Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:18 am

So people have complained at me that I have enough Shadowrun material to just rewrite Shadowrun. That is actually true. So sure, let's do it. But on second thought: NO. We aren't going to make a free alternate version of Shadowrun, we're going to give it the After Sundown treatment and write new IP that happens to be a near-future neo-tribalist magic-using cyberpunk cooperative storytelling game. That means that we need a name, by the way. Current front runner is "Future Imperfect", but whatever.

Basic Themes that make Shadowrun make us happy are in. It takes place in the near future. It has cyberpunk, it has magic. It has tribalism of both the "society has fragmented" and literal Native American influence variety.
This is New IP, so all of your beloved characters are gone unless they are historical people or real world nations or proposed real world nations. So Ryan Mercury's brown nipples are out, as is Dunkelzahn, but there can still be an Aztlan and an Amazonia, because those are real proposed nations.
Magic comes "back" gradually, with it becoming more and more common as the future history unfolds. Magic is defined regionally by a relatively small number of initial practitioners, and this regional bias makes historical local cultures more important all over the Earth. Spirits summoned in different regions are different, and this difference is readily apparent (mechanically).
This regionalism is perhaps most acutely felt in the Americas, where large numbers of Americans identify "Americanness" with Native American cultural and religious tropes more than European tropes. There is a complimentary effect where the Europeans of the late 21st century eat less hamburgers and drink less Coke, but this is less of a culture shock.
The playable metahumans are the Elf, Dwarf, Ogre (hybrid of Ork and Troll), Goblin (toothy but small), Asura (brightly colored, has four arms), and Deep One (like, from Innsmouth).
Hacking is something you do on the fly from standing. And you do it with hologram projectors, producing effects similar to that episode of Fringe with the neuroscientist who had the funky Christmas lights.

And because we are starting from scratch, we can go places that SR never went or never went well. So we can pull up Urban Fantasy and Cyberpunk tropes that we like and put them in. This can include:

Climate Change. Global warming, magic changing weather patterns, and so on. You can have a lot of cities either devastated or forced to adapt substantially to new environments.
Oppressive World Government. Sure, individual countries have fallen apart and abdicated much of their responsibilities, but there are still local agencies and supra-governmental institutions. It's like Belgium, they haven't had a prime minister or an executive government for over a year. But the local authorities, corporations, and European Union have stepped in. North America and Europe can be mostly like that, only more so. This has advantages for dystopia because local governments are corrupt, and weird multinational shadow governments are distant and unresponsive.
Magic Kingdoms Shadowrun did this a little bit with the Fairy Court, but it was a definitely underplayed trope. There should be magical countries phasing in from the ether that have creatures in there that you can talk to and locations you can adventure in. Avalon, Lemuria, and Xanadu can be in the UN. There can also be nations that are either overtly hostile or simply on a poor diplomatic footing with human society.
Magic Swords. Shadowrun enchantments are so limited that they might as well not exist. They are just an alternate way for magic users to advance with their XPs. They aren't really equipment in any meaningful sense of the term.
Africa. I would like to include all the continents. Shadowrun really dropped the ball on the Southern hemisphere.
Peak Oil. Shadowrun included some talk about barrens and arcologies and stuff, but they never delved into why that happens. It happens because fuel becomes scarce, making horizontal cities unsustainable. This results in the building of higher density residential, industrial, and commercial structures (arcologies) and has people moving out of the vast sprawls made in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to populate the higher density areas. So Peak Oil was always a thing in Shadowrun, they just didn't really talk about it, and the other implications were left to just sit there.

-Username17

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:43 am

What's the tech level you're thinking of?

Neuromancer, where bionic arms and vatgrown bodyparts are common and normal?

I would also like to see this have some cyberpunk IN SPACE.

Because big space stations and cities that look like this:

Are awesome.

And I don't care that that picture's from Final Fantasy XIII. The wide-angled shots of that city were about the only thing I liked in that fucking game.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 9:24 am

I really really liked the two related concepts of High Density Signal and Braintext. I think that together they make for a world that's suitably alien and unfriendly to the casual interloper exactly like a dystopian cityscape should be.

Cyberpunk in space should be an option that's somehow available and talked about more within the core assumptions of the game.

K · Post by K » Sat Jun 25, 2011 9:52 am

I think it would be interesting to use other forms of tribalism rather than native American ones. That was the part of Shadowrun I always thought was lazy design, even though it has become iconic to Shadowrun.

