![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_monetized_mind This post is meant for information explaining the setting of Iteration/Suffix, and how to incorporate it into the game smoothly.
The Core Tenets: So Cyberpunk has some things that are generally required for it to function, and the things listed here are setting-wide ones that affect all of the SRWU universe. The internet must exist, and be global in its reach. Cyborgs must be possible, though they don't have to be common. And lastly, since we're going for more of a Gibson feel here, transistor computers should be the default, not quantum. I don't think that these are going to be hard to do at all-I'm under the impression that they're the default assumptions for the universe. The cyborgs one is kind of weird, but if only one out of every 10,000 people is cyborg (let's face it, being a cyborg is weird and expensive), that's plenty for our purposes.
The Sprawl(s):So the key setting of a lot of cyberpunk stuff is a sprawling, dystopian city where corporations wield more power than the government and everything's cloaked in a dim twilight due to massive smog and air pollution. The good news about the Sprawl and setting integration is, it doesn't have to be the whole world! For this canon I'd like to set aside 3 regions defined as the Sprawl. Some options are listed below; all are either megaregions here in real life, or are rich enough and well connected enough that they could become huge banking and computer sectors easily enough.
-Taiwan
-Malaysia
-Singapore
-Hong Kong
-Tokyo
-Dubai
-Turkey
-American East Coast Megaregion (Massachusetts to Virginia)
-American Southern California Megaregion (San Francisco, LA, etc.)
-American Gulf Coast Megaregion (Houston, Baton Rouge, New Oreleans, etc)
-American Cascadia Megaregion (Seattle and some other places I don't know nearby)
-any of Europe's "bananas"
Because other canons are likely to use some of these areas, I think the best choice here is Dubai, Taiwan, and the American Southern California region. The american ones are the mostly likely to be used by other canons, and I can shift to gulf coast or Cascadia easily enough-but Southern California is traditional. So many cyberpunk novels take place there. SO MANY.
Politics
The Sprawl (all of them) are in a rather odd sort of political state, where either by corruption, government sanction, or legally purchasing the government, corporations have more effect on the day to day life of people than the government. Corporations maintain their own security forces, including mecha, and routinely engage in cold-war style espionage and skirmish matches with each other.
Life in The Sprawl is not that great. Wealth inequality is so massive as to be downright dystopic, and there's basically no upward mobility through society. The rich can expect to live calm, peaceful lives inside domed suburbs, sheltered from the crime and pollution of the city, while the poor can expect to live highly dangerous lives in buildings that may or may not be built over toxic waste dumps. People come to the sprawl for all sorts of reasons-it is home to more black market activity than anywhere else in the world, it is a place of extremely rapid economic growth, it has basically no corporate taxes, there's no ethics regulations on research, it's still better than some of the other regions in the world.
There are rays of hope, of course-not all corporations are soullessly evil, and most do a lot of good to their workers. Even street gangs, triads, and the yakuza watch out for their own. There's no social safety net, but people have created their own in the lack of a real "government" to speak of.
While corporations claim territory and have militaries like particularly wealthy gangs, there are things they can't handle on their own. That's where the UN Spacey/Federation/Whatever steps in. None of the corporations are nuclear states, they really aren't equipped to handle a proper war, and aliens are entirely outside their jurisdiction. So while Ono-Sendai may have cyber ninjas, if someone starts threatening people with a nuke you call them and they call the UN. They might be amoral or evil, but none of the various megacorps trust each other with nukes, and neither does anyone else.
International military organizations like the UN Spacey can be thought of like sleeping dragons with how they relate to the sprawl; they rarely move to action, but when they do, their power is immense and terrible.
Visually, the Sprawl looks a lot like the world of Blade Runner or Ghost In The Shell at night; huge skyscrapers and artificial lighting combining with smog to make a sort of constant dim twilight.
A Glossary Of Terms
Street Samurai/Razor Girl-A person with heavy cyborg augmentations geared towards combat, who is not beholden to a corporation.
S.Q.U.I.D.-Superconducting Quantum Interface Device. Used for detecting naval mines, or reading the information stored on a computer while that computer is turned off. Actually a real-world thing.
Megacorp-A really large corporation, usually global in scale, incorporating many different ventures.
Cyberdeck-A device that allows someone to mentally interface with computers and the internet, by connecting electrodes to your head. A hacker's best friend.
Cyberspace-C'mon, you know this one. The internet, the world wide web, the information super highway, the intertubes
Meatspace-A less-used term, this is the "real world", or at least how hackers call it.
The Meat-flesh, real bodies, etc.
The Ghost-someone's personality and "soul", the part of them that exists when you disregard their physical body.
ICE-Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, the electronic things that keep people from hacking your stuff and stealing your data.
ICE breaker-The programs hackers use to break the above. Militaries like the UN Spacey have the best ones, and keep them under strong lock and key.
Black ICE-Like normal ICE, except it will try to hack the hacker through whatever brain/internet connection they have and fry their brain.
Biomods-Organic modifications to a person's body. These might be adding pointed ears, tusks, changing skin color, or just steroids to build muscle mass.
If people or characters are unfamiliar with these, don't worry! The various Sprawls won't dominate the world, so it'd be easy to be an important person and spend your entire life not dealing with them.
Tertiary Organizations-Things not relevant to the plot of Jen or Willis, that could be dropped offhandedly for flavor.
Regarding Artificial Intelligences
They exist and are widely used for guard robots and spy drones, but are never more intelligent than a well-trained dog. Some things are just too risky.
