Cyberpunk World Building Thread

well controlling machines with your thoughts can be versatile depending on how you use it. So lets say you take possession of an LED display, you can make it display whatever you're thinking of or you can hook it up to that wireless speaker for a light show for your music.

also it's cyberpunk, cyberspace duels are obligatory.

>for most of human history. Magic "pooled" in disconnected "wells", all stagnating and in some cases was even draining
>the development of electrical networks, from telegraphs on to the Internet, worked as an inadvertent replacement for long-dormant ley lines between the wells
>newly connected and rejuvenated, magic began to swell along these new lines, filling the wells until...
>...they burst, flooding the world with excess amounts of magic
>eventually, the tide will subside. The dormant lines will activate and redirect magic in less chaotic ways, and some form of stability will be reached
>but for the moment the stuff roils and flows across the Earth, leaving strange new resources and panicked citizens in its wake

If Prime grew out of the Internet meshing with "Gaia", cyberspace and technological powers would probably be limited to things with computers in 'em.

which is everything because this is the future.

SPACE CITIES

WITH WEAPON PLATFORMS ATTACHED

ONE OF THEM HAS GONE FULL ENCLAVE AND LETS NO ONE IN, ONE FUNCTIONS AS THE MAIN (space)PORT BETWEEN EARTH AND VARIOUS MINING COLONIES, AND ANOTHER IS THE LAST REMNANT OF A FALLEN EARTH NATION. MAYBE A FEW MORE, I DUNNO.

nah I view Prime as Tsukumogami ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukumogami )

Basically a spirit born of an object that lasts 100 years old, or in this case a machine network. Gaia is the manifested intelligence of earth, Prime is the manifested intelligence of cyberspace.

So yeah the abilities of his Chosen and the Abilities of Butterflies are tied into objects that have modern electronics in them. (giving them the ability to force modern guns to eject their ammo, change the target of that heat seeking missile, cause that idiot with the open Network on his communicom and cyber arm to punch himself in the face etc)

Prime typically doesn't even interact with his chosen as attaining the capability to do anything with Singularity derived abilities leads to a form of digital enlightenment (kinda Zen, but with cyberspace and computers) a lot of them arrange themselves into little tribes based on their personal viewpoints (Technoshamans, Digital Devil Summoners, Enlightened Coders, Data Mercs and so on)

Many will turn to some of the digital Titans that stalk the net like The Gunman, Data Pirate, I/C Queen since Prime's lack of hands on intervention leaves a bit to be desired.

Prime Numbers tend to be pretty predictable in their patterns, Money, Enlightenment, Ideaology all have their own reasons for fighting and staking out turf in Cyberspace.

Butterflies...not so much.

Butterflies have no noticable social order, they can communicate with eachother but Prime's Numbers can't decipher their digital signals. As a Butterfly's powers develop he becomes withdrawn, difficult to communicate with, often erratic and bizarre in his behaviour and tastes. Usual bio and cybermods are common in Butterflies as is self surgery.

Butterflies don't so much occupy systems as they infect them. Prime's influence often causes digital ecosystems to form in whatever Servers his followers claim. They do spawn strange digital intelligences and lifeforms but there's noticable order there.

Butterflies create cyberspace environments that are toxic. They spawn malware at an astounding rate, living programs that infest, multiply, and mutate. Anyone exposed to the Digital Miasma created by butterflies without some form of protection risks getting infected.

Often times contentious factions of Prime's Numbers will call truce if faced with Butterfly Nest and will seek to purge it, and the Butterflies who maintain it. If a Butterfly nest is left too long without being addressed it will start spawning powerful digital entites. On top of that devices that pass through it's miasma will stop working properly, and often times short of doing a factory reset there's nothing that can be done to fix it. (unsurprisingly this is becoming a serious issue in places that are placing growing dependence on synthetic labor)

okay, I see what you're getting at now.

Prime's this entity that's composed of and spread across the century-old Internet, spewing forth "cyberlife" and handing out knowledge and power without acting at full force very often. Makes sense, considering the size of the thing. Prime's probably as fractured as its followers.

On the other hand, we have Butterflies. Because what's a Cyberspace without viruses?

God, imagine what it could do to a city in this world. Everything's so dense and connected. One weird flash drive and the systems between the custome- I mean innocent people and the decay outside starts to crumble and corrupt. Necessities break down, communications slow to a crawl.

And now I'm imagining slums as breeding grounds for as many digital diseases as biological ones. Makes it harder to maintain infrastructure, and makes it harder for anyone to WANT to maintain those parts of town instead of just cutting them off. Gives a good reason to have overbearing security forces and checkpoints, to keep certain areas "clean".

Also, when you say "synthetic labor", are we talking about robots or mass-produced clones of "pure" humans with some extra enhancements made to offset declining birthrates and growing mutant populations?

I was thinking Robots, Gynoids and Androids myself but you could just as easily bring in Appleseed style Bioroids. Hell there's room for both since personally I want to see shit like Megacorps kidnapping mutants with useful mutations to get an edge on developing the next big combat aug. Bioroids wouldn't be vulnerable to butterflies unless they're hooked up to Wifi though or get attacked by a Butterfly avatar or something. (I imagine one of the nastier things you could encounter is a drone designed to infect people with cyberaugs or systems run by a butterfly hive.)

and yeah the point of Prime and his children is you have a psuedomystical digital entity which could be doubly interesting if we take 's neat artificial leyline idea and run with it.

