Cyberpunk, as a system and setting, is something I've loved for a while. Mysteries are my bread and butter. When I saw this free RPG product offering from Talsorian, I was intrigued. Now I've read it, I'm still intrigued, but I wonder ...
OK, the very basics. CP RED is a combat game, with attitude. Its core mechanics revolve around the base concept of reducing something's Hit Points to 0, in creative and interesting ways. First, you have to hit it, which is a skill check. Then you do damage.
I suppose it makes sense that this supplement says you should give a Mystery Hit Points and represent the investigative process by reducing those Hit Points to 0 in creative and interesting ways. The system doesn't have Pool Points for investigative abilities, so it has to invent them by giving a number of clue types (Gossip, eg) and assigning those clue types existing skills within the game to provide the skill check. There's no such thing as a Core or 0-point clue and there's an argument that it's not very player facing, since the system relies heavily on a series of challenges set up like a shooting gallery by the GM.
Or, as the text puts it, It is up to the GM to decide on the best course of action for their table.
Short version: I like it, but I wonder if I like it because I'm wired that way. I acknowledge that the groups which like playing CP RED aren't wired the same way as I. This is the sort of thing that has me enthusiastic, but if the rest of the table isn't, it's going to be a problem.
Also that It is up to the GM bit kinda grates on me. The GM is not and should not be the chef de partie.
But!
There's an interesting concept buried in the text. Long Term Investigations.
An Edgerunner looking for someone who killed her lover five years ago may make a single Evidence Check per week as a side project when not focusing on other jobs.
There are two ideas in there and I want to talk about both, in Gumshoe terms.
First, it suggests that players may have individual, character-backstory mysteries to solve. This isn't something I've seen any Gumshoe setting do. I suppose that's to be expected. When the central mystery of the Campaign is whether or not the Dracula Dossier can lead the players to a final resolution of a tussle that's been consuming the brainpower and manpower of generations of spies through, among other things, two world wars and the Cold War, there's not much time for the less dramatic mystery of what happened to Uncle Bob two decades ago.
Second, it indicates that a mystery can go beyond the scenario. That it might take several scenarios to work out. Even, potentially, an entire campaign arc.
In part, this is what Rome is all about. The central mystery that underlies all the other mysteries. The Truth. The Man Behind the Curtain.
But not entirely. After all, Uncle Bob isn't Rome. Also, Uncle Bob isn't a priority that the GM chose. It's a priority the player chose.
It probably won't happen often, but there will be times when a player chooses a project to work on that's outside the campaign structure but which does require a certain level of mechanical input to close out. The closest I can think of in GUMSHOE is the Dreamhounds General Abilities Art-Making and Dreamscaping, both of which imply that something can be created or developed after passing a test. However, in neither case is the long-term nature of the project explored. It's just assumed that Player States X, a die is cast, and X either goes ahead as planned or it doesn't.
However, there's something we can work with here.
Let's say for the sake of this example that the player has expressed an interest in a long-term goal. It doesn't matter what that goal is. Simply that, at the end of the project, the player expects to get a result of some kind which can be clearly expressed. Nothing nebulous, nothing Deeper Into The Mystery. An actual result.
Example: the player, whose character has the Revenge drive, wants to engineer a final confrontation between themselves and the vampire who killed their squad, back when they were still a trooper with the Black Watch.
Fine. From the Keeper's perspective, this is an achievable result. Getting that confrontation doesn't have to be a campaign-ending event, not unless that vampire was Dracula. A fight to the death with one of Dracula's minions is what this kind of game is all about.
But! The player doesn't know, at the start of the project, who that vampire is or where they are right now. Just that a vampire did it.
When the project is announced, the Player and Keeper should get together to brainstorm. The goal here is to identify how many milestones this project has. Two? Four? Six? After all, from the Keeper's perspective this confrontation might be a relatively minor event. or a major one, or a campaign-shaking one. The bigger the bang, the greater the leadup to that bang.
From the Player's perspective, this long-term goal may be the biggest thing they've ever done. Regardless of its impact on long-term plot. The Keeper should bear that in mind. The Player expects big things, even if that doesn't impact long-term plot.
Each milestone should represent a clue along the way, perhaps even a physical artefact. Milestone one might be getting hold of the Top Secret after-action report on the encounter between the Black Watch and whatever-it-was. Milestone two might be a tense, secretive encounter between the player and the secret agent who set the encounter up to see what would happen. Milestone three might be interrogating a Conspiracy goon or technician who has the complete scoop, from the Conspiracy's POV. And so on, but the point is this: whatever the milestone, it has a concrete result which is specified in advance. The Player doesn't know what's in that after-action report, but the Player does know there's an after-action report out there to be had.
Why? Because Players react positively when they're invested in what's happening at the table. It's why this game is player-facing to begin with. The Player will be interested in the result of their long-term goal first, if they chose the goal, and second, if they have at least a rough idea of what they're getting out of it. The shiny loot. The clue. Remember that brain-storming session. They helped you decide what each Milestone was going to be. Let's not cheat and say that the Milestone you thought was X was Y all along. Red herrings can be entertaining; bullshit seldom is.
OK, you've brainstormed, you have the milestones. Now what?
Now the Player needs to build up a pool to get those milestones. That pool can be made up of XP, gained at the end of every mission, or Clues gained during a mission. X number of pool points = 1 milestone. The Keeper and Player should agree between them as to whether a particular Clue counts towards the pool. The number of points needed to get a milestone should be agreed in advance and may vary, depending on the campaign importance of the end goal.
In DD terms, an end goal that involves Dracula in some way, or some other campaign-ending result, should be more expensive than an end goal which does not touch on such a sensitive subject.
Now, XP is valuable stuff. It can be exchanged for permanent character boosts. If you're going to exchange XP for milestones, that milestone ought to be some kind of permanent thing. The after-action report, eg, counts as 1 pool point Research for campaign purposes, that sort of thing. The player can always use it for their stated goal without drawing on that Research point, but if they want to use it for anything else (divining a vampiric Bane, eg) then that Research point must be spent.
As with all of this, the actual value of any given Milestone should be agreed between Director and Player.
What happens when all Milestones are met?
The final result is achieved. There is a combat scene between the Player and the Vampire, on the Players' stated terms. Or they finally find out what really happened to Uncle Bob. Whatever the stated end goal is, that's what's achieved.
I doubt this will come up often. Most players are happy with the campaign as is. But some of them are going to be invested enough to come up with special projects, now and again. Some end result that is outside the campaign framework.
Did Someone Say Murder points to a means by which that need can be met.
It is difficult to picture a world in which space in cemeteries costs more than space in apartment buildings. Or that you can rent an apartment for more than three times longer than you can space in the grave. I have to wonder what happens to cemetery remains when your time runs out and there's no more money. Presumably the grave is emptied but I have a hard time believing the remains are just flung into a midden. Yet ... what else could happen?
Picture being the person who lives in the same building as one of these Bone Ash Apartments. You know what that quiet door on the same corridor as you hides. You recognize some of those who come and go. You can smell the incense. There may be peculiar deliveries. Perhaps priests come to visit. Or you hear ceremonies. But you can't intrude, you can't comment. That is their grief. One day it may be yours.
There must be someone from the family who comes round on a regular basis. Someone has to make sure the proper observances are made, that the apartment is kept in good order. That person has to take time off work to do it, or perhaps they don't work, or perhaps they come round after work. They would be the public face of the family, the one the neighbors see. But there would be a family, perhaps dozens of people scattered all over, all of whom have an interest in what goes on in that apartment.
I wonder what effect this has on a person's social credit. It can't be misconduct, not precisely, and yet ... like any system there must be grey areas, the neither-this-nor-that, and operating a bone ash apartment feels very much a neither-this-nor-that. Someone's name has to be on the lease. Someone pays utilities. Whoever that person is, they're removing an apartment from the pool that might otherwise be occupied by the living. Does this count as 'other non-life and non-work essential consumption behavior'? If that person passes on the lease to someone else in the family - which presumably they must do at some point, since nobody lives forever and a seventy-year lease could easily go through multiple owners - what impact will that have on the inheritor?
All that said, let's consider the RPG impact.
