Blades in the Dark and classic cyberpunk are two flavors which seem like they would go great together. And yet the community loves their weird fantasy and historicals, with a paucity of cyberpunk. Well, Neon Black is the cyberpunk hack you've been looking for, deeply inspired by classic Gibsonian cyberpunk stories, and with subtle mods to the BitD core to align rules with setting.

The action is set around Prime City, a corporate controlled megalopolis in a future devastated by climate change and out of control capitalism. Your characters have a chance to fight the powers that be and build a community. Prime City owes a lot to its inspirations, but it's not generic cyberpunk: the locations, NPCs, and factions are specific, alive, and eminently gamable.

So as to the changes to base BitD. The biggest is that Stress has been replaced with Luck, and there's no downtime action to get more. Instead Luck regenerates on crits and with the engagement roll. Running out of stress hits one of four calamities, and when you've used them all your character is burnt. Playbooks are also a little more narratively fixed, with special abilities replaced with milestones that have narrative requirements as well as an XP cost. Playbook items are also limited to ones you've unlocked, making characters feel a little more resource constrained to start. And getting three action dots requires cyberware, with the Get Chromed downtime action. Overall, this isn't a game about criminals struggling to make a name in a dark underworld. It's about misfits finding a family while dancing along the edge of catastrophe.

But the real genius, from a GMing perspective, is the series of downtime scenes, moments when the community and the city changes. Scenes aren't ordered and they aren't repeated. It's not a fixed campaign, but it's all the pieces that you need to make sure you hit the game's themes.

This is just the rules, no art and minimal layout. But the rules are are well worth the price. I've checked out a lot of Blades hacks, and this is one of the finest! I can only hope that Elliot finds an artist and a publisher to elevate this game to the level it deserves.