Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Economic Collapse

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Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Economic Collapse

Post by Username17 »

So for Frank Trollman's Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker, society needs to fall apart in a suitably Cyberpunk fashion without spending too much of people's willing suspension of disbelief (which they will have less of, because of all the magic.

Thoughts:
  • Resources are in general scarce and limit economic activity. You are not living in a post-scarcity world because you are constantly running into limited oil, limited aluminum, limited corn, an so on. The technology to fabricate everything everyone wants may exist, but there aren't enough raw materials to run the nano forges at anything remotely close to capacity.
  • With industrial capacity running at some low percentage of utilization all the time, unemployment is crazy high all the time. People talk about the "employment rate" - the literal percentage of people who have a job. It's like Africa is now, where actual labor utilization is like 20% and people are reselling things to each other on the street or just walking around looking for odd jobs that need doing.
  • The United States had a political collapse at the federal level. It was brought on by a combination of political gridlock and spiraling unemployment reducing the financial solvency of the federal government. And the federal government is just plain gone. That means no one is guarantying the American Dollar and greenbacks are no longer currency.
  • Each region in the former United States considers itself to be "The United States" for the most part. However, with the "real" federal government gone decades in the past, local governments speak for the US in absentia - like how Taiwan used to claim they spoke for the entirety of China.
  • The US Mints are all still issuing dollars, they just are doing so in the name of treasurers appointed locally. So different regions are in large part determined by which new dollars people have. The mints are in the places they actually are: Washington DC; Philadelphia, Fort Knox, Kentucky; West Point, New York; San Francisco; and Denver. These are the sources of money and the default capitals of the new organizational regions.
  • ...Except the places that actually have quasi-seceded, which are Utah, the Lone Star Republic, and Florida. Utah and Texas have made their secessionist ambitions pretty clear, ad need no further elaboration. Florida is now in federation with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and a couple other Caribbean islands.
  • ...And places that are low enough population that it doesn't make sense to deliver mail or provide currency at all: like Montana, which are just lawless zones like the Fallout wilderness, where people barter with bullets and fuel.
And that is how the US dissolves. Not with a bang, or with a war, but with a political failure that drags on long enough that regional governments have to form to provide basic services. Californians agree that they are in the US, and they agree that their capital is in Washington DC, but they still have a government in San Francisco that actually runs things. And officially it's a government in absentia. The one in New York makes the same claim.

And people will regard currency from Kentucky as foreign or even counterfeit if you try to spend it in the Denver zone.

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Post by sabs »

With the Federal Government Gone... which if you look at the Politics of the moment, and take them at the worse case, extreme scenario, isn't even that far fetched. What happens to the US Military? The FBI, ATF, Etc?

The Federal Government vanishing in a whimper isn't even that far fetched. You start with a Government shutdown, the Debt Ceiling gets hit, and not raised. The Federal Government all of a sudden runs out of money, and can't borrow more. They go on emergency what can we afford to pay. Military Pay gets frozen, Medicare/Medicaid gets Frozen, Social Security Checks stop going out. There's a political gridlock, it goes on for a couple of months, and then regular people start asking for their checks not to have taxes taken out. Small companies that needed social security spenders to keep them afloat go bust. Total Economic collapse. Now you need a reason for the Fed Government to not agree. The Republicans and Democrats have to be so short sighted they don't notice they've just destroyed the US Federal government, until it's already a corpse.

Regional Zones forming up makes perfect sense.
The Lone Star Republic, The Mormon State.
California might collapse into basically Los Angeles and the surrounding area, supported primarily by the Entertainment Industry, and the San Francisco Area. With the area in between turning into an unsupported No man's land. I think Florida might splint into 2 zones. The Panhandle would more likely form up with Georgia,Alabama and Mississippi. And the Peninsula (especially Miami) joining a Caribbean league. of some kind.
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Post by PoliteNewb »

sabs wrote:With the Federal Government Gone... which if you look at the Politics of the moment, and take them at the worse case, extreme scenario, isn't even that far fetched. What happens to the US Military? The FBI, ATF, Etc?
My thinking was that all that stuff either a.) reverts to the local/regional level or b.) gets privatized. Corporate armies and private security/LE teams are pretty standard cyberpunk fare.

You don't watch out for the FBI, you watch out for Lone Star and Blackwater...or if it is government, it's the Texas Rangers, the CHiPs, or the Danite League.

