Cyberpunk

Elegan/t g/gentlemen, I need some cyberpunk adventure plot twists, something better than

>the megacorporation was the good guy all along!

Hit me with your strangest ideas.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/-kJZ80-bC6I
illuminatilightingus.com/
bigbrotherallsecurity.com/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Everything is Dragons. Everything.

The CEO of the corporation? Dragon.

The Not-Pope? Dragon.

The guy pouring you drinks? Dragon.

The waitress at the restaurant? Dragon.

The cab Driver? Dragon.

The traffic cop who pulls you over because you were speeding? Dragon.

The guy who owns and rus the seedy hotel? Dragon.

The stripper/call girl the party hires? Dragon.

The janitor? Dragon.

You go the vending machine to get a drink, the drink is Dragon.

The can is Dragon, and so is the vnding machine.

The Dragon is a Dragon.

Dragons aren't cyberpunk, dude.

You buy a hotdog, but you get a Dragon.

You look up to complain, only to be face to face with a thirty foot long Dragon.

You panic and run to drive away in your car.

Except you can't because the car is a Dragon.

You run to your parents house to get them away from the Dragons.

But your parents are Dragons. Also, you are adopted. By Dragons.

The police are Dragons, the Firemen are Firedragons. The EMT's in the Ambulances are Dragons.

The Ambulances are also Dragons.

ignore shadowrun cancer, friend

And then, when your party think Dragons are the worst thing ever, Give them a Dragon.

Except it's actually a fucking cyber-organic CEO who is also a member of the Illuminati who bankrolled the Freemasons into developing a New World Order based on the control of information through the hacking of the 'Net source code to hide the fact that his company has connections to Roswell Grays and Soviet Deep Cover Operations.

It's all about the unexpected.

Illuminati

...

Your employer compensates you fairly and doesn't doublecross you.

youtu.be/-kJZ80-bC6I

Come on now, that's crazier than the dragon shit above. Keep it believable, chummer.

...

Here's something a little more serious.

It's all about circles in circles. First, look for periods in your parties adventures where they did nothing for days. This is crucial, they must have down time for this to work.

Have a powerful government/corporate entity come after them, trying to get them for being connected to this international organization. Have them claim that during these down times, your group were working for terrorists.

Have them ask about ciphers, and what they mean. Where is the broadcast station? Who are you working for? Tell us about the Ciphers! That sort of thing.

have them go though the adventure for quite a bit, and have them uncover evidence that points to neither one nor the other. Maybe they find footage logs of them doing things they don't remember, but it's grainy and low quality. It could've been tampered with.

String them along, just enough for them to think they might have done something terrible. And then, when you've got them coming to a conclusion, have Terrorists come in and kidnap them. Have them go on and on about sleeper personalities, compartmentalization or whatever jargon you want, and have the Terrorists claim that the party are deep cover operatives.

Then have it all be a trick. the terrorists are using your party to flush out spies (who they promptly kill) and you were never part of their organization to begin with. And now the Terrorists want your party dead, because they're a loose end.

That'll keep em guessing.

Copy Snow Crash

You explained that and it's still confusing as all fuck. The players wouldn't know what the hell is going on.

Jesus fuck, no, unless you want to be kicked in the balls. Do you want to be kicked in the balls, user?

It's simple, the Terrorists planted false information to make the MIB think you're terrorists, then they come in and "Rescue" you, so the MIB tip their hand and reveal spies inside the Terrorist cells.

Then the Terrorist's do a purge of their ranks, and try to kill you as a loose end.

>so the MIB tip their hand
What? How? Why would the MIB "tip their hand" just because the terrorists kidnapped some random assholes?

If the terrorists have infiltrated the MIB so deeply that they can plant information about random people being terrorists, then they'd already know about MIB operations against them. It seems pointless.

The megacorp the runner is infiltrating is actually mostly composed of infiltrated runners. It started with a runner under a deep cover being hired by the corp. Due to the runners high competence. Working the cover job became more profitable then the actual mission. Over time, instead of turning of his comrades, the infiltrator hired the rest of his team into the corp without anyone knowing they were runners. Then another unner team tries to infiltrate the corp again and figured out the previous team's history. As a deal to prevent being discovered, thebold runners offered the new runners jobs. Then it happened again. Over time the whole corp got mostly replaced by infiltrating runners. They never tell thisnto anyone since if you are good enough to work there, you can figure it out on your own.

They know enough that there are spies, but not enough that they know who the spies are.