With mystical might backing them up, both ancient and new forms of tribalism have a validity. The problem with that is that it starts to look a little like Mage: the Ascension, but if you kept it local I think it could flavor regions in a much easier way than simply saying "hey, this ethnic group with maybe 10K members now controls a region as large as a state because... ummmm.... magic."

I mean, I could see a New Goth Collective taking over London and a Technomancer Alliance controlling from the Bay Area to Seattle and both are enemies of a Punk anti-tradition. The trick would be to give them solid reasons for having their relative magic types actually work.... maybe the New Goths started drinking vampire blood and using old Victorian Hellfire Club and Le Vay spellbooks where the Techomancers started using code to describe various ideas that they explored in virtual environments like Neo in The Matrix.

Then you could leave the Native American stuff for underpopulated areas like Arizona and Colorado where it makes sense.

I think that cutting out the "mages are genetically special, even though they can't be cloned" is probably a good idea too, and coming up with a better reason why mages can't be cybered is probably also good. That never made a lick of sense, especially the "do some drugs or get some cyberware, lose magic permanently."

After that, the initiation system would need to be fixed, probably simply by not letting it increase your stats or giving you better versions of things, but different and equal versions of things or new and equivalent things.

By the same token, initiation costs need to be streamlined with the whole "I'm joining a lodge for initiation but I'm never going to mention it again."

Then you need a real magic item system.

Just some ideas.

ScottS · Post by **ScottS** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 10:18 am

Personal preferences as I think of them:

Less "oppressive governments"/more "societal collapse" works better for me. There was some fabulous dark humor in the early books (people accepting the fact that planes/buildings got blown up on a regular basis etc.) that got phased out when the cyberpunk got less "punk". Govts. not being able to provide basic security makes the turn towards megacorps more plausible. It gives you an excuse to let the chucklefuck PCs off the hook a bit when they screw up a run. Minimizes WSoD problems when PCs find out everyone and their mom has guns, grenades, rocket launchers etc.

I'd generally like it better if the writers didn't stoop to "irredentist delusions" when they set about redrawing the maps. The return of the original Confederacy... yeah, about that. 1M "natives" taking half the territory away from a 300+ M country. The return of magic doesn't mean that every failed state suddenly becomes viable again.

Don't have a strong feeling about tech, but you might want to consider "steampunking" the setting and decoupling the game technology from real-world developments. This might lose the gun-porn people who want "futuristic" extrapolations of military hardware, but it saves you from e.g. having to rewrite the Matrix over and over every time something like wi-fi or cloud computing happens and changes people's expectations of what an "internet" should be. (So just reset to the assumption that screwing co-ax into your brain "makes sense" like it did in the late 80s, then write an alternate-universe "fantasy tech" from there.)

K · Post by K » Sat Jun 25, 2011 10:28 am

Another factor with arcologies could be the production of cheap carbon-nanotubes. With it's amazing strength, it makes going up easier.

Water is also an issue that could lead to the collapse of society. Right now India is literally sinking because of their collapsing aquifers, so I could see arcologies as a means of recycling water rather than pumping desalinated water across continents because pipelines are no longer safe because of both threats and criminals.

Also, you could use thorium reactors and shit burgers, both interesting developments I've read about in the last week that seem ideal for arcologies.

Giant blanks spots on the map also make more sense, and I think the old Shadowrun developers spent too much time making new nations in areas they never intended to develop. I mean, Oregon is a wasteland except for Portland, so I'd be OK if some magic threat just owned the state and surrounded Portland and it became an arcology city-state.

I also think genetic modification would play a much larger role in any new vision of the future, as well as functional immortality for the rich and corrupt. Possibly cheap beauty for the poor. Maybe even Genejacks or other genetic slaves (virtual, genetic, and techo-slavery seem like big potential themes so that players have moral reasons to rebel and be criminals).

Back to magic, I think warding and setting spirits to guard needs to be cut back a lot. Magic works better as an active defense rather than a passive, so things like critters guarding labs is more fun than watcher spirits.

Astral space works better if people don't project at all, just sense. I think a lot of people never liked astral overwatch, which is why the pure spellcasters/pure summoners were even a thing.

By the same token, the Matrix really needs to stop being WiFi. That bugs, even if it solved mechanical problems. I mean, I'll accept that people protect things from hacking by not giving them access ports long before I'll buy WiFi in everything. Heck, WiFi jammers make more sense when you consider riggers.

