Tell me about the cyberpunk settings you've run, and cool lore or ideas you've had for cyberpunk.
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Tell me about the cyberpunk settings you've run, and cool lore or ideas you've had for cyberpunk.
The main antagonist wasn't suits and big wigs, it was a central ai responsible for everything. The ai wasn't all powerful or omniscient, it did however learn from anyone who entered into cyberspace.
I assume like other AI's that have been exposed to the internet it was insanely racist.
It down regulates economic factors, that primarily affects people of color, and forces them to work long and hard hours to keep up in this city. Effectively it reinvented slavery. This also had the affect to setting people of color into commiting more crime just to stay solvent, and as such players would routinely have to fight criminals, black people.
I've been thinking up a setting for a vaguely post-apocalyptic cyberpunk New York.
-WW3 happens in the 2080's, but with chemical and biological weapons in addition to nukes that cause more a societal collapse than a full on nuclear apocalypse with a lot of people surviving in bunkers
-The military industrial complex and intel agencies form a military junta over the Eastern Seaboard with New York as their capital, with several other regions being controlled by independent city-states.
-They build an upper city ontop of the skyscrapers of the major islands for the upper class, with Old New York being the city for the underclass. Jersey is made the waiting zone for refugees wanting to enter in the city.
Are there any New Yorkers who could contribute ideas as to how Cyberpunk New York should act? I want to capture a proper New York and Americana vibe to it. Like I want it to feel like it's actually New York and not some random city. Timeline diverges in the 1980's with the USSR never collapsing.
Another detail I was thinking of is that the upper class listens to Jazz rather than the typical electronic music you usually see in Cyberpunk. Doesn't really make sense to me that the ultra-rich would listen to 'punk' music, and I figure old-school Jazz gives them a nice hoity-toity feel. I was also thinking the upper layer of the city has a lot of Art-Deco styled art and architecture.
>Are there any New Yorkers who could contribute ideas as to how Cyberpunk New York should act?
Look into the 'Stop and Frisk' era of New York policing.
Yeah I've heard a good bit about it, but not sure it'd fit into a cyberpunk campaign, and if it did, how.
Just like in real life, it would decrease crime substantially.
I was born and raised in the city. Some facts The NYPD is the largest local police force in the US with 33,500 officers as of October 2023. Their presence is very visible or was at the time of 2010 when I moved away. Not in oppressive way just as physically very visible. This would have an impact in Cyberpunk because corporate immunity for security forces would have to be addressed. NYC also has very strict gun laws. Getting legal permits for concealed weapons will force people to jump though hoops, and many times it is not granted. I was denied a permit for example because my need wasn't enough. I applied because I had a job that had me carrying about $1500 in cash and perscription medicines people might want to steal. The city is made up of 5 boroughs, if you say you'll be meeting a local in the city, the automatic internal response for them is to assume you mean manhatten. True story, happened to me. 🙂 New York is aslo about neighborhoods. Manhatten will be the crown israeliteel of the city s it is now. The outer boroughs would be the more likely place that you find the lower classes and the combat zones. Corporate drones might work in a shiny skyscraper in Manhatten but they commute in from the outer boroughs. The most likely place to find the really bad zones in a cybrpunk game would be The Bronx. I grew up with the Bronx looking like Berlin and London after the WW2 bombings. While gentrified now,it could revert in a cyberpunk game. The Jazz thing would be something for you. Reality is more like what would be trendy being popular among the hoity-toity. For those deemed undesireables in Manhatten they would be litterlly be underground in old and abandoned tunnels and subways. The Meat packing district would be where you find the places for raves and underground clubs. Another thing to keep in mind is that the suburbs for NYC are Nassau and Sufolk counties out on long island.
I was thinking the post-apocalyptic scenario means that I ignore most of the suburbs, outside maybe a couple being close-knit towns of survivalists, and long island still being the home of giant mansions for the rich (some of them that were abandoned after WW3 might make some good dungeons).
What'd be the right way to flavor each borough? I was thinking as said Jersey is kind of the quarantine zone for refugee's, and has the most pre-war architecture that's been left abandoned. Manhattan as said gets an upper layer to it for the rich, while the street level becomes the undercity (and I was thinking the actual underground is for the even worse off and mutants) but what'd be authentic ways to flavor the other boroughs? I was thinking of wanting to preserve the local culture so like Chinatown would still be a thing for example. To keep that sort of 80's vibe I was thinking human-to-human racism is non-existent, instead racism has moved to transhuman elements in the setting (with people saying since they aren't technically ethnicities, it's in fact IMPOSSIBLE to be racist to them, ergo we can be as racist as we want).
