Six more Bounties on the Board (Ruralpunk Edition)

Flush with cash after the hacker crackdown in Florida, our intrepid cyberpunk era bounty hunters... probably spent it all on booze and cyberware, because genre conventions. That means a road trip!

These bounties all have a Ruralpunk whiff about them (marijuana, pig slurry and coal dust!). This can be attributed to my usual obsessions, and the fact I'm half way through an Elmore Leonard book set in Kentucky.

Featuring: Dog Fighting! Terrorism! Cheerleading!

1. Nancy Fry
Price: $4000
Wanted by: City Police

Nancy Fry is a ripperdoc with an unusual speciality: designing, producing and installing cyberware for fighting animals, particularly dogs. She had a hidden clinic set up in the city, with 3d printers for the materiel and a surgery centre. 

Now she's on the run after animal rights activists located her base of operations and trashed it, revealing it to the police in the process. Right now she's up a strip-mine blasted mountain with the country-Frys (less refined, more inbred than the city-Frys) waiting for the police to forget about her. Her priority is to replace her equipment. The problem isn't money, but acquiring unregistered machines and setting them up somewhere private. Entrepreneurial Bounty Hunters could use her to uncover an entire world of printer-hackers and electricity thieves. 

If you saw Nancy Fry walking down a suburban street you'd make her for a put-upon housewife. She has neuralware, cybereyes with magnification and elaborate tool fingers, but she relies on gun-totin' varmint-huntin' country-Frys for protection. 

10 Villainous Oceanpunk Factions

Picture from Brian Wood's The Massive, just about my favourite ongoing comic

Lately I've been building sandboxes: it's been far too long since I've run Cyberpunk 2020 and both me and some old friends are jonesing for it. Worldbuilding has always been one of my favourite parts of the hobby, and I'm always exploring new methodologies for creating a diverse and "alive" gaming environment. I'll probably have to write about them sometime!

The book which has held my attention lately has been the astonishing Darkness Visible espionage supplement for Stars Without Number. I'm a huge fan of what Sine Nomine publishing does, in just about any format and genre - Kevin Crawford's work has been a huge inspiration for what I've tried to do with this blog. Right now I'm especially besotted by the "maltech cult" generator in Darkness Visible - replace "cult" with "corporation" and it's been a perfect cyberpunk tool.

I really like the format SWN uses to provide sample factions, providing a brief paragraph and then brief hooks below - friends to help the party fight the faction, enemies to bedevil them when they launch their war, complications and things and places to centre the story. It's just the right level of detail for my purposes. I really like them as a framework to inspire the imagination.

One of my players has expressed a desire to head out to sea, so I've put some ideas together for expanding that world. It isn't a setting I've thought much about, except half my favourite sourcebooks seem to be set there: CP2020: Stormfront, Shadowrun's Cyberpirates, Blue Planet's Fluid Mechanics... even Transhuman Space's Under Pressure. It's an evocative environment which really takes the PCs out of their depths... zing. I want privateers, salvagers, radar seeking missiles, rusted ship wrecks, re-purposed military ships. I want to cover the big themes of oceanic stories in science fiction: environmental politics, claustrophobia, offshore freedom and strange underwater discoveries in the last Earthly frontier.

Presented below is the result of my faction brainstorming. Rather than just writing them out in a long list, I thought I'd experiment with the SWN faction format. Next time I do this I'll probably use Cyberpunk V3's "metacharacter" idea, and after that a completely different methodology...

Archetypal Adventures: four netrunner adventures in Sektor:K

All pictures from Starcraft II

Sektor: Korprulu is an eSports bar on the decaying fringe of a central European city, named after a location in the forgotten progenitor game of the eSports scene. Situated in a rusting Soviet-era industrial park, the Sektor is a metallic realm of varnished steel and fading Americana frequented by eSports fans flocking to live broadcasts of Korean, French and Argentine professional matches. 

It is also famous in a different scene: criminal hackers and fixers from across Europe know the bar as a place to wheel and deal and make connections, safe from absent police and protected from underground rivalries. This post covers four netrunning adventures originating in Sektor:K, concerning match-fixing, political violence and the viler side of unlicensed cyberware installation.

INTO THE NEUTRAL ZONE

Unbeknownst to most of the crowd, the staff and even the owner, the Sektor is located conveniently close to one of the pillars of the local 'runner economy: the underground "black medical" run by the Bandura clan, a Polish operation which manufactures and installs pirated, bespoke and illegal cyberware designs. 