The Matrix makes sense as an actual video game that the group goes on adventures in together to get information, with hackers being DnD thieves in the real world and in the Matrix [opening doors, breaking security] but they need people with good reaction times to fight bots(street sams) and people to run specialty programs that require concentration (mages). Playing up the idea that human brains are better at solving Matrix problems than AI or hardware regardless of speed is a good philosophical starting point.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 12:59 pm

Just make sure "guns beat melee" is in. Melee combat should be a niche, even magically enhanced swords should just barely make it viable.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 2:29 pm

What's going to happen with Japan? The original SR was written in a time when a lot of Westerners were all like "Holy shit these Nipponese are going to take over the entire world!!!!" Which is why there's that whole California storyline. And the whole pervasive worldwide influence of Nipponese culture.

But then Nippon's economy tanked and has since failed to recover. This would make any backstory dependent upon Japan being an economic powerhorse slightly less plausible.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 2:55 pm

K wrote:I think it would be interesting to use other forms of tribalism rather than native American ones. That was the part of Shadowrun I always thought was lazy design, even though it has become iconic to Shadowrun.

Combined with "using all the continents", this makes me think that cyberpunk Australia really ought to have a place here.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 3:06 pm

If we are going to make a near future, it's best to make it a projection of the present (as opposed to the present incarnation which was based on a projection of the "present" that is today the past). That means, even though in some ways the cards are all going to fall in similiar ways, the end result may not even remotely look at the current version.

First question, when does the shit hit the fan? This becomes critical in any evolution of the modern near future; we have so many just around the corner technologies that when the shit hits can drastically determine everything. Thorium reactors, space elevators (carbon nanotube technology driven), are two best examples.

I'm going to take my own suggestion not from Shadowrun but from that wonderful nation simulation game NationStates. We need a segment on Antarctica. Here is my argument. National and Global pressures in the years before the fall force many international billionares to flee their native lands and seek national / UN pressure by forming their own nations on the barren wastelands of Antarctica.

Strange things start to happen, including the following:

Emperor penguins explode for no known reason - it may be tech or it may be odd magic - used in warfare.
Dolphins are finally taught to speak a human language, but it turns out that they have the most god danmed fucking filthy minds of any creature on the planet.

P.S. Don't forget to destroy the UN, with fire, then never call it by name in any backstory. Seriously, these bastards are the number one in terms of anal trademark protection, and if their lawyers got wind you were using anything remotely UN like (especially the logo used on their flag) they will send cease and desist letters immediately.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 3:28 pm

tzor wrote: Strange things start to happen, including the following:
Emperor penguins explode for no known reason - it may be tech or it may be odd magic - used in warfare.
Dolphins are finally taught to speak a human language, but it turns out that they have the most god damned fucking filthy minds of any creature on the planet.

So you want Prinnies and a pervy version of Darwin from SeaQuest?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 4:18 pm

Fuchs wrote:Just make sure "guns beat melee" is in. Melee combat should be a niche, even magically enhanced swords should just barely make it viable.

Melee is never going to be a viable 'middle of combat' option in Shadowrun; it's a system with high lethality, and doing melee involves reaching the opponent who is probably firing at you with automatic weapons. But right now, even if you were to start next to your opponent in melee and win initiative and hit him with a sword that used to be your arm, you would probably still get shot and die right after. You get half the attacks as someone with a gun at less damage against higher defense.

Ranged and melee should be comparatively lethal. Both should be able to just flat out end people very quickly when used successfully under optimum conditions. Melee will remain a less viable option because charging into gunfire hasn't worked since... well, since they invented guns. But if both could actually kill people, it'd let the military commando/ninja sneak up on people, and instead of closing in to point blank range, pulling out a silenced pistol, and double-tapping them, they'd snap their neck/cut off their head or do something else both reasonable and thematic. And if they're stupid enough to try it mid-combat, introduce them to suppressive fire and delayed actions and all that tactical jazz.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 4:58 pm

Where does stuff like resource scarcity fit in? I suppose this might come in under climate change. But, fresh water supply, and genetically modified food sources can both be things to be explored in parts of a cyberpunk world.

Places like India where water-feuds between neighboring states is common.

Monsanto and other companies have already genetically engineered vegetables. "The Windup girl" is a great novel that explores what could happen if breeds of grain are created that accidentally cause massive crop failures or viral outbreaks that kill/taint food supply.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:06 pm

DSMatticus wrote: Melee is never going to be a viable 'middle of combat' option in Shadowrun; it's a system with high lethality, and doing melee involves reaching the opponent who is probably firing at you with automatic weapons.

