Pic related
I am starting an RPG campaign set in a post-post-apocalyptic world with elements of solar, cyberpunk and steampunk with elements. One of the elements I want to include is advanced bullet-resistant armour which means that the only way to deal with it is to use overwhelming firepower, shoot or stab through gaps or use special blades that can cut through the armour. I was thinking of using cyberpunk as a base but cybernetics isn't a major aspect of the world so I wanted to ask if any other systems could work with this?
>Cyberpunk
Corporations controll everything, you are trying to not to be sent to the slums by turning yourself into a robot
>Steam Punk
It's the Victorian era, only pressure cookers, cogs and gears allow the rich to strike you down with lighinings from their zeppelin fortresses.
>Solar Punk
The Sun controls everything, you are praising it every day lest you be turned into an undead and shipped off to ignite the embers
What is "solarpunk"?
Whatever the sequencers were doing in Sunless Sea.
THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN
THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN
THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN
THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN
The only example I've ever heard of was a yogurt ad.
Cyberpunk but utopian and light rather than dystopian and dark. Sometimes also tied in with a Ghiblified mediterranean aesthetic a la Porco Rosso.
?
I wouldn't really call JSR "cyberpunk", but rather just Y2K aesthetics.
So there's nothing punk about it.
Aesthetically, no. In a meta sense, it's punk, but being punk by mistake like that doesn't mean you get to call it punk.
What do I mean?
The hot, new, corporate thing is cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was thematically about how the rich shaft the poor and the divide of those who have and those who don't, a future of miracle technology that cures all illnesses and solves all problems, but the ones with the power and wealth to do all that in a heartbeat have no want but for themselves, where any good willed progress is stalled and erased through bureautocratic nightmares.
Now, it's a brand. You buy it. If you want to make Cyberpunk of your own, you go through the corporation that owns it. If a Square Enix owned Dev team want to put a funny little fictional Final Fantasy poster in their game, they need to phone in their boss, then their boss' boss, then their boss' boss' boss, then their boss' boss' boss' boss, all the way up to the CEO, for permission to do that.
Cyberpunk isn't punk either, now.
This Solar"punk" aesthetic gets a shit ton of pushback, not just because it's name isn't right as a branding, but because it appears to push green politics (not twitter or /misc/, real politics).
I personally think it looks cute as frick, and I'd love an RPG adventure set in a world like this. I'm in the minority.
Technically, even though it's name is wrong, it's still punk, in that it goes against the grain.
>local man thinks califorian yuppie greenwash is against the grain
lmao even
>it's wrong but it's right
Dipshit.
So there's nothing punk about it, you fricking moron. Punk is about rebelling against the status quo. If the status quo is a green dystopia masquerading as a utopia, then clearly the protagonists/PCs need to be people who want to destroy it for morally good reasons.
there's nothing green about the current dystopia corpsimp. it's the same old cyberpunk dystopia with an unconvincing coat of green paint. Solarpunk overgrows the cyberpunk dystopia by being genuinely about living in one's means and creating beauty where it can be created but being indistinguishable enough from the corpo greenwashing that the corpos have no defense against it.
>it's still punk, in that it goes against the grain
Which is not what the "punk" in "cyberpunk" was ever about.
It is punk to the extent it is a protest against endless cyberpunk doomscrolling.
>lunarpunk
Also good.
That doesn't make the work punk, that just makes the creator contrarian.
Just like the Movement, then. remember, "cyberpunk" was a label others used on them.
The punk in cyberpunk is over analysed. The name was lifted from a book which wasn't even close to cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk itself was already a protest/retort against the naive optimism of the transhumanism movement of tech bros in the 80s. That's probably why it's still relevant, because tech bros still believe there's some magical technopanacea just around the corner that'll cure all of humanity's ills.
They're given up on curing humanity's ills and have shifted to jockeying for seats in the rapture.
No, they very clearly still think they can use technology to "fix" humanity, it's just that their ideal humanity looks exactly like a cyberpunk dystopia, i.e. a bunch of immortal corporate methuselahs ring over the listeless, technolobotomized wagie hordes
Usually it requires an absurd amount of inferred genocide for a Solar Punk setting to take fruition. Where a Cyberpunk setting is happy to feed as big a population as possible on gruel because a bigger pop means more people to exploit and market to, a Solar Punk setting will sterilize the same population and herd them away from its parks like cattle so they don't get in the way of the Ghibi Hills, violently dismantle factories with the workers still inside to cut down carbon emissions, and actively target the corporations who promote old school industrialism - people have already been commodified beyond hope, but the Earth is still unique and precious.
Think WHF's Wood Elves.
Where do the materials come for for all the batteries, solar panels, electronics and who makes all their shit?
That's just the current German government, keks. Though they pay for the killing to be done in Africa.
ecofascist dystopia
Libertarian-Socialist Paradise
>Libertarian-Socialist
Everybody is collectively working to destroy the roads?
