I search the [Cyber] Corpse

The other day I walked past the most embarrassed man in southern England. He was wearing a kevlar vest, a riot helmet and carrying a complicated neo-club in one hand. The other hand was cuffed to a fortified payroll briefcase. He was standing next to the doors of an armoured van belonging to an internationally regarded security firm, clearly locked out of his own vehicle.

The van was screaming - well, loudly enunciating, like a female Avery Brooks - "HELP, HELP. VEHICLE UNDER ATTACK! PLEASE CALL THE POLICE. PLEASE CALL THE POLICE" loud enough to penetrate the walls of the bank across the street. By the time I left the bank minutes later three police cars were hurtling down the high-street, past laughing office workers and startled grandmothers.
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So my colleague in OSR-damaged cyberpunk Geist has a new blog: Neural Archive. He's been putting together ideas (and beautiful pages) for a cyberpunk City Kit - we've been talking Vornheim and science fiction and...

There's brainstorming on-going at the VFTE forums.

There's a small sample to the left. I'd encourage you to visit the blog and see the full pages, let them speak for themselves. Check it out! Add him on G+ (where he goes by the name "Geist" because he's more mysterious-than-thou).

There's lots to say about the a "city kit" for cyberpunk. That's for another time. Right now, this post is all about corpses.

Fancy looting some bodies before the meat wagons and the scavengers reach them? Need a D66 loot generator?

The main take-away from writing - and this has been a brainstorming session, more than anything else - is that it could/should have been so much longer...

Here's a printable googledoc.

ROLL A D66.

D66	I SEARCH THE [CYBER] CORPSE
11	Red candle dedicated to Santa Muerte, to find and hold onto love.
12	Work-in-progress death haiku scrawled on scrap paper.
13	Pack of “most-wanted” playing cards marked with faces identifying members of organisation allied or affiliated with a PC (3 of Hearts).
14	Apparently real Human eyeball in a climate controlled, completely transparent jar. Fixed angle. Residential address on packet.
15	Half-taken packet of pills for virulently contagious illness.
16	Competition winner’s back-stage pass to highly rated late night talk show.
21	Unmarked Clip-on IFF tag. Bearer identified as friendly until identified as hostile by human oversight by autonomous drones owned by 1-2 Police, 3-4 Major Corporation, 5-6 Local Cartel. IFF code expires after D3 days - requires quantum passcode provided by central server to update.
22	Tourist’s guidebook to this sprawl written in foreign language.
23	Body-lotto ticket - 25% chance that the owner’s death resulted in a winning number.
24	Gold plated bullet inscribed with chintzy script, serial number “2 of 5.”
25	Uncomfortable quantity of pink hair dye.
26	Scrawled jelly-fish recipe - motherly handwriting, champion taste.
31	Gold candle dedicated to Santa Muerte, to find wealth and prosperity.
32	Bag of contaminated drugs, three doses.
33	Annotated copy of Neuromancer. Line [D20] of page [3D20 + D12] marked for special attention.
34	Glass vial containing a live spider and eggs, not native breed.
35	3d printed 40mm figure of the a PC’s contact, exaggerated physical characteristics.
36	Donate a goat gift voucher.
41	Photograph of PC printed on folded paper.
42	Illegally fabricated copy of police-issue robo-cab hailer thumb - can use to flag down passing robo-cabs and ride for free. Roll D6 - on roll of 1, codes have updated and vehicle secretly alerts police, locks riders inside when they arrive.
43	Emergency Medical Aid membership card belonging to person with different face, gender and complexion to the corpse.
44	Key to railway safety deposit box.
45	Brightly painted pollution filter mask, gang colours.
46	Unlocked datastick containing 200GB of cult Sludge Metal albums.
51	Strictly offline samizdat political pamphlet for luddite political organisation.
52	Shark Fetus in a test tube hung from a necklace.
53	Zen Prayer Beads - tactical ‘runners brand, non reflective material.
54	Creepy Lover’s Pendant - half of a matched pair which changes colour depending on physical distance from the bearer of the other.
55	Vial of water from the Colorado River, religious iconography.
56	Love letter from a ranking Syndicate leader.
61	Pristine physical copy of a classic album, obsolete format.
62	1kg packet of “flour” - (covert biological feedstock, identifiable by tech and medical specialists). Pre-programmed shape will emerge if introduced to the correct household chemical.
63	“Fitbit” style fitness device - hacking device will reveal detailed record of former owner’s movements, heart-rate and drug intake for the last D3 weeks.
64	Keycard and address for a very hidden, very private cyberware clinic.
65	Expensive condoms with STD detection sensors. Phone number scrawled on back of packet.
66	Black Candle devoted to Santa Muerte, to bring death and vengeance upon one’s enemies.

