Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 5:43 am

How much money are we talking about?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 9:31 am

Fuchs wrote:How much money are we talking about?

Several thousand dollars. Art costs money on a per-picture basis, there's really no way around that. Printing, editing, and distribution cost money too. Even counting the writing as free because I'd do it anyway, we§re looking at a capitalization of like eight to ten thousand dollars.

Luxury Augmentation
“No reason? I got five thousand green reasons right here!”

There exists a substantial number of people who don't want to have the body that they were born with. Actually, that's pretty much everybody. But there exist a substantial number of people who have money that they are willing to pay to have the hand they are dealt changed. In the 20th century this was primarily confined to modest adjustments of appearance and ham fisted attempts at gender reassignment. But in 2075 there are more lasting and functional changes that can be made. People can be made skinnier or have their breasts grown or get a penis added or removed not with crude removal of living tissue or the insertion of inert lumps of material, but by the grafting of living tissue and the alteration of metabolic processes.

In the latter parts of the 21st century, augmentations transcended beyond people adjusting themselves to better fit their own personal prejudices of how they should appear or to be more attractive to people around them: it became possible to implant actual toys into the human body. Entertainment systems such as personal music players or even direct pleasure stimulation for the sufficiently hedonistic became possible. Expectations of what people would find attractive have also changed, which in turn has caused some radical rethinkings of what cosmetic augmentations to provide. The market for plastic surgery that looked like it was made out of plastic has basically ceased to exist, but the market for cat girls and other significantly non-human forms has prompted research in that direction. Wish fulfillment augmentations also include increased strength and endurance, often capitalizing on decade old sports enhancements that can no longer be considered covert but are still subtle enough to pass a visual inspection.

Criminal Augmentation
“Whatever I wish for, he'll get twice as much? I wish to be blind in one eye.”

The first real human augmentation performed to perpetrate a crime was in 1991, when the LTTE surgically removed some of the less immediately vital organs of a suicide bomber so that she could fill the space with explosives. This was part of an ultimately successful attempt to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. Sure, before that there had been criminals who manually altered their fingerprints or faces in order to escape prosecution for their crimes, but that was the first time a human's body was “upgraded” in order to commit a crime (it is generally thought that stuffing diamonds or heroin into a gash in the thigh or abdomen “does not count”). It was of course, not the last. But the general lack of care for the welfare of the augmented person has pervaded purely criminal cybernetics research ever since.

Putting augmentations created for so-called “legitimate” purposes to criminal ones is increasingly common, but the reverse flow – augmentations designed for criminal purposes being brought into the mainstream – has simply not happened. The cavity bomb has been refined in the last 80 years, but no civilian or military use has been divined for it. Criminals have developed methods of duplicating retinal patterns, finger prints, and other biometrics that are sometimes used by intelligence agencies, but really what is an intelligence agency but a group of criminals with a letter of mark?

-Username17

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 1:51 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Fuchs wrote:How much money are we talking about?
Several thousand dollars. Art costs money on a per-picture basis, there's really no way around that. Printing, editing, and distribution cost money too. Even counting the writing as free because I'd do it anyway, we§re looking at a capitalization of like eight to ten thousand dollars.

A bit beyond the usual reach of casual fan fundraising, possibly beyond Kickstarter. Still. Quite an idea.

FrankTrollman wrote:Luxury Augmentation
“No reason? I got five thousand green reasons right here!”
Criminal Augmentation
“Whatever I wish for, he'll get twice as much? I wish to be blind in one eye.”

Good additions.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 4:33 pm

Raptors.

I could get behind jurassic park raptors in a one off adventure of "Go steal the plans to clone raptors from this guy" and maybe the PCs encounter some.

The idea of Raptors being in the setting any more than that doesn't really feel right to me. Maybe if you dumped them on a lost island and said "Someone messed up an attempt to literally make jurassic park and thats totally an island now over there way outside the normal setting. You can go there, but its not the main thing".