It would be interesting to see the degree to which the Balkanization affects things...Frank pointed out that they don't share currency. How about things like extradition or jurisdiction?
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Post by fectin »

Of course everyone shares extradition, thats a state-level function. Well, not the quasi-seceded states, but the ones which are "still the US" do. Probably you have to apply to those states as a representative of other states though, not as a federal authority. That means that you CAN be extradited for parking tickets, but not for counterfitting. Spiffy, no?

I like severe global cooling as a precipitating event. It makes everything more miserable, reduces resources as described, gives a little bit of a frontier vibe, and is full of delicious irony. Make it a sudden and disruptive event, and you don't have to even argue about how fast global climate change would have progressed. Maybe fluffwise, magic is endothermic?
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Post by TheFlatline »

I'd say that corporations and rich individuals privately fund a stripped down version of the US Military, and it basically becomes soldiers for hire under the guise of "protecting the interests of American Citizens". It's still a national army, it's effectively Blackwater. And a lucrative Blackwater at that.

Let's not forget another current trend that's starting to ramp up: Private corporations running prisons, along with the re-institution of debtor prison. When the federally protected commons get devoured since nobody is there to protect them, a lot of people are going to end up essentially slave labor to produce ultra-mega-cheap crap.

It's already sort of happening. Lockheed I believe was caught using prison labor to build missiles or something insane like that.

http://www.alternet.org/story/150777/de ... age=entire

And Wall Street Journal's article on Debtor's Prison, which scarily enough doesn't exactly have much regulating it right now:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 36610.html

With a weak/nonexistent federal government and privately held debtor prisons, I can easily see a new credit scam like the housing boom sweeping hundreds of thousands of people into what are essentially arcologies at 3rd world slave prices. With resources being scarce, this creates the "company store" scenario, which gets the workers deeper into debt and thus more indentured to the company.
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Post by TheFlatline »

sabs wrote: California might collapse into basically Los Angeles and the surrounding area, supported primarily by the Entertainment Industry, and the San Francisco Area. With the area in between turning into an unsupported No man's land.
Never happen. Los Angeles/Southern California isn't self-sufficient enough. It needs water from NorCal, the Colorado River, and Owens Valley.

Central California is some of the most fertile crop growing land in the world. With a scarcity of resources I simply don't see people abandoning farmland, especially with the California Aqueduct there to keep water flowing.

Northern California and the Sierras still have mineral and timber industries that are lucrative. Even Death Valley has silver and other mineral deposits here and there, not to mention the largest borax mine in the world.

Nah... if anything California would do it's damnest to merge with Nevada, at least taking over Reno and Vegas/Hoover Dam. It needs that water, and isn't above getting into a shooting war to secure that water. See the California Water Wars of the 20's.
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Post by Maxus »

sabs wrote: I think Florida might splint into 2 zones. The Panhandle would more likely form up with Georgia,Alabama and Mississippi. And the Peninsula (especially Miami) joining a Caribbean league. of some kind.
I was thinking of that, and I only have one beef.

Mississippi doesn't touch Florida, so you basically have Alabama and Georgia splitting the panhandle, and a border to the Caribbean League at the top of the peninsula or right below it.

Anyways, if I have any complaint about a governmental collapse in the States, it's that it makes the US take up a lot of page time to explain the current Fallout-esque factions (folks who want to go back to the old ways, folks who want a theocracy, folks who want a magic-based government, folks who want to plug in Wintermute and let it run shit for them, etc) and the rest of the world should be just as interesting.
Last edited by Maxus on Thu Jul 07, 2011 5:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Vebyast »

fectin wrote:I like severe global cooling as a precipitating event. It makes everything more miserable, reduces resources as described, gives a little bit of a frontier vibe, and is full of delicious irony. Make it a sudden and disruptive event, and you don't have to even argue about how fast global climate change would have progressed. Maybe fluffwise, magic is endothermic?
Better idea - it was a giant idiotic accident. Someone tries to use magic to fix the global climate, but they fuck up magnificently. Instead of using magic to scavenge carbon from the atmosphere or something else intelligent, they opt to set global weather patterns to what they'd been in 1950. Unfortunately, they forget to tell everybody else what they're doing, and someone's strategic magic division manages to cancel part of the weather magic. Everything goes to hell and the world plunges into an ice age. Carbon dioxide production falls as the economy tanks, industry takes the opportunity to rebuild plus magic and nano and minus CO2 production, and the situation is perpetuated.

