How do you write cyberPUNK adventures...

>The perfect formula for cliches and stereotypes.
What even is cyberpunk?
>When people are still stuck in the late 80's

Well, literally armed with their teeth.. Except for the cyberdogs barking out dronebees. Their teeth are literally armed, the back molars

Quality post desu senpai

This place is full of swarmfront raiders and SAW shills, who are nothing if not passionate

The biting isn't what causes the damage. That just digs the teeth in, after which the jaw comes unattached and is left, still gripping the victim. Several seconds later, once the cyberfurry has bounded away, the explosives in the teeth go off.

>swarmfront
>SAW

Is this the story of the nanite Nazi swarm vs a bunch of crying people with pink hair and Squad Automatic Weapons? Because that's cyberpunk.

Christ, man that's hardcore. I just pop out my directed-charge canines in dudes, though I've been eyeing this Sharktooth System that would give me a clip of 3 in each fang slot! Gotta kids birthday coming up, should be some easy cred.

>Augs getting shit on

I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS

Gentlemen, would anybody care to perhaps get shit done?

The premise: Veeky Forums-Oriented 201X Cyberpunk that plays onto all the fears and anxieties of the New Tens. Post-Apoc? Maybe.

Religious and Political Extremists, Internet integration into literally everything, corrupt politicians and media, drones, meme magic, Tay, Brexit that may okay not involve going into Space, ridiculous metacontextual weapons like iGuns owned by our latter-day megacorps, enraged lower classes, the brewing threat of global conflict.

All wrapped up in a sci-fi candy shell.

Quick reminder that there's a 3rd edition of UA coming out sometime shortly after the themes in it are relevant

>SAW
??

Pfft, don't accept any low-rent sharktooth brand, get a Jaws fabricator implant and you'll continually grow rows of teeth as long as you eat the right stuff.
It's a bigger job, and you have to remember to actually eat or drink, but a it's much better end result - you can even upgrade (or crack) it to produce all sorts of custom teeth - you want a custom bite, fangs, explosive, venom-holding, british, whatever

when making stuff, always have the mantra "high tech, low life" in mind

this can be further expanded uppon to ephatize the downsides of technological development, such. human revolution attempted this when with the whole cyborgs making it impossible for regular humans to find work in some fields but also being drug addicted and such, but instead of having a story that the character fights against said issue directly, have it be a normal and accepted part of life

While I like the idea of getting shit done, it's really hard to get it done for Cyberpunk because it ties in so much to personal opinion and politics. You're just asking for arguments. What's better is to personally make your cyberpunk horror dystopia for your group of friends, because you'll know what upsets them about the world and what to play up. By extension, you'll also know what real life political opinions will piss them off and what to avoid.

Well that's Urban Fantasy, compared and contrasted to the Cyberpunk we're working with here

I'd be down for combining them tho

SJW, autocorrected because I'm a mobilefag traveling in Leafistan

Those are good points. A project director would help eliminate that issue, but that's more or less Antithetical to the Veeky Forums Way.

If we did it anyways, it would at least be very interesting. We'd have to keep it centrist and omnicritical so we don't get a /pol/ or tumblr: the game.

I'm not sure I trust Veeky Forums with this. The lot of you are wonderful, capable people but there's a large honest-to-god-I-can't-believe-it's-not-brownshirt contingent.

If we do go for this I think we should try to play things as straight as possible. No supernatural elements. Focus on all of the crazy shit which is already on the verge of occuring and extrapolate. Self-driving cars, delivery drones and advances in automatization driving blue collar workers out of business. 50% unemployment. Extreme wealth divide between the upper white collar class and the welfare class.

Operating systems (the legal ones anyhow) are now all walled gardens. Software unauthorized by the company (and thus the government) cannot be run on them. Everything is always connected to the internet and monitored (again, by both the specific company and the government). For that matter just about any potentially dangerous device is permanently connected to the internet. Those in the know gather in the countless small darknets using illegal modded rigs.

Actual physical surveillance is omnipresent. The UK's system taken to 111. 3D printers briefly threatened the monopoly of the corps on the "means of production", creating a short-lived golden age of piracy followed by a brutal crackdown. Surveillance is used to ensure citizens do not violate the intellectual property of the rich by printing illegal copies. Consequently patent-trolling reaches new heights as the corps register practically everything and prevent the common citizen from creating their own works.