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 8:23 pm

What if you say instead that raptors are basically always vicious and uncontrollable? That means no company is going to use them as normal guard dogs (collateral damage is too likely); but a secret island base is likely to have them roaming topside.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 9:32 pm

You can do that everywhere, as long as you have a means of bringing them in when needed . .
kinda like a death-zone, but instead of mines and sentry guns, you have RAPTORS!
As for the ammount of money needed: Dude, Frank . . that's gonna be mostly impossible to accomplish i am afraid x.x
as much as i want this to succeed, i probably could not chime in with more than some hundred bucks, and most people probably will be hard pressed to chime in even with a single hundred bucks . .

geordie racer · Post by **geordie racer** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 9:45 pm

Stahlseele wrote:As for the ammount of money needed: Dude, Frank . . that's gonna be mostly impossible to accomplish i am afraid x.x
as much as i want this to succeed, i probably could not chime in with more than some hundred bucks, and most people probably will be hard pressed to chime in even with a single hundred bucks . .

Check out Kickstarter -

Far West $49324 - for a d20 + FATE wuxia western
Chronicles of the Void $15100 - for a crappy looking mechafest
Adventurer Conqueror King $11648 - for a hot-rodded B/X

So, it's possible.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 11:00 pm

wat o.o
ok, two things:
1st: i did not know kickstarter
2nd: people are actually willing to give that much money for something like this? o.o

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 3:05 am

Well, yeah, they basically buy the book before you make it, possibly with special bonuses attached. It's not like they're just giving you the money. You have to provide the product after.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 3:13 am

Concerning raptors, I wouldn't want them to be common, but having one company be "the guys who make freakin' raptors for all your base defense and extremely ill-advised petting zoo needs" would fit just fine. You're doing a run against RaptorTech or one of their subsidiaries, there will probably be raptors there. Others, not so much.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 1:24 pm

Fucking RaptorTech and their ridiculous business model! Let's burn their house down!

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 1:52 pm

They may have found a niche though . .
Your Security becomes about 20% cooler in 10 seconds flat with My Little Raptors!

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 2:30 pm

Why would anyone even try to recreate some sort of dinosaur and then use it as a guard animal? I get dogs, dogs have been bred to be guard animals for millenia. By now they are good at it. Also they don't freak people out and respond well to authority. I get paracritters, they are scary and some of them can see astral intruders. I get drones, they are cheap and reliable. And I get humans, they can think, communicate and cope well with the unforeseen.

That is your baseline for guards. If you aren't cheaper than a drone, scarier or more potent than a paracritter, or more versatile than a human you better be a more awesome allround package than a guard dog. And raptors may look cool, but they aren't even as scary as a hellhound, and they are probably more expensive than even well-trained and augmented guards. Unless they are as cheap as cybering dogs there just is no use at all for them, and even then they are limited to guarding places noone wants to go to.

Of course some bored billionaire will want his guard raptors just so he can have guard raptors, but that is the same niche that sharks with lasers occupy.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 3:02 pm

They might not be super-terrifying, but it might actually be cheaper to have cybered raptors flying around your secure installation than to have fully mechanical drones. Just keep feeding them mice and they'll stay happy.

Cyber-owls, however, have a certain cachet that raptors just can't match.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 3:04 pm

The advantage of unrestricted genetic engineering is that you can get things better or cheaper than a cybered guard dog. For example, making it cold-blooded would make it far cheaper to feed, since it just sits around on a warm rock 23 hours a day 360 days a year using practically zero energy. Making it oviparous means less space devoted to internal baby support gear, which means more space for useful things like muscle. You could even build it with an extremely minimal or nonexistent digestive system and feed it on generic processed feedstock, both giving it more room for useful systems and cutting upkeep costs even more (generic processed feedstock is cheap).

I suppose that you could also engineer guard dogs to do all that stuff too, but then the question changes a bit. Instead of asking which animal to use, you ask what animal shape to use. I'd argue that the raptor is better than the dog; it's built for climbing trees, it can mount much larger claws, and it has arms.

Edit: Catharz, you win one internet for that picture. I lol'd.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 3:39 pm

Kickstarter is certainly a possibility. I would prefer to get something going with less people to keep track of and less administrative overhead being paid to kickstarter. Anyway, here is a thing from the Life section:

(Un)Employment
“If you don't have anything, you don't have anything.”

The vast majority of people in the world need to work for a living. That means that they need to find something that they can do that they can exchange for money that they can exchange for goods and services. There are a few people who have enough money in bank accounts or friends they can mooch off of, but while these people who have won the birth lottery (or a literal lottery) feature prominently in the media, they are a vanishingly small portion of the population. Nevertheless, few people in 2075 actually work the whole year – the average person actually has a paying job in two out of four quarters. Failing to find employment for more than two quarters in a row is not unusual, but the results are often catastrophic on a person's finances and health.

Corporate Citizenship
“What price hath your love?”

