Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Syndicates & Governments

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 1:47 pm

Why does the Egypt-Flag look like the Reichs-Flagge with red and black switched out? O.o

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:31 pm

Stahlseele wrote:Why does the Egypt-Flag look like the Reichs-Flagge with red and black switched out? O.o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Arab_colors wrote:The Pan-Arab colors are black, white, green, and red, and individually have their origins in the flags of prominent empires, and dynasties in Arab history. They were first combined in the flag of the Arab Revolt in 1916. They are used currently in the flags of Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine, Somaliland, and the United Arab Emirates. A sub-set of the Pan-Arab colors are the Arab Liberation colors, in which green is less significant. These appear on the flags of Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and of democratic Libya.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Egypt wrote:...with the emblem of the Revolution, the Eagle of Saladin...

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 4:09 pm

Ah, thank you, i did not know this yet.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 10:46 pm

Does "Papal State (Congo), Papal State (Niger)" mean what I think it does?

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 11:57 pm

You should have a sentence or two about what the hallmarks of First through Third Generation warfare actually are.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 3:24 am

Here's a thing: I don't care about Africa. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, I would simply ignore the whole continent in every campaign. The same is basically true for most of Asia, excepting metropolitan China, Japan, and maybe Russia.

I don't know if anyone else feels that way though.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 3:48 am

fectin wrote:Here's a thing: I don't care about Africa. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, I would simply ignore the whole continent in every campaign. The same is basically true for most of Asia, excepting metropolitan China, Japan, and maybe Russia.

I don't know if anyone else feels that way though.

^ This made me think of that v

Schwarzkopf wrote:
Crap like Tir na nOg and Lagos is incredibly damaging to the game because there are no hooks for the players. Yes, it's hard to get into the Tir. Yes, your shit doesn't work right in Lagos. But those places don't have anything the players want. There's nothing to steal and no corporate presence to pay you money.
Well I mean I kind of sort of liked the direction that Denver Missions and Ghost Cartels were going in, moving the game from being about corporate operatives to being more about organized crime and criminals doing crimes against the law (CRIMES) but I agree that there is LITERALLY NOTHING YOU WANT IN AFRICA. IT IS AFRICA. I happened to PC that particular run and even though our GM did an amazing job with the material as written, my PC is still bitching about having to go to fucking Africa. He had to seriously revise his runner's code.

Rule #1. Do not go to Africa.

If you want to include any mention of Africa at all that isn't just quickly writing it off, you need to put something pretty damn compelling there. Otherwise, Africa defaults to a horrible festering pit that people hire the lowest bidder to go die in, on the off-chance that they live long enough to bring back something useful. That's not actually a mission the PCs want to do at all, so unless there's something substantively different then that there, basically everything you write about Africa is wasted space.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 5:18 am

Presumably, 2070s Africia is not utter shit. The fact that the Papal States have apparently gone there, the Zulu Empire is a thing that exists and Sheba (which is presumably a magical phased in kingdom) is around seems to support this fact. You can also write up some stuff about Africa building a launch loop for cheaply sending things into orbit.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 5:37 am

Good choice!

The bit about the launch loop actually is a thing that you might compellingly put in Africa, because of the part where, if anything goes wrong, it explodes like a nuke.

Presumably, they've managed to fix it so nothing goes wrong, but before that, when it's an 'untested technology that might randomly produce an atomic explosion at any time', nobody wants to live near it, but at the same time you want to access it easily.

So they put it in Africa, and there was much rejoicing.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:09 am

Sheba could be this worlds Wakanda . .

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:27 am

It doesn't quite explode like a nuke, but it certainly would obliterate a few hundred thousand square kilometers if it failed. Imagine a hypersonic, four-thousand-kilometer cable cutting everything smaller than a mountain off at the knees. Nice idea.

The next question is who owns the thing. It's the most powerful weapon on the planet and it can probably finance an entire nation. It has to have been built before the apocalypse, because the post-collapse economy definitely couldn't bear the initial investment. My guess is that it started as a joint project by everybody, ate NASA, the ESA, the RKA, and the CNSA after the collapse, and ended up as a wealthy pocket nation. Think Qatar or the UAE.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:41 am

No candidate names, but I would like to point out that having it belong to a pocket nation propped up by corporate intrests justifies agent/asset activity both in the country that has the launch loop and in every other nation in the region, since everyone nearby secretly or not so secretly wants to invade and seize the satellite launcher for themselves.