This would ties handily into the stars-are-aligning backstory for the appearance of magic. As the stars get closer to convergence magic gradually becomes stronger and stronger. Initially only the US, the EU, China, and India have the resources to pull it off, and the first thing they do is wreck the climate. Then magic starts becoming strong enough for it to be useful in bigger industrial processes (steel production, say), which is coincidentally right when industry is rebuilding after world economy and government collapsing after the ice age. Only once that's all done and the government-by-corporations thing has settled down do individual mages start becoming powerhouses.

[edit: another thought] This would also give us some nice magical badlands, right on the borders of the counterspell. Picking China as the counterspell-caster because of its placement on the pacific jet stream, this would put a giant dead circle around China and Mongolia, through the mountains to the south, Russia to the north, and bits of Japan to the east.
Last edited by Vebyast on Thu Jul 07, 2011 10:06 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Jesus please don't make magic so powerful that it can control the weather for the entire planet. Please please please.
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Post by Vebyast »

TheFlatline wrote:Jesus please don't make magic so powerful that it can control the weather for the entire planet. Please please please.
It was the equivalent of the 1960's nuclear program. I don't really see a problem with it, given that every one of the components of the former US is going to have enough nukes sitting around to glass a continent. That's not even considering some of the more extreme cyberpunk tropes, either; Raven ran around with a freaking hydrogen bomb, for example.
Last edited by Vebyast on Thu Jul 07, 2011 10:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by tzor »

First of all, if you want to severely impact global climate, forget CO2; just blow something up! Yellowstone park is literally sitting on top of a super volcano that could easily plunge the world into an ice age if it decided to go super bang; that's how much reflective dirt it could throw into the upper atmosphere. And nothing says FUBAR USA like having that super caldera go nova. All it takes is a little magic sauce.

And best of all, it could be a FUBAR with all the best intentions; like trying to use magic to increase the electric output of the geothermal power plants around the park.
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Post by Grek »

Tzor has a very good idea there.
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Post by CCarter »

Related to the economic thing, some thoughts on currency?

Megacorps:
*some of the bigger megacorps may have their own scrip that they issue- potentially backed by a designated exchange rate for some commodity or for one of the 'official' currencies.
*Bartering with shares may be possible in some places.
*Slaves/fixed-price contract labourers might be a currency in some particularly evil place.

Multiple Currencies:
This brings up problems that there may be "official" exchange rate different to the black market exchange rate. There may also be monetary controls (a la Greece, if I understand it correctly) where you can't take money out of the country, or where when you wander into the zone, your cash is confiscated and converted to local money (assuming its not all just electronic - if superhackers are common, physical money may be the only way to do things?).
Different inflation rates/interest rates start making speculation a way to make money, and there's the possibility of adventures around corp/government actions to fuck up a regional economy to your benefit (borrow $40 million Denverbux, exchange them for Washington bucks, screw up Denver so the exchange rate goes down, then pay it back).
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Post by Vebyast »

I don't quite know about that; the Yellowstone caldera going off might be a bit too big. That wouldn't just cause governmental collapses; it would knock us straight back to the industrial revolution. Great for a steampunk game, not so great for cyberpunk unless you want an interregnum.

That's why I'm voting for a soft crop failure precipitated by a disastrous research project. The government can fix things up just by spending more money, but it's already been doing that for a while, and the money will run out eventually. Then the public-opinion problems caused by failed weather manipulation snowball into a general collapse, and you have a setting.
Last edited by Vebyast on Fri Jul 08, 2011 12:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by mean_liar »

I don't buy Florida joining a Caribbean league, unless it's in an exploitative sense where Miami is a financial hub with functioning infrastructure and the islands become satellite states run by governors beholden to the Panhandle interests.

Otherwise... why? Floridians are some of the most jingoistic pro-American anti-immigrants out there, and they're all either white trash or immigrants themselves. I can only see them ponying up to the Caribbean islands they now sneer at if it were something that fed into that sneering disdain.
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Post by K »

The important thing is to pull a Risk 2210 and lay down the wasteland tiles first. This tells you how important certain areas need to be and what problems arise .

So if you decide that Alaska is now a wilderness hellscape of were-people and megafauna, then those oil reserves are now unavailable and push a peak oil crisis.