Most of Manhattan should have 1984 tier surveillance and be a megacorporate playground in a cyberpunk setting. Bronx and some of the bigger North Jersey cities (Newark def comes to mind) are your urban warzone hellholes with gangbangers everywhere. Organized crime is a cyberpunk staple but it's usually yakuza, which I would avoid for the distinctly NYC/Americana feel you said you want; I'd have basically no presence from them at all, but make it so the Italian mafia has a pervasive presence in basically any criminal activity beyond the super street level (there's also def Russian mob and Chinese triad activity here but they're not as classic NY stereotype as Goodfellas type mafiosi)
Hell exists in my setting, it's a separate plane owned by a mega corporation. Countries that lack prison space ship their prisoners out to hell and front the cost of their stay, essentially turning hell into one giant frick off private prison. Since the prisons needed to be run by people, hell became filled with cities and populations to support the prisons. So now plenty of regular ass people live in hell and have tricked themselves into thinking that hell isn't so bad as long as you're not the one burning in the lake of fire.
i, robot, but R rated
"i'll give APB a long chance someday" - me, 2010s
>you've run
Mega-corporations finance philanthropic enterprises to divide humanity into two camps.
>lore or ideas you've had wanted to run
Maximally charismatic bodiless intelligences seek out or produce popular individuals in society and claim you can transcend and become enlightened and save the world from impeding doom.
Never thought about it, but you could TOTALLY make an AI cult leader, and you'd have legions of idiots falling for it.
Charisma isn't that hard to fake. It takes some doing, and not everyone can fake it, but con-men exist for a reason.
Well yeah, it's a whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing. Like how the Italians were passed over for jobs fresh off the boat and then they formed the Mafia.
How can we get our AIs in cyberpunk settings to avoid these kinds of biases?
Well Google is trying to figure that out. They ended up making an unironic 'woke' AI (about the only time I think the word is actually accurate). The ended up making an AI imager that inserted people of color where they shouldn't be (like say WW2 German photos).
AI are not like divinely intelligent or anything. They reflect the biases of the person who created it, and everyone's biased to some degree. Certainly what you want to avoid is exposing them to the internet and trying to crowdsource 'what is human behavior' from there given how people abuse the anonymity of the internet to be fricking buttholes.
Ironically, the solution is diversity hire. Prove me wrong. More job opportunities for would-be criminals.
I've never run a cyberpunk setting, but I have played in a FATE conversion of Eclipse Phase (yes, I know, it was cringe, but it's the closest to cyberpunk I ever played).
I'm not certain if this idea is necessarily cool or anything, but I'm putting it out here in case anyone wants to use it:
"In a world where the vast majority of wildlife is supplanted by synthetic duplicates, your team is a band of poachers who catch the few protected wild specimens to sell them to the highest bidder, while trying to avoid the ire and weaponry of the wild synthetics out to get you."
Is FATE any good for Eclipse Phase? I tied to run 2e with a group but they kept whining it was 'too complicated'.
If they think 2e is too complicated, they'll think the same about FATE, I reckon.
Having to step by step them through the step by step package character creation multiple times, before they give up after 2 hours and they still frick up their character sheets to the point where they are unusable was one of those experiences which makes me wonder why I even bother preparing a session. Then after all that they give up and use the premade characters but select the premades that I tell them won't work well for the scenario. You can literally make a character in 10 minutes in 2e.
Are players simply allergic to reading? Are they unable to hold more than one fragment of information in there head at one time? Do they think GMs need to put in all the thought and effort into the running of the game and they only need to occasionally give single sentence replies when you drag it out of them? Do games which are not D&D really happen or do people just collect PDFs and make believe that they are running campaigns as some sort of coping mechanism?
When 2e already has a super handholding method for character creation naturally that goes step-by-step and won't let you go to weird places until you are finished I am baffled that anyone needs more than that. Because it truly takes 5-15 minutes to make a character and now with Character Options it can even be quicker if someone writes a random character roller.