I honestly think you can't write something like this without being biased one way or another. For examle I can't imagine people in the future would even care about transsexuals once the tech is good enough to make them look and function exactly like biological members of the opposite sex but that's a hard sell for a lot of people who live today.

Well, I am not a communist, so I won't promote that fucking agenda.

Grounding it in reality would be just inviting conflict

Nobody cares about AI Rights or the legality of AR Chips or Laser Weapon Restrictions

I've actually been working on exactly this but it's all turned a little bit 1488.

Step one: THE MAN does something cartoonishly evil.
Step two: Give the rebel PCs some personal reason to give a shit because they're too jaded (read: cool) to care otherwise.
Step three: Include opportunities for ultra-violence, possibly but not always against THE MAN itself (most punk PCs in my experience are happy to gun down neutral parties for not being radical enough)
Step four: Give the PCs a chance to sell out to THE MAN for dramatic tension, or have a friendly NPC betray them if your PCs are too "dedicated"/murderhobo-y.
Step five: A bit more of the ol' ultra-violence.
Step six: If anything remains not-on-fire, correct this.

You now have an acceptible punk adventure framework. Apply numbers, mechanics, and color as appropriate for your system and specific genre.

>The players are part of the system.
>Introduce them to the opposition.
>Their boss/duties have them do increasingly immoral/unethical/anti-social/murderous activities.
>If they never call bullshit and rebel, ride it out to it's logical conclusion of the system disposing of them as the expendable asset and liability they are.
>If/when they rebel, have the opposition recruit them and try to make a change in the world.
If they're already involved with the opposition, then it's essentially a series of guerrilla-tactic operations of hiding, doing something nefarious, and then running the fuck away from forces ludicrously more powerful and capable than yourselves.

Holy shit, forget everything I said in This man speaks wisdom. >What even is cyberpunk?
>>When people are still stuck in the late 80's

Nawww, don't do that man. The worries of the 80's involved :

Corporate-rights trumping personal rights
The dissolution of unions
The undercutting and de-valuing of human labor, and human-worth in general
The alienation that comes with new technology
The panopticon surveillance state and loss of privacy
Income inequality
Pollution
Greed
Drugs
Sex

These things are still here. Some are a hell of a lot worse then they were in the 80's. It was a cautionary tale, and it's one that we've apparently didn't listen to very closely. With the technological improvements we've had, it makes a lot of people say that cyberpunk is NOW.

The punk trope, of youths getting angry and fighting the system and somehow actually succeeding is laughable. But it was ALSO laughable in the 80's. The hopelessness of the fight is part of Punk.

>Corporate-rights trumping personal rights
>The dissolution of unions
>The undercutting and de-valuing of human labor, and human-worth in general
>The alienation that comes with new technology
>The panopticon surveillance state and loss of privacy
>Income inequality
>Pollution
>Greed
>Drugs
>Sex
This sounds like the modern world. Like, a lot.

>A project director would help eliminate that issue, but that's more or less Antithetical to the Veeky Forums Way.

It's also very un-punk

> No supernatural elements.
Damn straight.

>Operating systems (the legal ones anyhow) are now all walled gardens. Software unauthorized by the company (and thus the government) cannot be run on them.

More. The Internet is a walled garden full of one-way mirrors. Hard encryption is outlawed. They literally monitor ALL traffic, and if they can't deep-packet inspect the CONTENTS of your traffic, then it act itself is illegal. And attempting to hide/subvert that inspection runs afoul of the DMCA (That's current law, bitches). No-one is allowed to self-host as "All the legitimate needs of civilians can be full-filled by state-sanctioned websites and services". The Internet is now a white-list. And that conveniently keeps competitors from trying to unseat the established players online.

But it's not like they control everything. There are still connections to the third-world and a few "liberal" states where people still have freedoms. But getting data sent past the iron firewall is difficult, temporary, expensive, and slow as fuck.

