Cyberpunk to Ionpunk, taking The End further

iambane · Post by **iambane** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:46 pm

Recently I've been taking a look at Frank Trollman's The End works and imagining using it for a more Cyberpunk-y game than Shadowrun. As in without magic, extra races, etc.

That said I don't enjoy the technical blunder that Cyberpunk games are. I was thinking that instead of the traditional now-defunct cyberpunk game I'd go for something a little modern which I've thought of as "Ionpunk" or Lithium Ionpunk. Instead of the chrome and steel, pearl and clear.

Example: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com ... c-limb.png

This would mostly be just a cosmetic change to the megacorporate future dystopia Shadowrun tends to paint. There are a fair amount of rules in Shadowrun that will have to be changed as well, though.

Anyways, I'm posting here because I know there are a fair amount of people who like Frank's work and especially "The End" and I was looking for people who might be interested.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:56 pm

Ooooor biopunk with rampant organ modification, organ swapping, gene modification (inhibiting myostatin was the tip of the iceberg) etc. would be a nifty concept as well.

I like this arm better.

There definitely is nothing wrong with the notion of using Shadowpunk rules to create a world of just humans without magic. There's a bit of work as ya noted, but I reckon since it is mostly removing things it won't be too painful an endeavor.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 2:09 pm

The future is always supposed to look like a mix of the cutting edge of today and retro nostalgia for things we wished we could do when we were nine. It seldom does though.

Right now there is a brutal war in cell phones to get them as small as possible, and they've already gotten so tiny that they are hard to use. One can imagine a future continuing that trend, but it actually seems pretty pointless. Once bluetooth devices exist, any novelty from making a phone "even smaller" is fleeting at best. The watch phone is very Dick Tracy, but it's basically pointless when you can already have the phone fit in your wallet and have the earpiece communicate radiopathically with it from inside your ear.

Right now cutting edge stuff is all smooth edges and small frames, because 10 years ago that was hard to do. But the pendulum will swing back once the novelty of that fades and people start wanting devices that you can drop down a flight of stairs. You can count the hours until someone advertises a portable device by showing someone typing with all of their fingers on it and then throwing it on a concrete floor, then dropping something on it, then pouring a cup of coffee on it, and then picking it up again and typing some more.

The iMac was a fad. The AK-47 is forever.

-Username17

iambane · Post by **iambane** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 3:30 pm

That phone series already exists, by Nextel.

ggroy · Post by **ggroy** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 7:45 pm

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 8:15 pm

Laptops like that exist too:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/985830/pa ... barcelona/

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 10:47 pm

No, the AK is seriously a weapon that only the Russians could have, and would have, designed.

Even if the AK was made by someone else. The russians would have needed, and built such a weapon. They couldn't afford to buy from other people, but they could afford to make their own equipment.

In any case, if you want a real cyberpunk feel, you need to go to the classics. For cyberpunk, it's William Gibson and his various books on the source.

This guy has been ripped off by everyone and their mother when it comes to cyber related stuff; and he started writing back before the internet was even around, let alone being a word.

Johnny Mnemonic
-I haven't read it, but I know it has
-Cyborged and Genetically pre-fabbed assassin agents
-Monomolecular material (Mono Whips)
-Use of an other person's brain space as almost completely safe data storage; even from the person whose brain space your using