I understand saying that it's complicated, you look at the book and it's a big US Letter one with 450 pages of content, even though the player facing rules are less than a 100 pages.
So yeah players are often allergic to actually reading into the game they are going to play. Same goes for D&D mind you, it's just D&D DMs have given up already and live with the fact.
Are there any good cyberpunk settings with genuine magic in them? Because I like the concept but dislike how Shadowrun approaches things, especially making magic opposed to cybernetics.
well, if they are not opposed, they are symbiotic which means you get a magitech setting. i guess exalted's autochtonia could qualify?
Besides suped-up arms with guns and shit, what kinds of cyberpunk enhancements would work best for soldiers and the like?
Endurance stuff that lets you go without food or sleep for days on end.
Well the upper plate section of Manhattan yeah, I'm thinking old-Manhattan is more anarchic. Kind of like 1980's Manhattan but not as bad.
I think since it's set in the future there could be some Chinese or Japanese gangs, but I think like you said they should be very minor to classic Italian mobsters. Wonder if I could even say there's a second wave of fresh-off-the-boat italians coming in while I'm at it. Hispanic gangs could probably work too given the large hispanic population (New York having large populations of everything) though I think there's zero crossover with south-american cartels in the south.
Another interesting question for Cyberpunk in general would be what kind of drugs get shipped in and what do they do? New York has a quite famous cocaine problem in Wall Street. For the 1980's feel I might steal Nuke from Robocop 2, though I don't think it's ever elaborated what kind of drug it is. Another one I'm thinking of, I think the film was called SSAM, but it was a hallucinagenic people would take while in VR, which to me seems like a perfect drug. You'd be tripping balls in the comfort of your own home where nobody's gonna stumble upon you, meaning you're not hurting anyone and you're super unlikely to get caught.
Ketamine is the big trendy drug right now among New York zoomers and millennials thanks to finally making it over from the Euro rave scene. I've always thought of it as pretty cyberpunk, it gets directly mentioned in Neuromancer (think it's one of Case's choice drugs) and it's tied pretty closely with techno music
Club drugs make a ton of sense for a cyberpunk setting in general. As someone not into drug culture, what's it do, and what are its effects?
It's a dissociative created for anesthetic use. Lower doses just give a kind of wobbly feeling somewhat similar to both being drunk and smoking weed but "floatier", higher ones pretty much shut you out of external stimuli for a while and put you in a dream state where you still feel conscious but are functionally KOed. It's not the kind of thing that can kill you or get you super physically hooked, but long term heavy usage will frick your kidneys super hard.
Unrelated but I also always liked the concept of "digital drugs" in cyberpunk stuff, like BTLs in Shadowrun or Accela from Lain. Stuff like inserting a USB into a cyberware port in your neck and getting flooded with waves of any kind of pure emotion or sensation you want. Feel like it'd be a popular form of escapism in that way you mentioned
Finally? Ketamine made a big splash over here alongside dubstep like 15 years ago. You could find it in New York long before that.
It's hard to believe that this anon isn't a bot.
Something that disconnects your consciousness while leaving all of your higher functions still intact.
Think about it: You enlist for ten years, most of which you will sleepwalk through. At the end of it, it will feel to you like no time has passed, but you'll have plenty of money saved, to live the life you want, without all of the traditional downsides, like PTSD* and such.
*May or may not still come with nightmares featuring actions you don't remember having done.
You’d still age though, not to mention the horrific idea that you might die in such a state without even knowing what happened until the lights suddenly go out.
It wouldn't be cyberpunk if it didn't have horrific and dehumanizing implications
I mean, if this document is to be believed, the military already considers these plausible (and *desirable*) within the next few decades.
>ocular enhancements to imaging, sight, and situational awareness;
>restoration and programmed muscular control through an optogenetic bodysuit sensor web;
>auditory enhancement for communication and protection; and
>direct neural enhancement of the human brain for two-way data transfer.
So make of that what you will.
Huh. Just goes to show that reality can sometimes be crazier than fiction.
Cyberfunk
Zoot suits, low-riders, cybernetically-enhanced afros and floppy-disk-based analog hacking.
And the incessant use of Fortunate Son.
>cybernetically-enhanced afros
What the Hell would that even look like, an Afro with LEDs or something?
Not that anon, but I can actually see people doing something like that, given the kinds of body mods we see even today.