Systems like D&D don't go much into religion or funerary behavior. Despite the number of scenarios taking place in crypts or graveyards. The role of the Gods is to grant spells to player characters and occasionally Smite things, not to actually have Views and Opinions as to what mortals should be doing with their time. When funerals come up, if they come up at all, there's the general (rather confused) view that funerals are a bit like the Judeo-Christian-but-not-really plop 'em in the ground and call it a day. Assuming there is a ground. Finding space for cemeteries is a problem that fantasy cities don't seem to have, in contrast to real-life London or Paris for whom cemetery space has been a constant headache. It's just assumed there's a nice spot round here somewhere to plonk your most recent player character, who tragically fell in the fight against Monster-of-the-Week syndrome.
Swords of the Serpentine goes out of its way to mention statues, and hints at an involved funerary practice.
Hundreds of thousands of statues. They’re in canals, on roofs, filling homes and staring out from niches in walls. It’s illegal to destroy a funerary statue, because that could destroy a soul, so families put the statues of their dead anywhere they can find space. A surprising number of crimes in Eversink involve funerary statues ...
I don't think Cyberpunk RED mentions funerals, funeral homes or cemeteries at all. The impression the main text gives indicates Night City is desperate for space, so there seems to be no room for, say, a Père Lachaiseor a Forest Lawn. Maybe a bone ash apartment would have a place in Night City but given how apartments are also at a premium that seems counterintuitive.
Night's Black Agents mirrors the real world and Dracula Dossier makes time for Asian vampires so it seems reasonable that a scenario set in China, or somewhere influenced by China, would have a Bone Ash apartment. Theoretically they might exist outside China, anywhere there's a significant Chinese diaspora. I wonder, for instance, what the situation is in Macao. Or hell, Puerto Rico, or anywhere else there's been a significant modern Chinese presence.
Let's establish some baselines.
This is a public hidden space. It looks like an apartment, a business, a whatever-it-may-be, but it's not.
It has deep significance for the people who maintain it, who regularly hold rituals here.
It is owned/operated/maintained by a group of people who may or may not be related by blood but are definitely working towards the same end result.
If there is a supernatural component, that component is more significant than a single ghost or haunting. In a world where, say, Aberrance pools exist, the site's pools might be higher than expected.
Dungeons & Dragons (or Similar)
The Guildhall
This space is within territory claimed by the Beggar's Guild, who may or may not be closely aligned with the Thieves' Guild. To look at, the building the space is in has been abandoned for years. However, there is a section protected by hidden walls and doors (makeshift, but surprisingly well constructed) where the beggars venerate their dead. Each soul memorialized here is represented by something they valued in life. It might be a cane, a scrap of clothing, a sketch. Whatever this thing is, it is up on a series of shelves put there by the beggars. At first it would have been a few items, nothing much, but over time the space has grown into a small library of the city's forgotten. These are the ones who couldn't afford anything better. Their successors remember them.
Swords of the Serpentine
City Watch Pub
From the outside, this is no different from any one of a dozen other cheap alehouses in the district. However, each of these is marked with Lady Swan somewhere on or near the door. This is where the Constables and Sergeants gather. Technically Inspectors and above are still considered Constables, but they aren't exactly welcome in the Pubs, though they are sometimes seen there. Each of the Pubs has a memorial board of some description. They vary from Pub to Pub, and some are much more elaborate than others. The Boards tell the stories behind the statues, remembering the deeds of Constable such-and-such who fell in the line of duty. The Constable's statue will be somewhere in the Pub. It is tradition for new Constables to 'buy a round for the house' after their first big arrest, and that includes the statues who get alcohol poured over them. It's said that Sorcerers covet the power that gathers in these places, or are afraid of these places, or that Sorcery works differently there. It's not clear whether this is so, or just something the City Watch tells themselves at night, when their fears hang on their shoulders.
Cyberpunk RED
The Wall
Every district has one. The taggers' Wall, covered in signs and graffito. Under all that paint there's a memorial for every joker who thought they'd make a name for themselves in Night City. Under all that paint, because every night there's more jokers adding their tags, making their names. The cops don't even think about touching the Wall. Every so often there's some Corporate who makes a big stink about quality of life, cleaning up the city, who promises big investments if only someone will take care of the Wall. It never happens. What's more likely to happen is that the Corporate in question is run out on a rail, sometimes literally. The last one got out buck naked in a corp limo so liberally covered in tags that, the stories say, the Corporation had to burn it and did their best to wipe the screams clean of all images. The most elaborate Wall, they say, is in Little China, which has a braindance studio attached. There, for a fee, you can jack in and listen to all the messages left behind by the dead. A kind of 'only after my death' message in the metaphorical bottle.
When I first asked for your input back in the Before Times there was a lone voice calling out for Cyberpunk content. I listen to lone voices, occasionally.
Let's talk RED.
Akira trailer
What attracts me to Cyberpunk? Nostalgia, partly. I have a strong sentimental attachment to those 1980 sci-fi classics. Blade Runner. Tron. Escape From New York! Dead Zone. Le Dernier Combat. Last Starfighter. Night of the Comet! God, that one is fun. Terminator. RoboCop. Alien Nation! Akira, obviously. Lots of memories wrapped up in those hours.
Then there's the hours, days, weeks playing the tabletop back in uni. You never really escape those early experiences. It's probably why Dungeons and Dragons still appeals, in spite of everything. I collected most of the books over the years. It's not difficult to whip up some old favorites with that kind of bait.
But mostly, it's the simplicity of it. Skill plus stat plus D10 randomizer. Sorted. Not like other games where there might be a dozen dice or more, rules for every possible contingency, and extra books with extra rules for all the other contingencies. It's probably the same thing that lures me into Gumshoe, honestly. D6 randomizer plus pool points, and you're off to the races.
Tell you what I don't like. Save the World narratives. They're attractive, sure. But they keep coming back again, and again. Sometimes I just want the world to stay saved, you know? For ten minutes? I feel like the maid ...
With that in mind, let's talk about some campaign ideas. If you like the look of one, give me a shout. We can talk about expanding it.
To start with:
Long Live The King
Partially inspired by this recent article concerning gang crime in Canada. Briefly: the removal of senior leadership within the Quebec mafia results in increased gang crime, as control over the smaller groups disintegrates.
Rome: the recent (and explosive) removal/retirement of senior crime figures causes a shift in power in the district. All the gangs come out to vie for control over the district’s lucrative enterprises. Everything from protection rackets to numbers running to narcotics is in flux, as younger gangs surge to prominence in a wave of shootouts and rumbles. Nobody knows who’ll come out on top; today’s Little Caesar is tomorrow's statistic. Meanwhile, nobody can get anything done and the cops are no help at all; they’re drowning in wave after wave of violence, unable to respond proactively to any of this.
Our protagonists: a local security firm which has contracts for three conapts and, until recently, was trying to become a player in the market. They had a business relationship with the former mafia bosses and now must deal with the coming storm. Do they play kingmaker? Do they go bust in spectacular fashion?
Main activities: diplomacy both corporate and street, fistfights and firefights.
The Bloody Red Baron
Royal Guardsmen
I have a soft spot for this tune. Blame a misspent youth.
Rome: The medical market is sewn up tight, but there’s always room for an independent in those districts where the corps fear to go. Rippers and medicos need someone with more guts than sense to get in and out of the combat zone. Sometimes it’s a body run, collecting spare parts. Other times it’s an extraction under fire. Runners need a proxy to get their wounded out of a tight spot, or some corporate finds themselves on the wrong side of the line. Meanwhile the poor and the desperate just want medical aid, and they don’t care much who provides it.
Our protagonists: owner/operators of the Red Baron, a ramshackle meatwagon which has seen more firefights than anyone cares to think about. Their mission: to bring mobile healthcare to the desperate and those willing to pay. It’s up to the Baron whether they provide Robin Hood medical aid to the poor for free or at cost, or whether they seek to extract every penny from every customer. Whichever it may be, medical supplies and bodybags are best-sellers in today’s market.
Main activities: thrilling chases and MASH-style medical action.