Most mega corporations (and aspiring mega corporations) maintain a very small number of people in the kind of income security and job stability that people had in America's 1950s. These people are called “corporate citizens”. A corporate citizen gets preferential posting to employment by that corporation (thus they work every quarter that they do not voluntarily take as vacation), gets a pension when they retire, and is able to call upon the safety net of the corporation when they are sick or have children. Corporations do this in order to create a cadre of people loyal to the corporation who can be trusted to look out for the corporation's interests. The vast majority of corporate citizens are also corporate patriots.

Corporate citizens are given corporate housing in corporate arcologies and are expected to advocate corporate positions on issues relevant to the corporation. Corporate citizens send their children to corporate schools and the corporation pays to get vocational augmentations for them to advance in their assigned career paths. Being a corporate citizen is a highly desired state, and corporations dangle the distant possibility of corporate citizenship in front of people as a giant and distant carrot. Actual corporate citizenship positions are few in number and competition for them is fierce. Many people go their entire lives attempting to prove their loyalty to a corporation without ever being allowed into the stability of real citizenship.

Secured Labor
“The worst part about being secured labor is that you work hard all day and can't leave.”

The other way to get job security is to have labor secured. That is when a bond gets put down on a person's future labor and their mandatory work can be bought and sold like a security. The bond holder is normally responsible for minimal room and board for the secured worker, and the rate at which the bond is paid off is based on a complex formula derived from current labor markets. With expense allowances adding to the principal of the bond, many secured laborers never get ownership of their labor back. With uncertainties and permanent depression in the job market, many secured laborers don't even want to.

There are many ways for a person's labor to be securitized. Since personal loans are pretty much impossible to get, when someone has a large and unavoidable expense such as a medical condition, they may be forced to put up their freedom as collateral. Many areas force people convicted of crimes to pay off their debt to society by selling the bond on their labor to the highest bidder. Some regions allow secured laborers to transfer some or all of their bond debt to their children, creating a perpetual caste of secured laborers. And people without families (including androids and cauldron born) are usually securitized as children in order to pay for their upbringing.

Contract Labor
“Half a loaf is better than none.”

The vast majority of workers work on three month contracts that have no renewal clauses. Advances in human resources technology has allowed corporations to sort through prospective applicants very quickly and to correlate workers to projected labor needs relatively accurately. So when a corporation draws up their one-quarter plan, they also hire people to fill the labor needs for that plan at the same time. Each quarter has the labor pool drawn up independently – there is no particular advantage to having been in the last quarter's labor pool for being selected for this quarter. With total employment running at about 30%, it has been conclusively demonstrated that distributing the few jobs that exist somewhat evenly to make a general state of underemployment provides for more political stability than simply allowing a majority of the population to be permanently unemployed. There are over nine billion people and less than three billion jobs at any one time – without constantly juggling the labor pool, class warfare tends to turn ugly. In pursuit of global harmony, most corporations give a modest preference to hiring people who did not work last quarter. Hungry workers are motivated workers, as the saying goes.

Even administrators are usually brought in for simple three month contracts, though they are paid well enough that the enforced periods of unemployment look more like extended vacations and less like coercive periods of near starvation. Longer contracts are awarded to people whose assigned tasks are expected to actually take longer than a single economic quarter to complete – which is less and less tasks as time marches on. Schools in 2075 are for the most part on the same schedule with children leaving, transferring, and re-entering schools on a quarterly basis based on the economic situation of their families.

Lancers
“Every time you shake someone's hand, you pretend you're their best friend.”

Not everyone works under the luxury and security of an actual contract. A person who works without documentation and expects compensation from something as tenuous as a handshake or verbal assurance is called a “Lancer”. Lancers include day laborers, artists, street hawkers, and criminals. Those who fail to land a contract for a quarter will often mollify their lack of income with lancer work. Some lancer work is done to a specific (if uncontracted) agreement, and other work is simply done on spec. In any case, lacking the protections of contracts, defaulting and broken promises are pretty common.

Deniable assets are lancers whether they are working on a purely mercenary basis or are acting on behalf of freikorps that they support. The lack of contracts allows movements to disavow or claim the actions of lone gunmen based on the perceived political fallout on a case by case basis.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 4:42 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:With total employment running at about 30%, it has been conclusively demonstrated that distributing the few jobs that exist somewhat evenly to make a general state of underemployment provides for more political stability than simply allowing a majority of the population to be permanently unemployed.