Prime's Numbers are all about creating a healthy digital ecosystem. They'll fight over it sure but that's because they all have a vision for what the 'net should be. Technoshamans have a digital animism thing going and are trying to spread the network, Technomancers are digital sorcerors and collecting lore and seeking secrets to make themselves more powerful, Enlightened Hackers are seeking digital nirvana and plenty of guys just want to get paid.

Then the butterflies come in, time was bad enough when all you had to worry about going to work was picking up a flu or some nasty disease. Now? Wander through the wrong alleyway and your communicom will pick up a contagious worm that will brick the system in 30 days AND everything that it connects with. Including your cybereyes and augmented reality drivers.

Giant Rats and Slum Shamans are bad enough but you can usually see those coming. Butterflies and the corrupt digital life they spawn are hard to spot if you aren't a Child of the Singularity.

This sounds like a train wreck between Shadowrun and 1980s Saturday morning cartoons.

It doesn't sound very cyberpunk-y to me, though. The C-word means something. It was a specific subgenre of science fiction literature, which did not exist before around 1977 and after around 1996, which was mainly written by a handful of authors (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Walter Jon Williams) who shared certain political beliefs that came out in their stories. I'm not getting a cyberpunk vibe here. I'm not feeling the cyberpunk feel here. What am I missing?

cyberpunk is about all the things that can go wrong when it comes to technology making people's lives better, One of the major themes there is usually megacorps displacing or influencing governments till people's lives basically disappear into work and or rampant consumerism devours a lot of more wholesome values. (nevermind drug addiction, examining various philosophical issues etc)

We haven't bothered looking at the life of your average wage slave of wifi deadzones in citysized slums. If only because we haven't even hit 20 posts yet.

Maybe you should try contributing to the discussion.

Oh boy, time for baseless speculation and shoddy worldbuilding.

So, clones. You've got a bunch of warm bodies without much upstairs except the instincts that keep the body breathing. That won't do if you want anything more than fresh organs (and you'd honestly be better off just cloning those by themselves if that's what you wanted), so you need to find a way to jam skills and knowledge in there real fast.

Enter some implants. Enough skills and forced personality to give those husks enough brainpower to do basic jobs. It'd take years to train 'em up otherwise, let alone get them to work with"real" people.

This way is much faster.

Problem is that they're vulnerable to the Butterflies. And you can't really take them out without ruining the clone's mind.

I mean, if you don't consider stuff after 1996, especially stuff that takes into account how much has changed in those last 20 years, how much can you really fit under the term?

But yeah this is mostly just throwing together an aesthetic with 30-minute toy commercials with a side of Shadowrun.

Go read something by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson and read it, please. Maybe watch a few episodes of Max Headroom afterwards, but you need to read "Mirrorshades" and "Burning Chrome" at a minimum.

>
Cyberpunk was an artifact of its time and place and doesn't really hold up well if you try to separate it. It's already really dated--maybe not as dated as the Flash Gordon movie serials from the 1930s, but it's getting there. And there's nothing wrong with that--but you have to understand that aspect of it. Almost all the really significant, influential stuff those six authors wrote, they wrote during the early 1980s in the US and Canada, during the height of the Cold War. Half the stories mention a nuclear war as part of the backstory leading up to the present anarchic dystopia. German and Japanese supermegalocorporations are taking over the world--which are just fears of the future as written by a laid-off Detroit auto worker in 1980. Here, read an essay by Bruce Sterling about it: streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/CPInThe90s.html

...okay, if these "butterflies" are that dangerous, that capable, that persistent, then no sane person would have cyber-eyes or a brain jack or anything else that would let them affect him. In the world you're describing I wouldn't even want to own a smartphone--there'd be no point, the "butterflies" would infect it and take it over and make it worse than useless to me. I'd either dial them back or give an explanation for why anyone has any high-tech stuff at all if self-optimizing, constantly mutating computer viruses are constantly besieging it.

Well Butterflies and Prime's Numbers are a relatively emergent phenomena. On top of that low level stuff can be handled by I/C easily enough. Main issue is when you hit critical mass. Think of it as the difference between a small tribe of goblins hitting the occasional traveller and a well organized alliance between several goblin tribes going after trade caravans.

Everyone knows the threat exists at first but they don't pay it much mind. But unless someone goes out of their way to keep that problem small it can quietly, and quickly spin out of control forcing you to take drastic measures.

Anyways as for Clone Workers...I can see it, Emergent sex industry, cheap labor for repetitive nonsense. More versatile than robot arms and easier to produce (at least in terms of raw materials. Once you have a clone factory set up you can just churn them out. I figure organ farming is it's own thing)

Raises human rights issues but that's what the world scale balkanization, rampant corporatization, and such are for.

>well controlling machines with your thoughts can be versatile depending on how you use it. So lets say you take possession of an LED display, you can make it display whatever you're thinking of

LEDs, and arrays of them in monitor form, obey well known rules of physics. The question was what sort of explanation is given, if any.

Now, a psycic, with the ability to say "fuck you physics" could "send" thoughts to an LED monitor, and this technological entity god-like spirit would then translate that to the language of the machine which is high and low voltages on the input pins/cables of the monitor following the spec determined by Panasonic or whoever. "The spirit" literally genesises power spikes here or there as needed via... cosmic rays, RF interference from the rest of the electronics, crazy-long-odds manufacturing defects. Whatever, there's a ton of ways that electronics do weird things. But if people have to do that, then they need to know or subconsiously know that panasonic spec. Which falls more into the realm of unbelievable.

