D10 | Cyberpunk Rations |
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1 | Jerky cloned from samples exhumed from historical figures’ graves. Try the new Austrian-style Hitler! |
2 | Cricket flour porridge. |
3 | Unflavoured soy-derivative cubes |
4 | Dried spirulina snack. |
5 | Pigeon skewer. |
6 | Caloric paste with multivitamins and flavour packets. |
7 | Fried panda testicles (lab-grown). |
8 | Private military company’s MRE. |
9 | Expired instant ramen. |
10 | Bland corporate-appropriated ethnic food, produced for the cheapest cost and the lowest common denominator. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Advertisements |
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1 | Reverse-targeted ad, calibrated based on aversions rather than preferences to provoke maximum offense and controversy, and therefore attention. |
2 | Messages from dead friends and relatives reconstructed from their social media presence. |
3 | Guerilla marketing therapists who assure you that their covert sponsor’s product is the treatment for your depression/anxiety/ennui. |
4 | Positive psychological association with their product wired directly into your brain, piggybacking on virtual reality qualia uploads. |
5 | Basilisk-hack corporate memes that prime you for consumption through your visual cortex. |
6 | Disaster relief campaigns for victims of hypercanes and geoengineering efforts, which incur a lifetime debt to the company for those they save. |
7 | Infrasonic jingles broadcast through the ground. |
8 | Those dream ads from Futurama, subliminally programmed into your subconscious mind by video screens in “public” areas. There are no true public spaces anymore. Being physically present in “public” areas is legally consenting to receiving dream ads. |
9 | Use your capture of academia to make the Science say that if someone does not consume your product, they are Objectively a bad person. |
10 | Extended time horizon hobbyist seed communities able to perfectly mimic genuine indie scenes while priming them to go hyper-consumerist mainstream and divert the diehards into another marketing effort. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Augmentations |
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1 | Character Faceplate: An animatronic, synthskin-covered replacement for the front half of a person’s head. Lets people resemble their favourite stylized mascots, vocaloids, anime, and so on while retaining the ability to chew, make expressions, and breathe. |
2 | Greyminer: An intra-skull implant which uses the brain’s spare processing power to mine cryptocurrencies. |
3 | Fur-Real Therianthropomorphization: Whole-body cosmetic surgery and grafted customized biomass that makes you into a living furry, and also dependent on proprietary immunosuppressants for the rest of your likely short and agonizing life. Price jumps significantly if you go for an option other than “rainbow wolf”. |
4 | Untrace: Biomod that scrambles the genes of your skin and hair follicles, as well as your fingerprints, so as to minimize others’ ability to track you based on biological clues. |
5 | Love Deluxe: Hormonal implant that lets you adjust your feelings of attraction, affection, trust, and jealousy with a few simple sliders. |
6 | LDAR Supreme: Reduces the body to the bare minimum needed to support the brain, then plugs that into a total simulated reality tweaked for pure comfort. |
7 | Bicameral Minder: Say goobye to stress, anxiety, and poor impulse control by outsourcing control of your motor functions to life coaches, rehab centres, or whoever bought your debt. |
8 | The Deal Sealer: Anaesthetic needle and ampoule concealed within the palm, can strike imperceptibly with a handshake. Typically contains an inhibition-lowering drug or a slow-acting poison. It's not illegal if nobody catches you. |
9 | Guttergut: Budget digestive system replacement that lets you break down cellulose and other normally-inaccessible nutrients, filters grants resistance to ingested toxins. |
10 | The No-More-Overcompensator: Tricked-out robo-cock. Comes in sizes from big to horse. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Diseases |
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1 | Printer Cough: Lung disease caused by inhalation of particulate stock from low-end 3D printers, or from printers infected by a computer virus that causes them to produce invisible clouds of the stuff. |
2 | GenoDie: A bioengineered virus which can be relatively easily modified to affect only people with a certain haplogroup. |
3 | Yumyum Lesions: Result of an international food & beverage company’s guerrilla marketing campaign. The company dumped a chemical that caused brain lesions that made those who had them experience an addictive appeal from consuming their products. Side effects include seizures, pica, and anhedonia. The company has publicly disavowed the chemical, but incidences of yumyum lesions continue to crop up. |
4 | Brainjack Rejection: Adverse immune reaction to an implanted brain-computer interface. Causes multisensory hallucinations and decline in mental faculties followed swiftly by death. |
5 | Digital Gnosticism: Mental illness caused by overuse of virtual reality from an early age. Primary symptom is identifying virtual reality as the “true world” and the physical world as some manner of false imitation beneath it. |
6 | Michael Butt: A transmissible skin cancer created by a trillionaire heir who read about Henrietta Lacks and thought cellular immortality would be really cool. |
7 | Anthropic Feline Leukemia Virus: Made the jump to humans due to an ill-advised attempt to make transgenic "catgirls". |
8 | COVID-35: It's still around, and worse than ever. |