E: It's not the most powerful weapon on the planet except in the very literal sense of being located on the surface of the Earth instead of being in orbit. That title belongs to kinetic bombardment satellites which, which much much cheaper to use if you have the launch loop, could have plausably been built up to MAD levels prior to everything going to shit.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 10:33 am

Grek wrote:That title belongs to kinetic bombardment satellites

If you want to strike immediately, you can skip the satellites entirely. Use atmospheric techniques to put your Thorshot in the right orbit as it launches. Not only are shots cheaper, but you don't need a thruster for gross orbital maneuvers, so your projectile is more massive.

Grek wrote:could have plausably been built up to MAD levels prior to everything going to shit.

Definitely true. It occurs to me that the launch loop is rather vulnerable to KBM satellites; we might need a way for heavily fortified installations to shoot down incoming KBMs.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 3:44 pm

Very true. If you've got a device capable of easily launching big things into orbit (with a launch loop, it costs the same amount to launch a five-ton object every five minutes as it does to launch nothing at all), the problem of destroying any planetary object you care about wrecking is trivial.

The problem with this, of course, is that a Launch Loop is actually big and tall enough that it'd be a strategic nightmare to defend against any intentional attack on it ever. Anyone with a killsat could take it out with ease, thus provoking all the disasters that would make bad things happen to those in the vicinity of the thing. You pretty much can't fortify it.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:13 pm

You can have it be a mutual resource though. Destroying it would be like poisoning the Pacific: no-one is willing to go that far.

Also, you can probably find a way to launch a bunch of thorshots that need constant correction to prevent them from falling. Basically, the doomsday device from Dr. Strangelove, but implemented differently.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:51 pm

Grek wrote:Does "Papal State (Congo), Papal State (Niger)" mean what I think it does?

It means that as soon as Italy tells the Vatican that they can't hide child molesters there anymore, they go through with their threat of moving the papacy to a place that will have them. Unfortunately, the moment the papacy starts moving, people who have different ideas of where the church should go in the 21st century take their ball and go to a different home. So there are antipopes. And you have three different papal states, two in Africa and one in South America.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 7:02 pm

Endovior wrote:If you want to include any mention of Africa at all that isn't just quickly writing it off, you need to put something pretty damn compelling there. Otherwise, Africa defaults to a horrible festering pit that people hire the lowest bidder to go die in, on the off-chance that they live long enough to bring back something useful. That's not actually a mission the PCs want to do at all, so unless there's something substantively different then that there, basically everything you write about Africa is wasted space.

This is true. Of course, it's true about every continent, but it is specifically true about Africa because most near future games don't put anything interesting there.

For Asymmetric Threat, there are two of the world's megacorps headquartered in Africa. We're going to put cavorite mines and the magic kingdom of Presteria. The point is that once you write in more than "here be negroes, also it sucks" then you aren't wasting space with writeups.

Every place that gets more than a centimeter of ink needs to have a hook for why you would go there. That's not just Africa, that includes places like Amsterdam. It needs to have a hook if it's supposed to get more than the "this place still exists and might get fleshed out in a later product" tagline.

-Username17

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 8:52 pm

i still say we could use something like marvels WAKANDA in Africa . .

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 8:56 pm

Amsterdam has nova-weed and more hookers than you can shake an Anchor at. People will already want to go there, both for runs and after runs.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 30, 2011 4:30 pm

Having looked at it more carefully, I think the place for the Launch Loop is the Arabian Sea at the equator right off the coast of the East African Protectorate. That means that world space interests periodically make landfall into Somalia to shoot trouble makers, as the EAP lays claims to peacekeeping over that entire area. Halo space marines vs. Somali pirates.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 30, 2011 4:39 pm

Europe

Albania
Atlantis
Austria
Avalon
Bavaria
Brussels Federal District
Corsica
Czechoslovakia
Dalmatia
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Helheim
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Lithuania
Macedonia
Malta
Navarre
Occitania
Ottoman Empire
Poland
Portugal
Prussia
Romania
Russia
Ruthenia
Scandinavia
Sicily
Spain
Strasbourg Federal District
Switzerland
Themiskyra
United Kingdom
United Provinces of the Netherlands
Yugoslavia

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jul 30, 2011 9:36 pm

Are you for or against leaving areas of the map blank?

I'm generally for it; it gives more MC freedom, and I am actually all for (good) splatbooks.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 1:22 am

You need to have a little bit to say about everywhere, even if it's just "We don't go to Ravenholm". It's one thing for two campaigns to have totally different answers to mysteries, but not for two campaigns to have different answers about what the mysteries are.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 10:35 am

Some of the world can and should be just a colored in section with a name an a flag, but it should at least be that. At no time should we pull a CGL and write "here be negroes" on large sections of Africa.

I don't really intend to write anything at all about Argentina. But I don't think that it is unreasonable for people to want to look at a map and see how much or little of Argentina has been absorbed into the Inca Empire.

-Username17