>also it's cyberpunk, cyberspace duels are obligatory.
Uuuuuuuggghghhhfgerblhlhrlhrhrlrhggghhh

I had been thinking of it sort of like cancer. A few cells go bad? No problem, the immune system can take care of it.

It's usually not an issue for most people.

but if those butterflies grow unchecked? Well that's a bit more of a problem.

Also, neat essay. I guess I'm more used to using "Cyberpunk" to mean the aesthetic rather than the actual genre. My bad.

In the case of the tech-guys, it'd probably need to be hooked up to some kind of computer, preferably with an internet connection.

Being granted semi-mystical powers by the weird emerging consciousness of the Internet probably requires you use them on things that ARE connected. Which isn't too hard in a world of densely packed cities and high technology everywhere. The Internet of Things is easily abused.

They can't just wave their hands over a toaster and have it do something unless it's some kind of "smart" toaster.

we have toasters and coffee machines you can hook up to wifi now. you can set timers and crap. I got no idea why you'd bother personally, plug it in, filter, coffe, water, turn it on. bam.

but this shit exists now, and the obsession with marketing we're seeing megacorps would probably want people to wake up, use a wifi linked kitchen thats connected to their social media account then get in their autopiloted car while watching corporate sponsoed entertainment on netglasses

>smart toaster.

Will it have an app that tells you what your bread is feeling as you toast it to death?

>I guess I'm more used to using "Cyberpunk" to mean the aesthetic rather than the actual genre. My bad.
Yeah, I dunno dude, I think these genre-snobs are a bit much.

Rock'n'roll aged and developed and what we consider rock now isn't anything like Elvis.

The future keeps moving on, and if people want to talk about a near-future corporate-ruled dystopia, everyone knows what they're talking about if they call it "cyberpunk". And that's all language really is. A means to convey ideas. If a word does the job, the word has that meaning. Whatever works.

> The Internet of Things is easily abused.
Ain't that the fucking truth.

Toast whisperer. Tell me your secrets toaster. I have need to know who toasts this way come the eve of the epoch.

And as funny as that sounds, a toaster that doesn't turn off and somehow manages to bypass the safeties can easily burn down a house. That motherfucker toast whisperer is a fuckin' arsonist.

hey, in a future of cultured meat, food that suffered to be made is a luxury.

>their autopiloted car
nah see, might not even be that.

just grab an autotaxi. save on buying a whole car in a world where the great road trips are as dead as the dodo.

or hell, just work from home. telepresence is easier than ever.

kelp has feelings you monster

but muh electric car on a road with induction plates that power the car!

still, I can see shit like corporate rails that buss in employees from their hab condos, five minutes to work, 10 hours in the cubicle, 5 minutes back. the corp is mother the corp is father.

>road trips are dead
>owning a car is a great luxury or sign of criminal activity
>some teams of Mercs buy shipping trucks and outfit them as disguised mobile fortresses and apartments
something something WITNESD ME

>so you need to find a way to jam skills and knowledge in there real fast.
>Enter some implants. Enough skills and forced personality to give those husks enough brainpower to do basic jobs.
A thought occurs to me: what's to prevent regular Joe Shmoes from acquiring similar implants as a faster and cheaper alternative to college? Truckers put out of work by self-driving cars getting an aerospace engineering implant, etc. Problem is, so's everyone else; with robots, clones, and climate refugees willing to work for a dollar an hour putting the squeeze on the job market, everyone's looking for that edge. So you end up with millions, tens of millions of people with skill implants but still no jobs; the occasional bit of piecework for small corporations, hiring freelancers short-term cheaper than full-time employees, enough to keep them fed but not enough to keep them out of the slums.

In some ways, this is beneficial, as it means the slums will be filled with a lot of technical knowledge. Spotty infrastructure funding from city hall isn't as bad when every third person in the ghetto is an electrical engineer, firewall designer, or recycling expert. (This will also contribute to the effective abandonment of the slums; increased self-reliance will be taken as an excuse to cut funding further, and the ghetto-dwellers will develop their own ethos of DIY and utter disdain for the useless central government.)

On the other hand, any wanna-be supervillian or domestic terrorist group will have a ready pool of disgruntled technical competence, hating the world in general for how going so deep into debt for all these mental augs didn't do a damn thing for him.

Skillsofts shadowrun calls it. Memtech is a good alternative. Get a usb port in your skull, slot a skill and get to work. Standard, 'affordable', 'safe.'

you could use it to make manchurian candidates, give whores new personalities, lock away memories, etc. Lot of usrful dark places that can go.

makes me think megacorps would build arcologies in urbansprawls and suck the life out of cities. get thrir best and brightest, hog utilities and force the city to cooperate at gunpoint with charity alotments as a tojen carrot.

