Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 7:50 pm

This IS the beginning of the space-age; with cheap automated production and maturing space-based logistics, it seems like it's only a matter of decades until people start seriously strip mining the asteroid belts and low-g moons of the gas giants for raw materials. That would do a lot to alleviate the raw-materials shortage. That said, there's no reason to assume any of that wealth would trickle down to the Earthbound masses.

If extremely efficient recycling is a thing, and given the resource shortages I would assume that it is, I imagine that a common 'unskilled/semi-skilled labor' job is digging up landfills and cleaning/sorting what you find for the recycler. All those expensive electronics we threw out are suddenly valuable stuff. (Idea derived from a scene in a cheap e-book: 2184, by Martin Parish.)

Again, I re-iterate an interest in the lifestyles of the poor and anonymous in this setting. I recognize that, as I ask that, the answer to that question varies enormously based on _where_ the poor and anonymous are located - being poor as fuck in a corporate enclave, in a rural area, and a third world city are all very different scenarios, and I'm interested in whichever of those you feel like talking about.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:15 pm

I don't see anyone being terribly poor in a corp enclave. If you are not an employee you don't live there, and the corp provides a a decent standard of living to employees. The food service employees and janitors won't make nearly as much money as the programers, but they won't be living in a refrigerator box next to the dumpster either.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:21 pm

The corp does not have janitors. They have a single guy who runs the floor scrubbing bots, sweeper bots, window-cleaner bots and so forth, and then a team of bonded repairmen who drive around from installation to installation maintaining the buildings. That's like 10 or so jobs per corp city doing janitoral work and all of them are high paying and probably mean being a corporate citizen.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Tue Sep 06, 2011 5:16 pm

Exactly. Corps don't hire janitors, they hire roboticists. Any 'manual labour' type profession that doesn't require a 'human touch' is something that robots do now.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Sep 06, 2011 6:20 pm

How valuable are materials? Are they valuable enough to scrap your roombas and hire sweepers?
If materials are super-valuable, does that make drone-poaching lucrative?

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:35 pm

It's possible that almost all of the landfill-extraction has already been done, leaving most humans with essentially no useful purpose to fulfill in the global economy.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 8:05 am

Materials are quite valuable. Given the resource efficiency of deploying cleaning robots as opposed to paying any kind of wage that would allow for an army of janitors (not to mention the relatively inefficient supplies those janitors would use and waste), materials are far too valuable to frivolously waste them on hiring sweepers.

Basically, for any job that can be done by humans, robots can do it better, unless the job requires either direct human presence (the McJobs), supervision of robots (a quickly eroding field, as automation gets better), or creative thinking. This last is where all the real money is; invention and speculation and out-of-the-box solutions. If you can look at a process and find a way to save a tenth of a percent on it's energy budget, or if you can scan through a stack of predictions and find that they differ notably from your own assessment of reality, or if you can look at some heap of 'useless' waste and figure out some way to put it to profitable use... then you find someone to sell your ideas to, and make a kingly salary for the rest of your life as that person pays your expenses for the rest of ever on the off chance that you have another idea half as good some day down the road.

Of course, that assumes that you're actually right. The earth is littered with the bones of failed concepts, and those broken failures that spawned them.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:42 pm

This might be helpful, some visualization for what 2075 can look like at different places

This is SanLiTun, a newly constructed office area.

This is where you get lamb skewers and chicken wings at 5am. Fresh soy milk (authentic! the guy blends real beans and then adds boiling water) is down the street.

They are Beijing today.
Just some visuals on how a centuries old city looks with brand new buildings.

Also, if y'all haven't heard of this before:
http://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Robot-Masa ... 4333010020

"I believe robots have the buddha-nature within them--that is, the potential for attaining buddhahood."
-author

It would be a nice read on some thoughts with how spirituality, magic, AI, augmentation and such can mesh together.

and about the author:
Masahiro Mori (森 政弘 Mori Masahiro?, born 1927) is a Japanese roboticist noted for his pioneering work on the emotional response of humans to non-human entities, as well as for his views on religion and robots. The ASIMO robot was designed by one of Masahiro's students.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 5:29 pm

If materials are that valuable, then the players should greyhawk every drone they kill. I don't mean that as a bad thing either.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 5:55 pm

Agreed. That fucker is chock-full of rare earths.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:16 pm

OgreBattle wrote:This might be helpful, some visualization for what 2075 can look like at different places

I keep seeing flashes of "Holy crap, that could work' in the new Deus Ex, and it's set in 2027.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:36 pm

Greyhawking is totally viable everywhere in this setting; provided you've got the cargo capacity on hand to lug things off to your scrap dealer of choice. For that matter, depending on skill selection, it's totally viable for one of the PCs to BE that scrap dealer. This may not be wise in all situations... you DO NOT want to try lugging sentry drones down from the 52nd floor of anything ever, no matter how much they're worth in parts... but it's certainly profitable, whenever you can manage to get away with it.

The big deal is that since there really aren't much in the way of any NEW resources anywhere (those that are available are exceedingly cost-intensive, like mining the ocean floor or something, and thus only barely feasible, let alone profitable), everyone's fighting over the old ones... everything from blowing up their shit so you can resmelt and resell it, to invading the old abandoned mine off on the middle of the zombie flats (not because there's any ore left there, because it was mined out in the 1800's... but because some clever guy wants to make some cash setting up ore processing bots in the tailings of that old mine, which weren't properly worked by the technology of the time).