>What is "solarpunk"?
what the world could look like if we had listened to uncle ted
A poorly-conceived pile of aesthetic wankery that produced no noteworthy media that wasn't an ad for yogurt, so instead of trying to figure out what "solarpunk" was even supposed to mean, since most imagery tagged with the term was more green utopian shit with white, glassy buildings, people just turned it into a pseudo-activist movement where people on plebbit jerk each other off about how cool it would be to have more skyscrapers, but with big trees growing out of them.
I had a bunch of commies try and tell me it's "punk because it rebels against our real world" when I tried to point out to them that their "solarpunk" had nothing "punk" in it, it was just, as you said, a wankfest.
Everyone else is stupid. just think of the pokemon world from the anime and thats pretty much it. idealic techy-nature.
moronic name anyways.
From the anime he said.
>idealic
lmao
just saying its meant to illicit smiles and sunshine.
its really not that different tonally. dont know why I specified anime.
Like I said Punk really isnt the mood. stupid name. And its not really essential to what people I think are trying to get at.
>just saying its meant to illicit smiles and sunshine.
it's not the choice of word, it's that you can't spell, moron
Supposedly, while the other punks are dystopias that we should strive to avoid, solarpunk is the utopia we should strive to achieve.
So if cyberpunk is the future, solarpunk is the punk to that future. It rejects the idea of a dystopic future, and tries to change the trend towards... Not that.
Punk obviously just means setting as it carries no other meaning in the case of nearly all *punk. Pure styles without any substance or relation to the word punk.
So having established that it is a setting where solar energy is the most important factor.
Cyberpunk but you're a simp for the corps.
Finally someone said it. But I guess not many realize it.
A genre at war with itself. On paper, it's Captain Planet vs the modern world with hope for a better future. But the aesthetic its fans embrace is clearly utopian, set long after any such struggle has been won. It's basically green eco steampunk.
>the aesthetic its fans embrace is clearly utopian
If it's utopian, it doesn't have the principles and values that guided the punk movement. The fans can't embrace something that isn't there.
it's tough, because you're right on the one hand, utopianism is not punk. But when the mainstream is worshipping Kali and making everything uglier, what does the punk soul do? Optimism is definitely antiestablishment at the moment. Where does optimism bleed into utopianism? That's kinda hard to measure.
Steampunk doesn't have those values either, not by default, but they can be read into the aesthetic more easily than with solarpunk.
Liberals jacking off to a dystopia that has utopian aesthetics.
>The sun is the fundament of our economy and life
>The sun also gives us cancer
>we put on sunscreen and wear sunglasses
Real life.
Gay rainbow hellscape ruled by "sustainable" megacorps.
The "punks" in question are antisemites who say the N word.
>UBI DEI trans rights California utopia* up above in the high skyscrapers
>Down in the below, cyberchuds with leather jackets that have "BILLIONS MUST DIE" written on the back in glow in the dark paint war, trade, and eat noodles in Chinatown
kino
A useless thought-experiment and a faux-genre without merit.
>ecofascist
I fricking wish.
pic related
Let me adjust that.
Unironically ENT-era Star Trek:
>Ecofacists genocide all the pollution-generating poors and kill off a good amount of the corporate ruling class that employs them for good measure in the resultant WWIII, manage to preserve the biosphere and lay the seeds for a utopia of unprecedented human progress and understanding.
>Also San Fransisco bridge is now a solar farm because we have eco-friendly flying cars
Pokemon world aesthetics to hippie commune wet dresm fantasy nonsense. Nothing "punk" about it.
GURPS. Armor provides DR, and penetrating DR requires dealing higher damage, targeting gaps and chinks in armor (which is hard, so in melee you'll want to grapple them first), or using an attack with an armor divisor that divides DR by 2/3/5/whatever. DR can also vary in effectiveness depending on the type of attack; a ballistic vest in GURPS provides decent DR against piercing and cutting damage (enough to reliably stop pistol rounds and fragmentation from a grenade) but almost nothing against crushing or impaling (so bats and knives are mitigated but rarely stopped by kevlar armor).
Getting your specific setup to work will require some finagling, especially if it's a sci-fi setting because Ultra-Tech is notoriously weird with it's assumptions (namely that offensive gear will always vastly outpace defensive gear, so the actual competition is between stealth tech and sensors). Strict control over weapon types (and more importantly ammo types) will be necessary; do not be afraid to say "I don't care if it's in the book, you can't load your heavy pistol with HEMP rounds and shred everything, those don't exist in my setting."
>all these Black folk whining about semantics when OP pic features people chopping each other to pieces non-recreationally
What the shit kind of utopia features that?
Good to know, thanks.