Neuromancer
-The Matrix as an online alternate world where everything is seen as streams of data
-Copies of people's minds in RAM/ROM format
-Space Stations outside of national law
-Being able to 'jack in' to the Matrix without needing
-The idea that the backlash against high tech will take ridiculous methods. The anti-Babylon Rastafarian enclave known as Zion is a massive, clunky, patch-built space station, that smells like ganja smoke
-Bartenders store room-sweeper combat shotguns under the counter
-Waiters in bars pack enough heat to clear out a bar
-If you want a cybernetic limb, it goes all the way from sleek cyborg limbs covered in synth-skin; all the way to ugly pink rubber coated Russian military surplus arms/hands that look like they can crush a solid acrylic ashtray, and can
-Clones
-People can have holograph rigs built into their bodies, and program them on the fly. The Illusionist is seriously a real person in Neuromancer
-People not only wear all kinds of crazy weapons; they also are all kinds of crazy weapons, girls with 4 centimetre long scalpels under their fingernails are normal
-Vat-Grown muscles are often issued to thugs of well-heeled people
-Not everyone carries a high-powered assault rifle, but even a cut down and taped up heavy revolver is going to give almost anyone a bad day
-People have enough sensors and data transfer capability that you can ride inside someone else's eyes and see everything that they do
-People have equipment to tell if someone else has such a joyrider

Count Zero[or.. fsck, i forgot
-Completely real alternate digital worlds, so real that the entire plot is about a guy who wants to stay 'inside', and the people who are tasked to keep his vitals active
-HE Fletchette rifles. On hard targets, explodes on impact. On soft targets, it waits 5 seconds before blowing up. The ultimate in fear generation
-The Judges: scratch-built combat robots
-Bunny. Bunny's 'gun' that can completely clear out an entire level of a building. Bunny is never actually an introduced character; they are seriously a cohort with a weapon so powerful that their boss sends a mental signal/command to "kill the floor"

Mona Lisa Overdrive
-complete body and face resculpting. We can make you look more like Tally Isham, than Tally Isham herself. Also, we're using you to replace Tally Isham

Idoru
-AI's so complicated that you can have a relationship with them, even marry them
-Nanofactories are super expensive, rare, and illegal for anything but megacorps and nations to own. The Russian Mafia and the Yakuza obviously want such things
-Nanofactories can fit in a little girl's backpack

Something that I came up with when playing around with one of the new articulated Dr. Octopus arms; the 'claws' were articulated, and the 'arm' was rubber with a wire in it. A pretty good quality toy part.

So, like, mini cyber hands that extend from our own hands, arms, fingers, wrists, etc.

Or the "typing" cyber hands from the Ghost in the Shell movie from the 80's, that can type almost any key instantly, as it creates as many 'fingers' as exist buttons.

In a cyberpunk era, you can have some truly crazy shit.

Also, mages can seriously exist.

Except that they'e an "Internal Holo-rig Operators" (IHO, think an Illusionist); or a "Nanofactory operator" (Create object spells).

However, the ranges are a lot more limited than they are in a D&D setting.

Making suits of medieval level, or even steam level, armour, when people buy kevlar isn't so super awesome. A metal vest can be useful, but it's slightly outdated. I could see a case for say... silk, over titanium scale-mail being super tough*.

*:

Silk doesn't break, but doesn't stop blunt force. Being shot with silk in a front pocket can kill you, but the silk will have stopped any blood from coming out, b/c it's a fabric, and doesn't break easily.

Backed by material that spreads trauma (really though, plates are ideal for spreading force; they're light, effective, and can be made to be flexible.

So, something like silk, linked material, and plates on a lot of regions of the body.

I guess in the hands of a talented physicist or engineer, a character could make some really high-end items.

Creating the bionic man (60 minutes)

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 1:01 am

My phone is a lot like the AK-47. Simple, rugged, reliable, and shipped to developing nations.

BEHOLD, the Motorola FONE F3~! [/url]

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 2:17 am

Speaking of technical blunders, I was thinking about cybernetic implants in general and direct neutral interfaces in particular, and the whole thing seems less practical the more I think about it.

Already, to stay on the cutting edge, you might be replacing your devices several times a year. Now do you really want to be getting brain surgery that often? And making the implant just the interface, with the processor external, wouldn't really help - "Oh, your implant is BrainUSB v3? Too bad, the new idPod uses BrainUSB v4, and it isn't backward compatible."

I don't see display-via-glasses and control-via-gestures becoming the next big thing either. Using the Wiimote is fun for a while, but a traditional controller is a lot more comfortable and often more precise.

