The Campaign Builder's Guild

Reading Hell's Angels by that journalist guy. Giving some nice new potential perspectives on the Alley Rogues.

That actually does sound interesting. If I ever get the chance to pick up a copy, I'll definitely read it!

One day mum totally flips a switch. She quits her job, junks her car, burns her stash of tabs and cuts out her synch-link. Then she paints a big bright red Ω on the front of the apartment and wanders out into the no-circuit burbs. Two weeks later she's chucking molotovs in my window.

At one end you've got the restless counter-culture fetishists and the chronic trip-angsters who fly the long frown off their shoulders and their fright-bikes as a weak self-affirmation. Nobody really takes them seriously except the doe-eyed grammar punks. The Trip doesn't even bother stomping them: after all, fantasies of rebellion are just another kind of narcotic. (In some places you can even buy Ω paraphernalia. No real Ω would ever let that fly)

At the other end you've got your genuine hardcases: corporate defectors, burnt out brain-fried transbuzzers, furious old-worlders and dispossessed veterans... hell, even the occasional fifteen percenter gone one-eighty; that rare spontaneous convert. These people are not to be fucked with. At least not once they've found the real Downers. They can see right through your bullshit to the hollow place Trip's been drilling out of your core since before you were born. They get what Ω actually means and even if they're afraid, they're ready.

The problem (at least as far as we Downers peg it) is that there's no big bright line separating the fakes from the freaks. It's a long uncertain continuum and in the middle there's thousands of doubters, delinquents and hungry dreamers who want to believe in Ω but aren't sure what that means. So here's a few pro tips from a true Downer, for anyone who's even thought about thinking about Ω.

1 '" Ω means THE END
Ωs are going to destroy the Trip. That's our purpose. It's why we're still here. Some Ωs believe that's why they were born at all.

2 '" Ω identifies the lowest of the low
We welcome censure and contempt and disgust. It means Trip can't stand us. If we were being greeted with smiles and fanfares we'd be doing something very very wrong. WE ARE NOT HEROES.

3 '" Ω means getting your hands dirty
And living dirty. And fighting dirty. Hell, even thinking dirty. We aren't frighteners or alley rogues or stoop-troopers, but sometimes we cross their paths and worse. We don't even have the rogues' numbers, so that means creative thinking. Which is a euphemism for nasty.

4 '" Ω means standing on your own two feet
We don't go psi or cyber, we don't do stims and overovers '" don't even think about the ubertab. That shit comes from Trip, and however delightful the poetry of defeating your enemy with his own weapon, if you down the dub you aren't a Downer. The Low Ronins put it best:

'Ω means dying clear-eyed and clean-blooded with thirty bullets in your gut.'

Though I wouldn't phrase it quite like that myself.

quick and nasty dictionary

no-circuit burb - places without CCTV; the most dangerous places in the world, they say
transbuzzer - someone who has perfected the art of tab-consumption and thus achieved a state beyond permabuzz
old-worlder - someone who remembers what things used to be like, when people had "values"
trip-angster - someone who bitches about the trip but keeps hitting the funrooms and dreamtabs
long frown - Ω
frightener - what happens to any kiddie that doesn't straighten out into a civvie, luck out as a fifteen-percenter, or fall out as a hard buzzer, rogue or other fiend of the gutters
civvie - unemployed idiot with no hope
grammar punk - secondary school ne'er-do-well
Ω - omega
alley rogues -  the hardest of hardcore civilians (besides Ω, of course)
low ronins - the largest gang of alley rogues, with close ties to Ω
stoop-troopers - slang for the domestic police, so called because of their tendency to lurk on your front porch and look menacing
synch-link - an implanted ID card
stims - heighten senses but can cause permanent reduction as an aftereffect
overovers - increases spatial and numerical reasoning, followed by a serious crash
ubertab - like dreamtabs, but waaay deep; used to provide strange insights
psi - slang for electronic interfaces, especially implanted ones like the synch-link
cyber - cybernetics
Downer - a hardcore Ω

