hook, line, & cyb3r

hook, line, & cyb3r is a GMless, zero prep, pick-up-and-play cyberpunk one shot of blade-wielding bounty hunters and neon-tinged heists, powered by Go Fish. It leans on mechanics you've known like your entire life & a vast array of generative tables to slide you effortlessly into playing out the chaotic professional lives of shadowrunners, bounty hunters, or some other type of high tech dystopic gig economy adjacent freelance criminals for hire.

What You Need To Play

GM: NO. PREP: NO. FISH: GO.

• Session length
  • About three hours
• Number of players
  • For a group: 2-6 (though I learned in the process of making this game that some people claim Go Fish works for up to 12 people, so, I dunno, give it a try)
  • There's a section with multiple solo variants
• Miscellaneous
  • A deck of cards (or digital analogue (that you can play Go Fish with))
  • A light handful of d6s (or an e-handful of cyber-d6s)
  • Print-outs of the physical play assets OR another way to take both private & shared notes (or the robust Google Sheets based online playdoc)

How It Works

You play this game by playing Go Fish.

Each suit of cards represents one of the four pillars of intel you need to pull off a job: the client, the objective, the opportunity, & your "in". The intel gets privately generated by each player (with the help of an extensive series of tables to roll on) when they "fish" from the deck, so by the time you've assembled all four cards of a value to complete a book, they've picked up a wild spread of facts that you get to weave into one single successful mission. If you complete a book by taking those cards from another player's hand, the two of you work together to build the narrative of how you stole that job out from under them.

The Tables

This game requires zero prep. In service of that, it's full of generative tables for every instance of information you might need to build a scenario. This is a GMless game in part because the cards & tables can help GM for you. Let the dice set your characters up so you can focus your creative energy on how they pull off the impossible. The nature of randomness means you'll be confronting situations zanier than any non-table entity would generally find reasonable to throw at you, leaving you with even more room for coming up with inventive & cinematic solutions.

On Providing Structure for Preplessness

Part of the core design philosophy of this game stemmed from being very very tired most of the time & often feeling that the narrative games I love don't provide me with enough structure to work with to get play started. It's important to me that the system doesn't require someone to be having one of their best days to be able to get something creative & fun out of it. In addition, it can be difficult to get busy & sleepy adults together for a game, so this system is designed to be something you can start playing almost immediately.