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...

Liquid Swords 1: Betamax Blades

A post all about swords. In the future!

So I've been away from this blog for awhile, although not for any special reason. Apparently some months I come home from the gym and want to write thousands of words about Neuromancer or Weird Fantasy New Mexico, and other times I just want to spend my free evenings reading a bunch of books about people shooting each other in the future. And even one book about people not shooting each other in the future, which seems like a pretty radical notion. I even took a (needed) break from the Shadowrun campaign.


And then, just as I was ready to return to the world my computer broke. Woop woop.

So now my laptop is working again - sort of - the time has come to write something! There's lots to do - Alienation follow-up posts, Aviationpunk, a whole bunch of stuff about Shadowrun and Dungeons and Dragons and cyberpunk warfare... or I could just write a post about futuristic swords.

Because futuristic swords! Because, to quote Snow Crash, swords need no demonstration.

This post is going to cover the setting assumptions that might allow a character in a science fiction game to actually carry a sword and not look like a sociopath or an idiot or a sociopathic idiot, and then follow up with a survey of different futuristic swords from monoblades to cheap plastic terror weapons and everything in between! 

Dishonored's beautiful, industrial sword

Review: The Gaean Reach (Pelgrane Press)

Years ago, someone named Quandos Vorn did something terrible to you, and you've sworn to destroy him. Since that dark day, you've prepared yourself to hunt and confront this dread individual. Now you're finally ready. 

Pelgrane Press has a new RPG out, set in Jack Vance's Gaean Reach universe. I couldn't be more invested in a game, so it was difficult to write an objective review of the pre-order PDF! Luckily, I found a lot to like with only a few reservations. 

Notably, i'm judging this game by how well it reflects the original stories, since they're among my favourite novels. That said: given the violent, mannered atmosphere and the simple rules, I'd be tempted to use this for a game set in 1840s Santa Fe...

Most of the potential readership of this blog probably know Jack Vance as the writer of the Dying Earth series, an enormously influential fantasy short story sequence which had a huge influence on the early development of Dungeons and Dragons.

I'm afraid to say I've never gotten around to reading the Dying Earth, although I intend to as soon as possible. For me Jack Vance means science fiction: Araminta Station, the Demon Princes sequence, Ports of Call, Showboat World, the Alastor Cluster sequence. These books bear little comparison with other fiction (maybe Fritz Leiber's dry wit, maybe Ursula Le Guin's strange cultures, maybe Cordwainer Smith's wild re-imagining of the human condition...). In the Gaean Reach, characters devote themselves to politesse, artistry and mordant wit, along with one final motivator: revenge. Revenge comes in all shapes and sizes in Vance: from Kirth Gersen's sociopathic quest against the crime lords who destroyed his village in the Demon Princes through the very personal collision between family members in Trullion: Alastor 2262, right up until Myron Tany's frankly laughable vendetta against his great aunt in Ports of Call. 

In Vance's novels, to quote the RPG: "heroism unfolds within a spare, and unsparing, moral vision."

For myself, I have a vendetta against Pelgrane Press. Specifically, they keep taking my money. Night's Black Agents, Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars are all fine games - i'm an unashamed fan of the GUMSHOE system. I've never actually read or played the Dying Earth RPG, so this is my first experience with the Skulduggery system (this game combines the two).

After completing this review i'm going to locate Robin D. Laws by searching through an intricate archive of punch cards. I'll pursue him all the way to the interstellar masquerade down by Sailmaker Beach... where I'll probably die, because he's considerably more erudite than I.

EDIT: So a few times in the review I brought up formatting and proofreading errors. Chris Huth got in touch with me a few hours after I posted this and I quickly established that 80% of those problems were only happening in Nitro Pro 7 and not, say, Adobe. I didn't think to check because I've never had that kind of problem before. However! I feel I ought to state that those formatting errors might be unique to the 8 people reading this game on a weird piece of business document formatting software, and I've changed the review below to reflect that.

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!

Ruralpunk 3: 10 more locations

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)

Ruralpunk 2: 10 Locations

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