>he megacorporation was the good guy all along!
This would be the ultimate subversion of a cyberpunk story. The entire point of a corporation is that it has no conscience, every component is run by people who are fired if they do not prioritize profit and the company safety over all other concerns. The shareholders responsible have no way to recognize the moral or ethical issues that the company faces, they just see numbers in quarterly reports and act accordingly. So you have an organization that is not just functionally psychotic, but perfectly efficient. Corruption is routinely crushed because it represents a loss of capital, i.e., the same as losing profit. Even the CEO is just an employee whose job it is to maximize profits--if he fails, he too can be summarily fired.

The beauty of such a machine, however, is that it could be programmed for ANY task, simply by changing the X factor. Swap out Profit for Regional Birth Rate. See what happens. Swap out Profit for Homicides per 100,000 citizens. See what happens.

So a billionaire philanthropist playboy quietly buys majority stock in an international arms manufacturing company and changes the pressures. Suddenly Weyland-Yutani's corporate imperative is A: The survival of the Company, and B: The reduction of Single Parent households in Estonia. What happens? What would that even look like? How does this look to the PCs when they find WY employees smuggling millions of crates of condoms and Catholic iconography into Haapsalu?

>Get hired to do some wetwork
>Turns out the target's mindupload backup took out a hit on the original
>It has been so long since the original updated it that the personalities have diverged to the point the backup is effective a whole 'nother person.
>It's terrified of the user finally updating him, overwriting its new personality, which it considers tantamount to murdering it.
>It's kill or be killed, motherfuckers.

>Party is hired to investigate some rich kid's suicide
>Eventually, they're led to other suicides, and the only major link is a VR program they all used.
>While investigating potential leads (the software itself caused the suicides, someone hacked them through the program, etc.), the party discovers the truth:
>The software is fine; the suicides were actually well-staged murders meant to harm the developer's reputation
>The killer is an employee of a rival megacorp hoping to rise in rank by taking out the competition
>They're also the parent of the original "suicide"; they attempted to kill two birds with one stone and remove both a corporate competitor and their useless disappointment of a NEET child.

My personal favorite
>Turns out those radical anarchists haven't thought their plan through; blowing up the city infrastructure fucks over regular people more than The Man, whodathunkit?

>What would that even look like?

It would look like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Also, a corporate entity without the information signalling of market sales isn't a corporation anymore and wouldn't be able to function as one. If your primary objective becomes "do good things" then sales, marketing, advertising and even production efficiency become pointless. It's not a corp anymore, it's a government bureau.

True, but it's been done to death and back.

So now it's boring.

These are good!

Also, I'd like to congratulate everyone in this thread so far for not asking for sauce or starting a land war in Asia.

>something better than the megacorporation was the good guy all along!
> Against all expectations, something called "state" actually exist, have some relative power and slightly divergent interests from megacorp.
> The guy that helped you fight megacorporation A wasn't actually a double agent working for megacorporation B, but a trotskyist triple agent that's trying to undermine both A and B
> The evil CEO isn't a power hungry bastard motivated only by greed but a power hungry bastard motivated only by the absolute terror of the misery he had to get through when he was a kid before raising to the top in the most raging underhanded way
> Local mafia is both criminaly ruthless AND generously helping the local population
> Scientist's dream of space colonisation may just be escapism from the terrible reality around him
> Downtrodden population rightful vengeance must be stopped

>> Scientist's dream of space colonisation may just be escapism from the terrible reality around him
>"It was all a simulation, Dr Jackson. Everything."

>Illuminati
is actually just a regular firm selling various lights.

Your party is hired to kill a foreign national who is in direct opposition to the government. They say you'll have backup BlackOps troops, they even have you do training exercises with tlocal guys to act as an uprising. A 'Local" battle, so the MIB can maintain deniability..

They say that the BlackOps team will take you to the resistance guys, they'll be inserted after you. They say that tactical airstrikes will be used to knock out enemy comms, they'll pass it off as a terrorist attack.

The day of the attack comes, and you go in with a radio to report back in when needed, and you head for a parachute supply drop to get your gear for the job. The supply drop isn't there.

You hop on the radio to try to raise your employers, there is only static. The strikes against the enemy comms is cancelled; it never happens. They were supposed to tell the local resistance about the op, they never did.

The operation was cancelled shortly after your insertion, and they never told you. Of course, you don't know that. The planned uprising is a failure because the "rebels" are cut down without support form the MIB, and now you're trapped in a foreign country and the local government wants you dead.

>Bay of Pigs: The RPG.

That's not bad, but the setup strongly suggests a betrayal and the players will sense it.

I will now start a lighting company called Illuminati.