Tournament of Champions
Rome: People need entertainment. People crave nostalgia. Yes, there’s the Net; yes, there’s Elflines Online. But for the hardcore, the truly grok, there’s only one drug that works: collectible card games. Nobody’s been making those cards for decades. Many of them were destroyed, either in the big bang or what came after. But some survived. For the elite, the best of the best, the geek beyond geek, a Black Lotus is worth more than a mint condition Action Comics #1. Up until now, card collectors have battled in private matches, the backrooms of brick-and-mortar stores, but the dream’s always been to recreate the grand tournaments of old.
Our protagonists: fixers, dealers, schemers, fakers, artists both bullshit and realshit. Sometimes they go out and Indiana Jones their way to a lost CCG collection buried deep in some forgotten pit. Or perhaps they liberate cards from those too gauche to own them. They might fake up whatever they need to make up. Whatever the case may be, they’re now in the enviable (well …) position of being the only ones in Night City with enough nerd clout to be able to organize a city-wide tournament. But how? Where? Who’ll be the judge? In a world without heroes, do these sad sacks have it in them to fake it till they make it?
Main activities: treasure hunting, heists, wheeling-dealing.
Rome: People need to believe. Religion is the opiate of the masses, so they say. But is it bad to spread a little hope, even if you don’t believe in yourself? Those with faith, and those without, struggle with the day-to-day and their personal demons. They cry out. They act out. The faith bunco has kept fraudsters in bucks since time immemorial. What’s one more lie in a world that’s full of them? Except this time maybe it isn’t a lie; there might be a grain of truth in that teeming mass of misinformation. Not that anyone wants to believe that, mind you; the truth is so overrated …
What happens if a fraudster finds faith? What happens if there really are demons out there?
Our protagonists: fakers, exorcists for hire, occultists in over their head. Against them: Maybe nothing but guilty consciences. Or perhaps the heirs of MKUltra, Uncle Sam’s mind control program – or maybe there really is a Legion hiding inside that swine after all …
Founded in 1966, the NYPD Movie/TV Unit was the first of its kind in the country. Because of its relationship with the NYPD, the unit has the greatest knowledge on how to assist productions, particularly with complex shooting situations, in a city that is dense with vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
Whether it conducts filming on bridges, highways, or busy intersections, the unit controls traffic to ensure that companies can get shots that may otherwise be impossible. It also oversees staged "crime scenes" used in the filming of the city's many police-related shows, such as Law & Order and Third Watch. The unit's responsibilities do not end there; the unit also monitors child work permits, stunts, prop firearms, placement of equipment, pedestrian safety, and parking.
While filming on busy New York City streets presents countless challenges, the unit has, over the years, developed a strong working relationship with the film industry. The unit makes an effort to ensure that New York City remains a popular location for filming. Its based in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Until the election of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994, the unit occasionally assisted with pornographic productions. But Giuliani put a stop to this as part of his effort to clean up the streets of New York City. In 1997, porn producer Michael Lucas filed a lawsuit against the Police Department and Giuliani citing discriminating practices used by the Movie/TV Unit against porn productions. The lawsuit was dismissed in September 1998 when a district judge granted a motion to dismiss on behalf of the NYPD.
Rome: Fame, fortune, glitz and glamour. It's a hero's life in the NCPD. All the world knows it. All the world sees the TV shows, the newsreels, the braindances. Someone's got to make sure all those shoots take place with as little drama as possible - well, unplanned drama, at least. Who is that lucky someone? Why, you! Yes, you will have to pull security duty on a porno from time to time (oh, the humanity) and yes, you will have to put up with every would-be Spielberg who happened to convince daddy to bankroll their student project. But the possibilities! You might be a background extra in Manic Slaughterhouse Four! You might get a fleeting appearance on the news! You might find out about the subliminal ... no, better not find out about that, it could be career-ending.
Protagonists: NCPD, medias, rockers - anyone who might look good in a uniform and at least knows the rudiments of cinematography.
Main Activities: security, photoshoots, chases both fake and real, diplomacy both street and corporate.
Most of you will have noticed that the world will soon come to an end thanks to a Japanese rock and an ancient curse, as attested by pretty much every newspaper in the Western Hemisphere. Possibly the writers were looking for a distraction from current events.
The rock in question is the Killing Stone or Sessho-seki, which until last week contained the corpse of Tamamo-no-Mae, a beautiful woman who had been part of a secret plot hatched by a feudal warlord to kill Emperor Toba. Tamamo-no-Mae was actually a nine-tail fox - a trickster spirit - and when caught in the act the Emperor had her remains imprisoned forever. Or so he believed.
Original Theatrical Poster
Most newspaper accounts mention that her story inspired an anime film, but none that I've seen went into any depth. Which is a pity, as the anime makes for a good story.
Incidentally I owe my information to the kindness of Ian Horner of Loadingreadyrun fame, a gentlemen whose Twitter feed and many comedy videos I highly recommend.
Once upon a time in 1960s Japan there was a man named Gentaro Nakajima who wanted nothing more than to make his magnum opus, Kyubi no Kitsune to Tobimaru, a horror(ish) fantasy anime. He switched to anime because nobody was willing to back his original idea, a live-action film. As it turns out there weren't many people willing to back his anime version either, and it proved to be a box-office dud which only showed in one cinema for a very limited period in 1968.
Crushed, the disappointed filmmaker retired from showbusiness and gave the original print of the film to one of his sons. That gentlemen speculated unwisely, and committed suicide in the aftermath of a bribery scandal. The original print - the only version thought at that time to exist - vanished altogether, and for many years was considered a lost film.
Not so. A print was found, and is currently in the vaults of the Tokyo Metropolitan Library. It has never seen a commercial release of any kind since 1968, though the Library has shown it several times.
So, in one breath we have: a curse. A broken sacred stone. A luckless anime that ruined the life of its creator, potentially also his son, and currently lives in a library vault like some scorpion lurking in a shadow. Or a nine-tail fox spirit hiding in a rock, come to that.
Given that one of the characteristics of a nine-tail fox is its desire to consume the flesh and/or souls of men this is a story that fits nicely into Nights Black Agents, but it could as easily be an Esoterrorists plot, Fear Itself, Delta Green or any modern-day horror setting. With a bit of finagling it could be a Cyberpunk plot; lost mysterious anime lurks on the Net, allegedly killing any runner foolish enough to seek it out. Is it some crazed AI, an urban legend, something else? Or, depending on the nature of Japan in your RED world, what really happened to the Killing Stone way back in the dim and distant past of 2022, and why is Arasaka so concerned about it? Is it because one of Gentaro Nakajima's heirs is now a senior figure in Arasaka who'd rather nobody remembered the past, or is there some other reason?
OK, all that said, let's gamify.
Lost But Not Forgotten
The original print of Kyubi no Kitsune to Tobimaru turns up at a minor auction or flea market, perhaps in Japan, perhaps somewhere else. The person who buys it has no idea what they have, but they do know it's anime, so they offer it up for viewing at a minor anime convention in [choose location now].
All twenty of the people who watch it are found dead over the next few days, brutally butchered and partially eaten.
If this is a Fear Itself game or a similar setting, where the characters are ordinary people who are unwitting victims of unearthly forces, then they were among the audience that day and recognized the film for what it was, but they aren't dead - yet.
The viewing takes place shortly before Monday 7th March; the cracking of the Killing Stone is when the murders start.
Options:
The killer is the alleged 'discoverer' of the anime, who actually faked it in order to lure in victims. This person believes, perhaps incorrectly, that they're a fox spirit on the verge of achieving the unthinkable: ascension to Heaven, after a thousand-year cycle. To complete that cycle and achieve the ascendance they deserve, they need a *lot* of energy - hence the killings. The victims are sacrificial, and the whole point of getting them to watch the anime is to make them understand, even on a subconscious level, their place in the grand scheme of things.
The 'original print' was faked by Esoterrorists (or a similar cult-style group) who added a special scene not found in the version held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Library. That scene is the true killer; the monster hides in it like a vampire in its coffin, but once it's exposed to an audience it lives in their minds - until it can creep out and kill them. It might emerge from a painting, a mirror, or a television screen, but it's really coming from inside the victim's memory. The intent is to spread fear, but also to generate interest in the 'psychic killer' anime. If enough interest is generated more people will seek it out, creating more mind monsters ...
