An AI co-GM for Cyberpunk RED, gig after gig

Your system automates more than you would guess, and none of it is people

Start with what you do not have to think about. Attacks know which table to reach for when autofire opens up, shotgun shells roll their own dice, armour ablates where it was hit, and the Critical Injury that follows Critical Damage lands on the character with its Death Save penalty already flagged. Cyberware installs with the Humanity cost worked out. Ammunition and reloads are counted, and the Difficulty Value tool sits on the canvas for range.

The netrunning side is built out just as far. Architectures assemble floor by floor, decks hold their programs, Black ICE rezzes as an actor with a sheet of its own, and the Interface ability rolls like any other. Reputation and the Facedown have their own roll. Improvement Points and eurobucks sit in a ledger the system keeps.

Not one of those is where a Cyberpunk RED evening gets expensive, and R. Talsorian's own advice for GMs says so without quite meaning to. The published guidance scores a Cyberpunk RED GM on describing people and places, on holding a voice, and on what the light and the sound are doing while a scene runs. Those are the three it says players want more of. They are also the three that a single GM, running a gig a week, is least able to hold at that standard forty sessions in.

So the split here is not really about rules at all. Familiar takes the presentation and the record: the room, the faces in it, what is playing underneath, and what this crew did the last three times they were in this district. What Familiar reads is the compendia and journals your own world holds, so the Fixer in the briefing is the Fixer you wrote down rather than a name a model liked the sound of.

• A district described so it could only be that district, with the weather doing something and a sound behind the talking
• A Fixer, a ripperdoc and two gangers in the same back room, each holding a voice of their own for the whole scene
• The gig written up into your world afterwards, so the next briefing has something to refer back to
• A screamsheet, a portrait or a corp letterhead drawn when the table needs to look at the thing rather than hear it read out
• A running note of what this crew is known for, so the next Fixer has something to hold against them

• The prep, read and run loopWhat a journal page needs on it before the AI can narrate your Night City instead of a generic one.

The jobs that come back every week, whatever the gig is

Cyberpunk RED is played in gigs, and the gig is the unit. A crew takes a job, the job goes sideways, and the night ends somewhere it was not supposed to. Next week there is another one, with a different client, a different district, and a different set of people to be.

That cadence is most of the appeal. It is also a volume problem, because every item below arrives again seven days later, and none of it is something the system could ever have taken off you.

• A briefing needs a Fixer with a name, a manner, and a reason to be offering this job to these people, and the last one was a week ago
• The night before the gig, and the client, the go-between and whoever is standing behind them still do not have names
• A netrun wants a fiction sitting on top of the architecture, floor by floor, before anybody jacks in
• Somebody asks who exactly the crew crossed at the Night Market, and the answer is in a write-up from five gigs back
• The bar has to be a different bar from the last bar, again, and the four people in it have to want four different things

The back room in Watson, before the Fixer starts

Here is the whole ask, typed while people are still getting drinks. "Open in the back room in Watson. Before the Fixer starts talking, tell me what the crew still owes her from the courier job."

The owing comes back first, and it comes back off the page rather than out of the conversation. The write-up from the courier job is a journal entry sitting in your own world, so what returns is the arrangement in the words you typed that night, not a version reassembled from whatever survived in a chat window.

Then the room. The light is low and wrong for the hour, there is something playing through a wall, and the back room sounds like a back room in Watson rather than a back room anywhere.

Then the Fixer. She is not a different person by the time the terms come up, and what she is angling for came off your own notes.

Ask at the end of the night and the gig lands on a journal page in your own world, which is the only reason the question at the top of this section had an answer.

Every roll in that back room belongs to the system that was built for it. The Difficulty Value on whatever check she makes them beat, the Reputation the crew leans on, the Facedown if somebody decides to make it one: all of that is the cyberpunk-red-core system doing its job, and nothing above reaches for any of it.

Two Cyberpunks share a name, and only one of them is at your table

The first reply settles which of the two you are in. Roles and the Role Abilities that come with them, STAT and SKILL against a Difficulty Value, Humanity and the cyberware that costs it, Reputation, an Interface roll on a floor of a NET Architecture. None of that had to be configured.

That other Cyberpunk is the problem, and almost nothing else at a Foundry table has one like it. It is a video game, by a long way the best documented thing wearing the name, and a decade and a cast removed from your table. A model asked about Night City with no brief in front of it drifts there by default: another idiom, another protagonist, and a city your crew has never walked.

The starter below is what holds it here. Familiar is told to pull the people and the city detail out of this world's journals rather than out of memory, and to say when something was never written down. Paste it in and the Night City at your table is the one on your own pages, in the year you set at the top.

The starter leaves the setting line open on purpose, and the year goes in there. A crew working the streets straight after the Fourth Corporate War and a crew working them later in the Time of the RED want noticeably different things out of the same gig.

Where the rules engine stops

On Cyberpunk RED, Familiar runs everything around the rules, and the rules are the one thing it does not touch.

Refereeing the rules is D&D 5e (2024) only. In combat the tracker, the turns, and the tokens still work; the rulings stay yours.

