Besides, you can find ways to keep the encounter challenging, even if the players have a leg up because of the intel they gathered with this benefit.

Generally, learning rumors about organizations is modified by how big it is, how secretive it is and how much influence it has. Use the table below to decide the DV of the Rumors check. These modifiers are merely a suggestion. The Referee should feel free to modify the DV by considering the exact narrative context of the check and if other factors need to be considered in the DV of the Rumors check.

SETTING THE DV OF THE RUMORS CHECK
Base DV15
Organisation’s influence stretches a few blocks-2
Organisation’s influence covers a neighborhood-1
Organisation’s influence covers the whole city+1
Organisation’s influence is national or international+2
Organisation is secretive+2
Organisation is massive (thousands of members)-2
Organisation is large (hundreds of members)-1
Organisation is small (dozens of members)+1
Organisation is tiny (handful of members)+2
Organisation’s location is accessible to the public-2
Organisation’s location is not accessible to the public+1

Recruiting followers

While everyone with a safehouse can attract followers, Hangouts grant you the benefit of having access to a much wider variety of followers.

For every level of your Hangout, you gain access to a follower of the type of your choice. The followers you recruit this way must share a role with the roles you target with your crowd.

You can look at the list of follower types in the sections about Followers, Sidekicks and Specialists.

Organizing jobs

Let’s get to business. Your Hangout is the perfect place to organize the type of jobs that you used to take as a starting edgerunner. When you own a Hangout, you become the client who is ordering the hit and you become the person who gets crews together for the big gigs.

Once a month, you can take advantage of your Hangout’s crowd expertise and organize a job. When you organize a job, you recruit a crew and task them a mission to accomplish while you are busying yourself with other, more important, things.

Unlike with an office, there are no limitations to the type of jobs you can organize. This is important, because it means that you can have other edgerunners do violence on your behalf. The people you pay will be willing to risk their lives to accomplish the tasks you hire them for. You can have the mayor assassinated. You can have a crew detonate bombs in a corporate headquarters. You can go have them steal a Trauma Team ambulance. The only limit is your imagination.  

If you organize the job, it means that you delegate the mission to the group you hire. You cannot help the group directly during the job, but you can provide assistance indirectly, such as giving the crew intel, proposing a plan of action, vetoing the crew’s plan, or doing scouting work. Your involvement, however, must end when showtime starts.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t indirectly benefit from the jobs you organize. If you task a crew to go start a shootout in front of the Militech HQ, for example, you might not be able to take part of the shootout, BUT you can use the shootout as a distraction while you sneak in from another entrance.

The Job Roll

The Job Roll is the roll that you will need to do to determine if the job you organize is a success or not.

When you attempt your Job Roll, you roll 1d10 + your Crowd's Job Roll Modifier + your crew’s modifier + any other contextual bonuses.

The DV of the roll is determined by the complexity of the mission and will then be modified by other factors.

You can work to improve your chances by helping your crew prepare for the job, such as providing your crew with intel, rumors, providing them with tools or anything of the sort. Every time you provide your crew with this type of benefit, you add +1 to the Job Roll.

The Job Roll is rolled during the job itself. You cannot roll and then ask to intervene in the job: when it comes the time to roll for the job, the outcome of the Job has already been decided.

Setting the Job Roll DV

JOB BASE DV
Job ComplexityDV
Simple job10
2-stage job15
Job with moving pieces20
Job with moving pieces and a narrow window25
A miracle is needed for the job40
  • A simple job is the easiest type of job. Having a fixer shot while they are taking their morning walk is an example of a simple job.
  • 2-stage jobs are slightly more complicated. If having that fixer shot also entails dealing with their bodyguards, it would be a two-stage job, because something needs to be done before the crew is able to accomplish the task.
  • A job with moving pieces is when a job has many stages, and many things that need to go right for the task to be accomplished. If the fixer you want shot is paranoid about security and has many security systems as home as well as bodyguards, your crew will need to maneuver around those many challenges to accomplish the task.
  • A job with moving pieces and a narrow window has many stages, many things that need to go right and can only be accomplished a certain way. If the fixer you want shot is the top fixer of Night City, has security systems, bodyguards, many allies and is only reachable in certain conditions, your crew will only be able to accomplish their task in a very specific way in very specific conditions. Any misstep during the process means death.
  • When a miracle is needed for the job, it is basically impossible. The job has many stages, many things that need to go right and can only be accomplished in a certain way that your target is also prepared for. If the fixer you want shot is actually Saburo Arasaka, killing him entails somehow getting through the best security force in the world, avoiding detection from top-of-the-line security systems, and surviving the wrath of the organisation. All of this will need to be done within an impossibly small window of opportunity. Everything in a mission like this can go perfectly and it still probably won’t be enough to achieve success.

