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...
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.
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!
I was going to write a long article about the Ruralpunk opposition, but I don't have the time. Instead, here are some more locations!
1. Animal Pharm
A farm devoted to genetically engineered animals - spidergoats, phatcows, narcollamas... probably has heavier fencing and more cameras than the average farm, to prevent theft and propagation of GMO creatures into the wider environment.
People: Pharmer, ecoterrorist, animal uplifted by a rogue doolittle virus/experiment and out for revenge
2. Rectenna Forest
A forest of alloy trees, miles wide, receives a low energy microwave transmitted from solar power collectiors in orbit. GEV smugglers love to hurtle through these at high speed, as the microwaves confuse all sorts of sensors...
People: mechanic, automated guard, high-tech smuggler (for about a minute and a half)
This post is all about futuristic rural locations that can be dropped into cyberpunk (or Traveller, for that matter!) games. The two black and white images are both from the 1968 edition of Kansas Farmer. Together with the image on the cover of Keith Roberts' Grain Kings short story anthology, they provide wildly inappropriate illustrations for this post - too Big Science, too Hugo Gernsback by far. I like them. Fuck it - It's my blog, I'll be as inconsistent as I like (and as needlessly sweary and belligerent).
(My friend Kasper, when told I was writing "10 ruralpunk locations", asked "Is one of them a small town at this point replaced entirely with spies? [...] It's a cold war in miniature, hidden beneath smiling folksey farmer types." I'm getting too predictable!)
1. FORTIFIED TRUCKSTOP
It's bandit country. A local PMC has a fortified caravansarai with repair facilities, high walls, a greasy cafe. A discrete, cheap brothel hides nearby. Guides and hired guards wait with light vehicles and motorcycles to head out with passing convoys.
People: harassed waitress, meth-head pimp, farmboy looking to hitchhike his way to the rebel base, trucker, robot truck saboteur in disguise.
2. DRONE MAINTENANCE DOCK
A small but important business out in the sticks, the drone maintenance dock services dozens of autonomous vehicles from crop-dusters to trucks. A small team of techies drive out to find malfunctioning vehicles and bring them in.
So the important thing for 'runners to remember about these places is that they have equipment capable of fixing vehicle sized drones, which are functionally pretty similar to vehicles. They have metal 3d printers and tools onsite. People don't question strange robots rolling in and out of them, particularly in regions where self-made people are in the habit of designing their own robots.
This is also where the local militia prints their fleet of recon drones.
People: yokel outlaw tech, farming drone programmer, militia rigger
Cyberpunk is an urban tradition, concerned with cities in all their cosmopolitan, progressive chaos. Cities have people, giant corporations, fashion. They attract the young characters who dominate mid-1980s science fiction. Cyberpunk exists in a world of identikit airport hotels, clubs and office towers. More than half the world's population lives in the Metroplex, rising far higher than that in the developed world.
All of which makes the rural environment a more compelling as an alternate setting to plunge jaded 'runners into, even if they aren't Cyberpunk 2020 nomads. Based on my mantra of trying to make the familiar strange by adding ten years and a little advancing tech, this series will contain lots of notes towards running a science fiction rural setting.