The problem isn't the film. The problem is the mold growing on the film reel. It's pretty toxic stuff. It does damage the film a little, but not so that it makes it unwatchable - though the effect is clearly visible, and anyone with knowledge of old film knows what's causing it. However, if you breathe that stuff in it can warp your mind in very unpleasant ways. The original discoverer is the most dramatically affected; they're living in a very dark closet trying to keep the mind weasels at bay. Meanwhile some of the audience, less dramatically afflicted, are seeking out the other audience members to 'commune' - that is, to kill and eat - their fellow sufferers. They see it as further exploring their shared experience. One of them has the film reel, and will do anything to show it to others - bringing more people into the shared experience.
From Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Common Cursitors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1566) reprinted in the collection Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars, Imprint Society, Mass, 1973:
Yet notwithstanding, they have so good liking in their lewd, lecherous loitering, that full quickly all their punishments is forgotten. And repentance is never thought upon, until they climb three trees with a ladder (ie. are hung for their crimes) ...
An Upright Man is a skilled vagabond who makes his living by begging and thievery, in turns. Frequently they are former soldiers, or trusted servants who betrayed their trust. They're so called because they retain a certain rugged charm, and are clever talkers. They usually travel with one or more accomplices, Morts and Doxies, skilled at theft as well as prostitution. If they go to a stout yeoman's or farmer's house [and ask] his charity they usually go in packs of four or more, to get what they want by intimidation as much as appeals to the yeoman's finer feelings. At fairs or public gatherings they hang about in unremarked alleys and byways to beg, and to spy out likely targets. Their chief targets are lonely travelers, women and beggars - those who cannot easily defend themselves. Their chief defense, apart from cudgels, is their character; they're well practiced liars, bluffers and con artists.
So in game terms we're talking about someone with decent Charisma (or the equivalent) as well as some talent for theft and brawling. This person might have had a good career at one point, whether soldiering or something else, but that's long in the past. Their biggest asset is their willingness to work together, to gather accomplices and make alliances with other Upright Men. Alone, they'd soon be caught and hanged. Working with others, having someone prepared to swear an alibi or two or pick a pocket as needed, they can do much more.
When designing a game world, as has been said once or twice before, you start at the ground up. Design those things that the characters see every day. The basic layer, and as a reminder:
The basic layer is simply this: the things the characters encounter
all the time, whether they want to or not. The characters will always
want to eat, to sleep, to move around. They'll buy clothing, toys, game
consoles. They will have needs and they'll want to fill them. At the
same time there will be events happening around them regardless of
whether or not the players are directly involved, because everyone else
in the game world has needs to satisfy too. This is at the heart of
every system, regardless of setting or mechanics, and you can play with
this layer in many different ways - so long as you establish it first.
The last time I dipped into this well I talked about Cheap-Johns, the base level of the market economy. This time let's flesh out the Upright Men, the base level of the non-market economy.
If the Upright Man seems at all familiar to you, there's reason enough:
Falstaff is probably the most famous Upright Man ever to draw breath. Fat, roistering old blaggard, living off of stolen or borrowed funds, surrounded by friends yet truly beloved of none - save possibly Mistress Quickly, who delivers his eulogy. A soldier who once fought for his King and now roils for his daily bread, he's successful enough to draw in the Prince himself - yet not so successful he can keep Hal in check.
When we talk about thieves in fantasy settings it's usually painted as though they're members of some kind of elite organization, perhaps with a storied history, its traditions passed down by generations of thieves. Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar tales imagine such a Guild, its dead Masters buried with their jewels in a crypt so ancient their descendants have forgotten where it is.
Yet historically while thieves do cooperate gangs like these are rare, often evaporating like dew. A decade, perhaps a little longer, is the most they can expect before entropy, arrests and an ageing membership brings them low. Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies and all - given enough time and they vanish into the history books, assuming anyone bothered to write their histories down.
No, the base level of the criminal world isn't some kind of proto-Triad, swearing loyalty upon pain of death by five thunderbolts. The base level is the wandering Upright Man working in loose cooperation with other Upright Men, bullshitting and bullying their way through a world that lacks the means to bring them to heel.
An Upright Man is someone with talent. They have a little charm, and perhaps a skill - it might be shoemaking, horsemanship, service in an army, something else. Fundamentally, they're clever enough to live on their wits and charismatic enough to work as a group when the situation calls for it. They can be intimidating but intimidation is not their talent; they don't get what they want by force of arms, not unless they work with others. Their natural target is the weak, loners, children, the aged.
If they escape punishment, it's because they have wit enough to be charming, and to bluff. As Harman remarks, repentance is never thought upon until the day it will do them no good - except in the eyes of the Lord, and possibly not then.
Not that the hangman is an Upright Man's only possible fate. Falstaff, after all, died in his bed, though he had plenty of chances to die on the battlefield. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no.
With all that in mind, a few Upright Men:
Bookhounds of London
Clarence Inkpen
Three things: fat, claims to be former constable and has a quasi-military bearing, never without his pipe and baccy.
Quote: Now, lad, don't be alarmed. I'm on your side, I am, truly.
Criminal History: Assault, bribery, pimp.
Background: Clarence is one of those people who's 'always been here.' Nobody can remember when he arrived or can reliably say what his history is. He claims to have been a police constable, but that was years ago in another city, and he keeps changing his mind as to which city. He knows just enough Law to get himself into trouble, and has a quick enough tongue to get himself out of trouble when needs must. His usual trick is the badger game, and he works with four or five different women all of whom he calls his nieces, though whether there's any actual relation is an open question. The badger game is simple: the target is lured into a compromising situation, and when things are at their height Clarence bursts in and threatens to bring the law on the unfortunate - unless the target coughs up a hefty bribe. Bookhounds know Clarence as a reliable witness - as in, 'he was with me that night, your worship, down at the pub. All night, yes indeed.' He's also a reliable forger of legal documents, and makes a decent sideline from forged pub licenses and similar.
Swords of the Serpentine
Simonetta the Red
Three Things: Always wears red, usually in barbarian fashions; false teeth, several sets, often uses iron choppers for intimidation value; pretends to be a Vontavni Horselord but was born in the Tangle and has spent time in the House of Broken Wings.
Quote:Crush you! Crush you! Break bones! Smash face! Money, money, money or I beat you stupid!
Criminal History: Assault, Assault, more Assault, procuring indigents for purposes of Corruption (as in, taking unfortunates from the House of Broken Wings so a sorcerer can use them as a convenient vessel for ghost possession).
Background: Simonetta dreams of being something she isn't. Right this minute, it's a Vontavni Horselord, and that's been her obsession for the last five years or so. Before that, a mighty sorcerer capable of channeling Corruption to her own ends. Truth be told she's a Tangle wharf rat, but that's not exotic or interesting enough for her. Though she hates her Servile connections she has a talent for Servility, and can vanish into the background when necessary. She has Allies among the Monstrous factions and has been known to act as a go-between, buying supplies in the Night Markets for her friends who can't afford to be seen there. She doesn't have strong connections with any of the Gangs but knows enough mooks and thugs to gather together a small-ish group of backers, if need be. Her usual racket is protection, and she works small food stalls in Sag Harbour, the ones that serve the poorer working class. She's also a freelance leg breaker for several of the larger loan sharks, and uses her reputation as a 'crazy barbarian queen' to intimidate the gullible.
Fall of Delta Green
Geoffrey Battle Lydell, aka G.B.
Three Things: Bullet head, toothbrush Hitler moustache, claims to have worked for the FBI and does have some law enforcement training (failed a psych exam and was disqualified).
Quote:Under the authority of Executive Order 11503 I am hereby charging you with ... [insert legalistic nonsense here.]