When you are organizing a job, you can predict how hard the job will be in general. You can ask your Referee for an approximate of the DV of the task. The Referee will tell you if the DV of the job is 5 or less, between 6-10, between 11-15, between 16-20, between 21-25, between 26-30 or above 30. You can only ask your Referee for this information once per job.

The Referee should feel free to modify the DV from these set complexity by taking into account the plan the crew goes with, the narrative context and the time during which the job takes place.

Recruiting a crew

To have a job done, you need to recruit a crew. Things don’t get done if nobody gets their hands dirty, after all. When you assemble a crew, you either choose to recruit a prebuilt crews or to assemble a crew. The crew you recruit has stats which modify their chance of success during the Job Roll.

Recruiting a prebuilt crew

Prebuilt crews are already established groups that you can recruit. This represents moments when you recruit a gang to do your job, hire a team of corporate enforcers or hire a squad of edgerunners who always run together. They are generally cheaper to recruit, but they don’t provide as much benefits as a handpicked team. Prebuilt crews have a quality level, which dictates the modifier they provide to your Job Roll and their Recruitment Cost.

PREBUILT CREWS MODIFIERS AND RECRUITMENT COST
Prebuilt crew quality levelJob Roll ModifierRecruitment cost
Meat fodder crew+0500 eb.
Junior crew+12,000 eb.
Competent crew+34,000 eb.
Expert crew+1020,000 eb.

Assembling a crew

When you assemble a crew, you recruit each member of the crew yourself, which allows you to maximize the bonuses your crew provides to your Job Roll. This is a much more expensive and time-consuming process.

Assembling a crew entails picking out the exact people you need to accomplish the job you are organizing. To do so, you need to choose the quality level and the role of each of the crewmates you want to recruit. You can recruit any number of crewmates.

A crewmate’s quality level affects how much of a bonus to the Job Roll the crewmate will provide during the job. Crewmates come in 4 qualities levels: junior, competent, expert and the best, which dictates the modifier they provide to your Job Roll and their Recruitment Cost. Crewmates who are “the best” are very expensive and cannot be simply recruited. To recruit the best Solo, for example, you will need to contact them directly and give them convincing arguments that would make them want to join your job.

You choose the role of every crewmate you recruit. If your Referee agrees that the role you picked would be useful for the job you are organizing, that crewmate adds an additional +1 to the Job Roll Modifier they provide.

Finally, if you recruit a crewmate who is uniquely qualified for the job you are organizing, that crewmate add an additional +1 to your Job Roll. For example, if you recruit one of your followers who used to be head of security for Arasaka for a heist job at Arasaka headquarters, that follower would be considered uniquely qualified for the job and would add +1 to the Job Roll.

CREWMATE MODIFIERS AND RECRUITMENT COST
Quality levelJob Roll ModifierRecruitment cost
Junior-1500 eb.
Competent+01,000 eb.
Expert+25,000 eb.
The Best+325,000 eb. or more

The recruitment cost of each crewmate you recruit can vary.

  • If you recruit a crewmate from outside of your Hangout’s crowd, the recruitment cost for that crewmate is doubled.
  • If you recruit a follower or a character that you know and are on good terms with, the recruitment cost for that crewmate is halved.

Paying for the job

The total cost of the job is equal to the total of the recruitment cost of the crew. If it is a crew you assembled, the total cost is equal to the sum of every crewmate’s recruitment cost.

The cost of each crewmate might be modified because of the narrative context of the job or by the people you recruit, who could try to negotiate for more or might accept a smaller pay in exchange for favors. The Referee has final say over the final price of the job.