For that reason, I think the interface endpoint may be a foldable paper-like interface which is both screen and input. So a step beyond the iPhone, but pretty much just one step. And instead of diving into virtual reality for information on the target building, you'll start typing the first letter of the name and Google will predict it and go there, because it's been listening in the whole time.

iambane · Post by **iambane** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 2:23 am

> if you want a real cyberpunk feel, you need to go to the classics

No, that's the point. I really dislike whatever the hell "real cyberpunk" is. I seriously don't want to make a "real cyberpunk".

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 2:24 am

Actually, since most current brain interfaces are just things you put on your head that measure the electrical stimulus or your brain, I have no problem seeing that be easy to upgrade.

The old Ghost in a Shell version was that you had your brain sealed inside a braincase that was just an interface into digital, with an insane throughput. No reason to ever upgrade that part, and the extra processors were all compatible and designed to work on that model, because all brain case models are essentially identical.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 4:28 am

Actually, since most current brain interfaces are just things you put on your head that measure the electrical stimulus or your brain, I have no problem seeing that be easy to upgrade.

Can you "write" to the brain that way though, or just read? If so, I guess it could work, although the potential for interference seems high.

... No reason to ever upgrade that part, and the extra processors were all compatible and designed to work on that model, ...

This I don't buy though. At one point, people thought component video was the shit, and maybe some people set up a home theatre with component cables running inside the walls. Now HDMI comes out, and that's all obsolete. And this has happened for almost every type of digital interface.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 8:47 am

iambane wrote:> if you want a real cyberpunk feel, you need to go to the classics

No, that's the point. I really dislike whatever the hell "real cyberpunk" is. I seriously don't want to make a "real cyberpunk".

If you don't know where things came from, how can you know if you're making something up, or wasting your time building things that you could already grab or modify?

Reading allows you to gather masses of ideas much faster than daydreaming could.

Ice, go to my link; move the time bar to 10:00; they describe mentally controlled interfaces there. It works by sensing the electrical impluses of the muscles in the stump that you're flexing. That's the military general-purpose grade prosthetic. In Sweden there's a surgical interface to the nerves, and I saw an article this week about a man in Ontario Canada who got one of these 'new' type of prosthetic that's showing up.

The mind-controlled ones are more clunky than arms you can wear all day without feeling sore; but it's there; with more time, it will get better.

Remember, DARPA is seriously spending 100 mill on this project. They've got cyber-legs already built; they're not awesome, but you don't get tired. Imagine that with twenty years of development.

Plus there are other groups doing the same in other parts of the world. The cyborg era is already upon us. In a while, these limbs will exceed human ability.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 9:49 am

I get mentally controlled, I was just wondering if it can work in the other direction - sending images to the brain, as seen in cyberpunk VR.

iambane · Post by **iambane** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 9:53 am

If you don't know where things came from, how can you know if you're making something up, or wasting your time building things that you could already grab or modify?

Reading allows you to gather masses of ideas much faster than daydreaming could.

I never said I haven't read Cyberpunk material. You shouldn't assume things.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 9:55 am

This I don't buy though. At one point, people thought component video was the shit, and maybe some people set up a home theatre with component cables running inside the walls. Now HDMI comes out, and that's all obsolete. And this has happened for almost every type of digital interface.

But the human brain actually is a set of hardware. Once you hit the point where the brain is limiting your data transfer rate, why upgrade to anything else?

Pain transmits at about 1 meter/second and has a resolution that goes up to a couple of thousand points per second per fiber. You don't need, and can't use a pain input that is any "better" than that.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 11:07 am

Actually, yes, there is more data. It's not just the limiting input to your brain.

The first immersive VR sets didn't have the human resolution. The ones we have still don't. They probably still won't fifty years in the future.

So that'll always upgrade.