Until someone completes another huge megaproject, like tapping the Earth's mantle or something, this situation will endure. Unfortunately, there aren't enough resources available to make such a project feasible, this despite the fact that a proper mantle tap could make all kinds of resources available (mostly Magnesium, Iron, and Aluminium) in short order.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:44 pm

That could actually be a really cool campaign objective. The party is hired by an enterprising man near the top of a corporation's hierarchy who wants to gain control of enough resources to launch either a mantle-drilling or asteroid-mining project (probably the former). He lays out all the things they'll need to acquire, including a lot of corporate influence he can already supply, and asks their help in getting their hands on the rest. After the first few missions, though, he's assassinated by a rival corporation, forcing the party to gather influence and make new contacts of their own to make the project happen. Other runner squads employed by the same man are still floating around, but none of them know who any of the others are with their contact dead. One of them was probably working for the other side and carried out the hit.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 7:08 pm

"Earth's teat has run dry, so now we gonna eat the meat."

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 7:22 pm

Corporate flamejumper is a little different than freelance specialist, but you're right; there's enough overlap to make it work and make it cool.

So here's the thing: it's entirely possible that the drones guarding the mcguffin are more valuable than the actual mcguffin, at least to the players. I don't know what currency value looks like in Heartbreaker, so these values are made up, but check this out:

McMega has crazy Mcguffin blueprints, which will let them rake in $10 million. Reasonably, they place 3 guardbots defending it at $50k/each.

InCorp would like the blueprints and the $Texas. They hire our intrepid heroes to take them, at the generous price of $40k.

Everyone so far has behaved rationally (enough for a caricature, anyway), but our heroes are now up against a defense system which is worth (to them) more than three times as much as what it's guarding. You might as well take the plans, but the big money is going to be taking out the guardbots with a minimum of damage (hacking?), then hauling them off for repair and resale, and failing that for scrap.

I think that's awsome and completely okay, but it either needs support (e.g. broken/scrap values for gear), or it needs to be rejected somehow.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 9:47 pm

Presumably, the guardbots cost more than the materials from which they are composed. Possibly much more.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 12:15 am

Right, but it's not like they're slagged afterwards; it's like they need repairs. Especially if you're trying to keep them mostly intact.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 12:41 am

Does this setting have anything like BT's lostech? Feats of engineering and technology now considered impossible because the techniques were so materially inefficient, that sort of thing.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 1:57 am

Vebyast wrote:Does this setting have anything like BT's lostech? Feats of engineering and technology now considered impossible because the techniques were so materially inefficient, that sort of thing.

Probably most machinery. If you're too oil-poor to make plastic, you're going to be kind of hard-up for lube too (and not the sexy kind).

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 1:42 pm

Be reasonable. We have the technology to denature plastics back in to raw hydrocarbon right now, and our landfills are fucking crammed to the rafters with the stuff. That technology is only going to get better, and the one thing that I presume there isn't a shortage of in this setting is raw energy, what with highly advanced solar panels, mature fusion tech, extremely refined renewable-energy harvesting, etc.

I'd assume that we'd have transitioned entirely away from a 'hydrocarbons as fuel source' to 'hydrocarbons as raw manufacturing material'.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 1:59 pm

Magitech, the solution to most of those problems. .
Spirits to the recycling center!
Some to sort, some to shred, some to melt.
Some to power machinery.
And the source for the Employement-Problem.
A Golem never sleeps. A Golem never Eats. A Golem never gets sick. A Golem doesn't need free days. Aside from the odd Sabbatical . .
A Golem never stops. For good or bad.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 4:27 pm

Yeah, while I personally don't much like Greyhawking, it is essentially inevitable that in a resource limited world that people would be trying to figure out how to scrap things and recover scrap and transform materials into wealth. I think it needs some sort of system for collecting parts and reselling them in an abstract way. I definitely do not want people to strip weather stripping off of walls during missions.

I do want people to be stripping weather stripping off of buildings, but player characters should have better things to do.

Vebyast wrote:Does this setting have anything like BT's lostech? Feats of engineering and technology now considered impossible because the techniques were so materially inefficient, that sort of thing.

You get that sort of thing now. If you for some reason want a car that runs without a microchip or a regionless dvd player, you need to grab some old tech. But more generally, yeah there should definitely be some "They don't make 'em like this any more" goods in circulation. The issue is that the players are high value lancers and they want stuff that is "awesome", which is quite likely not the same as stuff that is the most cost effective to produce.

So for example: the old 50 caliber BMG ammunition will totally fucking kill people, and it doesn't have any tracers in it. It's desirable to have those, even though no one will have made any of them for a long time. The EXACTO-II cartridges have advantages enough that no one makes the old metal cases (and no one would make a bullet that wasted metal on casing any more), but there are times that as a Lancer you actually do want the old ones.

And it's not just deniability. No one makes freon cannisters for cooling anymore, but if you upgrade an old fridge to newer specs, the freon can it has inside it is pretty fucking awesome.

-Username17

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 4:39 pm

And it's not just deniability. No one makes freon cannisters for cooling anymore, but if you upgrade an old fridge to newer specs, the freon can it has inside it is pretty fucking awesome.

Query: Wat.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 5:07 pm

Somewhat relevant to our interests, although far too optimistic for our setting. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/ ... index.html

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 5:59 pm

I think you pretty much need to declare a couple materials that are not scarce, then build everything out of that (maybe some kind of fiberglassed rayon from bamboo?). Otherwise, the weatherstripping is too valuable to pass up. It does change the setting, but less than any other option I see.