Cyberpunk

...

I like it better when my cyberpunk lacks magic. I want my technodoodads, and I want them to be the awesome thing. I want my character not the physical combatant because they were a shut in who liked making small robots, not because they read books and dealt with magical powers and shit.

Also, I find it kind of funny that the game Jazzpunk is an example of Cyberpunk as it would be in the fifties or whatever.

...

Yes, cyberpunk should be grounded in reality with technology as the primary driver of power and societal change.

...

Agreed.

...

Corey Hart?

Believe it or not most of my players wouldn't recognize him.

...

...

Well I don't know I'd recognise him on the street or anything

If anyone wants a bad movie
youtube.com/watch?v=a9V7rz2Dg7g

...

the femme fatale

thought you guys might enjoy this:

youtube.com/watch?v=jkjIsnjKhew
ruinergame.com/

> /v/

Looks cool, but it's yet another action shooter.

Satellite Reign was great because it mixed the tactical shootan with some hacking, resource management, infiltration and politics, even if it did get repetitive after a while.

youtube.com/watch?v=VFZVXG0g40Q

time for some cyberpunk blakk qts.

...

...

I hope some people found this useful for their games.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

What if the magic is treated as unknown science and is still outside human grasp? Its the domain of atrange creatyres with stranger objectives that are tampering with the human world? Humans are still blitzing ahead with tech and corps are making wage slaves. But theres occult conspiracies messing with reality

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

>Looks like someone's got a case of SURGE

...

yea, I love Satellite Reign, just because you can pull off smash&grab bank jobs, and because it's real-time it's much more tense running away

or just picking the scout guy, and running a solo infiltration

or using a mind-controlled guard to open all the doors for you

new-ish cyberpunk webcomic : drugsandwires.fail/

That's not a street sam. That's a shitty drawing of X-23 during her hooker phase.

...

Looks alright, will check it out.

>But theres occult conspiracies messing with reality
That would be better than the overt everyone-and-their-ghoul-dog has magic of Shadowrun. More like the weirdness of the Sprawl trilogy.

But really, cyberpunk is about tech, so everything "occult" should have a tech source, but one so advanced or bizarre that to human understanding it looks like spirits/monsters/magic/voodoo.

Consider the HFY angle

Were busy engineering new tech from this so called magic and leaping ahead in research

I've always been a fan of the concept of Cthulhupunk - you've got the dark, gritty world of cyberpunk combined with the unspeakable horror of eldritch abominations from another plane. Plus, it brings up the possibility for megacorps trying to utilize knowledge not meant for the minds of mortal men for fun and profit - weaponized shoggoths, anyone?

That's great for optimistic, gleaming future scifi. It's even great for 'man has gone too far' scifi. But it's pretty shit for cyberpunk.

Hey, don't let this thread fall off unless I really slouch off. I'm going to churn out a cyberpunk/generic-sci-fi short story as I do my homework.

Dom was in hell. His chest pounded and burned within with every breath he took. He groaned, doubled over around his knees as his nails dug into the skin of his temples. His stomach tried to twist in on itself, to leap out of his throat. It would have, if it weren’t already empty. He fell to his knees, the steel on his knees ground through the gravel.

The world spun and his hands were on the ground, spreading out like roots to give him support. Feebly, he found the edge of the building, touching it gently to find his way again. His eyes closed for a moment, and the shadows were replaced. He was back in the helicopter again. The rain was pouring, or was it spraying off the sea? He could taste the salt.

Iron bile filled his mouth and his stomach found more to spew. Dom was back in the helicopter however. “Gaijin!” his commander shouted, reaching over to punch his radio. “You’re our hacker. Stay in middle. We’re touching down.” Dom barked back an aye and turned to the open door.
He wasn’t a hacker; he was a mule with a gun. There was a preprogrammed assault code sitting in the back of his skull. The file was huge, almost as large as an entire artificial intelligence and he didn’t know a single line of it. Shinra had jacked it into his skull, covered it in red tape, and strapped him into the chopper.

Ink black water frothed just feet below him from the chop of the blades. It was darker than the night sky above, and had its own stars. Deep beneath the waves were multi-colored lights scattered about. Aquatic drones swam through the water, guided by the lights. Their shadows moved like miniature leviathans. He was punched again.