>the whole cyborgs making it impossible for regular humans to find work in some fields

...It's not cyborgs. It's robots and machines. Nobody is paid to be an office mail-room clerk anymore. Email does that. Nobody is paid (in America) to drill in 3 bolts 10,000 times a day in a factory line. Nobody will be paid to drive a truck for 20 hours across the nation.
Instead they're paid to keep the Email servers up and running and to filter spam, or to oversee the bolt-bots, or to unload trucks at the destination. All of which take less people.

I just take a thing, ANYthing, put CORPORATIONS in there and paint in cyberpunk.
>Princess is kidnapped by a dragon

How do I blame corporations for this? They allow dragons to kidnap princesses. It gets them money. Because all the kinghts go dragonhunting and dragonhunting gear is provided by corporations.
But people are suffering because wandering dragonhunting knights are basically legal robbers, not to mention the fucking dragons.

Basically, new type of power-up kind of drug called "dragon" enables a supergang who fight the police with brutal strength alone. To counter that, Government heavily arms a special police unit "Hunters" who are more than happy to abuse the shit out of their power.

A concerned police officer suspects where the drug movement comes from and decides to get a group of street kind of people to enter this shit from underground.
Enter the PCs

Funny how that works. Bands like Dead Kenndeys are still surprisingly relevant, three decades later.

Go give California Uber Alles or At My Job a listen some time.

Yeah, Veeky Forums's not exactly the most middle of the road place, politics wise, be it /co/mblr or /pol/

The thing that always gets me is people's perceived competence of conspiracies and things - most surveillance is passive, more for insurance and after-the-fact crime work than for spying on people; even digital surveillance, where there's computers to search through everything, mostly they will just log stuff, and the more things and people that are online means more and more data to scour.
Realistically, I don't think cracked software would get you arrested, it'd be something that gets you an extra few months or adds a few k to your fine.

Have you read When Gravity Fails ?

if you agree with op, you might be a retard

>More. The Internet is a walled garden full of one-way mirrors. Hard encryption is outlawed. They literally monitor ALL traffic, and if they can't deep-packet inspect the CONTENTS of your traffic, then it act itself is illegal. And attempting to hide/subvert that inspection runs afoul of the DMCA (That's current law, bitches). No-one is allowed to self-host as "All the legitimate needs of civilians can be full-filled by state-sanctioned websites and services". The Internet is now a white-list. And that conveniently keeps competitors from trying to unseat the established players online.

>But it's not like they control everything. There are still connections to the third-world and a few "liberal" states where people still have freedoms. But getting data sent past the iron firewall is difficult, temporary, expensive, and slow as fuck.
Good idea. I like it.

>Instead they're paid to keep the Email servers up and running and to filter spam, or to oversee the bolt-bots, or to unload trucks at the destination. All of which take less people.
WAY less people! Enough to make mass unemployment a fact of life for the lower classes.

>The thing that always gets me is people's perceived competence of conspiracies and things - most surveillance is passive, more for insurance and after-the-fact crime work than for spying on people; even digital surveillance, where there's computers to search through everything, mostly they will just log stuff, and the more things and people that are online means more and more data to scour.
The problem is the sheer volume of data and the limits of modern artificial intelligences. With advances in computation I imagine that the state will have the resources to use the data it is gathering in many new ways. We already use machine learning in order to try and identify terrorists, find out how likely a loaner is to pay back and figure out whether a given small time criminal ought be paroled to free up room in overcrowded jails. I don't think it is that strange to expect future governments to make use of such techniques in each and every area important to them.

>Realistically, I don't think cracked software would get you arrested, it'd be something that gets you an extra few months or adds a few k to your fine.
You're probably right, at least given the current political reality in the west. I will say, though, that as analyzing communcation becomes more and more key to governance having a blind spot like that will be less and less acceptable.

This board is by now basically a colony of reddit.

Fuck off to /pol/

THE MAN sounds very appropriate title for the DM storyteller etc.. esp in a cyberpunk setting.

Corporations have embeeded themselves so much into humanity that even to rebel you must submit to a corporation. Which just happens to be a non-profit PR firm with a few design firms.

There are no lone wolves anymore, your allegiance is given to an institution whether you like it or not.

