Terror in the Biodome CY_BORG Version

I finally did it! I converted my silly little Cyberpunk Red screamsheet into a CY_BORG Zungeon - for Zungeon Jam. You can find it on itch below

Is it particularly punk to lay out your zungeon in a markup language? Probably not. But it is in the sense that it is mine, and how I would do it.

Now I am going to get a little personal for a bit. This stupid little zungeon started off as a little piece in my back pocket for a Cyberpunk Red game I was running for my friends. Sort of an early toe dip into the OSR. That game fell apart before I could bring this to the table. I only resurrected it when I started running Red for money on Startplaying. Then I saw its potential.

Long story short I typed it up, realised I couldn’t put it on itch due to RTGs content policy and put it out on their Discord and this blog instead. I knew I wanted to give it another crack for a few reasons but couldn’t build up the motivation. Between work and kids I was cracking under the pressure and my hobbies suffered.

A few mental health crises later and I finally started seeing a therapist. So far I have only been twice but the changes are already pretty big for me. One of the first strategies we discussed was a flow activity between work and home to reenergise me - something I liked doing that gave me energy, writing dungeons ¹. Now I am sitting there on the train doodling away in my little notebook and coming home ready for almost anything. Bonus, I get a bunch of bite-sized dungeons² sitting there ready for game night.

After a couple of weeks of doing this I started turning my mind back to Terror in the Biodome and finally converting it for CY_BORG. Before you know it I have a newly drawn map, 3 more rooms, NPC stats, and Cairn 2e style encounter/sign/environment tables. So I pivoted on my half done Zungeon Jam submission that I resented and just choose to finish this.

For me it is enough to know that I finished the text, gave people something gameable, and submitted something to the jam. I don’t know, and don’t really care if it is good (though I do hope people enjoy it). This is my first proper OSR module! I did it and before the end of a really chaotic and challenging year. That’s enough for me for now.

So if you bothered to read all this, thank you for taking an interest, thank you for (hopefully) reading the zungeon and happy new year. Keep on keeping on ✊

1. Add that one to the maybe definitely neuro-divergent scoreboard ↩︎

2. See Traverse Fantasy’s post about this, it is a really nice way to make a quick 1 session dungeon ↩︎