The Campaign Builder's Guild

Amazing games. While fantasy, half the game takes place in the future and it reminds me alot of the vibe developing here.

Well it may not surprise you, given my tendencies as a setting-crafter, that our games with Triple A often veer dangerously close to fantasy.

My players are so used to associating "altered perception" with magic or psychic ability that they keep expecting to pop into some alternate reality whenever they OD on dreamtabs or overovers (which has happened often enough).

I don't object to that on principle, but we're trying to make Cyberpunk, here.

agreed. when it comes to settings, I am a purest.

what about religion in the setting?

You can't kill faith, but you sure can fuck it up.

Religion still exists, but predominantly among the very disenfranchised no-circuit civvies on the one hand, and the fifteen-percenters on the other. For the no-circuits its a spiritual necessity. For the 15% it's a conceited classist affectation. Most circuit-civvies don't think about it at all. Solipsism is God.

One of the player characters is a member of the Church of Inspiration (she made it up herself). It's probably your conventional monolithic, disturbingly-litigious Happyology rip-off, seeing as she's always lamenting having to make good on her "payments to the church".

ALSO, "Lottery": My players don't believe for a second that the lottery is genuinely random. I always figured it was, but what if it isnt? If employment status is judged on merit you'd figure the government wouldn't want to keep that a secret, so there must be a more sinister motive!

The lesson is: don't decide everything up front. Player speculation is the most powerful creative tool in the GM's arsenal.

Quote from: Sir Digby Chicken CaesarEDIT: 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!

Definitely interested. If you watch Akira, pay attention to the character development of Kaneda; All of the Capsules started out like Kiddies, and Kaneda wasn't really an exception. Due to his involvements with the resistance, and the scene with Yamagata's bike, he turned more toward being an Alley Rogue. It's a good highlight on some of the differences between the two.

You've taken the 15% Law in an interesting direction. When I originally came up with it, I was thinking that the working would be resistant to mass job loss, and the law would prevent universal job loss. I didn't think that they would like not having to work. Either way, though, remember that this does severely stratify economic classes. The rich that don't have to work for a living no longer have to pay the poor that do have to work for a living; The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Absolutely. I usually emphasise the decadent and deranged behaviour of the 15%, whose access to all the degenerate pleasures of the age far outstrips that of civvies.

Everybody, civvie or fifteener, is paid a "wage" by the government. 15% are paid by their companies on top of that, according to their profession. No human being is paid for manual labour (called BodyWork because labour clones or "Bodies" do it instead). Purportedly, only jobs requiring actual brains are allocated to the fifteeners, but for the most part this means simple office drudgery. Even so, a corporate drone has, at the very minimum, twice the wage of a civvie.

Of course, not every business needs or wants clones at all. Any civvie can work in such an establishment, and be paid according to their employer's judgement. Maybe 30% of all civvies are paid a legitimate business wage. A great many more profit in some form from "criminal enterprise".

Other than that, the only above-board way to earn extra dosh is to go abroad as a "Private Contractor". Some folks come back rich beyond imagining and start their own corp or retire to an easy life of chem-addled narcosis. Most come back scarred, maddened, and cold as razorblades. They become stoop-troopers, alley rogues, downers or ghouls. Wherever they end up, don't fuck with them.

ALSO: having just purchased The Longest Journey (only $10!) I can say with confidence that yes, the cities are very much like that. (But, again, much cleaner)