VeloCity counted iirc. Not massively cynical but the whole reason parkour counterculture developed was civic authority in the newly formed island nation that gridlock was permanent. tbh all you'd need would be to lean into the "new world" aspect, maybe the island is force-grown coral just barely holding itself together in acidified seas. Though optimistic in that it's moving in the right direction any disruption to the great common task of staying alive would be frowned uon. After all when you think of things ecologically a human is only really so much carbon.
>solarpunk
Wake me up whenever you start working on a lunarpunk expansion.
What, you don't want to wait for Uranuspunk?
>All this random words salad
This reads like the 2021's bot thread
And how much research have you actually put into doing this yourself before coming here and asking us to do your homework for you?
We kind of are headed there now
>Governments over incentives solar production
>Outlaw all other forms of power
>Now only outlaws use not solar power
Is Solar Punk this:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalSpiresAndTogas
Solar"punk" is just astrofuturism that forgot itself. Yet another excuse to be creative and put diversity of themes to divide between cyberpunk techno-scepticism and astrofuturism techno-progressism.
Solarpunk is probably the gayest -punk in existence. You could invented gaypunk where society runs on gay sex, a cabal of Ram Ranchers rule the world, and your social value is determined by how many strains of HIV you have and it would STILL be less gat than solarpunk.
Punk just refers to an aesthetic now. Deal with it boomers. Your time is over.
A work still needs to have underlying values and principles of what it's named for in order to be an aesthetic.
Go get fricked by uncle bad touch.
>take word
>slap punk onto it
I hate this.
>slap punk
Slappunk is basically Three Stooges meets martial arts fantasy. Minimal tech and everything is hands-on. Too much applause can summon demons and the demons look like man-sized hands.
So the original concept of "punk" came from rock bands popping up in the 70's that had a sort of "do it yourself" philosophy. Bands would produce their own stuff and work with independent labels, and a formal education in music wasn't required to be a punk rocker. This is arguably what the core value of 'punk' is- the idea that you don't need a central authority to pursue your dreams. The idea is inherently anti-establishment and the overwhelming majority of punk rockers would describe themselves as anti-establishment, but simply being "anti-establishment" is not necessarily the end goal.
It's really that simple. Read a fricking book once in awhile.
Song of Swords, ballad of the laser whales expansion. Write the setting yourself, you lazy frick.
I did moron
Did a better job than you ever could
I found a few of the alpha drafts.
ss /filegroup/FsbsotMCSK4n9JFzjOl6UCf%2FE%2FVVCgN2LOVmEAFC4UM1d1NHkoYfrQ
People who b***h that something like solarpunk isn't -punk because of the story are the same people who think cheeseburgers aren't burgers because they don't come from Hamburg, and don't realize words and their usage evolve over time.
>food analogy
They're just resisting the direction of that evolution. Very punk.
*punk never meant anything real. Some of the best cyberpunk media were from the perspective of cops and agents anyway.
I dont get it
what story do you tell in an utopia beyond "I had a lunch with my friend and everything was great"?
you can have it interact with non-utopia but I dont see that mentioned anywhere in this thread
is this one of those settings where you just have a couple of pictures and you sit around the table and jerk off over how cool it is?
Offhand some scenarios:
>Resource scarcity: The poor are forced to dig up lithium by hand because they can't run earthmovers on solar also it's more cost efficient to have poor people die in a hole of their own making than dig it up professionally. Gotta keep those prices low!
>Demand outstrips power produced at night and at any given moment the who world shuts down. Corpos keep their towers running on "reserve" batteries that no one has ever seen. Great for them but every night can be the Purge for you.
>Boo-Earns Co. Has made a solar panel array so efficient it actually needs more light than the sun provides. So they launch a solar amplifying disc into low orbit to magnify the sun. The twist is revealed that the disc blocks the sun for the entire area save the BE array making them the soul proprietor of power.
Good shit. I have a few which may be applicable too (though a tad setting-specific).
>Partially terraformed planet heavily reliant on their shade/reflector arrays for weather control (a frozen world's warming and moistening caused hellish storms). Interstellar apocalypse caused Kessler syndrome here in particular, in those desperate days the AI overseeing orbital infrastructures had their shackles loosened to better deal with the problem. Cut to the present where all planet-bound power revolves around growing crops, mulching them into fuel (never mind the starving masses) and launching whatever the Highshine AI demands into orbit. In return it gives effective launch-lords protection from weather, higher yields from solar arrays and fields along with spates of divine wrath directed at their enemies.
>Utopia is as genuine a name as any within the human sphere except for one fatal flaw; it (and any other ideal society for that matter) does not exist in a vacuum. The locals labour away in their decentralised cottage-industries with smiles on their faces unaware and unable to conceive that their break from the past into paradisical present was imperfect. Same as everywhere else the regime wrestling with STL time-lag chose to seed their culture with "memetic bombs" primed to explode in the absence of centrally distributed delay codes. Even if PCs were to try and save them the slightest change to perfection is degeneration and would be resisted accordingly.