What would a cyberpunk London setting look like, Veeky Forums? What would make it unique from other cyberpunk cities?

I mean, Chicken Tikka Masala is England's national dish. Though that probably speaks more to the quality of England's indigenous cuisine than anything else.

I don't think I have been as inadvertently insulted as the day I was treated to an english hotdog.

God damn that was bad. I'm also getting mad just thinking about it.

Fuck

>Don't make any comments about the staples of cyberpunk
Think reddit might be a bit more your speed bud

What is an English hotdog? Does it taste different or is it like just a hotdog but with curry powder on it?

V for Vendetta (More then movie then the GN) mixed with... what the fuck was that weeb comic called, Fisheye Placebo?

The only part of that which is a cyberpunk staple is the nanny state.

user just doesn't want the thread to fill up with /pol/tards spamming memes unrelated to the topic of "what would a cyberpunk London look like".

It's like a regular hotdog, just somehow incredibly stale and boring, to the point where it becomes decidedly distateful and nasty.

Posthuman football hooligan gang violence.

Man U fans get wetware and biomods because they don't want to ruin their carefully styled beards. Arsenal fans get cybernetics because it's better for incorporating shiny chav bling. Millwall fans get whatever they can.

I rather do fancy the idea of Londons gritty cyberpunk future being a mixture of big brother nanny state, gritty Indian flair instead of gritty Japanese, clean streets and dirty alleys, the underground, the thames full of toxic run off, Indian trch conglomerates and bobbies with shock batons and dangerous mustaches

The queen of course is in charge though no ones seen her in ages, the Prime Minister enforces her will through the morality council, Parliament raves about hooligans and bad elements ruining the youth. Children go to dull, underfunded over disciplined schools or work in electronics factories darting a.ong the assembly lines. Strange men wrapped in coats prowl the rooftops, sweeping coal and acid rain residue off the shingles

Sometimes the wind will hit just right and you can see the sun through the perpetual haze, ever so briefly, and you wonder what it was like when the city wasn't closed in eternal twilight and acid rain drizzle.

These days, an English hotdog is just a bratwurst sandwich.

Hotdogs with curry powder on them are delicious though. They're also a German thing.

>Sometimes the wind will hit just right and you can see the sun through the perpetual haze, ever so briefly, and you wonder what it was like when the city wasn't closed in eternal twilight and acid rain drizzle.
Nigga that's London today.

>Also between 2-3 at night, the streets will be flooded with ridiculously hammered slags and lads trying to get home.

It'll have nothing on cyberpunk Newcastle in that regard.

The timing of this statement is pretty hilarious. For the last week or so London has been sunny and hot.

Round the edges of town are where the Pikeys live, prowling the ruins and slums of long forgotten developments. Crude, swollen, inbred and mutated not a single one looks like Brad Pitt. If you're lucky they swarm you trying to sell packs of gum and lottery tickets. If you aren't, they shank you and eat your corpse, on account of you oppressing them and their way of life with your two eyes and cocky swaggar. Your death earns a blurb in the paper where the chief Bobby apologizes to the Pikeys and warns folks mischief will not be tolerated.

The Queen(/King by then?) is leading the rebellion against the corps.

Is it true that thieves in London carry around contactless machines and brush up against people on the tube to steal their money? Are we living in the cyberpunk future already, or is this just provincial paranoia?

We're forgetting to best Cyberpunk Dystopian location in England. Swindon.

There's a paki fellow down the road with a kebab shop and one eye. He doesn't speak a lick of the Queen's English - hell, you've never heard him speak at all. But he seems to understand, grunting and nodding, somehow able to interpret the most drunken slobbering order. You're pretty sure there's no dog in the kebab, that's for fancier places up the hill. Still, smothered in garlic sauce, it makes for a good way to soak up the alcohol you've poisoned your body with so you can pop off to mum's and Sunday service tomorrow.

>google swindon
>see this

And people call Germans autistic.

Also is it just me or is captcha being an unusual cunt today?

Sounds like provincial paranoia.

I thought it was just spray bottles full of acid these days.

>Also is it just me or is captcha being an unusual cunt today?
Change your Veeky Forums settings to Legacy Captcha. The image captcha has a glitch that traps you in an infinite loop of street signs.

>The image captcha has a glitch that traps you in an infinite loop of street signs.

The cyberpunk equivalent of hell.

>The image captcha has a glitch that traps you in an infinite loop of street signs.
Just like swindon!

>The story "The Lift that Took People to Places They Didn't Want to Go" ends with the section "...But actually... the evil elevator hadn't changed at all. In fact it went on secretly taking people to places they didn't want to go. For every time the lift took the inhabitants of Swindon back down to the ground floor, they stepped out of the department store and onto the streets of Swindon, and so found themselves somewhere they didn't want to be."