Criminal History: Breaking and Entering, Extortion, Impersonating a Federal Officer, Conspiracy, Wiretapping, multiple violations of the Mann Act
Background: G.B. never caught a break in his life, that's what he likes to tell people, and in exactly that way - G.B.'s gonna get his one day, you'll see, oh boy, they'll rue the day they crossed ol' G.B. ... He's a political go-between, messenger and bagman for any number of less-than-savory political hacks. As such he travels the world on missions for his masters. This week he's in Washington, next week Saigon, Berlin the week after that. He got his start (after his disastrous attempt at an FBI career) procuring entertainment for political meetings - hence the Mann Act violations - and when he proved himself as a somewhat reliable hand he was given more responsibility. He doesn't have any direct Mythos connections but you don't travel the world doing odd jobs for peculiar politicos without picking up a rumor or two. Several of his recent employers have MJ-12 links and he's sometimes used as a kind of a canary in the coal mine, sent in just to see if any of the rumors about (whatever it might be this week) have substance. Though G.B. doesn't work with a regular team he does know an awful lot of mercs, from Polish ex-RAF pilots now flying for African warlords to Spanish Civil War holdouts and Arab nationalists. G.B. has some knowledge of Fringe Science and the Unnatural, but his flights of fancy are usually best ignored; though sometimes when he's drunk he claims to be keeping extensive notes about his activities, who he's worked with and what he's seen. Oh, they'll be sorry they hacked off ol' G.B., yessir ...
CP RED
Pixie Dust
Three Things: Man mountain, tattooed head to foot including sun and butterfly on face, twitchy and paranoid (amphetamine addiction).
Quote:You hear something? I know I heard something. Like it was someone laughing, maybe?
Criminal History: Assault, Possession with Intent to Supply, Robbery, Bank Robbery
Background: Pixie Dust is an artist. Were it not for his less-than-sparkling personality, he'd be a vid star. As it is, folks all over Night City have seen his work, not just as light tattoos but also graffiti tags, particularly in Rancho Coronado but also in Pacifica Playground and Heywood. He got his start as a legbreaker working with the Coronado Pagans, but has since become a semi-independent contractor. Even the Pagans think he's a loose cannon, about to blow, and they don't want to be too close when he does. Still, they love his work. There isn't a Pagan who doesn't have some of Pixie's ink on them, and he's no slouch at customizing their rides either. He often works with Perfect Trung, the braindance-obsessed fixer, and due to his talent he has plenty of Rocker and Media friends too - though friends is perhaps going too far. Drinking buddies, the sort who deal in favors rather than cash. Pixie often claims he's waiting for the day when he can pull off his big score, whatever that is. It's going to be huge. Talk of the town stuff, big media blitz stuff, the kind that will put him on the path to fame and fortune. Nobody's sure what it is, exactly, but they all know it's coming soon to a braindance near you.
I didn't expect the Bozos to become a thing, but they're a thing.
I'm running a short-campaign RED for my regular group, in which the lead, Shamus, is a Rocker-Chef, an Anthony Bourdain wannabe being run off his feet by his jealous mentor. He operates a food truck in Rancho Coronado and has just recently had his big face-off against Bob Ghandi's Bhaji Bomb (From Bradford To Your Belly) in which he emerged triumphant, thanks to his team and his encyclopedic knowledge of Friends trivia. Now he wants to break into Playland By The Sea, but there are challenges ahead. Think of it as Food Wars but with more gunplay and far fewer anime boytoys. Though Shamus is kinda the Idiot Hero ...
Anyhow in the first episode, when we were all just settling in and I needed to introduce the characters to the game world, they ran up against some Bozos who were holding kids hostage in Five, which I saw as an old Uncle McPorky's fast food joint long since stripped out and turned a bit Five Nights At Freddies. Acid balls in the ball pit, rats instead of golden tickets being poured into the ticket blaster, that sort of thing.
Uncle McPorky's is all me, by the way. I was using that as a backdrop in CP2020, donkey's years ago. The Bozos are new to Cyberpunk; at least, I don't remember them being a thing in CP2020. According to the main book, p. 308:
When they first appeared, the Bozos were a prankster gang. Biosculpted to look like circus clowns with red bulbous noses, wild red hair, and long flat feet (no, not shoes) and costumed to the part, the Bozos became impromptu slapstick. But soon the Bozos became the ultimate killer clown gang. People living on Bozo turf learned the hard way that if you see a pack of Bozos, just run. Bozos enjoy playing on people's greatest fears: lurking in apartments in the dark, locking victims in small spaces filled with rats, stopping elevators midway and filling them with water. They are not funny.
I expected this to be a quick in-and-out, beat up the bad guys and save the day situation, with the added bonus that saving the kids would lead Shamus and his pals to a group living in Rancho Coronado that grows their own vegetables - perfect allies for a food truck business.
Little did I realize the Bozos would become one of the most popular recurring gags in the series. Particularly the mimes ...
Incidentally if the players out there are wondering how best to encourage your GM in bad behavior, screams of fear, gibbering, and general expressions of terror will do quite nicely, please and thank you.
Killer Clowns aren't the most popular horror concept in the world. Everyone remembers Pennywise, and the classically minded might mention Pagliacci, but those are about the only killer clowns to have made a significant contribution to the medium. As a trope, they're not even a 0.1 on the Zombie scale. Gosh darn it, they're memorable, and that's what counts.
Still, even in Killer Klowns they are just ... clowns. Pancake make-up, red noses, big feet, pointy teeth, boom, it's a killer clown. Clowning has a rich history. Why not steal a few ideas and turn Bozo into something really special?
I'm using the basic boosterganger stats found in the main book (p 412), with minor modifications. Pyros and Psychos (p 416) for the main bosses, with the occasional Netrunner (p 414) Tech and Rocker as backup / floating opposition.
I see these as Bozos with a purpose: cheap horror braindances. Jack in and be a Bozo out on the town, or see what it's like to be on the sharp end of a Bozo's rippers as one of the victims. There's going to be a market for that. There's a market for just about anything in Night City. Plus, the Bozos can sell surplus organs from their victims to Ripperdocs. Everyone's a winner!
At the very lowest level are the Mimes or Mummers, silent artists, working their way up to a speaking role. These are always basic Boosters. They can be mistaken for Posers since they sometimes borrow costume ideas from silent comics like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Variants: heavy melee weapon, cane with taser, light melee weapon, bowler hat with razor blades in the brim, both for swiping in close combat and short range thrown weapon, Oddjob-style.
There's a strong temptation to incorporate Noh ideas in a variant Bozo gang but I don't know enough about Noh to really make it work. Still, Mime Bozos playing out a Mugen Noh plot complete with supernatural characters and themes is ... tempting.
A step up from the Mimes are the ones with speaking roles, who I see as a Commedia dell'Arte troupe gone very badly wrong. Commedia relies on stock characters and cheesy storylines, and even if you've never once seen a Commedia performance in your life you can usually get the gist of it whether or not you know the language, because you've seen these stories before. It's soap opera with beautiful masks.
You can probably guess, for example, what Arlecchino is going to get up to. A servant to two masters is the go-between, the hapless slapstick target. Maybe Arlecchino is cheating both of them, maybe Arlecchino is just one of nature's whipping boys. Il Dottore, the Doctor, is going to seem wise while spouting rubbish, but as Il Dottore is head of the household Il Dottore will expect to be obeyed. The old wealthy man is going to be trailing after the perky maid like a dog in heat, and so on.
From there you can dig deeper into the lore to come up with variations. Arlecchino is also Harlequin, variously a devil figure and a trickster, a sword-carrying bravado and an indigent wanderer. And that's all before you get to the modern interpretation.
So there's a heavy emphasis on sexual comedy with all the broad tropes and dick jokes that implies. Someone's in love (possibly more than one someone), someone's in the way (possibly more than one someone) and it's up to whoever it may be - usually the servants - to sort this mess out so everyone can live happily ever after.
There are variations. One of the most famous is the British puppet version, Punch and Judy. In that blood-soaked narrative Punch is both protagonist and serial killer, and if he avoids the hangman it's only because the world is crazy.
Mr. Punch is one jolly good fellow,
His dress is all scarlet and yellow,
And if now and then he gets mellow,
It's only among his good friends.
His money most freely he spends;
To laugh and grow fat he intends,
With the girls he's s rogue and a rover;
He lives, while he can, upon clover;
When he dies-its only all over;
And there Punch's comedy ends.
Punch. [Knocking down her head.] I thought I should soon make you quiet.
Judy.[Again raising. her head.] No.
Punch. [Again knocking it down, and following up his blows until she is lifeless.] Now if you're satisfied, I am. [Perceiving that she does not move.] There, get up Judy, my dear; I won't hit you any more. None of your sham-Abram. This is only your fun. You got the head-ache? Why, you only asleep. Get up, I say.- Well, then, get down. [Tosses the body down with the end of his stick.] He, he, he ! [Laughing.] To lose a wife is to get a fortune.
