So guys I'm making a homebrew cyberpunk setting set in a coastal megacity like hong kong

So guys I'm making a homebrew cyberpunk setting set in a coastal megacity like hong kong.
Only problem is that I don't really have any inspiration for missions for the party.
I wanted the missions to focus on investigations but still have enough combat to keep it exciting for everyone.
So any suggestions?

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Fishing Yakuza

Could you elaborate?
Also forgot to say but we're going to play cyberpunk 2020 if that makes any difference.

Lots of tech starts getting fucked up by salt water.

Yakuza moving in on the fishing warfs. Or maybe rival yakuza groups are fighting in the open waters, causing problems for the businessman who wants his son exfiltrated from one of the gangs.

That sounds good thanks you got anything more?

>Take most all the missions and side-quests from the Witcher 3
>Refluff the spooky magic into future tech, bleeding-edge and/or secret megacorps prototypes.
>Profit

You can also take inspiration from Shadowrun. Just dump the magic parts and focus on the cyber bits.

But most missions in the witcher 3 were
>ask for hints from witnesses
>track monster
>kill monster

Drug smuggling
stuff.co.nz/national/crime/81118783/New-Zealands-biggest-meth-bust-a-comedy-of-errors

Fights for power within a crime syndicate (ex. young and dynamic gang vs. old and traditional gang)
Turf war between gangs / crime syndicates (ex. city is run by yakuza, but triads are moving in through mass-immigration from China)
Characters can be cops - this gives a good excuse to investigate

You’d be surprised how well it works.

You don't provide a lot of background information. Here are some questions you should try to answer for yourself:

How is the city structured - what are the districts? Do you have a map? What are the different ethnic groups in the city?
How is the general population satisfied about how things are being run? Who are the people who aren't satisfied and what are they doing about it (political activism, vandalism, terrorism...)? How are those people perceived by the general population?
Who's in charge of the city - who runs it? Who are the main economic power players and what's their relation to each other? Do they meet regularly?
Who controls the underground? Who are his competitors? What are their relations to other power players? Who runs prostitution, gambling, loan sharking, illegal organ banks, and other vices? How are the gangs structured - by territory or by activity?
Who is in charge of police duty? What are the "police's" relation to the power players and underground? Is there a lot of corruption? How strictly is the law upheld?
Who runs the other public services (fire department, waste disposal, electricity...)?
Is there a military force? Who finances it? Who controls it? What are its relation to other groups of influence (economy, crime, police)?
What are the major medias in the city? Who controls them? What are their relations to economy, crime, police, etc.?
Who are the personalities of the city - the jet set? How did they become famous? Do they have any relations to power players or underground?
What are the famous/special locations?

Once you have a rough idea of who populates your city, and how those groups/people are connected, you can use this to create "adventures".
The typical example is: A took something something from B, and C saw it. This leads to following possibilities: C can use its knowledge to blackmail A. A might want to eliminate C. B might be looking for C.

So a lot of mob activity based missions?
I already wrote one mission which is about drug dealers and it gets started by an old lady asking the party to find her son who has been missing for a few days.

I don't have a map yet as I am looking for a program to make it with but I already have a rough idea of how the city is going to work.
Basically the richest part of the city is being administered by megacorps who each have a district which they do everything from utility till security by themselves while also trying to fuck eachother over in any way possible as long as it is kept relatively secret.
Each district is populated by the respectie corps employees and their families.
Then there are other bigger but poorer districts which are administered by the municipal government who buys their equipment from the megacorps but has its own fire and policedepartment etc.
Further there are the slums which is basically an anarchy ruled by gangs where the municipal government and megacorps see as too much trouble for too little gain as it is a total shithole. The municipal police would be a corrupt bunch only trying to keep public order held up generally.
About media outlets I was thinking of each corp having its own while also owning several smaller ones without anyone's knowledge.
The slums would have pirate radio stations sort of trying to red pill people.
The city itself doesn't really have an army because they are only an autonomous region part of the planet's super power which is an union of nations which are basically !notgermans,!notirish,!notarabs,!notgreeks and !notturks.
Thing is that I made this setting as the future of my low fantasy iron age setting.
The city itself used to be a small coastal city on !notchina but the !noteuropeans conquered it to have a tradeport.
Also there are !notafricans who are basically being exploited as cheap workforce but in general every race can be found in the city.