Not to go too Pink Mohawk but:
>Chav hooligans on mopeds throw industrial pollutants at each other
>Toffs ride mutant horses through the streets, hunting the lower classes with cybernetic hounds and shotguns
>Community Support Officers are encouraged to bring their own weapons

>City of London is typical corporation-ruling, highrise, neonlight, cyberpunk city
>Everywhere else is shitty urban sprawl ruled by the government

No, it's not, because cyberpunk governments don't give a shit about their population. They don't need to be totalitarian, the economic situation does that for them. One of the major themes of cyberpunk is the disconnect between state and citizen.

>ctrl+f
>no split Second
Disappointing.

Christ, can you imagine the nanotech-tans?

It's a bit of a commentary, but there's other factors - like a lot of ethnic foods, they're altered for local tastes. Also it was invented in an indian restaurant in the UK (exactly where depends on who you ask), and its status as a national dish isn't very disputed on account of it being fucking delicious - like burgers, hotdogs and (especially) pizza in america, sure, it's based on foreign food but has very much become its own thing

Really play up the contrast of old and new

Sounds like paranoia, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some truth to it.

I recall one user in a cyberpunk thread mentioning that he had a mate in the early days of bluetooth (when it was even less secure) who'd travel the tube near the City and fish for data with a little palmtop computer

Related a little to this, in one of the Ian McDonald Indian-set cyberpunk books there was mention of Indian Diaspora expats in the UK owning a factory that was producing the fad food of the moment - tikka-pasta (the PoV character thinks it's an abomination) - fusion shit like that, alternate takes on things are quite likely

>The Truthful Phone
>The Nice Bomb
>The Lift That Took People to Places They Didn't Want to Go
>Motorbike Thieves
>The Kidnap Car
>The Vacuum Cleaner That Was Too Powerful
>The Train to Anywhere
>The Rocket to Hell
>The Dog Maker and Other Wonders
>The Day Things Started to Go Wrong
>The Castle of Imagination
>The End of Life
>The Love Machine
Yep, most of these sound like the UK

Well it is by Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame

Just exaggerate current trends. Unprecedented surveillance powers, internet regulation, mass data collection, the Snooper’s Charter. Minority Report style pre-emptive justice. Extremism and hate speech laws. Wrongthink, Newspeak etc.

Class divisions, gentrification pushing the poor out of the centre of the capital. Properties valued at hundreds of thousands and millions, only a couple streets away from squalid terraces built in the 1870’s ie Canary Wharf.

Look at Children of Men.

Islamic terrorism a daily occurence; the London intifada growing stronger every day.
Police brutality and pantopticon surveillance response to above.
Vigilante gangs of True Brits (including Hindus & Sikhs) vs Islamics.
The Greenbelt a restricted zone for the rich.

>British-Indian hybrid cyberpunk

I'd be really fucking down for this.

>Vigilante gangs of True Brits (including Hindus & Sikhs) vs Islamics.

I thought this was going to be a /pol/ post and probably still do, but this has me in stitches over how right it'd be.

Reminds me of that black dude applying to be a member of the Klu Klux Klan.

>instead of the Coca-Cola neon sign
>Chicken Cottage

Real life is stranger than the neat little narratives we try to pigeon-hole everything into.

Or Greggs.
Obviously a little less in London than up north, but still present.

Reminder that Shadowrun had a London sourcebook.

It covered the rest of the UK in some detail, too.

KKK bossman said they'd allow blacks so they could focus on the real enemy, the NWO.

Any chance of a PDF?

Not that it helps much outside of shadowrun, what with elves and dragons being a big think in their UK iirc

Reminder that Cyberpunk 2020 had a UK sourcebook that was much better.

Sure:
ttop.rem.uz/Shadowrun/Sourcebooks/7203 - London Sourcebook.pdf

Didn't know about that one, ta.

While the other great cities of the UK sank further and further into post-industrial decay foreign money poured into London. Of course none of this went to the people who lived there, most of it was just safe investment by Russian oligarchs and gulf state sheikhs. In the end all that happened was rents went up, more luxury apartments were built and more families wee thrown out on to the street. Of course you can only shit on the plebs for so long. Even the Sun reading neanderthals started talking about revolution at one point. Fortunately for the government after a mass "riot" (everyone I've talked to said it started with the police firing at unarmed protesters though) an emergency act could be passed, the Met were given more powers and a few insubordinate opposition MPs and activists could be put in house arrest. At the time there wasn't any mention of this in the papers though and after a year people just got used to the cameras, the body-searches and the armed police.