The niche for melee combatants in a modern environment is essentially in catching people who don't have their guns ready. Sneaking up on people is one way of doing it. Even face to face, it can work. If you start the encounter at a point where you can cover the distance to the gun guy before he can draw, aim, and fire -- and you're a sufficiently expert knife guy -- you can win (and that distance is probably farther than a lot of gun guys think it is). If the gun guy already has his weapon ready, not so much.

That's not a niche most people are going to want to occupy, but I am totally in favor of having it be a workable tactic for those situations when you have to occupy it. Or for purposes of keeping the PCs wary no matter how many guns they have and no matter how poor and ill-equipped the opposition is.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:34 pm

talozin wrote:
DSMatticus wrote: Melee is never going to be a viable 'middle of combat' option in Shadowrun; it's a system with high lethality, and doing melee involves reaching the opponent who is probably firing at you with automatic weapons.
The niche for melee combatants in a modern environment is essentially in catching people who don't have their guns ready. Sneaking up on people is one way of doing it. Even face to face, it can work. If you start the encounter at a point where you can cover the distance to the gun guy before he can draw, aim, and fire -- and you're a sufficiently expert knife guy -- you can win (and that distance is probably farther than a lot of gun guys think it is). If the gun guy already has his weapon ready, not so much.

That's not a niche most people are going to want to occupy, but I am totally in favor of having it be a workable tactic for those situations when you have to occupy it. Or for purposes of keeping the PCs wary no matter how many guns they have and no matter how poor and ill-equipped the opposition is.

That distance, with a holstered pistol is >10 feet for nearly anyone, and >20 feet if you're trained. It's possibly more for really extraordinary people, but I don't know.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:45 pm

"Intellectual property" should probably be a much bigger player in the new future than the old future. Content producers should dictate technology at least as often as the other way around.

Surveillance should be pervasive. The idea that anyone who lives in the "modern" future world has any sort of privacy is probably just not something that occurs to most people. If you have ever done something humorously embarrassing in your entire life, 50,000,000 people have probably seen video of it. Essentially, everyone on the planet is a Star Wars Kid waiting to happen.

Disease is making a comeback in the public consciousness right now, and that should probably impact the future somehow. Not just ebola and AIDS but stuff like MRSA/VRSA, genetically engineered zombie viruses, etc., etc.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 6:00 pm

Chunks of Africa are overrun by zombie hordes. A corporation has developed something along the lines of the Psi-Emitter from StarCraft, which draws zombies instead of Zerg.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 6:03 pm

See, any time Africa is full of zombies or any other dumb slave analogue, it feels wrong. As it should.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 6:05 pm

That's not a slave analogue, though. If a zombie disease were to emerge from the wild, it would probably surface in Africa, like Ebola or AIDS. If a zombie disease were to be engineered, it would probably be tested on Africa, where not only would the existence of a new disease not draw much attention, but the disease could build up momentum before it was caught and exterminated by competent governments.

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 6:47 pm

On the melee vs. range debate, I'd be fine with melee only being viable if you are magiced/cybered out the wazoo. Just for the love of Pete don't allow magic guns, they're the type of thing that immature little munchkin will fetishize to the point of obsession.

As for hacking, I think the best way to handle that is to focus on how it affects the real world, and not have the hacker have to worry about delving into this or that node. Basically you dump the concept of cyberspace that existed in Neuromancer, while it's cool in print in gameplay it is just weird to have the MC describe a scene for only one player.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 7:40 pm

For hacking, Augmented Reality is practically here now. Just extend it 20-50 years into the future.

Everyone wears glasses or contacts that project an improved HUD over whatever happens to be in the wearer's field of vision. IPhone browser gestures are as long ago as punchcards and have been rendered obsolete first by eyeblink/eyeroll control and shortly thereafter some type of neural link or skin-reader so good it might as well be a direct mindwire.

So when I look out my window I don't merely see a tree, two cars and a mailman walking in front of the ivy-colored fence across the street. Oh no I get tags and overlays for all of the following:

from the window manufacturer,
the blind manufacturer,
their competitors,
The safety notice about keeping kids away from open 2nd floor windows, with realtime updates of neighborhood, city, state and worldwide incident counts.
a efficiency schematic from the utility company using thermal overlays, micro-neighborhood meteoroligcal data and realtime market prices for electricity delivery letting me know the second-by-second money to comfort tradeoffs between running the AC with the window closed and opening it for a breeze instead
a botantical overlay about the species of maple tree and ivy with links to articles about care, allergens, and types of insects and micro-bots they most frequently harbor.
A public-key encryption function confirming that the mailman is a legitimate employee of the postal service with links to his route, schedule, office contact, and how many of my packages he has personally touched.
Data about each of the cars, including make, model, serial number, mileage, ownership history, maintenance logs, how well their actual Miles Per Megawatt compare to the averages for similar make and model vehicles, etc.