>The city itself used to be a small coastal city on !notchina but the !noteuropeans conquered it to have a tradeport.
Macau?

Basically that yeah.
I was also thinking of there being a threat of war with !notchina wanting the city back as they are also industrializing and getting stronger so they are starting to rattle their sabers. In the city itself I would have the occasional riot and protest between nationalists who want to join !notchina and the other people who want to tay part of the union of western nations.

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Just make a neuromancer knockoff

Ah, I remember you and your setting from a previous thread.

So, I can see you already have a vague idea about how your city is structured and who are some of the major players. There is still no info about who runs the underground, though. An other important thing you didn't mention, is what are the relations between those different groups. This is something important, since people make stories.

Cyberpunk stories are often inspired by noir fiction. People are always linked. Watch Sin City or L.A. Confidential for inspiration.

Could function, perhaps you gotta retrieve a data package that fell into the ocean, but along the wreckage there will be clues as to what happened on the ship that went down, revealing that the people who hired you actually just want the data packet to destroy any evidence of their actions, as they sank the ship to cover up a failed unethical experiment or some shit

but idk man.

I have seen quite a few film noir movies actually that and my love for sci fi is what made cyberpunk one of my favourite subgenres.
But for the underground I was thinking of a mafia like the triads and yakuza maybe I could have two rival groups who are fighting over who controls the drug trade and shipping like some anons here said while the slums are ruled by literal gangs.

This gives me a murder mystery idea actually.
I could make it so that the mob kills people with cybernetic limbs by throwing them into the sea where their cybernetics won't work.

>I could make it so that the mob kills people with cybernetic limbs by throwing them into the sea where their cybernetics won't work.
What would you call that? The Lead Foot? The Bricked Boot?

Rust legs maybe?
It sounds ironic enough.

Watch some crime films.
A whole fuckbunch of crime films.

Everything from Snatch through to Pulp Fiction through to Legend.
Now put neon in them and add opportunities for hackers to do stuff.

Now you have missions.

If it's set in Hong Kong just do a rehash of the British flooding the market with opium again.

Except the British now hide behind the scenes and use Vietnamese smugglers as proxies alongside other mercenaries (including the party maybe).

Also do you guys know any program for making modernish maps?
I used autorealm before but that is more suited for medieval like maps.

Ok will do do you know more of them because aside from the godfather, goodfellas,pulp fiction and legend I don't know many.

Well the thing is that this setting's brits still have the city.

The Maltese Falcon
Not quite a crime film, but North by Northwest is good inspiration for the results of getting mixed up in the sort of shit that might be happening

You could use Visio, it's got floorplan functionality.

There's a bunch of map packs on drivethru including one called...shadow plans I think?
Something like that.

Point being it has some map parts but also blueprint versions of them so you can do a blueprint version for the party to plan on and then a more detailed version for the actual play.

As for crime films, I think it's an entire sub genre on Netflix

Ok thanks guys I think I got enough info to continue for a while.

You can also make you campaign, based on political intrigue. There are two parties. The Independent Party and the Nationalist Party. Both are supported by different and rivaling corporations. The NP is also supported by the Triads and the Chinese military-industrial complex. The IP is supported by the notNigerian drug cartel and notWestern corporations. Throw in a nationalist SimStim star, a shady producer, a mercenary in love who knows too much, stolen data, a greedy reporter, an ambitious mobster, and a mysterious hacker, and you should be able to make a pretty cool story.

>Lots of tech starts getting fucked up by salt water.
So you have a mix of high-tech and crumbling infrastructure.

It's cool to have decaying and poorly maintained shit in cyberpunk.

Also, the big corps have fancy pseudo-plastic shit in the water that survives ok but the public stuff and the low-end shit runners have to use end up like shit after a while.

>Except the British now hide behind the scenes and use Vietnamese smugglers as proxies
The main reason that the British gave all of HK back (instead of just the New Territories, which they were obliged to under the treaty) was because it was impossible to defend from an invasion and China was making noises about taking it back by force. The line where the new border would have been was right through the mainland part of HK with half a city on each side, the Chinese army could legally march right up to there and then take another step and the British would be fucked trying to hold all that off.