INFLUENCES THUS FAR:
Akira, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, Farenheit 451, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

HOW TO BUILD A PRISON WITHOUT WALLS pt 1

15%
We got so good at war that nobody would fight us, except the really crazy ones. Everything was ours if we wanted it so a lot of us just stopped working. When the clones went legal there was no big fuss. We pretend there was, like we made some kind of angry stand, but it was mostly the moralisers and right-wing crazies who had real objections and that didn't amount to much. There were more and more clones as we got more and more distracted by opportunity. Then when we had gone way down that road and the Triple A's looked at how hard things had been, they decided we would never go back. The 15% law makes everybody happy. A full seventh of us work if we want. Maybe we'll make high corporate, even A-grade. The rest of us can simply enjoy the world. It's ours, after all.

Synth
There's Corp synths and there's civilian synths. There's public and private sector. There's short and long-synapse brain classes; steady shape, A-license and farmables; and let's not forget the Turings. They're designed different, under numerous patents and with varying reliability. So there's that burning question: if they're always getting more sophisticated and the line between them and us gets smaller, but no-one's even thinking about awarding them personhood... maybe it's us we should be worried about?

Oh, hey, look what I found here. I may or may not add to this, but either way, I figured I'd give newer members a chance to peek.

great noir flavor, but still has nice strangeness to it. where was this? reminded me of gonzo journalism (Hunter S. Thompson) and then I read that you were reading Hells Angels. this could be fun. Ω is amazing.


science fiction in general seems to be hard to get going at the CBG.

We've had a few adventures in the Triple A setting (that's what our group calls this project). Here are a few points about Tone and Themes:

Dissolved Identity
You can change your face practically for pocket change, and filter out the meanness and madness of the world with a hundred different brand-name hallucinogens. Lacking profound human connection, people turn to synths for solace, company and sexual intimacy. Body Dolls are the modern prostitutes, soulless but vivacious and materially satisfying. Auto-moms and -dads will raise your children for you, when the little scamps aren't off in some digital wonderspace spoiling their formative years with psychedelic fiction.

Unpopular Revolution
Most people in the "civilised world" at least think they're happy. Videogames are vivid, cinemas are immersive, marijuana is legal (and now available in Extra Strength!) and the sex is generally pretty amazing. Rebellion has been commercialised. Now that Trip is virtually the government, the Government itself is a convenient scapegoat for all the public's ills. Laws are being passed and altered all the time, without compromising the monopolies. Status Quo is God.

Compilicity
There is endless and pointless warfare, genocide and profiteering... all on some anonymous continent far from our imagining. You can get rich on the spoils of that miserable game as a mercenary of Private Contractor, if you fail the 15% and despair of civilian mundanity. Even if you don't, remember that this whole vast edifice was built upon the bones of that war, and all your present joys are the fruit of so much suffering.

Suspended Time
We never pinned down the time period, and I don't think we will in the future. It's more effective to keep it nebulous, as though the drugged psychology of modern man and woman cannot properly process the decline of their society, can neither remember nor imagine a cleaner, better age.

Personally, I have this mental image of absolutely massive, dizzyingly tall, quasi-fortified cities surrounded by souless, dark, rain drenched expansises of automated factory wastes, sad looking farms - for both food and clones - and the occasional "truck stop", complete with floating signs flashing "FUEL", "LAST BODY DOLLS BEFORE STATION 113!!!", and "DISCOUNT DREAMTAB OUTLET" all in dreary, half-lit neon.

I think clones would be great if they looked like these androgynous, perpetually happy - always with a disturbing smile -, genetalia-less creatures with limited intelligence according to what they were grown to do.

Vehicles would be neat if they had somekind of organic appearance. Stoop-troopers would patrol the streets from hovering, urchin-shaped pods while a dozen searchlight beams swoop around it. Dark, bloated hover-blimps would project messages and advertisements from side-mounted screens, flashing messages like " :) BE HAPPY :)", "NEMO,,¢ DREAMTABS", and "APPLESOFT,,¢ A-POD XIIV, COMING SOON!", and red-eyed, serpentine AAA watch-drones, just making sure that you're safe.