If you decide that the oceans are now contaminated with Deep One magic poop or secretions and can't be safely desalinated for use by large populations, it makes water wars a much more serious situation.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Vebyast wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Jesus please don't make magic so powerful that it can control the weather for the entire planet. Please please please.
It was the equivalent of the 1960's nuclear program. I don't really see a problem with it, given that every one of the components of the former US is going to have enough nukes sitting around to glass a continent. That's not even considering some of the more extreme cyberpunk tropes, either; Raven ran around with a freaking hydrogen bomb, for example.
If I want a cyberpunk game where magic is all-powerful and wank off to super magic, I have Shadowrun.

As soon as you introduce the concept that magic can literally control the world, you've taken the technology approach to the game out back and put both barrels into it.

The fact that you equate magic with hydrogen bombs and don't see the problem with putting the two on the same playing field shows the problem: If you want players to all tool around with hydrogen bombs, or the capability to tool around with hydrogen bombs, then your idea is fine. Otherwise making magic the cyberpunk version of the hydrogen bomb is a bad, bad idea.

Edit: Furthermore, why does everyone have to jump to magical Armageddon and over the top supernatural shit to get to a dystopia? If we ever do end up in a dystopia, it won't be from transhumanity or a magical catastrophy or any other deus ex machina. It'll come from humans being greedy and selfish and stupid. Peak oil, climate change, and controlled mass media will get you there perfectly fine. Maybe HIV up and mutates into an airborne strain that fucks billions. Maybe some fuckhead politician decides to actually try to enact Atlas Shrugged and all hell breaks lose. Maybe some religious extremist group gets ahold of one of the bugs some country or another is developing and unleashes it.

Because if we're going for a dystopia, saying that magic did it is actually saying "without a Deus Ex Machina, we'll be alright as a civilization."
Last edited by TheFlatline on Fri Jul 08, 2011 2:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by tzor »

mean_liar wrote:I don't buy Florida joining a Caribbean league, ...
Oh I can buy into that. The core hub of Florida is Miami and the core hub of Miami is the nth generation Cuban population. Almost everything about this population is based on the current regeme in Cuba; it's difficult to extrapolate from current trends the relations once this is removed but my gut feeling is a greater sence of pushing Cuba to prominence. You might even call that the Hemmingway Hegemony eminating from a newly revised Cuba (with the special secret sauce ... ethanol petrolium from sugar cane) using it's newly discovered economic dominance and "new" revolution to cajole other islands in the region to join suit.

This would, by its very nature include the Yucatan penisula in Mexico.

This would, by its very nature form a choke hold on any potential shipping routes from the gulf states. That includes the Panhandle.

In case you didn't know Miami and the Panhandle don't get along with each other. My ten years in the Florida Knights of Columbus showed me how they deep down hate each other.
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Post by fectin »

TheFlatline wrote:
Vebyast wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Jesus please don't make magic so powerful that it can control the weather for the entire planet. Please please please.
It was the equivalent of the 1960's nuclear program. I don't really see a problem with it, given that every one of the components of the former US is going to have enough nukes sitting around to glass a continent. That's not even considering some of the more extreme cyberpunk tropes, either; Raven ran around with a freaking hydrogen bomb, for example.
If I want a cyberpunk game where magic is all-powerful and wank off to super magic, I have Shadowrun.

As soon as you introduce the concept that magic can literally control the world, you've taken the technology approach to the game out back and put both barrels into it.

The fact that you equate magic with hydrogen bombs and don't see the problem with putting the two on the same playing field shows the problem: If you want players to all tool around with hydrogen bombs, or the capability to tool around with hydrogen bombs, then your idea is fine. Otherwise making magic the cyberpunk version of the hydrogen bomb is a bad, bad idea.
Nuclear Bombs are in the world today. Very few people get to use them.

But if you want that scenario (me, I like the irony of it), just postulate a huge spike in magic as it "burst free", and a steady trickle thereafter.
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Post by Maxus »

How about part of the collapse was changing weather conditions (whether deliberate or natural or unexplained) in the Midwest which blighted or dried out a lot of land and cut the States' food by a bunch. Meat and the like become very scarce because to keep everyone fed, they have to turn pastures into actual agricultural fields.