The best advantage of a Punch and Judy theme is the wide variety of characters. Crocodiles, ghosts, devils, hangmen, policemen, skeletons, Toby the Dog, lawyers, servants, blind men - you can stuff almost anything into Punch and Judy. Also, since murder's all part of the plot, Punch & Judy's practically built for Bozo.
OK, so all that in mind, what next?
First the basic structure, in a kind of loose Cospyramid a la Night's Black Agents.
At the very outer rim are the collaborators and business partners, the Ripperdocs, Fixers and Media willing to work with the Bozos to distribute the dances. These aren't Bozos proper but if anyone ever found out they were working with Bozos their Reputation would be trashed.
I see these as low-level characters about on par with the pregens found in the Single Shot Pack. Anyone more influential wouldn't be caught dead working with Bozos. They might have a few allies or know where to find some Solo muscle if necessary, but otherwise anything they do, they do themselves.
Closer to the Bozos proper are the Netrunners, Techs and Rockers who create, edit and prepare the dances for distribution. They also prepare the lures and traps the Bozos use to sucker in victims, and maintain the Bozo vehicle fleet, such as it is.
These are no higher than Mimes and Mummers, and might not have body mods yet. They can wear masks and costumes, and they're committed to the Bozo lifestyle, but they can't afford the full sculpt. This is both a financial and a practical problem. Someone's got to be the go-between. Someone's got to meet the collaborators and business partners. You can't do that if you look like a Bozo.
Next up the chain are the Mimes and Mummers, the ones with actual biosculpting. These are the basic boosters, and they're the muscle for the high-ups. When people talk about Bozos, the Mimes and Mummers are usually what they're talking about. They can look like anything - Chaplin tramps, exaggerated whiteface, something out of the Wicker Man parade - but their stock in trade is funny/scary.
One step up from the Mimes are the Commedia, and these are the ones committed to their particular bit. Arlecchio is always Arlecchio, Il Dottore is always Il Dottore. These are the speaking roles, and while some of them may have Booster stats they're generally one step up from your average Ganger. Better equipment, better armor. Pyros and Reclaimer Chief types - mini bosses.
At the very top is the Psycho, the Boss Clown. Punch, or Pierrot if we're being classical. Punch can only tolerate other Bozos, and even then it's a very thin-ice arrangement. Seeing anyone who isn't a Bozo drives Punch crazy. When not laying about with his club (or gun, or grenades) Punch is kept happy with a combination of drugs and games. The minute Punch's happy pills run out, or the game isn't as entertaining as it was, is the minute everything goes pear-shaped. Probably in a six-block radius. For Punch is a jolly good fellow ...
Story Ideas:
Where's the Baby? Punch has lost track of the Baby, and the other Bozos want it back. If they don't get the Baby soon, Punch will start looking for it himself - and then things will get very complicated very quickly. Turns out, the Baby is at the same Night Market the characters are currently shopping in - the little scamp! Exactly what the Baby is, is a matter best left to the imagination; stats-wise, it's no tougher than a Booster, but nobody's allowed to hurt the Baby except Punch.
Jealousy. Pierrot is in love, again, and that can only be bad news for the inamorata. The Bozos have taken over an abandoned multi-story car park and turned it into a theme park filled with traps and unpleasant vignettes. Then they place the bait: braindance volunteers wanted to run the maze, with some valuable McGuffin at the top of the car park as the prize. Pierrot will 'fall in love' with one of the dancers and pursue them through the maze, singing all the while. A few other speaking role Bozos will also be on hand, to make sure the fight's as fair as it can be.
Uncle McPorky's Strikes Back. The Bozos have captured a food truck and turned it into their own special mayhem delivery vehicle. They travel around Night City selling treats to whoever will buy - but those treats are nightmare-inducing hallucinogenic 'pork rib' kibble. Or perhaps that's not really rib of pork at all ... They film the trippy antics of their victims before going in for the kill.
These men have several articles which they sell singly, such as tea-trays, copper kettles, fire-irons, guns, whips, to all of which they have some preamble; but their most attractive lot is a heap of miscellaneous articles: 'I have here a pair of scissors; I only want half-a-crown for them. What? You won't give me 1 shilling? Well, I'll add something else. Here's a most useful article, a knife with eight blades, and there's not a blade among you all that's more highly polished. This knife's a case of instruments in addition to the blades; here's a corkscrew, a button-hook, a file, and a picker. For this capital knife and a first-rate pair of scissors I want 1 shilling. Well, well, you've no more conscience than a lawyer; here's something else - a pocket book ...
Very nearly two years ago to the day I talked about campaign design, and how designing from the ground up is the best way to put together a memorable scene, or even a longer story arc. I said then:
The basic layer is simply this: the things the characters encounter all the time, whether they want to or not. The characters will always want to eat, to sleep, to move around. They'll buy clothing, toys, game consoles. They will have needs and they'll want to fill them. At the same time there will be events happening around them regardless of whether or not the players are directly involved, because everyone else in the game world has needs to satisfy too. This is at the heart of every system, regardless of setting or mechanics, and you can play with this layer in many different ways - so long as you establish it first.
What more basic than a Cheap-John?
Magnifique Hooky Street, after all.
A Cheap-John has three characteristics. First, they have a main line of business. It's the up-front stuff which might have fallen off the back of a lorry, but it's what catches the customer's eye and brings them to the Cheap-John in the first place. It might be the tea-trays, whips or guns, it might be something else. In a Cyberpunk setting, it might be clothes - racks of Leisurewear, say. Or guns. Or kibble.
Second, they have their sideline - all the other stuff they're selling in a job-lot. A Cheap-John will sell almost anything, and make the most outrageous promises if it means making the sale. A half-dozen spoons, nothing inferior to silver, and that do not require half the usual quantity of sugar to sweeten your tea ... a splendid pocket-book, which must add to the respectability and consequence of any man who wears it ... a pocket-comb which possesses the peculiar property of making the hair curl ...
Notice the phrasing. 'Nothing inferior to silver' does not mean it's silver. 'Do not require half the usual quantity of sugar to sweeten your tea' means ... something, but probably not what the buyer thinks it means. The buyer hears 'I will use less sugar,' but that's not what the Cheap-John said.
Third, a Cheap-John is a transitory business. Here one week, gone the next. On the move. Trotter's Independent Traders has its 1972 Reliant Regal Supervan III, knackered yet sturdy; symbols of British eccentricity, Wikipedia calls 'em. Comedic yet dangerous; you could drive those on a motorcycle license, and they tipped over and crashed at the slightest provocation. Point being, it's cheap. Ubiquitous, at least in its day, and it will get you and your goods where you need to be, more or less in one piece.
A Cheap-John is someone the characters will encounter all the time. They are the base level of the market, whatever the market is. More expensive traders sell more reliable, authentic merchandise, but the Cheap-John sells whatever the Cheap-John can lay his hands on, and the lure is you just might find an actual bargain. Of course you rarely do; if that was at all likely, the Cheap-John would go out of business. The whole point is to sell cheap tat for more than you paid for it.
Legal? Of course it's not legal. Do you think someone selling cheap tat at the lowest possible price is going to pay whatever the local authority wants for a trader's license?
With all that in mind, let's talk about three versions of the Cheap-John, with plot ideas for each.
Bookhounds of London
Morris Farraday
Age: indeterminate, but definitely over 40. Fat and wheezy. Works with an associate, 'Ribs' Macavoy, whose job it is to stand watch for the peelers and give warning if the stall's about to be raided.
Main Line: tea sets and china.
Sideline: almost anything, but the characters are going to be interested in his collection of pocket books. These aren't for note-taking; they're small paperback versions of popular novels, printed in the tens of thousands. They're useful for bulking up a struggling bookhound's stock. Morris' collection isn't exactly what you'd call mint, pristine or even complete; pages might be missing, the cover torn. That doesn't matter to the bookhounds - much. Besides, these have colorful covers that attract the eye.