That's not a terrible idea, though it could lead to a lot of player vs DM scenarios developing - after all, Punks™ fight THE MAN

Well there are still privacy advocates - anyone doing dodgy shit with the power to lobby will do so, and I still reckon the increasing amount of traffic will be somewhat prohibitive to tracking communication - if you've got a city of 5 million, with at least that many personal communicating devices (and probably twice that or more), on maybe a dozen networks (some of whom have actually bothered to buy infrastructure as well), and then all the landbound communication, who knows how many public and private camera systems and more, that's a whole lot of shit to attempt to keep track of.

It's helpful that most people's data goes through a limited few pieces of infrastructure, both IRL (transmitters) and digital (how many bing users do you know?), but I think it's a serious question whether the increased capacity of AI can manage with the increased proliferation of data.

Also, in the vein of cyberpunk crime, I'm sure I recall someone being lured into a mugging by pokemon go - Augmented Reality is a great thing, and probably a bit underused in cyberpunk, but criminals can use it's base features, even without hacking it.

>I honestly think you can't write something like this without being biased one way or another. For examle I can't imagine people in the future would even care about transsexuals once the tech is good enough

Your first sentence is correct. You can't imagine the second because leftists can't imagine a Muslim-dominated world in which jihadi gangs murder gays, trannies and techno-furries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Miami...oh, wait. :\

Anyone remember the Death Metal band that was sentenced to death in Iran for being un-Islamic? Punks don't exist under totalitarian Muslim regimes; they're exterminated.

See, this is why we can't create a collaborative cyberpunk game; politics vary.

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V A P O R W A V E

I like how the only hacking in that pic is shoulder-surfing passwords.

Hey, I don't exactly like fundies. MAX_FEDORA. Just kind of hard to imagine the radically religious winning anything over the long term. They're hamstrung by their own ideology.

>Punks don't exist under totalitarian Muslim regimes
Not true. I watched this cool documentary about Iran's punk scene. Watched one about China's too. They're just small, careful and prone to being executed haha.

>Just kind of hard to imagine the radically religious winning anything over the long term.

It's because you've been living in a very sheltered, secular part of the world, which is an anomaly by historical standards. Muslims have gone from being 8% of the global population to being a projected 33% by 2050. They will be winning plenty of things in the future, better get used to it and start imagining it in your games.

...

...

I can't find the PUNCH or KICK keys on my keyboard. Should I get a new keyboard?

I'm Israeli so that might be part of it haha. I run into fundies - jews and muslims and christians - on a daily basis and one consistent thing about them is that they're always, always incompetent. I predict that after the initial "we must accept everything about Islam because the right hates it and Muslims are a minority!!!" thing the Western left is doing right now there will be a backlash and things will return to the status quo.

>things will return to the status quo
Not when you consider
A) They're coming in large numbers
B) They're reproducing more than the natives
C) Their population is concentrated in certain areas
So they'll run for local elections and win with a landslide. Then they'll use that to influence policy on a national level.

Their numbers will continue to grow, and they'll spread across the country subsuming everything in their wake. When their numbers are high enough they'll start passing their own laws and before you know it you'll be a Sharia state.

They're still a minority trying to push laws to which the majority of the population opposes. They can't leverage their position to pass such laws until they have an actual majority. 20% of Israel's citizens are Muslims and they haven't exactly turned it into a Sharia state haha. That's a far higher percentage than that found in most Western states.

Importing millions of fundies is not risk-free, don't get me wrong, but it is not the end of the world either. Things will get out of whack for a bit and then the system will normalize itself.

>So they'll run for local elections and win with a landslide. Then they'll use that to influence policy on a national level.
Where do you live that local elections effect anything on a national level?

Case in point, lads

That and...kids tend to be less fundamentalist than highly religious parents if they live in a society that offers alternatives.

>They can't leverage their position to pass such laws until they have an actual majority.

You might want to read pic related, by one of France's leading writers (critically and popularly acclaimed both). He shows quite well how a Muslim minority y can take over, at least in the things that count (education and freedom of expression). It's a very sobering novel, parts of which are well into becoming reality.

tl;dr Muslims don't need 51% of the population to take over.

Also incorrect. Pew Research and other polls have shown that younger Muslim generations in European countries such as France, Germany and the UK are much more fundamentalist than their parents and grandparents.