Definitely not worth defending given the odds against them and no real reason for them to want to hang on to it since they didn't even really care about having bases there.

In the near future though, with South China Sea heating up...they might want it back so that the wester powers can use it as a staging post for keeping China's wings clipped. USA is the real mover in the idea but MI6 are doing most of the work preparing the scene.

So you have MI6-backed Vietnamese smugglers, CIA randoms and maybe a few Euros messing around there. PCs can be helping or hindering James Bond while he takes out !notChinese agents while they try and stop the artificially created revolution from overthrowing the pro-mainland government.

There's a recipe for political intrigue in a game.

And if you do some reading on East India Company, you can see that this has all been done before and mega-corps using the British government to conquer shit for them is as old as Earl Grey Tea.

>Also do you guys know any program for making modernish maps?
Dungeon Painter Studio is geared to medieval maps but there is a high-tech texture pack. Probably limited range of shit in it though.

>Well the thing is that this setting's brits still have the city.
That's sort of fucked up but I suppose if China had a bad recession in the 90s or was somehow otherwise unstable and couldn't afford to go to war then it might be vaguely plausible. The Brits could have bought an extension on the New Territories treaty with enough cash to bail out the Chinese economy or something.

Failing that, an unstable China tried to make a play for the rest of HK and was rebuffed somehow, I don't know how the fuck it could happen but let's pretend that the Royal Navy beat down China's navy completely and took out their air defenses with cruise missiles and then Royal Army held off the Chinese army due to coastal bombardment and stuff?

It's hard but I guess not completely implausible to imagine Britain beating China in a border war but it would require stuff that didn't happen in our world, like China being much poorer or some internal turmoil that prevented the full PLA getting involved.

It's more fun I think to use present-day HK which is under the thumb of the mainland and has real internal tensions as well as shadowy wars between Chinese-owned corps and western-owned corps, even before any foreign governments get involved.

I am definitely thinking about doing things like this in the background allowing to party to work for both sides from time to time.

Thanks user would you say its user friendly or not ?

In my setting the equivalent of the european union/NATO fromed before !notchina became industrialised enough and economically and militarily strong enough to challenge the union head on. At the start of the campaign they will start to think that they have a chance of taking the city back especially after it has become such prosperous place so the threats and military build up on both sides will start.

Do some reading on the Umbrella Revolution.
Now think about the trailer videos of Deus Ex HR where they're opening fire on the protestors, then watch some old news footage about Tiananmen square massacre.

I think you could have a more fun game about a Hong Kong that's under Beijing's control and western powers are trying to create a revolution so that they can sweep in, liberate the fuck out of it and then make military bases to keep China contained, so that their allies in South-East Asia can drill the fuck out of the natural gas and oil in the South China Sea.

Combine that with actual mega-corps owned by either Chinese tycoons or Western stockholders/tycoons and you've got a good cyberpunk setting. Watch Sleeping Dogs too and remember that 90% of the Triad stuff is based off shit that really happened in the 80s/90s (and lots that still happens, though a lot of it in Macau).

You've got corruption, activism, spies, corps, gangs...what more do you need?

>I'm in China, so I have to activate my VPN to make this post or guys in suits might show up on my door.

>Thanks user would you say its user friendly or not ?
Mostly, yes but not the hotkeys, those are retarded. The rest of it works fine once you start to understand what the developer was thinking, it's not that hard to get.

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Scenario:
>corpo dude makes PCs kill/kidnap gang boss/journalist/anyone who knows to much about his shady buisenes
>they can't refuse he threatens to kill them and he has the means to do this
>they have like a week time limit on each assasination/kidnaping
>they have to plan the whole thing
>little to no support because he's doing it behind his boss back
>after they kill/kidnap him they have to escape from his tower/slums hideout (hideout one is better because there will be a shit ton of mobsters trying to murder them)
>corpo dude tries to kill them thus eliminate the witnesses

The corporate has some backup (like a gang of corrupt cops) - they provide most of the goons.

After the PCs kidnap the VIP, the corporate and his backup will try to kill the VIP and frame the PCs for it.