I already talked a lot about the last session I had in the last threads of session, a chrome berret Module is like "Kings Maker" for cyberpunk it's a political RTS module where the players are the equivalent of high ranking corpos that become advisors to a Corpo Democrary run by a president puppet controlled by those corporation.
Outside of that I made a cyberpunk setting with pathfinder a long time ago, I put general stuff that I tought was cool in the setting like
>The setting still had magic and magic guilds that lost the meaning of real magic guild only the old masters and elves remember the "Medieval fantasy time" as nostalgic and pure
>All the world was going under a post apocaliptyc phase, there were only MEGACITIES and the Wastes where the AI lived(Abnormal Intelligence, old Ai robots from the nuclear war that survived)
>The other planes of existence got corrupted by capitalism, in fact the "clerics" power are given only by a monthly subscription of the gods and even the gods play political game to get richer.
>New gods came with the new style of life of the future, the god of mobsters, god of terrorism, god of profits, god of fast foods etc etc, and try to play a role like if they know that there is a "Terrorist cleric" they will give money and weapons so that their gods will get what they ask "Terrorism and Money" back.
>The wastes you can still go there even if it's still radiocative, there are corporations and mobsters that made some special places or building outside of the megacity, like the mega rich that still care for their families or corporation that still need bodies, have made a illegal cemetary outside of the megacity because cremation is the only option(no waste of space)
>Undead and Meatbags(a special type of Undead made for this setting) are illegal because once the necromancers used it as workforce or infact to repay the debts you body holds even if you're dead you body is still usefull and they use them like a service job
>physical labor automation isn‘t geting cheap fast enough
>workforce collapsing globally due to over a century of subreplacement birthrates combined with skyhigh rate of mental illness and suicide
>in desperation the megacorps pool their resources to create a stopgap measure before the net generation of robotics arrive, they uplift the humble beaver
>neobeaver slaves are soon left to largely police themselves because it’s cheaper than hiring human security experts
>human scientists working on the net generation of robotics are soon replaced with neobeavers too
>while this might seem like a huge oversight, the elites runing the megacorps grew increasingly misantropic over time and decided to hand the Earth over a new superior species
Is this still a cyberpunk?
Lots of mind/soul hacking and messing with people's perception of reality and the use of psychic powers.
Also, communicating with the mind/souls of the dead.
I don't get why a lot of sci-fi includes mental powers. That's not science fiction, that's magic. It's not even like magic you gussied up with a sci-fi explanation. It's a pet peeve of mine.
There is a supernatural element to it but then I don't pretend that I need to have some "hard" science reason why it exist. To me, "hard" science just means how logically consistent the idea is.
Regardless, it's an excuse to explain away being able to communicate faster than light and having Inception/Evil Within style virtual worldds.
I don't need everything to be super well explained either. I just think psychic powers are about sci-fi as wizards.
You're not wrong. I think my particular pet peeve with that is that it's somehow culturally ingrained that sci-fi magic is somehow different from the medeviel fantasy magic especially when both are doing DBZ D&D style wizards who chuck fireballs at each other. It doesn't matter if one is explained as etheral fire from the planes of fire and the other being nanomachines (son).
Exactly. It's just magic with a different coat of paint. Like at least Star Wars doesn't try to pretend the Force isn't viewed and treated as being exactly like magic in universe. Meanwhile Star Trek has a bunch of literal gods show up, but it tries to pass itself off as more enlightened and skeptical about all that nonsense.
I feel like there's almost an impulse amongst writers to sneak some sort of magic into stuff cause it seems like once they establish an otherworldly setting they can't stop themselves.
That said: I feel like an unexplored part of cyberpunk would be cyberpunk in a fantasy setting. Like the new Final Fantasy 7 game just came out, and that has magic but that's because it was a medieval fantasy setting that became a cyberpunk one.
Personally? I feel like there should be more biotech augmentations in cyberpunk settings, maybe even to the point of it being a biopunk setting as well, what do you think?
I think that people who engaged in genetic editing make for a good sub-race in a cyberpunk setting. I feel a pulp-y 80's styled name for them would be 'Gene Freaks'.
That said I'd make them all anime catgirls.
I agree, what do you think that the most common kinds of modifications would be and why, outside of boosts to the immune system to deal with pollution and shit.
I like the idea of biotech being 'high class' in comparison to mechanical augmentation.