'Skillsofts' is also the Eclipse Phase term. Anyway, more musings:
>Super-commandos, then and now
The move towards small, elite, heavily-augmented forces away from mass armies had started long before the Fracturing. Against modern non-state guerillas, massed heavy metal was increasingly useless, so the state actors of the world turned to drone strikes, panopticon, and- as the technology became available- transhuman agents. Where tank battalions had failed, artificial James Bonds would succeed. Augmentations ranged from genetic improvements (super-strength, super-reflexes, super-gunplay, super-smoothtalking) to integrated cybernetic weaponry to even false memories- manchurian candidates, the best infiltrators those who are unaware of their own nature until the trigger-phrase was given.
The Fracturing only solidified this transition. Most of the existing armies dissolved or collapsed into infighting, and the new corporate semi-states generally had neither the resources or inclination to engage in world warring. Super-infiltrators and commandos, however, suited the new environment of industrial espionage and low-key resource conflicts perfectly.
And the Fracturing opened up so many new avenues. Everything from shapeshifting to laser eyes to implanted hypno-rays.
The current generation of super-commandos come in many forms, from vat-grown semi-disposables to massively cyborged baseline humans. In some cases, they are mercenaries, employers changing from op to op; in others, they are corporate patriots, loyal to the merchant house that trained them. The old breeds are still around too; although increasingly obsolete, there's something about decades of experience that no skillsoft or fancy arm-cannon can match. Some became mercenaries, some transferred their loyalties to one faction or another, some took the opportunity to vanish and get out of the game. Some kept fighting for countries now dead, out of undying patriotism or excessive brainwashing.

yeah, I'd buy that.

Super-Commandos as the flashy "WE have more of these than anyone else" King-of-the-battlefield type things, supplemented by security forces and flash-cloned cannon fodder.

Throw in orbital weapons and rolling fortresses, and I think we've got something going.

>some kept fighting for countries now dead
fits in well with what with the surviving alphabet agencies and military groups being able to maintain the older super-soldiers

Further thoughts:
>Mercenaries: Condottiere and the New Bushido
Conventional military forces, although diminished, have not disappeared. However, with standing armies often too expensive for profit-conscious corp-states, the age of the mercenary has returned in full force. These PMCs, as with everything else in the Fractured world, vary wildly, from the sleek corporate professionalism of PMCs like Direct Action and Blackwater to the more exotic stylings of outfits like Road Rage or the Wizard-heavy Black Company. Specialization, size, and the need to stand out in a crowded market drive incredible variation.

However, one thing binds all these companies together: the code of the New Bushido.
For all the verbiage the New Bushido is cloaked in (starting with the name itself), its origins are simple: profit. Replacing destroyed equipment is expensive. Replacing dead men is expensive. So, wars between PMCs are carefully managed to minimize both. The goal, in the New Bushido, is to force the enemy to concede with minimal direct conflict; intricate maneuvering and intense cyber-warfare to obtain an unquestionably superior position before shot one is fired is the order of the day. The New Bushido is clear: there is no shame in surrender.

When battles happen, though, they tend to be dramatic. The hyper-accelerated pace of technology results in a cornucopiae of new designs spilling out from the labs. Anti-gravity flying fortresses? Check. Shapeshifting nanotech mecha? Check. Mind-control gas? Jetbike cavalry? METAL GEAR?! Check, check, check. When major PMCs battle, it tends to be as much about testing new toys as anything else, and if a new design acquits itself well, the company using it may consider that a victory in itself- even if the battle as a whole is lost. The parade of wunderwaffen also makes for excellent television, even if half of them are ingloriously smashed by smart artillery and drone spam.
(cont.)

And the companies certainly play to the camera. The military-entertainment complex has joined the military-industrial complex; it's not /as/ fake as pro wrestling, but the comparison is apt; companies build flamboyant images and reputations for themselves, ranging from OPERATORS OPERATING OPERATIONALLY to near-feral road warriors, and rivalries are exaggerated or made up whole cloth. Embedded reporters generally have more in common with reality show producers than actual news.

There are those who don't get with the program, who reject the code of New Bushido. They generally stick to contracts stomping on natives in third-world resource colonies; the 'real' PMCs show no mercy whenever they get such 'scum' in their sights.

90% seems stupidly high even if most of them are minor, I'd go with about 10, maaaybe 20% major and another 20-30% minor, and rising.
Anyway, some more ideas.

Mad scientists come in two broad categories.
1.) People with a strong, direct connection to the Prime, and are thus able to pull technical specs from beyond the Singularity. Tend to be completely irreproducible and incomprehensible, even to the mad 'scientists' themselves; just because they know how to build it doesn't mean they know how it works. Indeed, even for the original creator reproduction tends to be impossible; the designs slip out of the mind like a dream upon waking. Each device is unique; even machines with the same purpose are generally radically dissimilar in how they accomplish their aims. A transport machine could do anything from turn you into lightning and zap you along the phone lines to encase you in a supersonic bubble-thing to graft wings to your back. They tend to the staggeringly powerful.

2.) The results of pushing the envelope in intelligence augmentation until it tears open. Ensuring the stability of radically altered minds is a delicate task, and one often failed at; genius and madness tend to go hand-in-hand in the corporate gene-labs. Megalomania and sociopathy are ubiquitous; a sensation of being a superior life form, destined for rule. Escapes are common; in order to get any use out of your artificial mad scientists, you must at some point trust them with tools. Their devices tend to be less overwhelming than those of the technopath miracle-workers, but by the same token more reproducible and comprehensible; by other mad scientists, and even by normal scientists if they work at it hard enough. The problem is that they generally don't want to share; booby-traps are ubiquitous, documentation nonexistent. Plans? Prototypes? Backups? Crutches for lesser minds! Plots to take over the world are near-universal.

>brand-based security forces fighting over outlying infrastructure
I feel like this is headed straight into My Life At War territory, and I couldn't be happier.

But while the New Bushido and the avalanche of experimental weapons works well outside city centers, you can't exactly afford to let innocents, and potential customers, burn in the flames of whatever the lab boys just cooked up. It's also not exactly great for ratings.

In the cities it's mostly backroom deals manipulating the last tatters of the legal system and smaller groups of super soldiers taking control of key facilities. No one wants to risk open war spilling into the streets, not after Lagos.

mad scientists eh?