He turned back to see a small plastic bottle being rattled in his face. “Don’t forget your supps, Gaijin.” Dom eyed the strange, hexagonal pills. He scowled and reached out to swat it away. As his arm moved, it swirled through the vision and brushed it away as well.

He was upright again. Every step scraped his shoulder against the concrete in a dry, tearing rasp. He winced as he walked into a wall of light. He turned to the garish purple glow slashing through an alley at him. Then his hand found the control panel to his door. Cold sweat smeared across the panel, but it got the scan. The computer welcomed him home, and the entrance lights slowly illuminated the hall. One step through the portal and he fell back into the vision.

...

...

...

...

The Matrix was totally unrealistic in that neither the humans or machines created hedonistic paradises in the matrix. Even the guy who betrayed the humans just wanted to be reincarnated as a rich guy basically, which is still really low on the totem poll of possibilities.

They do address this though.

Basically a 24/7 pleasure palace for everyone gets maddeningly boring and it causes the system to break down.

Suffering and struggle defines people, and in the case of the traitor, being a king is made better by being able to look down on the peasants.

Dom was in the station now. He was crouched down, two fingers on the ground. His eyes were closed but he could feel every step near him. He tried not to think about the drug hidden in his waist pocket, but it pulled him down with a Sisyphean weight. He poured himself into the task. Twenty meters away from him, a drone the size of a kabuto beetle was crawling between IR lasers and through electrified grid.

The tiny robot waddled to the server with a loping certainty as Dom guided it. The access terminal was exposed to security, but the carapace of the drone was some kind of reactive gel. Light hit its back and bended, blurring the base colors of the terminal together until it disappeared. He figured that in two, maybe three, months, every terminal this side of the planet with something to protect would have a high contrast grid sprayed onto it.

“I’m in,” he whispered as the device slotted into the terminal and opened its wireless access. Dom put his other hand to his head and reached out with his neural implant. He found his lips suddenly dry. His implant wasn’t designed for this, not that Shinra cared. All they knew was it could be used for the job, and that they had a hold on Dom. He hoped his implant wouldn’t be noticed, and connected with the drone.

Data immediately began pouring out of his skull. He could almost feel the circuitry heating inside his head, boiling his brain. The implant was archaic by laboratory standards. It had to be, because it was at body temperature and couldn’t use quasi-superconductors. It didn’t even have a Diarca Battery in it, it charged off his blood. But nevertheless, the amount of data flowing from him to the drone and into the terminal would have been a momentary river if written out.

“Door open,” the Korean on the team whispered, and Dom’s spine froze. Delicately, he rotated the camera on the drone. The terminal was near one of the emergency exits for the lower station. The door they had expected to stay closed, the one covered in red and white warnings, had been popped ajar. A man in his mid-twenties stepped out, snugging a polyester knit hat around his shaven head. A flame appeared between his hands, and soon there was a cigarette between his lips. Every physical security location had the fatal flaw of the humans using it, except now that was poised against them.

“I can’t extract the drone without blowing the op,” Dom whispered.

“How much time do you need?” his commander responded.

Dom could feel the crosshairs on him as his overwatch surveyed. “Too much.”
All of them paused, waiting. They watched the man’s cloud of smoke dissipate with more interest than the smoker himself. Below, work was continuing as usual for the Huronian outpost. A quiet night where an employee could sneak off for a smoke without being noticed. But that employee was too free in the wandering of his mind, and noticed the terminal.

Dom’s chest was thumping. It pounded and hammered like a caged animal. “Don’t do it. Don’t be curious today,” he mouthed to himself. But he watched as the man walked over, getting closer to the terminal. Hope fluttered for a moment when the man hesitated; but, it was only to take another drag. A sneer of confusion distorted the man’s face as he leaned down.

(More to come tomorrow, anyone reading and liking?)

That was addressing the entire matrix, which makes sense. I am talking about on an individual level.

What about in the second Matrix movie? There is the Nightclub of Orgies

That's why shadowrun magic was promptly exploited and turned into a big industry. Magical security is a constant stream of income (Almost nothing magical is truly permanent, so wards need to be replaced weekly and spirits need to be rebound every once in a while), as is making and selling foci to the Awakened (Some of which can cost more than a new car).
They made it pretty cyberpunk for what it is.

you all sound like perfect candidates for cyberpunk 2020/cyberpunk 2013.

you sound like a good candidate for 1st edition shadowrun.

and you sound like a perfect candidate for the ovens
>the matrix
>cyberpunk
its just standard dystopian scifi you cock. go hotglue yourself.