The Bandura clinic attracts 'runners from across the region, possessing a reputation for discretion and competence. The clinic also has some notoriety within the same scene; the people who run it come across as totally amoral. In addition to 'runners - not exactly the most reputable people themselves - they have also been known to supply gear to paramilitary militias, football hooligan gangs and organised criminals. This last client is responsible for much of the special horror surrounding the clinic: the Bandura have been known to perform non-consensual surgery on various captives and "employees" of the Balkan mafias.

The proliferation of 'runners caused by the presence of the Bandura operation gives the Sektor its specific ambience. Situated close to a number of discrete hotels and far from regular policing, the Sektor is a convenient place to rest, recuperate and pass time while waiting for the mercurial Bandura to complete their work. Anyone who pursues a grudge or starts a fight anywhere near the clinic risks smashing the tacit agreements which keep the police away. The Bandura have promised to "blacklist" anyone who does so, so the Sektor remains neutral ground. The presence of so many cyber'd individuals attracts transhuman subculturalists and posers, reinforcing the chromed aura of the place.

Ruralpunk 6: a funny thing happened on the way through the checkpoint (and more!)

Ruralpunk returns!

I've already had some great feedback in about 8 different places about Alienation. In a few days i'll put up a summary post with changes and ideas for change. Until then...

We've had places. We've had antagonists. What we don't have is an entire post about checkpoints (just because you didn't know you wanted one, doesn't mean you didn't...). Pictures from Far Cry 2, a game which was 20% about fun and 90% about checkpoints. I stand by the maths in that sentence.

Ten encounters at the checkpoint

1. Antisocial behaviour stop. The police are looking for speeding cars, drunk drivers, personafix racers, and so on. A real risk to the PC's carefully constructed, expensive, fake identities...

Ruralpunk 5: even more antagonists!

Low born smugglers and fast living privateers

Any place with borders or commerce restrictions will have smugglers, whether they run international boundaries or bringing narcotics to the masses. Often, they move quietly between production centres in the hills and the big cities. In real life, Canadian marijuana smugglers go out into isolated, desolate regions and dig underground bunkers made of steel shipping containers to use as aquaculture centres growing cannabis - similar outfits become more and more common. Organisations looking to dodge patent laws, sales tax and chemical prohibitions all have these hidden manufacturing facilities out in the bush. 'Runners are often hired to find and destroy these organisations, or draw off the hunters. 

There are various kinds of smuggler. Quiet smugglers hide in plain sight, using mules or hidden compartments to avoid detection. Either that, or they use hidden routes through inhospitable territory. Surveillance drones have complicated things for that kind of smuggler, so many spend a lot of money acquiring hunting license IFFs or similar credentials to dodge border rangers. Still other groups use tunnels to move covertly past barriers. Quiet smuggling methods could fill an entire article, and frankly they aren't often antagonists. 

There's a second sort of smuggler who will exchange fire with 'runners, from the safety of a flying tank.

Ruralpunk Part 4: the Opposition

The Opposition

Part 4 of the Ruralpunk series concerns itself with the Opposition. I almost said "bad guys" before I remembered the genre.

A big theme of ruralpunk is abandonment. The world revolves around the cities. The countryside is left to the agricorps or the rebels or the poor - left out in the suburbs and fading exurbs after the oil crashes. Flooded towns wash away or are torn apart by heavy weather. The rule of law fades away. Let the first Mad Max film be your guide! (but perhaps ignore the second one - the post-apocalypse is a whole different thing)

Corporations

Oligarchs, oil-men and railway barons were stock enemies in Westerns, and work just as well here. All represent large scale corporate forces rolling over individualistic country folk - one of the reasons American crime fiction used to idealise bank robbers is because many rural people lionized them for fighting the banks that took their homes during the Great Depression.

A cyberpunk campaign can add frackers to that list. Games aping the neo-noir tradition might also choose a specifically Californian antagonist, old families in control of the water supply. (I rather like the idea of a setting in which a post-USA Californian nation is ruled by an aristocracy that combines the money of the hydrocracy with the style of Hollywood). 

Big Agriculture might be driving independent farmers off the land or dumping chemicals in the rivers. They might be using the deep countryside for hidden bases. PMC training camps are a definite possibility. Out here, there isn't much oversight to restrain their actions. 

Big cyberpunk corporations are big cyberpunk corporations. I'd prefer to spend this post talking about other enemies!