And then there's inputs beyond our current senses. 3d, 4d, etc imaging can continue to have more and more positional data added to it.

-Crissa

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 4:12 pm

Except that in this case we area talking about doing crazy Brain surgery to extract a brain and fuse it to a giant metal casing so that all inputs/outputs are digital.

The point being, you don't do that until after you have built a digital interface that is as fast as the brain can output/input.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 6:03 pm

iambane wrote:
If you don't know where things came from, how can you know if you're making something up, or wasting your time building things that you could already grab or modify?

Reading allows you to gather masses of ideas much faster than daydreaming could.
I never said I haven't read Cyberpunk material. You shouldn't assume things.

Have you read Gibson's work or not? You never said or stated your inspirations, so all that I can surmise is that you're based on game books. Which, frankly, are not good, or well written, or well thought out sources many times.

If you want to play shadowrun, without magic, then Gibson's material is a good source. Seeing as much of SR is lifted completely out of his books.

It's a near future setting where tech gets ratcheted up, high, but many people still live like rats, or in squalor. You have megacorps, and bleeding edge medical tech that can repair almost any sort of damage to your body or brain; but people seriously also rent .38 specials and ammo from a boy at a laundry shop when they feel that they are being followed by other people.

That's a very difficult idea to put across at times. Not the 'used future' that star wars has; but more like the high tech city of tokyo from 'Akira' (albeit, probably even more high tech than the Akira movie).

In many ways, playing a cyberpunk setting is a lot like playing D&D, b/c the rules of society are different than our own.

Is cash going to be black market currency, or just sketchy?

Is carrying a firearm accepted or not? Do people shit bricks if they see a piece of military hardware in the hands of a civilian? How about a folding assault axe? or a parang/kukri? How about a straight or a folding knife?

Do people fear or embrace tech? Is it just scenery, or does it drive the plot?

How well is the tech level distributed? Are there people who grow catfish in cement boxes and kill them with an awl; or is everyone eating vat-grown beef?

Just some questions to help frame the setting. A cyberpunk setting often has a wide range of situations from highest to lowest of anything. Tech goes really high, but also goes really low. Same with violence, prevalence of weapons, wealth, legal protection, moral codes etc. etc.

iambane · Post by **iambane** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 6:10 pm

Yes, I've read Gibson's books. I've also read Stephenson's books, Sterling's, Cadigan's, and many many others.

What I want to play is a more modern version of Cyberpunk. None of the above authors are good for that because they wrote pre-wireless, pre-terabyte, and pre-Google.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 7:08 pm

Look at Gibson's most recent stuff. The references are to the 90's and early 2000's; the setting is a lot 'closer' to us temporaly. Gibson has been reducing the time gap between his books and the present-day as he writes more and more.

Neuromancer was something like... the 2060-2080's or so, but was written in the 80's. is more like 2010-2020.

The Bridge Trilogy was written in 93, 96 (Idoru), and 99; and is set in the early 2000's (2010-2020).

Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country are influenced by stuff like 9/11 (which happened while he was writing Pattern Recognition, and then had to modify the book to have it make more sense; and Spook Country was written in 2007.

Which is interesting, since his work is becoming less sci-fi as time passes, and is set closer to our current reality the more he writes.

Something that I thought I should mention.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 7:55 pm

Kaelik wrote:Except that in this case we area talking about doing crazy Brain surgery to extract a brain and fuse it to a giant metal casing so that all inputs/outputs are digital.

3001 by Arthur C. Clarke talked about using nano technology to wire the interface directly into the bain itself; the digital / analog interfaces would be distrubuted throughout the various portions of the brain as needed.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 8:05 pm

tzor wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Except that in this case we area talking about doing crazy Brain surgery to extract a brain and fuse it to a giant metal casing so that all inputs/outputs are digital.
3001 by Arthur C. Clarke talked about using nano technology to wire the interface directly into the bain itself; the digital / analog interfaces would be distrubuted throughout the various portions of the brain as needed.

