How do I combine the Roman Empire with Cyberpunk Veeky Forums?

How do I combine the Roman Empire with Cyberpunk Veeky Forums?

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Imagine 40K from the point of view of an ordinary citizen.
>enlist in the guardsmen to march off and die for the glory of the emperor
>revere the colorful supersoldier Space Marines that have a long and colorful history
>The Emperor is a god, and is humanity's only hope
>Everything outside the empire is darkness and madness
>Eat your nutrition gruel and be satisfied with your lot in life, citizen. Glory to the Emperor!

Recall the opening scene from Avatar, with whatshisface in the city -- overcrowded, hopeless, beyond decadent to the point of violence.

So there's your themes: decadence, violence, hopelessness, while the upper class lead desperate lives of their own of rich luxury albeit with a dehumanizing system of brown-nosing, payoffs, political maneuvering, and trying to stay in-favor to those in power.

Remember that cyberpunk is all about the little people living down at street level (or below it). They're "in" with what's real and have their fingers on the pulse of what's going on, despite not having any money or overt power.

Yeah thats not cyberpunk, thats just punk friendo

"a genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology."

Make a setting that's similar or identical to Ancient Rome but make it cyberpunk.

>take normal cyberpunk setting
>rename everything so it sounds roman (president = emperor, police officers = vigiles urbani, gladius mkV class assault rifle)
There you go.

In an abandoned elementary school there is an old computer. On the computer is a virtual reality world that was used to teach ancient history. The school was shut down many years ago, but a teacher neglected to unplug the power cord of this computer. The virtual world and the NPCs inside it have been left running the entire time. The software is from the early days of virtual reality. There is a primitive AI and a machine learning algorithm.

A look at the computer's memory reveals that it is being taken up by gigantic AI files. The machine learning algorithm has been creating logs that now occupy hundreds of terabytes of memory. It is deleting old files to make room for new files. Much of the data on the computer appears to have been corrupted, but the sheer quantity of data is so huge that it cannot be analyzed by standard methods.

Therefore, the only way to investigate this intriguing curiosity is to dive inside it. The software was made for children, so it surely can't be that dangerous. Perhaps the AI has been perfected by its long running self-development, even in spite of the large amounts of corrupted files. What's the worst that could have happened? Cyber Romans descended into madness and decadence? Hordes of cyber barbarians overrunning the server? It ought to be interesting, whatever we find in that dusty old thing...

>10ft laser pole.jpg

Fascist Italy. Just add Wi-Fi.

I ran a homebrew campaign based on a mish mash of that Titus Andronicus Hopkins movie and Romeo and Juliet with Dicaprio.

Was a blast.

This sounds like an awesome campaign

>The year is 2050
>The EU has become a reality, governed from Berlin
>The first steps towards a true cloning program have been set, and the first human being is about to be cloned
>The Italians propose using the relatively well-preserved corpse of Julius Caesar, despite many doubts from the German/EU government
>"Come-a on! It'll be-a very interesting!"
>So it was said, so it would be done
>Julius Caesar is cloned, but the clone-child suddenly disappears from public view
>Despite having no evidence for it, the Italians claim the experiment was a failure and the clone died almost instantly of cell malfunction or whatever
>The project is dropped
>20 years later, a Neo-Roman army led by Julius Caesar 2.0 (awesome cyberenhancements optional) surrounds the palace of the EU President
>"We're-a sorry, but we're-a running this-a show now!"

youtu.be/YcsYSJwewWk

The world's gone to shit, and it's entirely because people are doing things wrong. Rome did things right. Emulate doing things right. Emulate Rome.
That was/is the basic premise of an entire city-state arcology. Regardless of whether its citizens still really believe that or how truly historically accurate it is (Most likely not very accurate at all). A lot of its income now is from tourism. People pay a lot of money to vacation in that "authentic" historical atmosphere and experience its rich art and entertainment scenes.

What do you mean, the EU "has become a reality"? What year are you living in, 1992?

Or are you talking about some sort of facist overstate conglomeration?

he means the EUSA

The USA, if the Senate was exclusively made up of multimillionaires that keep their voters alive by running trickling-down economies within their home states.

I'm not sure you can. Cyberpunk tends to depend on their being multiple factions vying for power and no one entity has full informational control.

You might be better off doing something with the Greek citystates.

Time travel. See: "Mozart in Mirrorshades".

...

Well, Romans were the original fascists. In that they made the Fasces a symbol of office. The bundle of sticks with the axe?

>Individually we are weak
>Together we're strong
>But if you get out line I will fucking chop you

It was a symbol of authority. Explicitly authority over the death sentence.

Some of them even made a point of displaying a fasces without the axe, because they were Roman hippies or something.

This. Vaporwave.

The Year of the Five Emperors showed us there were a lot of factions in the Empire. No entity ever has had full informational control so that's irrelevant.