It should be added how miraculous that it is that everything still runs despite such a spectacular unemployment rate; when you think about it, that means that every one person does the work to support about three people. It takes advanced technology, loads of automation, hyper-centralized manufacturing and distribution, and in some cases straight-up magic, but things keep working. Somehow.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 5:07 pm

Vebyast wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:With total employment running at about 30%, it has been conclusively demonstrated that distributing the few jobs that exist somewhat evenly to make a general state of underemployment provides for more political stability than simply allowing a majority of the population to be permanently unemployed.
It should be added how miraculous that it is that everything still runs despite such a spectacular unemployment rate; when you think about it, that means that every one person does the work to support about three people. It takes advanced technology, loads of automation, hyper-centralized manufacturing and distribution, and in some cases straight-up magic, but things keep working. Somehow.

The actual surprising thing is how historically normal that level of employment actually is. The United States has an employment rate of about 59 percent, which is a disaster, because the US has been running at about 63 percent. But a hundred years ago, numbers like that were unheard of. At issue is the civilian employment population ratio:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost

And levels in the sixties are what we've had my whole life, but they are a bizarre aberration by historical and international standards. A hundred years ago, women basically didn't have paying jobs in the US at all. Remember also that countries like Turkey are running a 44 percent employment rate among people 15 to 64 (that is the statistic that the OECD likes to throw around). Considering that more than 32 percent of their population is over or under those benchmarks, their total employment percentage is under thirty percent right now. And that's a country in Europe. For the world as a whole, a thirty percent employment rate is high.

-Username17

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 6:21 pm

Okay, so it's not that 30% of the population which is _actively pursuing employment_ has employment. It's that 30% of the population, period, has employment? I'd make that more clear.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 6:33 pm

Okay, I just started reading this thread yesterday, and am only up to page 16 at the moment, so I may have missed something. But at this point, these are a couple of cool ideas that seem to have been overlooked, dropped, or otherwise not mentioned for a long while, that probably warrant some sort of re-examination:

-The Matrix touches on the astral plane. There is a lot of really cool implications with this intersection of magic and technology that could be explored. AIs being spirits that got trapped on the wrong side of that barrier as an example.

-Hacking split into two roles: Brain Hacking and Tech Hacking. Tech hacking is the role of the Cyber guy, while Brain hacking is the role of the Punk guy. ie you have your guy who's cybered out the ass and a total badass ninja who can hack tech stuff. He doesn't need brain hacking because if he needs to deal with a physical problem, he's got a gun or a sword, because he's a goddamn cyber ninja.

Brain hacking on the other hand becomes the realm of the unaugmented person. Their social skills and unmodified brains allow easier direct communication with other peoples' brains. Brain hacking is literally a part of the face's job. Whether it be for things like charm person out of combat, or giving people siezures in combat, this is what the face does.

When the benefits/penalties of augmentation started coming up, the initial discussed triage seemed to fall off the radar, with the triage shifting from Hacking/Cyber/Magic to Magic/Unaugmented/Cyber. Somebody made the above proposal a long ways back, and as far as I could tell nobody really commented on it, but it seemed like a great solution to both ensure a role for the unaugmented person that was viable and would scale, and keep the triage in place.

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 6:38 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:They might not be super-terrifying, but it might actually be cheaper to have cybered raptors flying around your secure installation than to have fully mechanical drones. Just keep feeding them mice and they'll stay happy.

Cyber-owls, however, have a certain cachet that raptors just can't match.

Catharz: We are talking about velociraptors, not eagles and hawks and shit. Velociraptors didn't fly.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 7:01 pm

Quantumboost wrote:Velociraptors didn't fly.

That's what augmentation is for!

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 7:08 pm

fuck flying velociraptors.
much too dangerous. Imagine what it would be like to get shit on by one of those bastards.
now, some slight running and jumping enhancements, that's a whole different kind of talk!

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 7:10 pm

Okay just finished the last 5 pages, and it seems aside from Frank writing up Employment and Augmentation descriptions, all that's happened from the point I left off on was arguing about Velociraptors and what is appropriate for the setting. So I'm just going to leave my above two points to stand as things that should be revisited.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Sep 01, 2011 7:17 pm

Actually we had a brief interlude about how to raise about 15k for this project . .
Big problem being, that Frank and his work are pretty much banned from both dumpshock and the official boards, which would be the best places to get attention for this . .