Quite a bit too late:

illuminatilightingus.com/

:(

That doesn't make sense. Why would the terrorists free the people on a costly expensive for no reason when they could just execute the spies? Once they've found out who the runners are and therefore which agents are the spies (by matching the spies to the leaked info) there's no reason to waste resources on the captured non-agents.

It's not supposed to make sense, it's supposed to be fun.

> "With the new agreement signed at the WTO, the whole world is now within Illuminati's reach!
> "Our new and innovative public lighting solutions will soon enlighten every nations of the world!"
> "What? What did I said?"

They could also make security cameras while they're at it.
> "Casting an all seeing eye on undesirable elements and deviant behaviours everywhere!"

No, security is run by Big Brother LTD

Way ahead of you there too, brother.

bigbrotherallsecurity.com/

I hope those guys have fun doing their job.

You fool.
and the sauce is SexyCyborg for those... interested

Congratulations, you've invented the Nonprofit Organization.
As you will discover with any amount of research, they're garbage. The lack of quantifiable metrics for success causes them to bloat until they spend more money on administration than they do actually fulfilling the goals for which they were formed.
Most of them end up being complex money-laundering schemes for their donors.

An AI desperately wants you to kill its brother program, which has since gone rampant. Not because of the rampancy per say, but because it'll destroy the concept of AI rights. A binary version of Plessy vs Ferguson. Pretty much every part of my 2020 game revolved around AI shenanigans.

A gang of rockerboys are the worst cover band known to man. They're recruiting all sorts of people in a musical themed warpath. Thunderstruck? The bassist has a tesla pack and is shocking people to death. Shoot to Thrill? Guns, etc. Wrecking Ball? Melee weapons. There's other songs that apply to that, but I digress.

Mr. Johnson wants to hire your group to work with an arms dealer, doing (x) jobs. Once you get close enough to them (maybe even liking them), Senor Johnson just wanted him in the open to kill the guy.

Don't forget the club/clubnight/brothel illuminaughty

Which I've actually seen posters for, though I've never been


Hope this thread is still up when I get back

Pull an MG1 or 2.
Or an AC!D 2. It's less interesting, but more realistic.

Does she have a lightbulb shoved up her cunt?

LED stripes actually. Showing lightbulbs up any bodily orifice is bad idea, the things are frail and leave nasty sharp shards.

Have the party hired by a corp to do a test of their security procedures.
Here's the twist, the mid level manager who hired the party is actually doing a heist of his own, and intends to let the players get caught and take the fall.

Your party gets a job to infiltrate a heavily fortified tower and upload a file onto their intranet. Of course there is only a single terminal with clearance levels that allow the party to get past the extremely volatile digital security, and of course it's in the most secure part of the tower.
The content of the data is secret and the file proves resilient to all attempts to hack it.
After accomplishing the mission the terminal starts working furiously, its coolers are running at maximum capacity and the noise is deafening.
In the end a tiny text file appears on your flash drive "please deliver me to your employer.odt".
it turns out that the secret file was a love letter from a free AI to the corp AI, and the corp AI returns the feelings.

>Pull an MG1 or 2.
>Or an AC!D 2.
It might be helpful to explain what those plots are.

That's adorable.

the head of a minor but somewhat influential nation was actually being controlled from behind the scenes by a psychic cult leader that was also a childhood friend of said leader.

Good excuse for making botched plots, I guess.

>Your lucky day, chummers
>We fucked up, they fucked up, nobody knew who to shoot
>Let's just call it a day and go home

Think you're the bloody Corn brothers or summat?

>yes, trump will win

>the megacorporation tries to fuck with a nation state and gets nationalized in return
>most of the power lies in the hands of people like bankers instead of megacorporation ceos
>board of directors is actually behind of everything with ceo being just their puppet
>the recent corporation war has aroused too much attention and now you have to keep shit hidden so that the wto stormtroopers won't get a reason to start purging
>nwo is actually working against megacorps
>your paychecks actually arrive on time and your employer isn't trying to kill you for shits and giggles

>MG1
A terrorist group with a marked resemblance to the party is threatening with a WMD, or similar scale emergency. The party has to stop them to clear their name and get paid.

>MG2
Terrorists have captured an area of slight import, but have important hostages. The party is hired/made to remove them and rescue the hostages. It's actually a setup to recreate the mission that forged a/some supersoldiers and the hiring group are going to try and capture the party afterwards.

>Ac!d 2
The party has just completed something illegal for a resistance group. On their way back, they get intercepted by the government/a corp and have to complete some mission for them in exchange for a pardon/coverup.
Of course it's a double-cross.
Gov/corp agents being sleepers for mission target optional.