9 | Cybernetic Atemporal Depersonalization Disorder: The result of erosion of personal identity by exposure to multiple contradictory information streams. Sufferers have great difficulty conceiving of themselves as a self consistent across time, rather than constantly reprogrammed hardware that just happens to be made of meat. |
10 | Vaxsickness: Complications related to shoddy vaccines rushed out to address the constant developments of total biowarfare. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Polities |
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1 | Little St. James II: A mobile artificial island seastead fitted with cutting-edge anti-surveillance technology. The place to be for trillionaires and politicians seeking collusion and debauchery. |
2 | Red Olympus: Humanity’s only Martian colony, owned by a depraved oligarch who plays god with its captive, dependant population of technicians and sycophants. |
3 | The Job Club: Exclusive orbital observatory/habitat and social club. Ultra-rich members pick a person on the planet below at random, absolutely surveil every facet of their life, place obscene bets on how it will turn out. Interference is forbidden but happens constantly regardless. |
4 | International tech company town/city-state arcology. A sealed environment built to give a taste of pristine suburban life. |
5 | Anarcho-scavengers living large off the discarded trash of decades congealed into a rusty island by ocean currents. |
6 | Isolated and intensive psychological research facility peopled only by researchers, investors, and people who've surrendered their human rights for a pittance, allowing any number of studies to be performed on them, with amnesiac drugs applied afterwards to avoid tainting the baseline. |
7 | Politico-technological archipelago composed of "islands" of various technological and political forms. Exist exclusivley off tourist income, selected for novelty of their offerings. |
8 | Malthusian eco-fascist militia that's taken over a national park. Allowed to remain there due to sympathizers in the government and the fact that it's cheaper to let them maintain the park. |
9 | Immigrant mafia organization swollen in forgotten lumpenproletarian corner of society into government of miniature ethnostate. |
10 | Moleman mutual aid commune squatting in defunded public transit tunnels. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Businesses |
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1 | Sablestone Real Estate: Build and manage everything from luxury condos to slum towns. Heavily involved with university endowment funds. Blast propaganda about how property ownership is settler-like. |
2 | Waifuworks Inc.: Manufacturers of relationship-mimicing AIs, sex toys, and companion robots. Headed by a digital emulation of its founder. |
3 | Caracara Consulting: Specialists in looting failing states. Their ruthless work ethic is masked by a bubbly executive cult of personality, their speeches peppered with self-help jargon. |
4 | Bluewave: Vertically-integrated company that operates desalination plants powered by its own tidal power stations. Political activists that coerce countries deprived of fresh water to adopt their agenda. Strong ties to neoliberal institutions. |
5 | Astromedia: Bizarre startup that sells itself as beaming cultural influence to aliens, which haven't been discovered yet. A black hole of venture capital money. Executives have the part of their brain correlated with their conscience removed. |
6 | IntravenUs: Provide narco-subscriptions and health insurance. Promote a flat hierarchical, family-style corporate model. CEO is a serial killer whose modus operandus is death by overdose. |
7 | Peaceprize Worldwide: Pharma-memetic company that deals in pacification of entire populations: chemicals in the water supply, social media guidance, and so on. It's gained notoriety for sponsoring terrorist cells in order to scare up business. |
8 | Retributors Experiences: Combined theatrical and special effects firm that creates scripted encounters to make you feel like a real-life superhero, to your preferred degree of realism, anti-heroism, etc. |
9 | Procrustes Perfections: Cosmetic alterations and elective augmentations company. Known to prey on people suffering dysphoria. All employees are contractually altered into an identical androgynous ideal. |
10 | Hyperborea Resources: Prospecting company that seizes claims in the artic and antarctic for trace rare earth and other such elements such as helium that are running out elsewhere. Practice a quaint, old-school nationalism, and operate off one of the few remaining old boy networks on Earth. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Fashions |
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1 | Ironic gender hyperconformity. |
2 | Animated anti-facial recognition tattoos. |
3 | Brutish personalized gasmasks, clinging opaque clouds of perfume or stench chems. |
4 | Pop cultural nostalgia, dressing in the clothing of a past decade and only consuming media from that time. Often accompanied by cosmetic surgery to resemble celebrities famous in that time. |
5 | Basically naked but in augmented reality dressed in impossible videogame character outfits. |
6 | Ethically-sourced human leather. Taken without coercion! Preying on people made desperate by poverty does not count as coercion. |
7 | Neural network-created & optimized hyperstimulus clothing, maximizes attention on its wearer. |
8 | Anti-surveillance clothing featuring designs registered to you, which anyone holding footage of has to pay royalties for. Only works against the little Big Brothers who don't have the legal pull to ignore it. |
9 | Identical grey jumpsuits. |