Like, imagine a bioengineered superhuman heir to some lofty fortune casually pulling off feats of grace and power that would require your average street punk to lop off limbs and lock themselves into a corporate spare parts/firmware ecosystem to match even momentarily. Really drive home the gulf between those born with everything and those who have to dehumanize themselves just to get by.
I'm not very good at this, but I feel like there's *something* there. Themes-wise.
Obligatory
shadowrun campaign where magic is progressively disappearing before it's supposed to happen. mega corps have other names in the no magic areas(ex: ares macrotechnology is called militech). (shadowrun is becoming cyberpunk because the areas of no magic are becoming what would have happened if magic was never a thing.) team is investigating what is causing magic to disappear and have found a giant glyph in a cavern under the amazon forest.
Cringepunk where everyone is a 70IQ weeb or furry with cat ears and pink machineguns covered in glitter and the streets are swarming with holographic moeshit hentai ads, but it fully retains the dismal grittiness of cyberpunk
What are some cool things that can be done with religion in cyberpunk worlds besides cults creating AIs to worship as gods?
Cults are kind of a given seeing as they're arguably just the infant form of a religion. That said you could get some mileage out of making new schisms occur in major religions over cybernetics, AI, and/or any other tech in the setting that has major philosophical implications
Like brain uploading, and whether or not the soul truly transfers over for instance.
Spammers like you getting fricked in the face to death, fricking homosexual moron
Christians subjugating AIs to worship God.
I feel like we're in essence seeing the rise of cults in the form of evangelicalism right now. I think it's a lot easier to misappropriate a popular religion (like christianity) and then straight up lie about what it says. Like prosperity gospel- the idea God wants you to be rich is the exact opposite of what the Bible says. But they retrofit christianity onto peoples politics- telling them what they want to hear, and bam, cult.
>prosperity gospel
Pic related is their father will show himself to them.
Plugging your brain into a machine so you can meditate within the machine
I want to run a campaign in a setting that's in our future rather than uchronic/retro-futuristic like most Cyberpunk settings nowadays.
Any funny ideas of strange directions your country could go, that would be both believable and work great for a campaign setting?
For exemple:
>In order to stop anti-EU nationalism, the European Union pushed regional independence movements
>From 28 countries, the EU became a federation of 200 or so regions, each too small to be able to breakaway from the Union.
>These regions are extremely varied, from Neo-feudalist, to Cyber-totalitarian, to Eco-luddite, to Solarpunk-multicultural hellhole
>They don't all work well together, some of them are even waging stealthy wars against each other, which means if PCs quarrels with the authority in one region, they can just frick off to another and lay low for a bit.
Your pic reminds me of an old cyberpunk video game called Circuits Edge, itself based on George Alec Efhnger’s When Gravity Fails, which is an Arabic rather than Japanese influenced Cyberpunk setting
Still very cybernetic based setting from what I understand though but still
When Gravity Fails is pretty good anon
It's somewhat Arabic inspired, but apparently it's largely based on New Orleans's French Quarter.
There is some cybernetics, but they're very minimal - there's brain interface tech, but for example no smartphones or anything close
Ah I see
Never read it myself since I've only heard of it because of it's connection to the game
Still seems interesting though I'd have to check it out
What are the key aspects to designing a cyberpunk city?
Inequality.
That way you can have desperate people who have fallen through the cracks make increasingly terrible decisions in an attempt to get a slice of the pie despite vanishingly sparse odds. Looking up at glittering spires from a cesspit of filth, rolling the dice knowing they'll never win, that sort of shit.
That said- I feel like it can be taken too far. Wealth inequality is a major factor, but like there needs to be nice parts of a city too. Like Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 even in the corporate plaza that's meant to be the epitome of wealth is covered in trash. I understand the idea that Corpo's despise public spending, but you'd think at least the areas that they do business in they'd want the streets sweeped. Likewise the big park nearby is filthy and turned into a homeless camp (and this is the same city where the mayor was planning to napalm a homeless camp in a tunnel to clear them out).
I think contrast is a very important part of the city-building. Immense poverty, but side-by-side with immense wealth.
Yeah, the idea that they wouldn't bother keeping even the rich part of the city at least relatively clean seems odd, presumably it's only depicted that way in the game for the aesthetics. Thanks for the advice.
Have you done anything cool with motorcycles in cyberpunk campaigns?