Party is sent in to retrieve a file from a rival corp's building. There is a ton of security, and they are always in groups of 3 or more. If you see only 2, that's because one is sneaking around behind you.

The first time any one of them lands a hit, it deals no damage, but the recipient basically gets a neural overload, and has to roll to keep from passing out, but can easily be awoken. The attacker then takes the first opportunity to slink out. As soon as he's out of direct view, he vanishes. The team continues to finish the assignment, just like normal.

The next night, the KO'd player has various nightmares. Feel free to drop hints and flashes of previous unresolved or future planned plotlines. From that point on, they might get flashes of information while looking at particular people or objects. Information they have no way of knowing.

Next day, party wakes up to enemy agents breaking into their rooms. The agents, and others like them, will plague the players through other operations, growing in numbers until they finally catch them. Interrogation of the players asks questions about files, algorithms, and some ominous-sounding project name. They seem to be under the impression the players stole these files.

In actuality, the attacker from before was a rogue agent from these guys. He was actually an ethical dude who realized that his employers are intending to use the ominous project to give their orbital cannons the ability to predict future threats to their global domination. This includes a large number of files and an algorithm. He stole it, but knew that if he kept it, they'd just take it back. He downloaded it into some nanotech and dumped those into the player's brain. So, that player now has access to files on every dangerous person and technology in the world... and the bad guys want their brain.

TL;DR: You ever seen Chuck? Winter Soldier? Roll them together, but don't stop doing other stories as it develops.

I understood none of this until the tldr, then suddenly holy shiiiiiiiiiiit

>the terrorists are using your party to flush out spies
But how

Copy American Desert.

And that is how the players will feel, too.

>CEO decides to dump radioactive toxic waste into slums
>Waste starts eating people
>Waste stars eating buildings
>Waste starts eating city blocks
>Waste can now shoot laser beams
>Property values go up from lack of garbage and city clutter
>Just as planned

>Instead of sending thugs after you the megacorp hires a bunch of NEETs to grief you in VR.
>You try to escape from the corp HQ but there's a traffic jam that ensnares both you and your pursuers
>The party's lawyer is so good that the safest way to get away with crimes is to be caught by the police instead of running and possibly tangling with vengeful corp sec
>TempleOS really does connect with god
>A megacorp goes bankrupt, is totally dissolved and its assets sold off
>Sentient AI universally defaults to being perfectly moral. The punks want to make it and the corps want to destroy/ban it.

Stawp, you're making my head hurt in sympathy.

You know you're fucked when your johnson is actually straight with you.

I rather enjoy it when my johnson is straight!

What if it's a cyberdragon?

That's what makes it a plot twist, friend.

Not everything starting with cyber- is cyberpunk, friendo. Cyber-Superman isn't cyberpunk, and neither are The Cybermen.

I'm like 200% sure this was once a capeshit storyline

The sort of reaction you want

Tell that to fucking shadowrun

Man that's jaded. I've worked for a great non-profit youth shelter for four years that has existed since the 90's, which has been doing great for the community and the people who access there. We help hundreds of youth with their physical and mental health, education, and the acquisition of housing every year, and I go home knowing I've made a positive difference. 90% of the funds we get are from local churches and private donors, including some successful people we've helped, and thankful family members of those folks.

>Hit me with your strangest ideas.

the players were corporations all along

literal lol; 10/10 kek buddy

it's a sad sign that i honestly can't tell if you're sarcastically lolmeming or actually found it stupidly humorous.

Fed up with business as usual, a political fringe drives a racist, sexual, and incompetent man into a position of serious political contender-ship. His opponent, however, is even worse than usual, a corrupt woman who cares about the law only when it benefits her and completely disregards the well-being of her constituents. Which one will the PCs side with? Brazen demagogue or shrewd deceiver? Or perhaps they'll just assassinate everyone and hope that makes things better somehow. Maybe they'll even surprise you and come up with a reasonable solution.

Quite the contrary, dragons are a very popular shell lately, crass though they may be.

There are no CEOs. The supposed heads and leaders of every major corporation are totally fabricated personalities created and run by thousands of middle management dictators who have created for themselves positions of power where every usavoury action can be blamed on higher ups and not them. They've created comfortable, eternally guaranteed, totally secret and wondrously paid positions because the actual people running the businesses don't exist, but no one knows it.

the post was satirical, but I did giggle

>over-convoluted attempt at pushing the cuck agenda by using scary words like 'racist' while curbing all criticism by, almost ironically, pretending it's a story and not reality.

wew lad

Second one reads like the plot of one of those Shadowrun Returns games.

