I had played and run other RPGs since 1980, in the early 90s I tackled CYBERPUNK 2020. The key is to know the Netrunning rules cold , get 'er done, because you're making all the other players but the Netrunner wait idle. I bought the first 2 issues of the Cyberpunk digest-sized magazine, Interface, and a few other supplements, but never really used supplement material. I invented my own stories. I had paid for a speed-reading course around 1980 to cope with university reading loads. Speed-reading really works, pledges to double your reading-speed while measuring the same comprehension level. You learn how to shed some bad habits in reading from grade-school that slow you down as an adult, and also take in more of a line of print at a glance. But they also covered note-taking techniques. I learned a graphical "tree" style of note-taking that was a big improvement in creating stuff. Normally people write plain old "straight-ahead" notes, maybe use point-form. But the tree-structure (always putting new branches in an upward direction, and to the right, therefore requiring you to write below horizontal lines and to the left of vertical lines), let you see everything at once, and was more editable. You could even "zoom" and create a new page to develop a branch more. (large files:) <a href="http://downstat.homestead.com/files/Temp/TreeDiagrams/Cyberpunk_tree-diagram_notes_1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://downstat.homestead.com/files/Temp/TreeDiagrams/Cyberpunk_tree-diagram_notes_1.jpg</a> <a href="http://downstat.homestead.com/files/Temp/TreeDiagrams/Cyberpunk_tree-diagram_notes_2.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://downstat.homestead.com/files/Temp/TreeDiagrams/Cyberpunk_tree-diagram_notes_2.jpg</a> When I was really practiced with the CP2020 rules and this creation-system, I was running games just from these branching notes, checking off branches as the PCs more or less completed a "chapter", and I only had some scratch-paper to write down NPC stats to run combat with. It was beautiful. As I said, I never used the prepared adventures in the CP supplements. I took a subway map from my city, Toronto, and "futurized" it, guessing wrong about how the subway lines would be extended, of course. I added sites, and suggested that strong space-metal alloys made in orbit were brought down to build Lake Towers and extend the city south into Lake Ontario, shifting the center of gravity of action somewhat. Lake Towers were forbidding, isolated-looking arcoplexes connected by a grid of highways. I added many other touches to amuse my players, such as Mayor Mel Lastman's Head in a Jar. Mel Lastman was a particularly long-lasting mayor of Toronto. I think he was the second-longest lasting in all of the British Empire, second only to Dick Whittington, "thrice Lord Mayor of London", 700 years earlier. So if we see FUTURAMA now with that same head-in-a-jar idea, the players joke, "Just call Mel!" It was fairly immersive stuff. My specialty was "powers of description", like from the old Reader's Digest column "It Pays to Increase Your Word-Power". So a plane crash-scene at night doesn't just have floodlights and rescue-workers, but as the Sun rises in the morning they gesture to turn the Klieg Lights off, and the lights turn off, but leaving a little coil of filament at the center glowing white, then red, then dying to nothing...if I run a game, you will believe . Yes, I had a mix of role-playing and action. As Archie Bunker (from All in the Family) said, "You got yer Faith, yer Hope, and yer Charity, but the greatest of these is Violence..."