Plot Hook: Morris acquires a suitcase from God alone knows where, and the contents are a bit literary for him so he offers it to the Hounds at a knock-down price. Papers found inside suggest that this is the very suitcase lost by Hemingway in the Gare de Lyon, Paris. Legendarily, it once contained Hemingway's entire literary output up to that point plus a large chunk of an unpublished World War One novel. It's anyone's guess where those papers are now; a large hole, chewed by a rat, in the bottom of the case may provide a clue. Oddly, once the Hounds get the case they find themselves plagued by rats of all kinds, including Rat Things ... but Rat Things are intelligent. They might remember what the papers said, if they don't still have the originals. The group's forger may be very interested in talking to these knowledgeable rodents.
Swords of the Serpentine
Pasqualin the Contrary
Age: no more than 20, at least biologically, and no matter what he does those moustache hairs aren't getting any thicker. Thin and aggressive. Is on the outs with half-a-dozen different criminal gangs as he refuses to pay dues, tribute or any other fealty. Fancies himself a ladies' man.
Main Line: blades, mostly knives.
Sideline: oddments, particularly foreign oddments. If it came from somewhere other than Eversink and is cracked and damaged now, you can bet it will find a place on Pasqualin's stall. He doesn't discriminate; that peculiar game set with half the pieces missing is just as important as the tooled leather belt he got from a barbarian, or the colorful blown glass bottles with the odd green sheen.
Plot Hook: Everyone knows foreigners have strange ideas about how to treat their dead. Those born and bred in Eversink know you have to put up some kind of statue, but these horsemen from the Flatlands have odd notions. One of Pasqualin's cheaper items is a mask about right-sized for a child, which Pasqualin thinks is a death mask. Unbeknown to him it has magical properties, in that someone used it to channel Corruption into a blood relative by means of the mask. The child is long dead, and the sorcerer wants her mask back, for ... sentimental reasons. That's before the heroes realize that the dead child also wants it back, for ... sentimental reasons.
Cyberpunk
Perfect Trung
Age: probably 40s, they/them, loves Asia Pop, particularly Hot Monster brand accessories and glasses. Drives around in a bright yellow modified groundcar, the Forbidden Palace (cargo upgrade, counts as seating upgrade for spend purposes, housing upgrade, malfunctioning biolock upgrade - as in, doesn't always let Perfect in). Works with Nomad pack, Coronado Pagans, who help them with their vehicle. Sometimes Perfect has one or two Pagans with them on a run, usually Pixie Dust, seven foot tall shotgun-toting bruiser. Younger Pagans also travel along with Perfect as technical support; the Pagans see it as a good way of testing out wannabees and hangers-on.
Main Line: Asia Pop fashionware, also light tattoos if Pixie Dust is with Perfect.
Sideline: Perfect rummages around in all the forgotten or broken-down parts of Rancho Coronado, particularly abandoned strip malls, so they often come up with software and braindance chips, pre-Red. Not all of them work as intended and some of them are so retrograde they won't work with current technology, at least not without Tech modification. Perfect fancies themselves a braindance artist and connoisseur, and frequently splices in old dance material to their latest creation for extra buzz.
Plot Hook: Perfect needs a place to lie low after a braindance chip sale went bad. Perfect's not sure what the customer's beef is, but the customer has weight with the Happy Daze Posers and as Perfect's allergic to multiple Fonzies beating the snot out of them, Perfect's calling in favors. Anyone who can offer Perfect a quiet place to sleep at night gets whatever they want from stock, plus a tip on where to look for some sweet salvage.
Generally speaking people know what they're getting into when they play a particular system. A James Bond game is all about being Bond and therefore can be expected to fulfil Bond tropes - the quips, the car chases, exotic locations and world-shattering evil masterminds. A Trail game is about Cthulhoid horror and can be expected to be moist and squamous, with a heavy dose of American gothic, possibly a hint of film noir. A Cyberpunk game is about dystopia, people lost in a futuristic landscape looking for meaning in all the wrong places.
You rarely see mixed genres in RPG settings, but it can be very interesting. The old Cyberpunk had a quasi-horror setting, the Night's Edge books, that worked remarkably well. In that setting you might encounter vampires, ghosts, Voodoo acolytes and terrifying dreamscapes. It had its faults; it leaned a little too heavily on serial killer tropes. But when it worked, it sang.
Body horror is a storytelling method where the narrative attempts to invoke intense feelings of physical and psychological disgust, or squick, and plays upon anxieties of physical vulnerability. One of the most effective versions of this I've ever seen on screen is the 1999 Takashi Miike movie Audition, in which a lovelorn businessman attempts to spark romance by auditioning women to 'be in his movie' - but things go badly wrong when he meets Asami, a fascinating woman with a past. And a few extra feet. There is a moment with a sack ... but I've said too much, and the trailers I can find online are a bit too spoilery, so I'll stop there.
The essence of body horror is making the human form do things we consider unnatural, though what we consider unnatural can be very revealing about our own prejudices. Stephen King once pointed out that, in the 1950s, you could freak American kids out just by having characters with a relatively mild physical issue. Even a bad case of the zits and shaggy hair was a major taboo, at a time when good hygiene, medical advances and three square meals a day had sorted out most of a generation's physical issues. Cleft palates, goiters, and many other ailments once relatively common, vanished almost entirely from the landscape. Bones lengthened, teeth straightened, complexions cleared. People forgot the old normal and replaced it with the new.
Clive Barker treads similar ground in Hellraiser, in which physical punishment - nails through the head, being skinned alive - masquerades as spiritual punishment. The spirit and the body are, apparently, one - mutilate the body, torture the soul.
Or Cronenberg, in films like Rabid, implying that a once-normal, healthy body can be tainted by, in this instance, a medical procedure, becoming a necrotic, corruptive influence.
There's no suggestion that a person's spirit and corpus is somehow separate; no immortal essence hidden behind a mortal façade. In body horror the two are one, and you can tell corruption at a glance because they don't look or behave like us. Often this is a buckets-of-blood genre, where guts and slick essences are spilt all over the screen and, by implication, your own home, since the whole point is to make the audience think this might happen anywhere at all, but especially where you feel safest. There's a reason why Hellraiser takes place in an ordinary house, why Rabid is set in semi-rural suburbia. 'This looks like where I live,' you're meant to think. 'This could happen here.' Of course, the logical tagline is 'it could happen to me,' which as you'll recall was Edwardian ghost story master M.R. James' famous bit of horror writing advice.
It doesn't have to be awash with gore. Invasion of the Body Snatchers achieves a very similar goal without the slightest drop of blood, by creating invaders that look like us but aren't quite like us. All flesh, no soul. Whatever immortal shred resides within that flesh is annihilated when the Body Snatchers take over.
In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us — a little bit — we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear ...
If body horror is the subversion of the natural - exploding guts and all - then cyberpunk is the conversion of the natural. We think we know what normal is, and then our expectations are upended. The only difference is, in conversion we willingly accept the change, where in subversion change is forced upon us.
Manga and movies like Ghost in the Shell explicitly play with this concept, going on and on about the Ghost without ever really exploring the concept beyond muttering 'The Ghost!' as if they were all ravens programmed to say Nevermore every few minutes. Paying lip service to the spirit without really confronting the concept, yet taking every possible opportunity to show off fantastic new body conversions. At times you wonder whether there are any downsides to becoming a cyborg, beyond a compulsion to mutter 'The Ghost!' every other episode. Nobody changes; the Major is always the Major, Batou always Batou. Even when changes seemingly occur, the series reverts back to the status quo ASAP in the next episode. For all the characters talk about the Ghost, it rarely impacts the narrative.
Cyberpunk the RPG setting does something similar with Empathy/Humanity.
Empathy: Your ability to relate to and care for others, and take others into consideration. Particularly important as it offsets the effects of cyberpsychosis, a dangerous mental illness common in the Dark Future ... For every point of Empathy the Character has, they gain 10 points of Humanity (HUM) ... Cyberpsychosis Humanity Loss is defined (for this purpose) as a loss of empathy for others and a corresponding loss of self-regard or sense of self preservation. Subjects with low Humanity have trouble emphasizing with themselves or others as "real."