Now the armies back in Belfast, you're put to work in a warehouse for your dole and all the parks have been privatised. It isn't too different from before though. You're just have a little less to spare, are little more afraid to go out at night and have to use you're ID card to look at porn on the web.

And here's the Cyberpunk 2020 pdf:
www19.zippyshare.com/v/P6q4jcoV/file.html

What if the British class system was an actual caste system like in India?

Those aren't organized gangs those are literally just directionless mobs of football fans that appear prior, during, and after a game. Usually a massive riot after every game, seemingly making no difference between celebrating a victory and lamenting a loss. Actual gangs tend not to be present when the football rioters swarm, or use the distractions to commit crimes quietly while the poorly prepared, overly restricted riot police are occupied.

Cybernetic trucks that can spray acid and shoot hundreds of knives

Hellgate london

i am seconding this, absolute legend of a game

Having not played Hellgate, what's cyberpunk about it?
Sounds a lot more magical than I'd expect from anything that wasn't shadowrun

LMAO good..
but more like Milwall fans get Jewdetectors/ Muzzi-dar but they really just got sold some mood rings.

Ah yes, the shard, when you need a megacorp lair but can't be arsed to go somewhere with a lot of skyscrapers

Coming from leicester and having lived in london for the last 3 year i can say this, London is not the most diverse part of Britain. If you want to see the proper fusion of British and Asian culture you really want to head out to the midlands.

Saying that, That could tie in to making a good cyberpunk UK setting.
London is essentially a city state , it has it's own economy, infrastructure, customs and cultural zones. It differs from every other part of the UK and you could really play with that.

London also has huge economic divide from street to street and it's infrastructure varies from 300 years old to the cutting edge, all built on top of each other.

The Street Samurai have to use plastic monosporks. It's really dampened their style lately.

They just use creative interpretations of the rules and (ab)use the letter of the law - as they can't just shoot you or use large blades, they have to get creative and end up concealing things a lot more

It sort of is, Even if you move up you will never be seen as equal by those born into the upper classes, even if you have more than they will ever have and are a beter human being in every way.

Class inequality is a good way to go.
I used to leave work in a literal railway arch at 11 at night with trains giving my hearing problems all day, walk up to the station and see the shard and other towers shooting lights into the sky ,Being covered by clouds and shining through it like the peaks of mount fucking Olympus.
Also chavs, hundreds of chavs.

Read any Judge Dredd comic.

>huge economic divide from street to street and it's infrastructure varies from 300 years old to the cutting edge, all built on top of each other.
You see that a lot in big cities - I've definitely seen it in Manchester (hoboville to some of the fanciest bars in the city by turning the corner), and to some extent Nottingham, Glasgow and Birmingham as well, just not quite as dramatically

If hell was as easy as just turning on the legacy captcha in options, and be forever free of suffering.

oh of course, And you get it all through the uk, But london is sort of it's own eco system with a million little systems within it. I worked across from parliament and there was a hobo camp under the bridge, It would grow for a bit, get ploughed over, then come back.

You get areas like Chelsea and kensington where millionaires are buying flats to act as investment property and people in council housing were allowed to burn to death.

Brick lane is simultaneously a deprived area populated by ethnic and immigrant families AND a fashionable area frequented by celebrities, on ONE FREAKING STREET.

Maybe OP should have his players leave the city and suddenly find themselves detatched from the automation of the capital, having to wait around for 3 hours for a train or bus that costs them 4 times as much and takes 4 times as long to travel half the distance through the deprived agricultural wasteland and ex industrial ruin that surrounds the shining glass citadel of the city centre?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_God

The bbc has got you covered user.

Yeah, the bigger the city (and London's something like 5 or 6 times larger than literally anywhere else) the more extreme this sort of thing gets - I've seen it on adjacent streets, certainly, but the same street (assuming it's not one of these ones that oddly goes for like a mile for no good reason) is a new one.

You make a good point about highly variable transport as well - also applies for things like intercity trains costing more than international flights, and so on.

Trains in this country are insane. I can spend the day out in london and go across the city several times and barely spend £10. Getting back to leicester for a holiday or visit is £70 minimum.

I was debating commuting to london for my MA and a years rail pass from LE to London is over £9000.

there are also massive parts of britain that are just ex industrial wastelands. Visit portland (But don't, it's grim.) or Wigan , Or the non touristy bits of any city, and you'll see vast areas of disused industrial property and wasteland.