>tl;dr Muslims don't need 51% of the population to take over.

So clearly every single minority can take over? Or is this a unique muslim superpower?

Yes. Yours is defective. You want a standard QWERTY-HADOUKEN keyboard.

Untrue by British experiences. Pakistanis who are born in Britain from a history of their family arriving in the 60s/70s are if not more violently radical than their grandparents.

This is entirely negating the ethnic/racial tribalism that occurs when you put different ethnic groups, let alone races in the same patch of earth. Religion is not the end all. As long as the economy and state is strong enough to suppress the low-intensity tribalistic race-hate and violence currently going on, and has a consumer culture to keep people comfy, it will remain not that open. When the economy tanks, all these disparate peoples the capitalists have brought for cheap labour will fall upon themselves in the struggle for land and resources - for their tribe.

Absolutely. It's a lot easier to be religious when you're not constantly tempted to "sin" i.e. have fun.

>younger Muslim generations in European countries such as France, Germany and the UK are much more fundamentalist than their parents and grandparents.
This is puzzling, even to said parents and grandparents.
There are muslim kids whose families have been here longer than mine who fly Algerian flags every occasion they can, still pretend they're Algerians over French (even though their own parents are already French and probably have no valid claim to Algerian citizenship anymore) and stuff. Hell, some of them have parents as the other mention, who never entered a mosquée once in their life.

I mean, I'm open to the possibility but the Muslims here are trying *really hard* to take over and that's not going very well for them. It could only work with the help of pants-on-head-braindead neolibs in numbers which I just don't believe exist pretty much anywhere.

Welcome to the real world. Algerians aren't French, because they're Algerian. French people are white Celtic, Germanic and Mediterranean people who have a common culture, race and religion. Why would an Algerian want to shun who he is, and always will be, because of his birth? If I moved to Japan, I sincerely doubt me or any white children I'd have would be considered 'Japanese'. Even if they spoke Japanese, and the rest.

Those Algerian kids like their blood, their culture, their people - and white dupes like you don't. They're quite celebratory of seeing France as some kind of reverse colony of theirs.

tl;dr, you've been brought up to believe by the gov't that being 'french' is just a piece of paper

Well first, and have good points, but it's not a great time to be a young person - it's easy to be radical when you hear about all "your" people getting shit on, you failed your exams, everyone shits on you for being a millenial and you can't really get a job

It's a fertile breeding ground for young men who want to make a difference, and they're convinced they can do that through violence.
If nothing else, it's sure as hell a way to get people to pay attention

I think melting pots are the only safeguard against tribalism. So long as every tribe is allowed to freely live in its own commune and run its own schools integration is impossible. Private schools, the right to homeschool children and lack of inculturation in state schools perpetuate tribalism.

Homogenity isn't a solution - it is a nostalgia to which one cannot return.

>run its own schools
>live in its own commune

That's called segregation.

If you mean mixed communities, no, again, you have the most numerous/dominant race attacking and driving out the other out-groups there. London's white flight and self-segregated communities of Pakistanis, Blacks and Eastern Europeans is one example. Melting pots can work between ethnicities of the same race, like America used to have a whites-only policy.

Homogeneity is totally a solution, if white people won't defend themselves collectively in their own countries, then non-whites of a particular race will definitely take up the chance once they are the most populous to purge them for it.

As said, you can only keep up this forced association multiracial society with a strong economy and near-police state. The most ideal solution is peaceful deportation of non-indigenous races, but if white people will refuse this, then I think white people's children will enjoy a nice future like Zimbabwe or South Africa, where their children are raped, stolen from and spat on.

To be fair, there was what, a couple of decades of serious violence and organised crime when the wops, the kikes and the micks moved to the US, but that just devolved into general moderate criminality, didn't it?

>The most ideal solution is peaceful deportation of non-indigenous races, but if white people will refuse this

I don't think white people want to leave America, yes.

Old cyberpunk was at least relatively clear-cut.
There's was the faceless, corporate Man and then there were the scrappy underdog heroes.

Today, the old heroes are the new Man. They have a friendly face, they support all the right causes, they concede to the demands of the mob at every turn. They have great PR.
But PR is just another name for propaganda.