10 | Democratic ultra-extravagance by way of open-source gengineering, customized spiders or silkworms constantly weaving and consuming outfits around you. Hope you're not ticklish, but if you are there's mods for that. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Weapons |
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1 | Vortex gun originally loaded with hookup app guru’s personal pheromone brand, now with short-lived homecooked nerve gas. |
2 | 3D-printed submachine gun loaded with frangible ammo for safe firing in thin-walled apartment complexes. |
3 | Vermiform organism that burrows into its wielder’s arm and feeds off their spare nutrients. Emerges and spits envenomated needles when that arm is flexed right. Undetectable by most scanners. |
4 | Micromachines applied as nail polish, can rearrange themselves into claws. Break off into scratch-wounds and break down bodies from within. |
5 | Super-tactical full frontal assault rifle with rotating superimposed load barrels, under-barrel grenade launcher, side-barrel mini-drone port, magnifying scope with night vision, heat vision, sonar, and video streaming, and a spring-loaded fractal ceramic bayonet. |
6 | A computer virus that hijacks a target’s online profiles and causes them to behave in socially-ostracizing ways that are nigh-impossible to deny as their own actions. |
7 | Strategic "bass boom" ultrasonic resonator that causes long-term, hard to detect damage to infrastructure, reducing entire buildings' or city blocks' quality of life well beyond the ability of most to afford repairs. |
8 | Designer pug with carbon nanotube-threaded musculature, reinforced bones, titanium pharyngeal jaws that can extend up to twice its body length, and a remote control rig wired to its nervous system. Indistinguishable from an ordinary, very expensive dog at a glance. |
9 | Autonomous robots that can construct improvised explosive devices from commonly available materials and plant them to deny access to designated areas. |
10 | Spider-taser that seeds area with electrified wires. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Policing Methods |
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1 | Freelance bounty hunter drones piloted by children playing an augmented reality-obscured alternate reality game. The game is pitched as a way increase their civil engagement. |
2 | Gig economy gangstalker networks you can hire to do zersetzung on anyone at any time. |
3 | The classic "gated communities with private security forces that can go Guantanamo on your ass if you step on someone's lawn on the inside, lawless favelas outside". |
4 | You are implicated in a terrorist plot instigated by the authorities themselves and killed by an extrajudicial missile strike on domestic soil. |
5 | They just roll up with a death squad and shoot you, there's too much else going o to really register it happening. |
6 | They've got an agreement with a private prison and quotas to make, so look forward to whatever disciplinary, pharmaceutical, etc. nightmare you're bound for. |
7 | They enact a localized quarantine in your area, and if you leave your domicile they'll be able to stick you in a hole for however long it takes your non-existent illness to heal. |
8 | An occupying army coming through, convoys of armoured vehicles running over anyone too slow or disabled to get out of the way in time, barely less-than-lethal ammunition raining down on the crowds. |
9 | They'll stick a chip in your spine that lets them hit you with some paralyzing agony whenever. |
10 | Algorithms constantly observing your online activities and biometrics, and tank your credit rating and ability to work or apply for jobs if you're predicted to slide into political extremism. |
D10 | Cyberpunk Weather |
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1 | Fog lit like glowing tie-dye by neon light pollution. |
2 | Acid rain wiping smooth past monuments it wasn’t profitable enough to remove. Bring a sturdy umbrella. |
3 | Heatwave pushing temperatures above the survivable human limit, streets are dead, air conditioning bills through the roof. |
4 | Sky bright with space-junk burning up in the atmosphere, natural drift or pushed by laser broom in a Kessler syndrome-reduction effort. |
5 | Superstorm pissing rain nearly sideways. |
6 | Air thick with gengineered locust swarms, feedstock escaped and turned globally invasive species. |
7 | Stratospheric sulphate clouds seeded by dirigible drones. |
8 | Severe, sudden cold snap spat out by fucked-up atmospheric cells. Satellites too blinded by ultra-high bandwidth telecomms wavelengths to predict. |
9 | Old-school animated billboards beamed right onto the clouds. |
10 | Rare clear, sunny day. Parks and beaches are all rented for exclusive use by influencers doing photoshoots. |
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ReplyDeleteThis is what a campaign setting book should look like. Thake GURPS Cyberpunk—throw it in the bin, take this and run it. It isn't so much a blueprint as everything one could need to run a setting for dozens of games. Of course, being as well written as this post is important, obviously, but the format itself is just all around superior to bookfuls of description, biographies, flavour text, and gazetteers. How large is the post? Let me run it through a wordcount... ~2300 words, ~15k symbols with spaces. More gameable info than an average Mystara or FR boxed set. Look me in the eyes, son. Planescape could have been 2300 words long.
ReplyDeleteThis is very good. Need to give it a more thorough look in the future, but I appreciate how, even though it is decidedly within the bounds of the genre, many of the entries feel clever and take modern inspiration, while still feeling appropriate to the retroactively retro-futuristic 80's sensibilities of much cyberpunk.
ReplyDelete