As a sidenote, the prices shown here are mostly useful when dealing with violent crimes and jobs that require that your crew risk their life. The jobs you organize don’t have to be like this, however. You can organize non-violent jobs, like tasking a team of scientists to do research or ordering a crew of drug dealers to sell your synthcoke supplies. For non-violent jobs where these costs might not make sense, the Referee can choose to halve the cost of the job.

When you have finished preparing the job, you give the go ahead. When you do so, you pay half the cost of the job to the crew. You will pay the other half of the cost after the job is over and if the crew accomplished the goal you set out for them.

An example scenario of organizing a job

This system is very deep and complex, so here is a scenario of the rules in action.

Lily wants to gather blackmail on an enemy Rockerboy rival who is aggressively pushing her out of interesting opportunities. She has a level 1 Hangout which attracts a narrow crowd of Rockerboys, Medias, and Writers (a non-edgerunner Role). She already knows that her rival often sleeps with fans during concerts in a popular downtown night club, even though he has a loving partner. She decides to organize a job with the goal of getting a crew together to gather blackmail for her during one of those saucy meetings.

The Referee determines that this is a job with moving pieces, setting the DV at 20, but lowering it to 17, because Lily wants to accomplish this task in a non-violent way.

Lily asks the Referee how hard the job will be. The Referee tells her that the DV will be between 15 and 20.

For this job, she figures a team of 3 will do.

  • She recruits a Competent Netrunner, arguing to the Referee that the Netrunner will be able to defeat any security system in the club.
  • She recruits a Competent Rockerboy, arguing that the Competent Rockerboy will be able to get a gig at the club, providing the crew with backstage access.
  • Finally, she recruits an Expert Media who is a paparazzi by trade, to produce the best blackmail material possible.

Because the Competent Rockerboy she recruited is relatively unknown, Lily decides to tip the scales in her favor by using her Charismatic Impact ability on the club manager to ensure that the Competent Rockerboy will get the gig.

She pays 8,000 eb. for the job, recruiting the Competent Rockerboy (1,000 eb.) and Expert Media (5,000 eb.) for their normal cost, but paying double for the Competent Netrunner (2,000 eb.), since her Hangout’s crowd does not attract the Netrunner Role.

For this Job Roll, Lily has a bonus of 12. This bonus is the combined result of her Crowd’s Job Roll Modifier (+4), the Expert Media she recruited who is uniquely qualified (+4), the Competent Netrunner she recruited (+1), the Competent Rockerboy she recruited (+1) and of the help she provided to the crew by providing intel on the target’s location and activities (+1) and by using her Charismatic Impact Ability (+1).

D-Day arrives. Lily rolls for the Job Roll. She rolls a 6, ending up with a result of 18.

She receives a text message from the Expert Media she recruited, saying that the job is a success. A few days later, she finds an unmarked envelope under her office door, in which she discovers many saucy pictures that she will be able to use against her rival in the future.

Using the Job mechanic without a Hangout

Some might see this mechanic and want to use it without having a Hangout. If you wish to do so, you should double the cost of every crewmate and every crew, because you do not gain the benefits of a Hangout's crowd. In addition, you would not gain the Job Roll Modifier bonus granted by the size of your crowd.

So while it is not impossible to organize jobs without a Hangout, it would probably be much more difficult and tricky. Having a Hangout reduces the costs of organizing jobs and ensures that the people you recruit will be competent.

Next article: acquiring and building safehouses

<-- Acquiring a safehouse // Safehouse benefits per Role -->

Disclaimer

This is a fan project for our game of the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop role-playing game. Most corporations, game rules and in-universe references are the intellectual property of R. Taslorian Games. Some graphical assets are created by Cédric Duchaineau and Alejandro Olivares were inspired by assets created by CD Projekt Red or R. Taslorian Games.

Disclaimer

This is a fan project for our game of the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop role-playing game. Most corporations, game rules and in-universe references are the intellectual property of R. Taslorian Games. Some graphical assets are created by Cédric Duchaineau and Alejandro Olivares were inspired by assets created by CD Projekt Red or R. Taslorian Games.