Burnout Reaper

While i havent played this game, I appreciate the maker having the game for free however one question I have is, what would happen if someone was actually maniacally insane enough to spend 250$ on this game and not take one of the MANY free community copies 

Weird, sinister and bombastic. Has one of the coolest character sheets I ever seen. Burnout Reaper is pure dark and wicked cyberpunk set in a world where the player must take the lives of others to continue theirs - however little there is left of it. My advice is to play this when the mood is right and heed the author's warnings.

Loving the art. Very 80s feel to it.

sheet is so cool

Burnout Reaper is a stylish nihilistic over-the-top cyberpunk oneshot trpg about app-driven organ harvests.

In Burnout reaper, your characters are expected to die. Their situation is untenable. Their ethics are ambiguous. But you'll care about them as they go out.

The setting is a near-future city where everything has been hyper-commercialized and all the wealth has been vacuumed up to the top of the system. Consequently, all the infrastructure in the city is built around taking money off of you, and you have to do hyper-violent gig work to pay your bills.

Repo seems to be the big tonal reference point, but I think you could also describe this as "Doordash Purge." Freesia is probably another similar work, but I'm not 100% sure other people have read Freesia.

Layoutwise, Burnout Reaper consists of a two-page trifold and a one page character sheet. They're well-organized, and just on the edge of dense. The black bold text feels a little difficult to read via a screen, but I suspect it's easy in print. There's a lot of it, and it's packed fairly tight, but it's all important and flavorful.

The writing is strong, and often goes for a sort of Guilty Gear pre-match text style. It injects some humor into the otherwise very dark setting by pushing it slightly over the top with lines like "Submit to Capital or enter Oblivion."

Honestly, I think this is one of the places where cyberpunk shines---where it sets one foot over the line into absurdity, but an absurdity that you can see from here, like the mouth of a whirlpool drawing in your ship.

In other places, the writing is simply nightmare dark. Too dystopic. Too close to real. The "Welcome to Paradise City" column stands out as one of the bleakest things I've read in a game, and it maintains a bright and peppy tone the whole time.

Gameplay-wise, this is a GM adversarial system. The city wants to chip away at the players, and the GM plays the city. Everything costs too much. Anything that looks free stings you with a price. Police don't interfere in violence unless they can make money off of it, but they will happily extort you through writing tickets. The gigwork app shortchanges and cuts pay over nominally damaged organs.

Much like the game, the dice are weird but compelling. You roll any number of d6s, add them up, and try to beat the target number for a success with a complication. Or you get three 6s, three of a kind, or a straight and succeed without complication. Any 1s you roll are permanently taken from you, slowly whittling down your total pool over the course of play.

There's a genuine gameplay loop, with downtime and resource tracking, and there's character classes that feed into this (each is defined by what bills you have to pay.) There's also a mini economy, extremely bleak sample missions, and room to go off the rails and change the nature and tone of the game.

Overall, if you like stuff that's quick to play, stylish, and darkly comedic, I think you'll enjoy Burnout Reaper a lot. It's a very tightly made game, while still giving the GM and group lots of leeway to freestyle and storytell.