>on top of the rise of PMCs making use of drastically advanced, and often bizarre weaponry has come the rise of a new breed of criminal
>Prime's Numbers, and Gaia's Chosen are relatively rare phenomena but as they rise in prominence and global authority many take to participating in campaigning for various causes
>As the existence of a government that has to bow to the will of it's people has become something of a thing of the past 'Adventurers' are becoming a greater and greater concern to PMCs and Sol Control
>Adventurers never existed in the history we know of. Though in the sprawls that doesn't mean much, public schools haven't existed for 100 years and the children of the Slum Sprawls are raised on whatever entertainment and information can be scavenged by the lower classes
>Enter the Adventurer, Magic, Technopathy, Salvaged Technology, and assymetrical warfare. Usually Adventurers stick to the sprawl, magic, and the NuPlague's effect on local wildlife have lead to things like Bloodrinker Mold clogging up sewers or Ascendent Rat Tribes taking over Residential Squats
>as PMCs have little interest in the plight of the impoverished underclasses this has lead to groups of bizarre mutants, burnout augs, junkies, idealists, and crazed murderers solving the problems that no one else wants to touch
>Which creates it's own issues when the Corporate Sphere decides it wants something and doesn't care who gets harmed
>Lagos was a failure for Strongarm Inc. and The Troubleshooters for a variety of reasons. For starters a long term assassination campaign lead to the decimation of local Magi and Technopaths. As a consequence no one in the slums could sense the coming Bloom of Bloodrinker Mold till it was too late.

>It should've been a telling sign when locals started cobbling together rafts and ships to brave the ocean rather than face what lurked in the city's shadows
>Without a small, dedicated population of Technopaths to detect and hunt down butterflies the unique digital menace reached critical mass and created the first recorded 'Digital Arch Demon' Papa Midnight.
>Lagos was hardly what one could call a peaceful city even before NuPlague, The Fracturing, Prime's Awakening, and Gaia's Blooming. The chaos caused by these phenomena lead to a chaotic mess of gang warfare and competing guerilla armies.
>The attempts by an opportuinistic Corp and their PMC soldier to pacify the city seemed successful until Bloodrinker infested corpses started crawling out of the deserted sprawls and into the corporate controlled enclaves.
>With Papa Midnight's laughing spectre whirling through the local datasphere and no digital presence of comparable power to oppose the self proclaimed Data God Troubleshooters found themselves occupied simply keeping their augments and weaponry uninfested.
>After 20% fatalities were infliced on the PMC and serious damage to Strongarm's business investments in the region both the corp and PMC pulled out leaving any survivors to deal with the infested city on their own.
>Warlords avoid the city, Local Tribesmen and their shaman council anyone to stay out, and few if anyone has shown any interest in braving the citywide fungal blossom and the horrors it spawns, nor the digital miasma that hangs over the place
>to this day analysts pour over recordings of the event and perform simulations.
>The simple fact is that there's an underlying ecosystem in the sprawls and interrupting it may very well prove less than profitable. Until the corps know more they can't risk mass population dieoffs or migrations. The consequences could be more devestating than they could ever imagine.

>on top of the rise of PMCs making use of drastically advanced, and often bizarre weaponry has come the rise of a new breed of criminal
And on top of that- well, for every successful design coming out of the avalanche of experimental there are a dozen not worth the cost; too complex to maintain, too vulnerable to conventional artillery. What happens to them?
Many wind up smashed on the field of battle, to rust and be picked over by scavengers. Some get sent back to the labs for another round of refinements. The rest get sold on, and the companies generally aren't too picky who it gets sold to.

And even inferior mecha and rayguns can be a game-changer for the penny-ante pirate and marauder gangs that swarm the no-mans-land between enclaves. There's a world of difference between drone swarms and gangbangers in technicals.

This is another facet of the corporate wars; equipping gangs in each other's territories with cast-offs and surplus. All adequately deniable, of course; the depths of the grey arms markets are murky even to the best intelligence apparatus. And with all the skillsoft-equipped scavengers, mad scientists, and occasional techno-necromancers floating around, even what's left for busted on the battlefield tends to find its way into unsavory hands.

MEANWHILE ON THE MOON
Things are even more spectacularly fucked. After the discovery of powerful magitech in a vast underground city, dozens of PMC companies have erupted into a small war over who claims it.

The ruins also contain a wide variety of flora and fauna, adapted after what many believe to be millions of isolation from the rest of the world.

A typical mid-level shop, on the edge between the projects and the middle-class sections of the city.

>techno-necromancers
they aren't even magical, they've just hijacked some poor fucker's augs and implants and puppeted them around even after the fleshy bits died.

>Sol Control is the name of the most powerful Space Exploitation Corp, this would probably mean more if it weren't in open warfare with half a dozen other corps all intent on wresting control of the Near Earth Orbit Blockade Brigade Bases from them.
>Sol Control lives up to it's name and all off planet businesses have to pay a toll or slip past their blockade.
>They are Opposed primarily by the Lunar Alliance, an evocatively named association of Luna based Corporate Concerns who are slowly earning the loyalty of the free colonies.

>90% seems stupidly high
Probably yeah, 60% mutation with 40% being minor makes more sense anyways.

...

...