(Would mean the most common meat is chicken and even that would be expensive, but ANYWAY)

That puts a lot of people out of work and gives the US not much of a margin for their food supply, and this situation help put the country closer towards economic and social collapse, especially with people bitching that the current administration isn't doing enough because, hey, look, ten years ago I could go buy a pack of T-bone steaks and pork ribs! Now I can't!
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

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Post by fectin »

What if currency is backed by something fungible, but not portable: each credit is redeemable for one day of lodging and filling meals for one person at most companies' housing. Not high end housing though; basically just barracks-style.
If it's cold outside, that makes earning at least 1CR/day vitally important.
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Post by jadagul »

The "magic to fight global warming" thing could work. The point of the hydrogen bomb comment, I think, is to suggest that, say, the US had basically all its magicians working on a way to fix climate change. But they didn't tell anyone. And then Russia and China noticed that some group of mages in the US were dicking with their weather patterns, and got a huge group of their mages together to dick right back. And the whole thing went wild and fucked the world climate patterns.

This has the added advantage that we have an instant credibility loss for two or three major governments, greasing the slide into anarchy.


TheFlatline wrote: Because if we're going for a dystopia, saying that magic did it is actually saying "without a Deus Ex Machina, we'll be alright as a civilization."
And you've succinctly explained why neither this game nor AWOD really grabs my attention that much. Cause, I mean, won't we?
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Post by Vebyast »

TheFlatline wrote:The fact that you equate magic with hydrogen bombs and don't see the problem with putting the two on the same playing field shows the problem: If you want players to all tool around with hydrogen bombs, or the capability to tool around with hydrogen bombs, then your idea is fine. Otherwise making magic the cyberpunk version of the hydrogen bomb is a bad, bad idea.
I, like any chemistry or physics major, know most or all of the physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering required to make a nuke. All I need is several billion dollars to actually buy uranium, build and run an enrichment plant, machine the parts, and assemble it. It's not a problem that I know that because I need a major government behind me to fund it.

Similarly, in magic-cyberpunk-land, I'd know most of the magic for controlling the planet's weather. I'd just need several billion dollars to actually buy the foci, build and close a gigantic magic circle, assemble all the ritual components, and cast the thing. It's not a problem that I'd know that because I'd need a major government behind me to fund it.
TheFlatline wrote:Edit: Furthermore, why does everyone have to jump to magical Armageddon and over the top supernatural shit to get to a dystopia?
A) Because it's cool.
B) Because we need an actually catastrophic event to make sure that the world's four largest tech corporations aren't Wal-Mart, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Electric. All but Wal-Mart are older than WWII, and GE survived WWI and the Great Depression. They wouldn't have a hard time surviving the balkanization of the US and China. Mere socioeconomic collapse won't clean the trademarks out of the setting, so we need something a bit stronger.
C) Because we need geographically significant wastelands, as K states, and some of them have to be magical. They also have to be nearly completely uninhabitable for a while so the magical stuff has time to establish an ecology without interference. That means we already need a major physical catastrophe, and it's easiest to do everything in one go.
Last edited by Vebyast on Fri Jul 08, 2011 3:44 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

K is totally right about laying down the wasteland tiles. That should be done fairly early in the process. However, I can't condone "global cooling" or anything else done that is "wildly counterintuitive for no purpose other than irony" because you're already stretching suspension of disbelief really hard by having magic and cyberpunk. If you throw in contrarion events just to fuck with the reader's expectations, you're spending suspension of belief that you can't afford for a joke that won't be funny for very long.

Every time Shadowrun made an "ironic" country it hurt the setting. Yes, Red Skins forcing White People to leave their homes and head East was funny, but it was stupid, and it hurt the setting. You do not want to go there. Ironic setting turns stop being funny after they are mentioned a couple of times, and then they'd better be fucking plausible given the conceits of the rest of the setting or they become jarring.

Now as for Miami merging with Cuba and getting Puerto Rico thrown into the mix, why not? Miami has been trying to conquer Cuba for forty years, the moment that governments in Washington and Havana stopped being able to stop them from doing that, they'd just go through with it.

As for Europe, Africa, SEAsia, and China falling apart into Cyberpunk dystopia, yeah that needs to be laid down. The general level of the financial system, militarism, and magical development need to be put up for the whole world right off. However, the actual magical traditions and political parties and arcology locations don't need to be specified for places other than the main starting character locations in the primary book. And you have to devote a big chunk of the plotline to describing how the US falls apart, because it is the most powerful country. Your future history has to describe how and why it is carving up China and Russia too, and to a lesser extent should do something about France, Germany, an Japan.

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http://www.webscription.net/p-770-the-l ... urion.aspx
How about an combination of an virus and less (or more) sun activity.
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