So I've been reading through GURPS Cyberworld, as the setting kind of interested me a bit, and jesus christ they killed Australia.

How does that even work? A plague that virulant would kill the world. There are people leaving Melbourne every minute of the day on planes and it evidently spreads ungodly fast.

Lightning fast incubation period, perhaps? Got it one moment, and 30 minutes later you're pissing and shitting yourself. That would turn a plane around damn quick.

>quality of Veeky Forums improves overnight

Apparently everyone else in 2041 is as confused as you are.

Not bad. "Huronian", I'm guessing that's the corp?

When a runner uses their political connections to make one of your executive consultants temporarily unavailable, then executes an inside job to steal your plans for a small government coup, so you pay off a security agency to run a data trace on said runner's location, and then flatten them with munitions you just happened to have stockpiled (sadly the counterstrike teams were unavailable) - it feels good to be the corp

>live in a small ass country
>less people on this god damn rock than there are people in New York City
>spread super far apart
>could split the country up into individual lots of land and everyone would have 2.8km^2 to themselves
>have 1st world amenities
>top tier health care
>everyone in the entire fucking country dies within 4 months
>mfw

fucked up that stat, should be 0.3 km^2 per person

The problem with Shadowrun is that the magic spiraled totally out of proportion in the fluff. At this point, it's more of a magical dystopia 'also with cyberware' than cyberpunk 'also with elves.'

Is the cyberpunk future only going to have boring stuff?

In real life? Depends on how boring you find smartphones and self-driving cars. I'm guessing you're some kind of an obnoxious shitheel determined to be unhappy for some stupid reason, so yes, it's going to be super boring for you.

By definition, yes. Everything becomes boring when you interact with it long enough.

Good point. I shouldn't whinge about things no matter what excuses I'm offered.
I personally don't trust self-driving cars, but smartphones and Skype are both cool and useful.

Older people said the same thing. Familiarity breeds contempt, after all.

>I personally don't trust self-driving cars
Why not?

>I personally don't trust self-driving cars
They have a WILDLY better safe-driving record than humans do.

I personally don't trust human-driven cars.

Because I got my license a few months ago, and I want to enjoy it for a few years more.
Can self-driving cars react to bad drivers in other cars as well as human drivers should?
Can self-driving cars know when to break the rules of the road, and which to break, in response to road conditions?

>Can self-driving cars react to bad drivers in other cars as well as human drivers should?
Better, actually, because their reaction/processing time is better than the best human driver's.

>Can self-driving cars know when to break the rules of the road, and which to break, in response to road conditions?
Yes, that's actually one of the easiest things to program.

Computers aren't just better, safer drivers than humans, they're orders of magnitude better and safer. It's a task that humans are, flatly, inferior at. Every second that a human driver is on the road instead of a self-driving car is a second that people are literally being put in unnecessary danger - and when car accidents are the single most common form of injury-related death in the United States, that's a big fucking deal.

>Because I got my license a few months ago, and I want to enjoy it for a few years more.
That's the type of selfishness that ends lives because you don't realize how shit you actually are at driving.

youtube.com/watch?v=9X-5fKzmy38
youtube.com/watch?v=0-M3RY9lSks
youtube.com/watch?v=9I5rraWJq6E
Seems to deal with shitty drivers pretty well.

one of the corps, Shinra is in fact another corp

That cybereye on the doctor looks amazingly shit. Like it was just plonked on there.

You've got to love it, right?

I figured it was, but it could have just been any asshole who wired him up.
Not sure if I would use "Sisyphean" for a weight pulling the man down, that feels like a weight you'd push ahead. Still, a good word though

I figured it was an applicable word since he gets pushed supps every op, and has to take them every time it goes FUBAR, leaving him in a spiral of addiction and purging essentially

In that case it's good. And amusing.
You the EDEN dude?

Indeed I am. I'm distracting myself from the hell of trying to edit my synopsis by writing a short story set in universe, a few months after the end of the book.