London also has complete cultural hegemony over the UK, Which while it might not seem a huge deal , really is for the way the rest of the british populations absorbs and engages with culture. Almost all the arts funding goes into london and trying to find any consistent culture outside of london or the larger cities if next to impossible. You could easily have a group of PC's trying to redistribute culture across the country as a form of counter propaganda protest.

Yes it's ridiculous (unless you're buying something small, in which case it's ridiculous the other way. The classic strangled cry of "how much!")

Yeah, most cities have some dead zones, though there's usually a fair bit of activity in industrial estates... just not the ones that were previously used.
After all, despite the perception (British perceptions tend to be a bit odd, for whatever reason... probably because we didn't actually collapse after being a superpower) quite a lot of things are actually made here - iirc Leicester is fairly big in textiles still, and Derby, my home city, still builds cars, construction vehicles, trains and jet engines

Big in textiles yes, But they all come from sweat shops built into the old mills.
We used to go to a music studio set up in an empty corner of the same building, the whole place was falling apart but every other room was packed with people making cheap clothing and textile products ,knelt on the floor working from old sewing machines.

I guess that would be OP's central theme, The gaping void in quality and lifestyle across the country ,all packed into the area of london.

Also fuck the trains.

No matter how bad it gets at least it isn't Milton Keynes

I just finished Snow Crash. There are countless examples just in that book that prove you wrong. Ever read a cyberpunk book

Ironically enough, a cyberpunk future, or any technologically advanced future, will never happen because of pakis.

Anybody can make London, England cyberpunk. That's just Dickens in the future. I want to see someone make a compelling cyberpunk London, Ontario.

NANDOS

I don't disagree with your overall point but you could have picked a better example

Go back and look at the list of conditions you have to satisfy in order to be allowed into the US government enclave

A nuclear wasteland after the Soviets and the America used tactical and theatre nukes with abandon without reaching the strategic ones.

So if cyberpunk doesn't necessarily imply nanny states and universal income, and with a 80% unemployment rate, how do the corps make money? Who do they sell shit to? Their own employees?!
I always assumed universal income was a given, sinking the governments further and further into debt, enslaving them more and more to the banks and corps, until they'd slide into irrelevance and become little more than money printing machines.

Mushy Peas are proof that god hates England.

That happens in Australia, and we're about 60 years behind the rest of the world in all fields except for bogan studies and fermenting racial cold wars. London thieves probably have them built into their pants as a matter of course.

Surely by their very nature Aussies are good at crime?

Most organised crime is pretty hilariously inept, but I think that's endemic all over the world. We have some amazing rates of drug-driving, assaults, etc. And a sky high missing persons rate, most of whom can be found in shallow graves in the bush.

Mostly we just try and bash each other now. The police are pretty weird when it comes to enforcement and actually laying charges.

Probably a combination of the two, where the old aristocrats own both the corps and the government, to the point where it's hard to tell where one ends and one begins.

You are a fucking liar, and have shit-tier taste.

Universal income or social work. Emerging nations - unemployed Americans and Europeans become economic refugees in China, India and Africa.

What about cyberpunk Sunderland? Modern Sunderland is already just a giant housing estate, where everyone's on the dole, slowly drinking themselves to death while the council does nothing (since they know they'll be voted in next year anyway). It's a city full of angry old men nostalgic for a time when Sunderland was one of Britain's greatest industrial cities, and naive young idiots who think it can become an important cultural city even as the museums close down and the libraries are sold off. What will it be like in the future? The same, but even worse?

Security cameras everywhere and MI7 or whatever is established as a secret police, like MI5 on steroids. Weapons are restricted, but police everywhere start carrying them after a series of riots and terrorist actions by islamists, Irish nationalists, commies and other organisations. The prime minister is not-so-secretly a puppet of notable members of the House of Lords, many of whom use megacorps as fronts. This same cabal is rumoured to be controlled by Russian oligarchs and to have orchestrated false terror attacks to justify introducing a national DNA database and other security measures. Non-BBC news sources are heavily regulated and the government now controls the BBC directly. Everywhere outside of the gated communities of the rich is a slum, left to rot by successive governments and full of cynical drunken peasants who slave away in the corp workhouse to earn the right to claim dole from the government. etc.

Probably about the same, but like a lot of places it might just become a bit of a "feeder" city, like a lot of these post-industrial places.
Though some find resurgence in other things.

Also malice. Always malice.

The house of lords is usually where you put someone who won't be elected even in the party's safe seats - it tends not to have all that much power (they can't start bills, for one), at least now, but if you eventually might get it stuffed with so many politically important but utterly unelectable powerhouses that the balance of power might swing back to the Lords

>Non-BBC news sources are heavily regulated and the government now controls the BBC directly.

No, more like the government sold the BBC to NewsCorp / the Mail Group