It's only theft if he was innocent. Or still alive.

Electronic Environmental Hazards

It's been a long time!

(...no further comment...)

In the time I was away, my hobby time (such as it was) was mainly taken up with D&D of various sorts. In particular, my friend's Beyond the Grid campaign really opened my eyes to the uses and abuses of random encounter tables in ways I hadn't ever considered before. 

I've been experimenting.

I've wanted to do a table full of electronic hazards for a while now, covering everything from contactless pickpockets to AR vandalism to suburban geo-fencing.

This table was originally a D30 table covering all of the above. By the time I finished the process, I'd realised that the environmental hazard and the human hazard tables really had different potential uses. So I've split them up into two different D20 tables. You get an extra ten entries for your nu-buck! Well, you would if you were paying a nu-buck. 

This post contains the Electronic Environmental Hazards table, covering all sorts of spam zones, wireless outages, electronic fortresses and scary advertising systems. It could be so much longer! The Electronic Criminal Hazards table is finished but will be posted in a day or two because I'm a tease like that. 

One of the reasons I separated the two tables is because I realised how much potential the environmental hazards had for really, really interfering in surveillance, chases and casing targets. I think that would be the best time to roll on this table!

Quite a lot of this post was inspired by this BLDGBLOG blog post and several books about "fortress urbanism." I really do recommend reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz for anyone developing a cyberpunk setting, and not just because it was credited in the back of William Gibson's Virtual Light.

Two final notes - my view of a city is clearly inspired by London, where you can turn a corner and be in a completely different environment. The increasing privatisation of streets and gated communities reinforces this even further, when you can enter a shopping street with different effective laws to the rest of the city.

The other thing: sometimes these events might seem inappropriate to certain parts of the city. Just remember that surveillance gear is cheap (cheap enough that I know a low income single mum who uses a camera to check on her kids when she's at work...). Acoustic gun-fire sensors might surround any church or cinema. A syndicate might have installed hidden geo-fences to confuse the police. A poor neighbourhood dominated by a pious minority is just as likely to have a morality enforcement system as a preppy gated community (and so on).

20 ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS

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: the Medtech

The Medtech is a classic cyberpunk role which presents a number of difficulties for the players and GMs who deal with them. I didn't want to talkabout those problems in this post, but five abortive attempts at writing this introduction have proved I can't do that.

If you want to skip the stuff about theory and go straight to the adventure hooks and the "10 Medical Emergencies" table, scroll down below the jump!

Littering the galaxy, one sweaty footprint at a time!

The universe is full of trash. There's evidence to suggest life is ten billion years old young in the galaxy at large, with a four billion plus history on Earth. The lifetime of a person or even an interstellar civilisation is nothing. A million cultures could have emerged in that time, expanded across dozens of systems, destroyed themselves with decadence or plague or murderbots or relativistic kill vehicles or trans-sapient speciation or simple ennui (or an ascent transcendence), been forgotten. 

Ruins on Earth, battered by the wind and pollution and microorganisms and looters, can last thousands of years. Here's the thing - on an airless world, or in airless space, or even on atmosphere'd worlds abandoned and lifeless for many centuries - ruins and litter will stand for eons. Neil Armstrong's footprints will last forever (if they aren't disturbed by tourists, which they will be soon). The Voyager probe will continue to drift for an eternity, lost between systems (until it collides with a Sirian generation ark and kills twenty trillion electronic personalities stored within its transport pods). 

The kind of evidence space-faring civilisations leave behind need not be as grandiose as any stark black rectangle or space ark. Any culture embracing regular spaceflight is going to leave behind footprints, mining camps, abandoned machines... even if "regular spaceflight" meant a few atomic rockets burning around a single solar system.