One setting to change: turn the combat auto-pilot off in Familiar's settings. It drives NPC turns through the 5e engine, so it does not know your system; the monsters' turns stay yours to run. Playing solo, that is the part you will feel.

This table is read from Cyberpunk RED's own data model and Familiar's shipped code. It has not yet been run at a live Cyberpunk RED table, so nothing here is described as observed.

The starter your table begins from

Familiar carries a Table Rules field per world, under Settings, System Rules. Whatever you put there is appended to every request, and it reaches your MCP client too.

Cyberpunk RED has its own starter, offered first when Familiar sees your world. It is a starting point rather than a ruleset: the terms, the table culture, and slots for your setting, your tone, and your house rules. Paste it, then cut what does not match your table.

We play Cyberpunk RED. Use this system's terms: STAT + SKILL + d10 checks against a Difficulty Value, Role Abilities, Humanity and cyberware, Reputation, and NET Architectures with Interface and Black ICE for netrunning. Look rules and gear up in this world's compendium and journals, and defer all rules adjudication to the GM.
Let the system handle rolls, damage, armor ablation, and Critical Injuries.
Standing guidance:
- Keep the stakes personal and street-level: a debt, a friend in Trauma Team's care, not saving the world.
- Frame the work as gigs from a fixer, and keep pay and eddies tight so the next job matters.
- Reward style and nerve: how an edgerunner carries a room can settle a standoff before anyone draws.
- Make firefights fast and costly: a gunfight thins the crew and brings gangs, corps, and the law.
- Track what the crew is known for, and let that Reputation open and close doors on the next gig.
- Pull NPCs and Night City detail from this world's journals, not memory, and say when something was never written down.
Setting: [Night City, the year].
Tone: [e.g. gritty neon-noir, high stakes and street attitude].
House rules:
- [rule]
Never speak or decide for the edgerunners.

Where the reading stops on a Cyberpunk RED sheet

The first is about how far a number travels, the second about where this system keeps a state. The third is a refusal you will hear rather than a failure you have to notice. All three are worth knowing before you install anything.

• The pool this system counts down comes back with the character now, current and maximum both, read from the path the capability table prints. It stops there. The scene and token listings and the GM screen go looking for a field name this system does not use, so they arrive without it, and mid-fight the score that counts stays the one you already had: the token bars you pointed at that pool when you set the world up.
• The Conditions row above is worth reading twice. A Critical Injury is an item this system creates and looks after, and the wound state is worked out from the sheet rather than stored as a flag, so the two things a Cyberpunk RED GM would want to flip from chat are the two that were never toggles to begin with.
• Initiative is declined, and on this system that costs you something real rather than nothing. Cyberpunk RED has an order to roll for and your combat tracker already knows the formula. Ask through Familiar and you get a refusal, so the order is one more thing to start in the tracker yourself.

Not one of those three is something Familiar would keep better than your own screen already does. The token bars move as the fight does, the order sits in your combat tracker, and a Critical Injury is an item on the sheet where you can see it. What Familiar covers is the part no system was built to hold: the people in that room, and the record of what this crew has already done to them.

Where the answers come from on a Cyberpunk RED world

The free system ships gear. Weapons, armour, cyberware and programs sit in its compendia, and its licence is why they can. What it does not ship is people: there is no pack of Night City faces to pull a Fixer out of, so every named person at your table starts as something you wrote.

That decides where Familiar reads from, and it is the whole reason this works on published material. A screamsheet laid into a journal page, a gig out of a published collection, a district you sketched in four lines: those are the source, and the answer that comes back is assembled out of them. Where you wrote nothing, what comes back is that nothing was written.

Cyberpunk RED is unusually well supplied here. R. Talsorian has put out a long run of free downloadable material alongside the paid collections, screamsheets included, so a table that would rather run published work than write its own is not short of it. All of it becomes readable the moment it is a journal page in your world.

• Laying published material into FoundryGetting a gig onto the page as journals and sheets, so there is something to read from.

The account a gig-of-the-week game runs up

The starter carries one standing instruction that is easy to skim past: track what the crew is known for, and let that Reputation open and close doors on the next gig. It is a short line with a long reach in this game.

Cyberpunk RED rolls Reputation and rolls the Facedown, so the mechanic is covered. What no system holds is why the number is the number: the corp this crew embarrassed in Westbrook, the Fixer they left carrying it, the ripperdoc who still does them favours because of a night in Santo Domingo that never had a rule attached to it.

That record cannot live in the conversation, because a conversation is the one place it will not survive. It lives on journal pages in your own world, and the next Fixer's read on this crew gets assembled out of them. Reputation moves, the crew changes district, and the pages move with them.

• How the campaign record worksWriting the record down, and reaching it again five gigs later.

The parts that are the same everywhere

Connecting an AI, choosing a model, and what it costs do not change with your game system.

• Everything Familiar can doThe full tool reference. Everything outside combat refereeing runs on your system too.
• Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or GeminiThe connection steps, identical on every game system.
• Choosing an AI modelWhich model, and how much thinking headroom a hard scene needs.
• Voice and sound for your tableVoices, music and effects, the same on every game system.
• Campaign memoryThe record and the recall, unchanged by your game system.