>repo man
>dead kennedys

you guys are alright

Wew. Context: Europe. In America's case, White Americans founded everything there - the state, the constitution, the industry, the economy, the institutions, the buildings, etc. If you want to imply Blacks contributed via slavery, that's not really true - the contribution was comparatively minimal, but there are American nationalists who would consider granting blacks their own state in the US viable, or shipping them back to their motherland.

Ain't no such thing as a white race matey.

t. reddit

Well, Muslim behavior is directly correlated with population size, a sort of creeping Jihad. this road map has been followed time and again.

For example,
>at only 1-2%, they're a "model", peace loving minority.
>At around 3%, they start to recruit muslims from gangs and prisons
>At 5, they start campaigning for special rights, Halal food and the like, and start to talk about allowing sharia law in their own neighbourhoods.

And it scales up like so.

You're grouping a bunch of distinct ethnic groups which would consider one another as different races just a scant few centuries ago.

Genes matter.

History of racial classification roughly goes like this:
>homogenous race of varying ethnicities experience virtually only each other
>they come into contact with a wholly different biological race, ala, europeans vs. sub saharan (black) africans
>they self-identify coincidentally with the most genetically similar ethnicities they'd previously seen as just another different people

It's like if aliens showed up one day and decided they wanted to exterminate Humans. There'd be a collective response to identify as Humans vs an alien species.

>but there are American nationalists who would consider granting blacks their own state in the US viable, or shipping them back to their motherland.

Nationalist here. I'm fine with determining racial groups that have historically been important to the states (blacks, Chinese, etc) and divying up appropriately sized groups of land with the largest being some sort of "Neutral zone" for people that Think it's wrong for people to separate voluntarily based on race, for some reason.

>If you want to imply Blacks contributed via slavery, that's not really true - the contribution was comparatively minimal, but there are American nationalists who would consider granting blacks their own state in the US viable, or shipping them back to their motherland.

I meant those guys called 'Native Americans'.

That and due to poor record keeping, a lot of people descended from slaves don't know exactly which country their ancestors came from.

Just because there's variation within a group doesn't mean the group doesn't exist. There's huge variation between Muslims (say Moroccans and Indonesians) but no-one could say that "Muslims don't exist". That goes for beetles, whites, Europeans and all kinds of other groups. You're repeating a fallacy.

The native americans lost, though. It wasn't even close.

Native Americans lost their wars with whites, and whites seem charitable enough to actually try help them and look upon them with idealistic altruism. Native Americans basically already have territory that is entirely autonomous. I have never seen Turks apologise to the Greeks for genociding them, or the Armenians, from Anatolia.

So? This goes back to:

>The most ideal solution is peaceful deportation of non-indigenous races

White people are not indigenous to America.

They have no problems determining who's white when it's for negative things, but suddenly when white self-interest comes into play, it's a big philosophical question about,
>Who counts as white, anyways.

That was contextualized to Europe. Re-read:
>Wew. Context: Europe
America was founded by whites. The state and the institutions are theirs, the Native Americans didn't have an American state. They lived in hunter gatherer-tier tribalism.

Muslim is not a race. It's a religion. You can be white and Muslim.

You're being a pedant. It was just a poor example.

>White people are not indigenous to America.
Nobody is indigenous to anywhere, except maybe humans to central Africa. History imposes borders and racial group dispersions across the world, which we have to deal with today, not in some idealized past.

Yes, it's funny how blacks and self-hating whites say that:

>whites are to blame for everything
>there's no such thing as a white race

The doublespeak makes my ears ring.

That still doesn't make them indigenous.

So now you need to start defining who really started cultures for every nation and what REALLY counts.

I kinda want to ask Slavoj If he has time to DM a campaign now.

I'm white. My collective white interest is to see American whites retain control of the state they have a spook/moral and objective foundation attachment to. Same with all post-colonial territories of Europeans where they make up the majority. The only places in the world where 'diversity' is being mass imported to the degree where it is going to end in disaster is white countries, whether the indigenous homeland of Europeans/whites - Europe - or their colonial territories they took by force, Australia, US, Canada, and so on.

You didn't read properly, senpaitachi.

rip thread

I want /pol/ to leave. The containment field stopped working a long time ago.