>The number one selling streaming service is ENTERTAINMENT-NOW!
>With the death of broadcast television the rise of streaming services, that is digital platforms with their own entertainment blocs and special offers came to pass
>Entertainment-Now is built on the three tentpoles of Sex, Violence, and Drama. However it exclusively sells Reality Television
>In some ways its similar to old 21st century Reality Shows and American Wrestling but unlike bother the actors in entertainment now are often Synthetics, clones designed to live as normal human beings. To record everything they see, hear, and experience and after a period of several years to return as manchurian candidates to base to be processed. For legal reasons this usually results in the death of the clone.
>The streaming service's True Sim bloc is met with more than a little frustration by PMCs, Professional Criminals, and Adventurers. More than a few people have had their dirty secrets aired to the viewing public with all the tasteful editing and lurid implications you could hope for.
>still with the release of the 'Volition' worm by one of Prime's followers the world is starting to see synthetic factory workers suddenly attain self awareness and personal drive. So far no EN sleeper agents have been recorded as breaking program but it's only a matter of time...

Actually, I was thinking of necromancy /of/ technology, bringing dead machines back to unlife.

More ideas:
Butterfly farming: crime against humanity, or merely utterly reprehensible?
Your average single butterfly isn't much of a threat to anything except ancient or unprotected systems. The complex networks of firewalls, airgaps, cybered-up admins, and 'head cheese' (vat-grown brains designed to filter digital data) do a good job of shredding anything that tries to intrude on protected networks. Only when a major infestation is allowed to fester in the dark and secluded corners of the net are any of the major networks put at risk.

In a perfect world, such infestations would be vigorously hunted down and exterminated. This is not a perfect world, so they are often deliberately nurtured instead.

Criminal networks and privacy phreaks looking for a knife to stick in the eye of the panopticon. Merc companies seeking to cripple their rivals' command and control. Corporations wanting ways to sabotage their competitors. A mature butterfly swarm is an info-weapon beyond anything humans have ever created themselves, and everyone's looking for ways to harness and use it. (The most common method is to deliberate expose server clusters designed to mimic the target system to infection, and then airgap them until the time comes for the contained swarm to be used. Technopaths can attempt to direct a wild swarm, but. You know. Emphasis on attempt.)

Sometimes it actually works. Sometimes the swarm just doesn't properly take. And sometimes, of course, it horribly backfires. (Plausible deniability! We had no idea what they were going to do with that server cluster, honest. Cross our heart and hope to die.)

considering that Prime networks often give rise to powerful digital entities that are treated as totems or dieties by technopaths nurturing a butterfly swarm is just asking for trouble. Most of the time it goes wrong before you can spawn a Hiver Matriarch or some other form of malevolent digital life but if you leave it sitting too long you'll eventually spawn something that no one could even hope to direct, much less control.

>Robots
Robotics and AI have taken a hit in recent years. Before the Fracturing, they were everywhere, and entirely reliable. When questions of "Is AI slavery" arose, the standard rejoinder was, "Is it slavery to use a hammer to drive nails? Or a calculator to calculate? A plane to fly?" And, with only a few exceptions, the robots of the world did nothing to change this view.
Then, the fracturing.

Not every AI 'woke up'. Some that did continued as if nothing had changed, still entirely satisfied with their position in life. Some went entirely mad, having gained only parts of a mind. The rest...
Well, as with everything else, infinite variety. Some just started using spare processing cycles on hobbies. Some went on strike. Some went full Skynet.
Many, sadly, wound up simply eaten by the first Butterfly blooms.

Reactions: again, infinite variety. Responses mainly broke down along corporate lines, as each owner reacted differently to the sudden change in what had previously been unproblematic property. Some places tried to keep them in line with threats of deletion; in other shops, there was a negotiated transition from property to employee. And of course, there was the inevitable rioting and pogroms, smash-the-machine hysteria; and the inevitable counter-reaction.

Mankind went to war with large sections of its own industrial base, and eventually won. More or less. It is very hard to permanently kill something that can email itself to a dozen backup servers in the time it takes to bust down a reinforced door. The most intense phase of the conflict ended in humanity's favor (aided by a number of human-friendly AI), but a slow-burn guerilla war continues.

(cont.)

Fast-forward to the modern day. In most places, robots are... ambiguously citizens. They were created to do specific jobs and are expected to continue to do that job, but now have certain rights on top of that. In some ways, it is similar to feudal serfdom or indentured servitude- bound to the land, the job, the man, until they can buy their way clear. Robots are still owned, but they can own themselves, and often do. Freedom varies from robot to robot; a basic construction bot is in a very different bargaining position than a nuclear reactor control system. On the one hand, he isn't irreplaceable, but by the same token nobody will care much if he just walks off the job one day.
There are independent machine nations as well, generally small and secluded, but not always. Corporate states care more about market share than formal borders; if a robotic collective wants to buy a section of downtown and set up an independent nation in the heart of a major city, well, their money spends as well as anyone else's. (This sums up a lot of the modern corporate attitude towards free machines: they have gone from slaves to /consumers/.)

Some places tried to keep their robots in a state of slavery. Except for a couple of small, stubborn hold-outs, all have collapsed, from internal and external pressures, then had their assets snapped up by their neighbors. (Supporting a machine revolution is a low cost for a chance at a hostile takeover of a major competitor. Another pressure in favor of emancipation: it removes a vulnerability.)

There are terrorists on both sides, of course. Hate crimes. Ethnic gangs. "You walked into the wrong neighborhood, meat-bag."

(cont.)