You've actually had adventures in this? That's awesome! I'd love to hear about how they went.

I like the suspended time idea. Too much sci-fi has become rather uncomfortable by giving an explicit timeframe, such as the far-flung future of 2002. This also reminds me of an episode of Doctor Who, in which humans had been waging a war for [spoiler=countless generations]Or, more exactly, seven days. A progenesis machine was creating, by the Doctor's guess, about twenty generations a day.[/spoiler].

The dissolved identity thing also works as a wonderful highlight to the posthumanist clones. The sophistication of clones are bringing them to be more "human", while humans are culturally devolving to mindless consumers. I can see a lot that can be done with this.

Leetz, everything you just said is awesome.

I should however clarify that the modern cities (at least in the closed circuit burbs) are actually very beautiful. The streets are clean and filled with the music that spills from high-up terraces and streetside restaurants.

The stoop troopers are similarly non-threatening. They have the sort of large, dark physical presence that seems a paternal comfort when you are confident of your own good standing and a foreboding menace when you've got something to hide.

SDragon, dissolved identity quickly became established as one of the driving conflicts of the setting. So much of what's wrong with society stems from the insensitivity of a populace with no investment in their environment, no connection to the whole. Clones are getting smarter and smarter, adopting ever more the old trappings of human life, as the spiritually isolated citizenry increasingly long for traditional interaction... but the people still want their dreams and fantasies and hallucinatory paradises; so the ever-smiling clones, in their pantomime of our own better nature, become just another fiction in our tab-addled psyches.

That's why Ω exists. In opposition to the madness and psychological self-mutilation. Downers are so clear-headed that, to a society filled to the brim with users, they seem absolutely terrifying and implacable.

EDIT: I should also mention that in the no-circuit burbs there is often the stink of raw sewerage and always somewhere the sound of gunfire and crying children and the stoccato thrum of Alley Rogue 'cycles tearing through cold streets in their furious herds. The buildings are designed with terrible acoustics, so the noise seldom reaches the ears of upstanding civvies, and never the fifteen percenters.

ALSO: At the moment my chief visual inspirations are Minority Report, Blade Runner and Judge Dredd (the comic)