The Core Tenets: So Cyberpunk has some things that are generally required for it to function, and the things listed here are setting-wide ones that affect all of the SRWU universe. The internet must exist, and be global in its reach. Cyborgs must be possible, though they don't have to be common. And lastly, since we're going for more of a Gibson feel here, transistor computers should be the default, not quantum. I don't think that these are going to be hard to do at all-I'm under the impression that they're the default assumptions for the universe. The cyborgs one is kind of weird, but if only one out of every 10,000 people is cyborg (let's face it, being a cyborg is weird and expensive), that's plenty for our purposes.
The Sprawl(s):So the key setting of a lot of cyberpunk stuff is a sprawling, dystopian city where corporations wield more power than the government and everything's cloaked in a dim twilight due to massive smog and air pollution. The good news about the Sprawl and setting integration is, it doesn't have to be the whole world! For this canon I'd like to set aside 3 regions defined as the Sprawl. Some options are listed below; all are either megaregions here in real life, or are rich enough and well connected enough that they could become huge banking and computer sectors easily enough.
-Taiwan
-Malaysia
-Singapore
-Hong Kong
-Tokyo
-Dubai
-Turkey
-American East Coast Megaregion (Massachusetts to Virginia)
-American Southern California Megaregion (San Francisco, LA, etc.)
-American Gulf Coast Megaregion (Houston, Baton Rouge, New Oreleans, etc)
-American Cascadia Megaregion (Seattle and some other places I don't know nearby)
-any of Europe's "bananas"
Because other canons are likely to use some of these areas, I think the best choice here is Dubai, Taiwan, and the American Southern California region. The american ones are the mostly likely to be used by other canons, and I can shift to gulf coast or Cascadia easily enough-but Southern California is traditional. So many cyberpunk novels take place there. SO MANY.
Politics
The Sprawl (all of them) are in a rather odd sort of political state, where either by corruption, government sanction, or legally purchasing the government, corporations have more effect on the day to day life of people than the government. Corporations maintain their own security forces, including mecha, and routinely engage in cold-war style espionage and skirmish matches with each other.
Life in The Sprawl is not that great. Wealth inequality is so massive as to be downright dystopic, and there's basically no upward mobility through society. The rich can expect to live calm, peaceful lives inside domed suburbs, sheltered from the crime and pollution of the city, while the poor can expect to live highly dangerous lives in buildings that may or may not be built over toxic waste dumps. People come to the sprawl for all sorts of reasons-it is home to more black market activity than anywhere else in the world, it is a place of extremely rapid economic growth, it has basically no corporate taxes, there's no ethics regulations on research, it's still better than some of the other regions in the world.
There are rays of hope, of course-not all corporations are soullessly evil, and most do a lot of good to their workers. Even street gangs, triads, and the yakuza watch out for their own. There's no social safety net, but people have created their own in the lack of a real "government" to speak of.
While corporations claim territory and have militaries like particularly wealthy gangs, there are things they can't handle on their own. That's where the UN Spacey/Federation/Whatever steps in. None of the corporations are nuclear states, they really aren't equipped to handle a proper war, and aliens are entirely outside their jurisdiction. So while Ono-Sendai may have cyber ninjas, if someone starts threatening people with a nuke you call them and they call the UN. They might be amoral or evil, but none of the various megacorps trust each other with nukes, and neither does anyone else.
International military organizations like the UN Spacey can be thought of like sleeping dragons with how they relate to the sprawl; they rarely move to action, but when they do, their power is immense and terrible.
Visually, the Sprawl looks a lot like the world of Blade Runner or Ghost In The Shell at night; huge skyscrapers and artificial lighting combining with smog to make a sort of constant dim twilight.
A Glossary Of Terms
Street Samurai/Razor Girl-A person with heavy cyborg augmentations geared towards combat, who is not beholden to a corporation.
S.Q.U.I.D.-Superconducting Quantum Interface Device. Used for detecting naval mines, or reading the information stored on a computer while that computer is turned off. Actually a real-world thing.
Megacorp-A really large corporation, usually global in scale, incorporating many different ventures.
Cyberdeck-A device that allows someone to mentally interface with computers and the internet, by connecting electrodes to your head. A hacker's best friend.
Cyberspace-C'mon, you know this one. The internet, the world wide web, the information super highway, the intertubes
Meatspace-A less-used term, this is the "real world", or at least how hackers call it.
The Meat-flesh, real bodies, etc.
The Ghost-someone's personality and "soul", the part of them that exists when you disregard their physical body.
ICE-Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, the electronic things that keep people from hacking your stuff and stealing your data.
ICE breaker-The programs hackers use to break the above. Militaries like the UN Spacey have the best ones, and keep them under strong lock and key.
Black ICE-Like normal ICE, except it will try to hack the hacker through whatever brain/internet connection they have and fry their brain.
Biomods-Organic modifications to a person's body. These might be adding pointed ears, tusks, changing skin color, or just steroids to build muscle mass.
If people or characters are unfamiliar with these, don't worry! The various Sprawls won't dominate the world, so it'd be easy to be an important person and spend your entire life not dealing with them.
Tertiary Organizations-Things not relevant to the plot of Jen or Willis, that could be dropped offhandedly for flavor.
Regarding Artificial Intelligences
They exist and are widely used for guard robots and spy drones, but are never more intelligent than a well-trained dog. Some things are just too risky.