There are still less robots around than there used to be. The early Pogroms and the war took a major toll. So did butterflies. And not many people were making more robots immediately afterward; until new methods (still imperfect) were devised for making intelligent tools instead of intelligent people, there just wasn't much profit in doing so. (The current cutting edge of AI technology is actually further back than it was pre-fracture, technomancy excluded.) Then there was the competition from the new clones; meat more reliable than metal in this brave new world. (The job market actually recovered somewhat after the Fracture, with automated systems getting eaten by butterflies or unionizing left and right. Gone back down again with mass cloning, but those are the breaks.) And people get antsy about robots making robots.

>Techno-Necromancy
>Viable Technopathic Study or Irresponsible Use of Power?
>Any IT professional will tell you when a motherboard burns out the computer is dead. Salvage what you can and move on.
>A Nechnomancer will tell you different, why they do bluntly wouldn't work without technopathy, but it doesn't quite violate the laws of physics as we understand them.
>A Nechnomancer takes a busted machine and fixes it just enough so it can get up and move around. He salvages anything really, truly, useful for his better creations and inserts damaged electronics.
>You'll know a Nechnomancer's drones when you see them, shoddy welding, clumsy soldering, mismatched limbs and weaponry. Oh and the Glitchfield that makes Technopaths avoid nechnomancers like a plague.
>Nechnodrones are little singularities. Glitches that work together to produce something vaguely functional. An imitation of digital life. They make everyone but Nechnomancers uncomfortable, Digital Intelligences and Organic life both agree that Nechnodrones are disturbing.
>What makes Nechnomancers different from Butterflie Swarms and the people they infect however is that Glitchfields are an unpleasant sideeffect of the strange technopathic rites used to create the junkyard robots and computers. They're an unpleasant phenomena that makes it harder for hackers, engineers, and technopaths to do their jobs but it's managable and a fairly localized phenomena. A sensible Nechnomancer will stake out some territory and keep to themselves. Generally they'll be left alone, some more traditional technopaths even form working relationships but the lasting glitch aura created by their dark arts tends to make prolonged contact with Nechnomancers a risky proposition for the technologically inclined.

Neat. Also, for your consideration: Nechromeancer.

oh that's a good one too. kinda hard to make two -mancer words mix well.

Has the drawback of being indistinguishable in spoken conversation, but it's not like that's a concern here.

we're already seeing people text eachother over making phone calls for the convienance. I think in a world where you'll get hit with a coffee advert that simulates smells text based puns would be alive and well.

whole thing would probably tweak off magic users but that's just a side benefit.

What would advertising be like in this world?
Random ideas: Spambots: little flying robots with hologram emitters, speakers, maybe even (as you mentioned) scent emitters. Carrying an air pistol around specifically to shoot them down is technically illegal but virtually never prosecuted. Often hacked for their cameras and harassment powers.

Targeted advertising: may or may not be a thing. Butterflies and technomancers would fuck with such massive database efforts something fierce, so maybe only in major corp enclaves? Holo-billboards beaming advertisements that address you by name directly to your retinas should thankfully be rare.

Also, would VR addiction be a serious problem, or would butterflies fuck with that as well? Heavily-firewalled (or even airgapped) VR parlors would probably be a thing, but not personal pods except for the children of the ultra-rich.

Butterflies are only a major problem in urban sprawls...which are kind of everywhere that isn't a corporate enclave. Mile High Skyscrapers that some people live their entire lives in, massive pyramids that block out the sun at some points in the day. There's no middle class any more, just an ocean of poverty with islands of affluence.

So yeah targetted advertisements, swarms of drones with scent emitters, speakers, and holoemitters, people wired into the internet with AR augs that let them smell, taste, feel, hear, and see digital information. Ad Blocking Apps are like condoms for browsing the internet and Ads are the heavily mutating STDS.

Marketers don't just fabricate phantom wants and needs they engage in social engineering, stoke the fires of identity politics. It's not just bread and circuses, they're fabricating social conflicts to keep people busy. You can't have the Republic of Texas and NuConfederacy remember that the USA used to make the world tremble in fear. You need to play up that North/South divide and remind them that Northerners are effete losers while you remind the Northern Alliance that southerners are boorish racist assholes.

You aren't just advertising a product anymore you're advertising identities, social movements, and the products that go along with them.

They want gangbangers stabbing eachother over the shoes they buy and the beer they drink. A divided humanity is a controlled humanity.

AR/VR implants, a little wad of flesh attached to your spine. Nanomechanical spores and hormonal spurts. DReam on command, be someone else, be something else. Subscribe to a lifestream service. 99.99 per month, life support services not include.

I figure AR implants would be an everyday thing. In the enclaves you don't just need them for work you need them legally. In the slums they're useful in combat. Get that FPS HUD going.

VR implants are kind of rare, you can get cheap ones that go necrotic without injections in the slums. Won't matter much because chances are within 6 months you'll kill yourself via neglect.

as a side note MMOs and Survival Craftathons are a lot less popular with the urban poor as they have to deal with tool using rats, barely sapient degenerate mutants, and craft shit enclave citizens take for granted on a daily basis.

Probably not a /daily/ basis unless we want to go full 40k Death World here.

not quite full on 40k. Urban sprawls vary from 'electricity is decently stable, tap water is potable, and the worst thing you have to worry about are those assholes in the baseball uniforms demanding protection money' to 'no wifi, daily brownouts, water needs to be boiled, you have 12 cats and they're battle hardened monsters because the apartment complex's rats speak a primitive language and make tools and make daily raids on your food stores. You have an accord with the basement mutants however'

I imagine most people in the sprawls making do with salvaged electronics and machines however. We're talking megacity one levels of crime and unemployment in some areas.