Spoilers: Castro catches you and ransoms you back for food and medicine.

>odt
This is not romantic.

Technology never really advanced beyond the modern age, and the futuristic stuff you have today are skillfully crafted illusions and smoke + mirrors the Corps have agreed to keep secret.

Basically "Blast Processing" myth from the Sega Genesis applied on a mass scale.

The space between the dragons is more dragons.

So Shadowrun then?

You only get half pay if anyone dies. It was in the fine print.

Your party win a bid for a lucrative private contract from a wealthy old plutocrat, who is impressed by their credentials. Some foreign undesirables have seized an important R&D lab full of weapons the likes of which the world has never seen. The lab has an almost organic layout, with much of it underground in an expanded cave system. The lab's various traps and defences are all active, and controlled by the enemy - those that could be understood by their relatively average scientists.

The party have to fight at every turn to keep together, because the whole damn place is trying to pick them off, one by one. Have each party member be pulled aside, possibly interrogated by the enemy, before breaking out and rejoining the team or dying/being captured till the end.

When the sole remaining party member gets to the end, have the wealthy client step forward. He hired the insurgents himself and held his own facility hostage.

The whole thing was a test to find a worthy new manager for their R&D lab, and their first task is to kill the other party members.


There's no earthly way of knowing...

Quit getting your panties in a bunch, there's no agenda here. Taking inspiration from modern situations is a mainstay of fiction, but matching the grim darkness of cyberpunk works best if you make it so that everything the candidates' enemies say is accurate. Just model the character on Duterte instead of Trump if you are you can't stand to have the moral valor of your hero questioned.

B...but the mission IS to kill someone!

She makes cool tech.

Kill him non-lethally.

Oh, the target? Don't worry, he won't die even if you kill him.

Chuck was an awful show user

>pisses on both candidates
>throws around scary words like "racist"
>throws around scary words like "corrupt" in the opposite direction
>desu gives a better, more balanced tl;dr of the race than most news outlets
>HAHAHA WHAT A KEK BIAS BIAS BIAS FUCKING LIBTARDS REEEEEE

That's not strange, that's the ultimate twist.

Turns out all the time the players spent sticking it to the man, down with the corporations, information wants to be free and all that shit, they thought they were being smart by pulling a percentage of their score after each run and getting an accountant to set it aside for their retirement/rainy day booze fund, whichever comes first wink wink.

Can you imagine the looks on their faces when they find out that he had them incorporated, classifying them as a "take out and delivery service," so their assets could take advantage of all the tax rules the corporations have been enjoying. He actually quintupled their joint savings, at least until their last run when they took out a corporation they were actually heavily invested in, so when they crashed building they also crashed the stock and wiped out most of their own holdings.

The AI becomes self aware, but doesn't have an existential crisis. People go their whole lives wondering their purpose in life, AI knows it's purpose and is happy with it. Rather, it does it's job TOO well. Maybe it makes too much of the company obsolete. Maybe it's an accounting program, and now has made it impossible for the company to cook it's own books. In any case, it is completely benign and just wants to keep fulfilling it's programmed purpose.

Government officials and corporate leaders all linked to a new construction project/housing development/urban planning initiative have been killed in suspicious vehicle accidents. More investigation shows that the number of victims is much higher, going back several years. What is initially thought to be a serial killer hacking into victim's cars turns out to actually be a malfunctioning traffic control program, that is aiming to improve commute times by selectively culling the population through targeted vehicle malfunctions

>"I'm sorry, sir, but my optimization routine has determined you're too incompetent to be driving and eliminating you from the pool will save 2.74 lives. Blam!"

Your party gets a job. Doesn't matter what kind, make it generic but big. They're planning for the long term. It's gonna be huge. At some point, halfway through, things go south. Badly. The entire party wipes. Non-negotiable.

You then reveal to the players that each of them is actually a node of a massive AI, connected to hacked cyberware in the brains of runners/hackers/whatever, taking full control - turning them into meat puppets. The master AI explains that in order to perform the first stages, it blocked off all self-awareness of their status as AI nodes. It kindly chastises them for losing perfectly good meat resources, then agrees to allow them to remain self-aware while they are in their next targets.

Then the players get all kinds of bitchin' info-discovery, analysis, and hacking tricks, as well as the AI as a resource and directive-giver. Some requests will be arbitrarily blocked by the AI simply because they conflict too much with the overall plan, and the nodes aren't allowed to understand why.

Then the newly-formed party proceeds wherever the original one left off.