Streetside
it goes
SPAK SPAK SPAK
sounds more like a crack of a disciplinarian's untethered belt than a blast of gunfire
in the seconds before the screaming begins as the engine kicks up and the killer speeds away I even have a flash of schoolyard memory and flinch more at the image of teary eyed grammar kids with bloodied palms than at the sound itself
a few of the boys have their guns out by the time the '˜cycle swoops the corner and I'm scrambling for my own as Maddys pistol sounds its sharp rejoinder but the kid is gone and Styles is going quickly too in a bloodless heap at the bottom of the steps and Pukko is snarling at us to stop
there are children about
just some goddam junior Pukko says before I can ask the obvious question
we cram Maddy's mouth full of tabs that he coughs back up in a muddle of red froth
helluva shot he says and maybe he says it at the sky because he isn't looking at us and never once does before he bites it
Club Ambrosia
the entryway is an arch topped with crenulations and feathercapped patrolmen propping old rifles on their shoulders and it is the mouth of a snaggletoothed demon crowned with thorns and I think for a second it is even the exposed genitals of some anonymous exhibitionist and in watching its grotesque changes the sting of these dreamtabs becomes painfully acute
the doorman doesn't pause for us or spare us a glance and to us he is likewise irrelevant
he and we are peoples of altogether different elements
air and stone
we pass into cold corridors dripping sunlight and honey and the children playing in them are drenched gold and stupefied with its sweetness and through opened doors are half and fully naked men entangled with automata and drinking liquor fresh from vines that spurt from and split up the floor and there are women dressed like dogs and in congress with the images of dogs and yet others are suspended in silent machines wherein are played their fantasies and their own exultations at nameless personal pleasures ring loud above this place's pleasured chorus and we marvel at all of this as we pass and split a second tab and it is joyous
The Sympathy Room
it is the ugliest and the best of all rooms and it costs us more than we care to admit to secure it for a quarter of an hour
we bind ourselves in cables and fill our veins with sedatives while Caleb tinkers with the settings on our headsets and Artie gives us all sceptical looks and says so we're going to share your wasteland of a body ?
by choice ?
he's such a buzzkil
Caleb pushes Artie into his seat and says I know the peculiarities of physical intimacy are anathema to you but rest assured this will be worth your pathetic little four figure allowance and he sticks out his tongue and sidesteps a not very friendly punch before pressing a few more buttons and flicking a big yellow switch
now shut up
already I feel the beginnings of Caleb's own self unfurling within me or else I am unfolding instead within Caleb and I'm dropping the visor of my helmet into place and checking my gun one last time for the fiftieth time and my gut is afire with expectation and my heart isn't so much beating as shrinking with each small vibration before an unhuman resolution toward arbitrary harm and the tensing of my hand around the handlebar is VIVID so much more terribly vivid than it ever was when these were my own thoughts and my own flesh and a minute later I am stood before that rundown house and those unknowing men and the righteous kick of that long barrelled pistol and the
fuck no that's enough goddammit !
Stacey has wrenched away her headset and with it the wires that bind all our minds and the sudden shedding of that second self is so violent Artie even retches
I scream the hell was that for Stacey ! but she's crying and beating her head with a tiny fist and I can't make out what she's saying but she won't stop saying it over and over and Caleb only looks on knowingly and distant as if this is to be expected and when it occurs to him he switches off the machine while we help the poor thing out of her chair and make quickly for the exit
Streetside
in this city the children dream that they are men and all the artifice of their lives is configured after that very same myth so that they play at war in streets that are the shadow of our own bloody walks and even the girls who in another age would drag their loves from these horrid contests and counterfeit trials of masculinity are now likewise enamoured of brutality
when they spill each other's blood we laugh and wager on the tragedies to come but we know well the line that divides their shallow mimicry from our own perfected barbarism and we assume that they too know the line of division
these children do not
they are a crowd of youths so gaudy it profanes the senses and they discourse with the diction of mannered men upon subjects better suited to myself or to my fellow gunmen who are crouched like toads in these trash-cluttered shadows clutching pistols that scratch at our palms with their eager promise and share looks of hate and hunger and vindication
the boy is in front wearing the very same suit that betrayed his class and his allegiance and I glance at my brothers disbelieving and marvel that a child could be so stupid
clearly so
he is speaking even now of his success as though by a single act of murder he had somehow mastered death and there is triumph in his walk as he passes with a fools resolution beneath the arch that marks the truest boundary against our kind and our cruelty
we step out in unison and raise our weapons with the practice and efficiency of executioners
it is several insulting moments before he apprehends our purpose but his comrades are more gracious and retreat toward their familiar ward and the comfort of the everpresent EYE
oh shit he says
sharply put says Pukko
who is smiling brighter than the moon

Quote from: Sir Digby Chicken CaesarI should however clarify that the modern cities (at least in the closed circuit burbs) are actually very beautiful. The streets are clean and filled with the music that spills from high-up terraces and streetside restaurants.
...

ALSO: At the moment my chief visual inspirations are Minority Report, Blade Runner and Judge Dredd (the comic)

agree wholeheartedly with the insprirations. but the fact that the cities are clean and modern quickly reminded me of The Longest Journey, and to an extent Dreamfall.

No inspiration from: Demolition Man? (If you have clean cities)... or Fifth Element, or Total Recall?
--
For a dystopic one... Super Mario Bros move, perhaps? :D

Leetz: Those are games I've always wanted to play.

LD: The cities are clean but also, in a sense, stunning. Demolition Man's Los Angeles is an unimpressive sort of clean.

EDIT: arrogant as I am, I'd been playing around with this setting for about a year without giving serious attention to SDragon's chief inspirations. Now that I have, various elements have been cast into a new light. Ideas coming forthwith!