Many cyberpunk campaigns begin in Night City, but they don’t need to end there. It’s a big world and a bigger solar system, and humans are everywhere.
There are numerous tools to help build your dark future metropolis, from city generators to map generators to soundscapes. Want to get into what your city looks, feels, and even smells like? Books like Augmented Reality and Single Player Mode can help with that.
Get more urban inspiration:
Cyberpunk Map Generators
Procedural City Generator
The Procedural City Generator creates 2D and 3D city maps. The 3D maps are exportable to Blender. Map styles include Google Maps, Apple Maps, and hand-drawn. The map styles best suited to a cyberpunk aesthetic are:
- AppleDark (inspired by Apple Maps, the main streets are orange, side streets are gray, city blocks are dark grey, water is dark blue)
- Assassin (inspired by Assassin’s Creed IV, main streets are thick white lines, side streets are thin white lines, and water is black).
Snazzy Maps
Snazzy Maps takes real world maps, and lets you apply a variety of color themes to them. This allows you to take conventional maps, and give them that dark future feel by using styles like:
- Shades of Grey (a sort of dark mode view)
- Thrive (bright blue neon lines)
City Roads Generator
City Roads Generator renders the street map of any real-world city, minus any buildings or structures. It leverages OpenStreetMap for its underlying data, and the results are striking. The design is changeable, allowing you to transform the default elegant black-lines-on-white background to a bright green-on-black cyberpunk theme with a few clicks.
Cyberscape Pro
Cyberscape Pro | Procedural City Generator – A true cyberpunk city generator for use with Blender. There’s a cost, and we don’t work with Blender, so we haven’t tried it, but the screenshots look impressive. If you’ve got the skills and want to create an immersive city for your campaign, check it out.
Cyberpunk City Audio & Soundscapes
MyNoise.net: Cyberpunk Sound Scape – A web-based soundboard which recreates the sounds of a futuristic city. It includes an array of sliders to quickly change the dominant sounds, which include “Cafe Restaurant”, “Terminal A5”, “Car Interior”, and “Modern Starship” (for that sci-fi flair).
Syrinscape: Cyberpunk RED – Syrinscape, the RPG soundboard web app, worked with R. Talsorian to create sound sets for the game. There’s a cost for each set (or you can subscribe to the service). You can get a taste of them through the “Forlorn Hope SoundSet Demo” video.
Cyberpunk City Random Generators
Fantasy Name Generators: Cyberpunk City Names – Spawns 10 cyberpunk-inspired city names with each virtual die roll. Examples include “Eclipse City”, “Revolution Center”, “Neo Impetus”, and “Reflection Park”, It tends to lean too heavily into the “City” part of its logic, but it’s still worth checking out for quick-hit name ideas.
Bright Sun Games: Cyberpunk RED Generators features a bunch of useful city generator tools including “Night Markets and Bodegas”, “Random Buildings”, and “Urban Environments”. Not sure what your PCs should be doing? Check out “Expanded Hustles” and “Random Encounters”. Those who want even more tables can pick up Bright Sun’s expanded sourcebook, Darker Futures: System Agnostic Generators for Cyberpunk and Tech Future Roleplaying.
Cyberpunk City Books & PDFs
Augmented Reality, The Holistic City Kit For Cyberpunk Games [PDF] – One of our go-to tools for building out the lost streets and forgotten corners of our Cyberpunk RED campaign. It’s packed with a ton of tables including “Sense & The City: Smells, Scents, Sights”, “What’s On The Road?”, and “More Traffic”. What a more physical approach to city design? Try “drop grids”. You print a sheet, which is a grid including various potential locations. Then you drop dice on to it; wherever a die lands, there’s your business/bar/hideout.
Cyberpunk RED: Single Player Mode [PDF] – The solo player add-on is great for people who want to tackle Night City alone. However, there is also a ton of great content for anyone running a game. There are tables for districts, corporations, communities, businesses, and a bunch of other “I need it now” kinds of locations. While some of the tables are generic, others are seasoned with that Cyberpunk RED feel . Examples include apartment buildings like “Glenlife Perfected”, “Coronado Heights”, and “Silverhand Studios” though somehow we’re pretty sure Johnny didn’t have anything to do with that last one).
Fishwife Games: 100 Overheard Cyber City Chatter [PDF] – A collection of random conversations heard in the city.