And with this much data, hacking becomes the art of convincingly falsifying data that is higher priority to a human reader than to a security program. A hacker maxim might be"information control is mind control"

So a hacker might do something like spoofing an update for the window safety incident report at the hyper-local level, so that I will respond by rubbernecking to see which neighborkid just took a dive and whether the ambulance has been contacted yet.

Or maybe they would put a "subject to immediate armed repossession" tag on the ownership history of one of the cars, so that I will keep my head down and away from the window.

Of course how you simplify and abstract that sort of thing down to game mechanics is an issue, but the basic conceit should be that cyberspace is not separate from ordinary space, and that cyberspace tags are most often used to add potentially useful data to physical objects.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 7:59 pm

For melee vs ranged, all of the iconic cyberpunk fiction has notable sequences of both melee and ranged combat happening. (Priss getting gunned down vs Roy Baty beating the snot out of Deckard, Molly from Neuromancer fighting with finger-razors, Hiro Protagonist using his katana to block Raven's spear in Snow Crash, the kink-spring guns vs Emiko's barehanded slayings in The Windup girl, etc, etc)

There is no compelling reason to nerf either in the game design.

Characters should want to use guns when they're in the open, when the opponent is physically stronger and tougher, and when the noise of gunfire or the chance of stray bullets isn't a concern. They should want use melee when they are in cramped quarters, when they are physically superior to the opponent, and when they need to keep things quieter and more contained.

The misplaced "realism" of SR4 where I can burstfire someone twice with a complex action, but only use my magical kungfu to kick them once with the same type of action should be scrapped in favor of a more universal set of mechanics.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:04 pm

Leress wrote:
tzor wrote: Strange things start to happen, including the following:
Emperor penguins explode for no known reason - it may be tech or it may be odd magic - used in warfare.
Dolphins are finally taught to speak a human language, but it turns out that they have the most god damned fucking filthy minds of any creature on the planet.

So you want Prinnies and a pervy version of Darwin from SeaQuest?

The penguins come from The Federal Republic of Omigodtheykilledkenny while the dolphins come from the The Palentine, both a part of the Antarctic Oasis region where my own nation of Retired Werepenguins resides. The Palentine tends to role play towards the Girl Genius side with a side order of Pittsburg, where the player is from. The dolphins have debated in the World Assembly (formerly the United Nations unil the real UN issued a cease and desist order to the owner of the simulation) on a few occasions. Unlike Darwin, these are military dolphins.

I totally left out the real guns of the region, the Stripper Commandoes (probably inspired by a bad Buck Rodgers TV remake, these female commandoes can wreck the moralle of any muslim force), (also available - a male stripper unit), gay spray (which actually exists ... a battle field aphrodiesac that makes anyone want to have sex with the nearest person they see), and, well, a frigging death star hovering right over the south pole.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:15 pm

Frank, if you're tossing the Shadowrun IP, why have elves and dwarves in a setting where transhumanism is practically the norm and hypochondroplasia and pygmies actually exist?

I'm cool with the fey court making a (re-) appearance as the return of magic weakens the boundaries between Earth and its meta-planes. In that case playable faeries are basically a requirement. And I'm cool with contagions like vampirism and ghoulishness (as long as they're balanced for play).

But non-humans should be non-humans, and metahumans should be engineered. Not some kind of random demethylation of magical DNA.

If anything, I'd take inspiration from Man After Man, which indeed has genetically engineered ocean dwellers (as well as more bizarre things).

K · Post by K » Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:20 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:For melee vs ranged, all of the iconic cyberpunk fiction has notable sequences of both melee and ranged combat happening. (Priss getting gunned down vs Roy Baty beating the snot out of Deckard, Molly from Neuromancer fighting with finger-razors, Hiro Protagonist using his katana to block Raven's spear in Snow Crash, the kink-spring guns vs Emiko's barehanded slayings in The Windup girl, etc, etc)

There is no compelling reason to nerf either in the game design.

There really isn't any reason to nerf melee. I mean, with faster than human speed and a computer in your head calculating bullet trajectories and reflex movement, dodging bullets is not even a deal. That's before you account for the fact that greater than human strength and mass and full-body armor of the future should render bullets pointless.