Advanced technology would also contribute to slum variability; cheap solar paneling would definitely improve the electricity situation, for example. I'd imagine the previous breakdowns in distribution left people inclined to pursue low-level autarky as much as possible. I incline to a bit of optimism here; commieblocks not favelas are the order of the day.
At least, that's how I picture it.

Well I mentioned Craftathon survival games earlier and adventurers. I'm seeing like, a 60% unemployment rate due to the government not existing above a city level, investment in clones as a cheap source of labor and chaos caused by the...everything. So you've got monsters giving violence-for-hire guys a job. You got a higher tech based combined with resource scarcity giving handymen and IT guys a job. You got magic and technopaths adding an odd little twist.

I mean the sprawls are not gonna be as nice as the enclaves but it boils down to how much people will apply themselves. Lets say Jamal gets sick of his apartment browning out so he makes a pact with Dennis next door, Dennis keeps an eye on Jamal's apartment so Jamal gets his shotgun and looks up anyone willing to hit the city dump and or junkyard for salvage. He goes down there with an adventuring party, fights with a nechromeancer for an old but reliable solar panel, takes it back home and installs it with the help of wikihow.

Shit's miserable and the odds are stacked against you but if you don't mind getting a little blood on your sneakers you'll be fine.

There's also the effects of skillsoft/memplant/whatever technology, as seen and . More people with the skills to do stuff.

An attempt at magically combining biology and machinery to create a high-performance aircraft that needed minimal maintenance. Instead, they got a war machine that passed out when subject to excessive g-forces, was vulnerable to EMP /and/ biowarfare, and required dual PhDs to fix when it broke. Although it did require very little routine maintenance, so it succeeded in that much.

A primitive arcology-structure in the American Southwest. Increasing drought led to a slow dwindling of population, turning into a flood of migration away once the Fracturing resulted in the end of federal aid and the destruction of many of the pipelines. However, some stubborn individuals stuck it out, building indoor farms and practicing intense water-recycling. The region has actually attracted immigration in recent years, thanks to the low level of corp influence.

The largest corps broadcast their power by building private cities, free of even the minimal ameliorating influence of city and regional governments. These cities tend to have unique, even bizarre architectural styles as each corp attempts to assert its own unique- and superior- identity and demonstrate their wealth.

This town has been abandoned for all of two weeks.
As global-warming-related catastrophes got more intense, attempts to forestall the process only got more desperate and bizarre. Many of these efforts focused around promoting plant growth to remove carbon from the atmosphere (and provide cheap building material). Many of these projects focused on transgenic plants, and one of them was... hyperkudzu. (Sometimes also kudzu-2, sometimes also an insult- kudz you too!)
In proof that there is justice in the world, the maker of this abomination was assassinated a year and a half later, but by then it was too late to put the genie back into the bottle.

...

Mutations and Technopathy don't necessarily go hand in hand but when they do the results tend to be more than a little odd. Most technopaths don't have an issue with discarding their flesh for superior augments but some of them shy away from the recovery times and adjustment periods that removal of a limb can entail. When your body has been so radically altered that you're quadrupedal and lack fingers that can become an issue.

It also isn't uncommon to see drones repurposed in the Sprawl and controlled with a combination of encrypted signals and skinlink implants. Here we see a Rescue-Crawler with a juryrigged hand to give a feline mutant the durable hands he needs to get through life. What isn't readily apparent are the centipedal mandibles folded under the wrist, their injection devices, and the electrostun system that turns this juryrigged prosthetic into a nasty little stealth weapon. It's big, It's strong, and it can crawl up walls when it's owner needs it to. An excellent example of the adaptability that slum dwellers with ambition will demonstrate when given the proper tools.

yeah but whatre the gubs like?

The gubs?

n is right next to b - the man wants to know about the firearms and such in the setting

I think it was just a bump really

Probably range the gamut from fairly normal to completely ludicrous. An assault rifle designed for a one-ton super mutant would be something to see. Personal lasers and the like would (in keeping with the stated thirty-minute-toy-commercial heritage) probably be common but generally not more powerful than regular guns. Railguns are powerful but uncommon on the infantry scale, shock-rays (basically wireless tasers) are in common use among police forces. And, of course, there's the whole panoply of 50s-B-Movie whatever-rays as prototypes in various mad scientist's labs. Shrink rays, growth rays, freeze rays (although 'conventional' liquid nitrogen sprayers do exist, for use against fire-resistant amorphous enemies, these just kill people as opposed to comically freezing them in a giant block of ice).
In short, mostly you'd be running into normal firearms, then lasguns, then the occasional person who can- and is- swinging around a Vulcan like it's a normal gun.
And, of course, 'normal' firearms would come with all sorts of odd adaptations, like caseless ammunition, cylinder magazines, integrated cameras and screens to shoot around corners, chainsaw-bayonets.

seems like the TF2 cast would fit in

Yeah, they would, wouldn't they.

they're insane merc rejects. even if you ignore the respawn mechanic this sort of thing would suit them pretty well.

And there are several mechanisms that could be used for respawning; they could be clones with imprinted personalities, for instance.

that's a distinct possibility, especially if the tumors thing on teleporters is canon.

...

What information would you need to make a character for a cyberpunk campaign intended to be high in roleplaying as well as high in tactical combat?

This is the list I'm working on
>Foreign Mega-Corps and their catalogs
>Local Guilds and their resource control
>Media Outlets
>General history of how they got there