That's fine, but I was specifically talking about the Ghost in a shell version. The point being that with a single interface that matches actual brain input/output, you can tailor everything to that interface, and never need to update.

A nanite based insertion method of the interface would be easy to upgrade though, and that would also be a way to not worry about having an "old" brain interface.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 8:29 pm

iambane wrote:What I want to play is a more modern version of Cyberpunk..

And yet you are not articulating what "more modern" would mean here. In a genre that is about future tech, that's really important.

So lemme talk about what I think Cyberpunk is.

Cyberpunk is a sci-fi subgenre with the following axioms:

Technological advance fundamentally alters society
(examples: the Replicants in Blade Runner; Vinge's Enhanced Reality and Wearables; Stephenson's Metaverse)
Such alterations to society cause huge shifts in the existing institutional powers and create new groups of winners and losers.
(examples: Blade Runners are police whose job it is to kill people, Uncle Enzo's Mafia operates in the open and is more widely trusted than the US. Govenment)
Technological advance occurs continuously - the bright shiny new society-reshaping technology at the start is old hat by the end of the work
(example: even though the Nexus-6 models are nearly undetectable to the Voight-Kampf test, by the end of the movie, Deckered is running off with a Nexus-7)
4. The protagonists are grim and gritty lowlifes. Even when they are talented, they have never been successful in life.
(examples: Deckard is washed up, Hiro Protagonist can't even hold a job delivering pizzas)

and the following tendencies:

usually near-future - Most cyperpunk is based on extrapolations of current tech.
(example: the Max Headroom "20 minutes into the future " tagline,
usually dystopian
(example: the LA Deckerd lives in is seedy and falling apart and real animals are nearly extinct)
usually the new "winners" with technology are menacing
(examples: megacorps, mobsters, AIs)

So which of those does "Ionpunk" keep? which does it ditch? which does it invert?

My intuition is that you...

... keep the first three axioms, change the fourth to a tendency, keep the plausible near future setting, but then ditch the dystopia and menace for more of a Futurama "highs and lows" setting.

Personally I think this is a more plausible view of how history and culture combine. I have to think that if he came back to life today, my twice great grandfather would be astounded that we wiped out polio, amazed that I'm currently writing essay which will be read on three different continents today, baffled by what DNA is and wonder why the hell all the kids today dress like hobos and carry tracking devices around and dismayed that I've been to synagogue merely once in my entire life

.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Dec 19, 2009 9:39 pm

It should also be noted, that the more things change; the more things stay the same.

People don't, and will refuse to, eat food in pill format.

So, even with sexy android girls that look like peoples, and act and think like peoples; and flying of the flying cars; you still go to an asian noodle stand to get dinner.

A shovel will still kill a person

Unless you're working for an organization that will supply you with high powered firearms, but most people will seriously use stuff that looks stone-age, or just primitive.

Lets say, the last Bruce Willis movie about everyone having an artificial body/mannequin; he's got a sniper rifle. His enemies had crowbars, shovels and shotguns. His android avatar went down and got gacked.

Likewise, the same applies to all other tech.

People will seriously use land lines if they think that people will only monitor cellphone bands.

If you have the resources, a land line might be how two groups communicate securely. If they set up the wiring themselves, then no one else can tap into their copper cables, unless they physically tap in.

Facebook: Organizing protests in Tehran

Likewise, existing things are going to be re-purposed all the damned time.

Facebook isn't a social network, it's a networking app. You can organize a group for almost any purpose, and get lost in the myriad pages of the site.

You could also, just make your own forums, and no one can see what goes on in them unless you approve them.

Groups of all kinds can exist, and survive due to the internet. Like, really niche groups of say, 10-20 people with a few hundred lurkers, all that talk about and develop designs for vidya games/tabletop RPGs/art/pr0n/your mum/trains/plane/automobiles.

Groups that never existed, could spring up, then vanish completely in the course of a single adventure.