Many cyberpunk games (or rather conversations on social media about cyberpunk games) share a rule: you don't do jobs for corporations. It's a sound rule. Especially if you want to signal to strangers, "No, the cops and corporations are not misunderstood good guys. They're the bad guys."

Here's the thing, though. If you can trust the group, set up safety tools—and they're open to it—dangle the corporation job. Make it look enticing or necessary. Hint at the danger. Make NPCs warn them. Then—play the corporation like a corporation.

There are many ways to start a cyberpunk campaign, but none motivate the players or nail the genre better, than an evil corporation at its center.

Three myths about corpos.

Most depictions of corporations are pure fantasy—between the cyberpunk setting and the real world, the real corporation is much worse. I'm genuinely surprised by what cyberpunk characters do in response to their corporations' behavior—if they only knew how much more infuriating the real ones are.

#1 Corporations are logical.

The mythological corporation is like the T-1000 Terminator. Pure logic in service of pure evil. In reality, most corporations hurt people for illogical, emotional, and ideological reasons. We've seen it before. Corporations fire 30% of their staff only to hire worse candidates at double the cost. Corporations burning billions of dollars to scrap pennies. Right now, Boeing's obsession with its stock value has rendered it incapable of making planes that fly. I won't even mention Elon Musk.

#2 Corporations are competent.

Corporations have a superpower: they're so big (and so rich) that they can absorb failure at scale. Their ability to survive scandals, catastrophes, and collateral damage is unmatched. Some of our biggest injustices right now are from corporations covering their ass through conspiracy, extortion, or—in the most boring fashion possible—by leveraging a compromised legal system. Corporations are anything but competent. Their ability to stay incompetent is what makes them a corporation.

#3 Corporations are slick.

The cyberpunk genre likes to show its corpos in Balenciaga suits, making plans, and drinking scotch. In reality, most corpos are middle managers with no tangible skills. High-level executives are usually weirdos with terrible tastes. Look up any billionaire's house—they're goobers, 4Chan users, or Disney Adults with bad attitudes. Some might exclaim, "It's so dumb, it's brilliant!" But to quote Benoit Blanc—no, it's just dumb. Corporate baddies are vindictive, sad, and pathetic.

How to play dirty corpos.

Now that we've refamiliarized ourselves with our very dystopian, very real corporations—let's talk about how we can make them the perfect villains for our cyberpunk freelancing punks.

Offer jobs they can't refuse.

1. Make the job seem easy. Freelancers know what I'm talking about. Make the job look stupid-easy. Other jobs require punks to beat the odds, navigate uncertainty, and tip-toe around politics. Corporations keep those hidden. They even keep themselves hidden through shell companies and subcontractors.
2. Promise an obscene payout. Corporations burn money. Make their jobs pay two, five, or ten times as much as the little guy. They don't care. They'll find a way to not pay anyway.
3. Put the screws on them. Evil corporations always find a way to make not taking the job costly. Withhold resources, threaten the punk's community, or make their goals seem like shared goals. That's how they win. Corporations make themselves mandatory by rigging the system.

Run the job like a horror scenario.

1. Spring the trap. The corporation knows the job is dangerous and complicated—that's why they hired someone else to do it. Make the scope of the deception hit hard and fast and treat it like a jump scare.
2. Make the dystopia new. Show the imbalance of power from the clean penthouses of the capitalist. Depict the cruelty in a way that's detached—almost clinical. More importantly, show how easy, mundane, and boring it is for corporations. They're not doing it for massive profits or sadistic joy—they're doing it because they can.
3. Inflict a moral horror. Many horror games, like Mothership, evoke body horror. The genre of horror that destroys the self through physical mutilation, but corporations are different, they destroy us by perverting and mutilating our morals. This is the classic psycho-thriller twist. The data you're destroying is evidence. The office you're robbing are the good guys. Whatever it is, your characters are the final piece in the corporation's ascendency.

10 Cyberpunk Plots

1. You're hired to kidnap a politician in disguise, but it's a trap. Once you do the handover, the client executes the politician. You're a patsy that triggers a war.
2. Lightbringer hires you to steal their rival's data, but it turns out it's a shell company of the corporation. The data is evidence of corruption.
3. Project Pizza hires you to deliver pizza, but it's not pizza. It's drugs.
4. Wagner Subsidies has hired you to do asset security. The twist? The asset doesn't exist. The kill squad is here to kill everyone as part of a convincing insurance scam.
5. Methuselah, a medical research group, hires you to track down kidnapped patients. The reveal? The patients are escaped lab rats. Methuselah is a bio-weapons manufacturer.
6. McKinsey invites you to a focus group. It's the Thunderdome.
7. Medusa hires you to steal the blueprints of a new nuclear facility, but when you connect their data drive to the mainframe, it doesn't download their data, it triggers a meltdown. Medusa is a subsidy of big oil.
8. BurgerBach is hiring you to distribute samples of its new sandwich in target neighborhoods. The problem? The burgers cause hallucinations.
9. A rich media mogul has hired you to hunt down a criminal. The twist? They also hired the criminal. It's a duel. It'll make for great television.
10. Archmage has put a bounty on one of their customers for stealing a prototype. There's just one problem: they sent the prototype to the customer. The customer has been too busy working a double shift to open the package.

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