All of this should sound very familiar to CoC and Trail players since this is basically the SAN/Stability mechanic, except where in CoC or Trail SAN is permanently lost by exposure to Mythos sources and temporarily lost by exposure to any number of frightening circumstances, Empathy and by extension Humanity is lost by grafting on technical adjuncts to the flesh. There's a side mechanic where Humanity can also be lost by exposure to terrifying circumstances, but it's encapsulated in a small chart on p. 231 and I wonder how many GMs run with the idea. Sanity is a major concept in CoC and Trail; Humanity doesn't seem as important in Cyberpunk.
It's difficult to make those numbers mean something without engaging the players' imaginations, and it's difficult to engage imagination though numbers alone. Particularly when those numbers have a mechanical consequence - in this instance, loss of the character. To cyberpsychosis, but really loss of the character to anything, whether it's cyberpsychosis or the Spaghetti Monster, is just as frustrating to the player.
Exactly the same conversation's been going on in CoC for decades. At first SAN and loss of same meant a roll on the Temporary (or Permanent) Insanity table, which meant that in some or all future scenes the player had to behave as though their character suffered from, say, a fear of insects, or a fear of crossing bridges. From that relatively simple (at times cruel, unintentionally or otherwise) beginning, systems became more complicated, until now we have setups like Delta Green's relationships, bonds and disorders system, actively engaging the players in their own spiritual demise. Because if they don't tend to those Bonds, in-game, the characters lose out big time.
I'm going to suggest to you now that body horror is indispensable to Cyberpunk because body horror gets the players to engage in what it means to be Cyber, in ways other than crunching HUM numbers. Those implants and modifications they desire come at a cost, and it's not just in Eurobucks. Further, that body horror doesn't have to be guts and gore; it has to be a subversion of the norm.
White Zombie isn't a particularly interesting film. It's historic, as it's the first zombie movie ever, based in part on William Seabrook's book The Magic Island. However everyone who's ever seen that film remembers this early scene if they remember nothing else, because it's the most chilling moment in the movie. Nature can be cruel, but only man can be so pointlessly cruel as to set up a system like this. The dead toil to grind cane into sugar, and it doesn't matter if one falls into the mix and is ground up with the cane.
It has a lot in common with the Moloch scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis:
Both scenes are dehumanizing people in service of a mechanized, semi-supernatural overseer, for a goal that might be pointless. Both turn people into things. Both destroy people to achieve their objective. The workers of Metropolis march to their doom just as unthinkingly as White Zombie's dead men tend the sugar mill. Both are made in an age when socialism and worker's rights were hot topics, vigorously debated in the halls of power and on the factory floor.
Body horror - the subversion of body and soul.
Going back to Cyberpunk's player guidance:
1: Style over Substance: It doesn't matter how well you do something, as long as you look good doing it. Why should it matter if you look good? Because everything else doesn't. Imagine what decades of poor hygiene, lack of medical care and poor diet is going to do to people. Then add in radiation poisoning. Sure, if you're a corporate beaver, that's not a problem. Most people aren't corporates. Why do people cyber up if they can afford it? For the same reason people get plastic surgery. Not everyone needs a gun arm, but everyone needs to fit in.
2: Attitude is Everything. It's truth. Think dangerous; be dangerous. Think weak; be weak. Remember the sugar mill, and Moloch. The average primitive screwhead is going to end up sacrificed on that altar because they have no other choice. The average booster is going to die for some corporate's big power play because they don't know any better. That's what grunts are for. Are you a grunt?
3: Live on the Edge. The Edge is that nebulous zone where risk-takers and high rollers go. On the Edge, you'll risk your cash, your rep, even your life on something as vague as a principle or a big score. Why? Because the alternative is worse. Your principles are your soul, and you're trying to keep that as pure as possible in a world where people trade their souls in every day for a better butt or a new pair of eyes.
As GM you need to be banging away at body horror as often as possible, and you need to be making much greater use of that handy-dandy Humanity chart on p. 231. You should also encourage your players to go to Therapy (p 230) as often as possible, and maybe consider small Humanity rewards for interesting roleplay moments, much as CoC or Trail rewards heroic moments with a little SAN or Stability boost. After all, Humanity is ultimately about being human; there should be a reward for engaging with your Humanity.
As a final what-if, consider these potential body horror moments:
You enter the ripperdoc's dimly-lit den and notice, among the jars and storage tanks lining the walls, a new-harvested face floating in preservatives. You know that face. It belongs to the bartender at the Mad Hatter; you recognize that cute little mole on his cheek. He's been talking about selling his face for months, but until now you've always persuaded him otherwise. Guess he needed the money more than you thought. Wonder what he looks like these days ...
Womb rental - it's the latest thing. Some prefer vat-grown, but a healthy female with no significant black marks in her genetic history can command a substantial fee. They just put you into the factory for nine months, fill you full of sedatives to keep you compliant, and pop goes the baby. Of course, there are rumors that some of these women aren't exactly what you'd call volunteers, but hey - corp beavers need kids ...
You hear about the new factory they're building out by Jesus Street and Memory Lane? Remember about five years ago when they were going to renovate the old St. Simon Building, but the job stalled out? How they lost a cleanup crew? Well, turns out they didn't precisely lose that cleanup crew. I guess someone forgot to unlock a door when shift ended, and they've been down there ever since. Pretty airtight in those vaults, so they didn't decay so much as, well, became liquid. Anyway, there's good cheddar on offer for anyone who, you know, wants to scoop up the slurry and dump it somewhere legal. Or at least somewhere out of sight and mind ...
You see that group over there? Garbage pickers. They work the mounds out by Hooker Loop. How can I tell? Well, look at the fingers, choomb. See, on the one hand you get those who've been able to buy new hands, or at least good second-hand digits. See how the metal gets pitted and cruddy-looking? On the other, well, there's this kind of ulcer you get from that work, it eats fingers ...
You want to sign up for the Hustle Truck? Comes by every morning, picks up folks who want to earn a little extra by doing odd jobs. It's not a lot of money, and the work ain't much, but it's legal; it'll cover your coffin costs, choomb. One thing, tho; you got to get the Hustle Truck chip if you want in. It's nothing serious. The people who run it, they want to keep tabs on you - how you spend your time. Just when you're working. The chip doesn't monitor you when you're not on the job ...
Remember how Nixon used to tell those tall tales about Japanese ghosts? The what-was-it, the nupper-something, that was the one that really stuck with me. How it could just wipe its face away, leaving nothing behind but a blank. Well, they say that the braindance viewers over in the Night Market that sometimes pops up in Bitters has this problem. You go into the dance, and everything's slick. You come out, and sometimes you see faceless people. Now, are these real faceless people? Or is this some hot-shit rewired brain bull you get from the Dance? This one chica, she swears that after she did the Dance she went to, you know, freshen up, and there was this woman in the same stall, red hair, and the woman turns around ... nothing there, man. Nothing. Blank, from forehead to chin ...
Rear Window is a fascinating piece of cinema directed by one of the greatest talents of the medium, but it struck me as I was watching it the other day how much it relies on a setting that is as dead and gone as Caesar's Rome.
Shot in 1954 and based on a story written in 1942, the concept, setting and entire premise relies on two fundamental facts about New York in the mid-twentieth century.
First, there is no television. The glass teat does exist, and the basic technology's been around since the late 19th century. Yet it hasn't become a commodity, it isn't in every home. None of these people own a set, and if the protagonist, James Stewart's L.B. Jefferies, had one in his apartment this whole movie needn't have happened. It won't be long before televisions become commonplace; Sony sold over 4 million portable sets worldwide in 1960. It just hasn't happened quite yet.
Second, there is no air conditioning. Again, the technology exists, but it's so far out of reach for the ordinary consumer that the average New Yorker prefers to live with their windows open in the red-hot summer time. Some even sleep out on the fire escape, as the only way to get anything like a decent night's rest. I lived in New York for a short while years ago, and I can personally attest the city's just as hot in summer now as it would have been in the 1940s - but that doesn't matter any more.
15,000 persons spent last night on the beach at Coney Island and several thousand more sought relief from the heat in Brooklyn parks and playgrounds. Additional thousands slept on roof tops and fire escapes in the Brownsville, Williamsburg and other crowded sections of Brooklyn. In Manhattan, many slept on the grass in Central Park and on the open piers in the East River.
There's even a brief moment early in the film where you see someone delivering ice for the ice box, which isn't something you'd see nowadays. The ice box, if you don't know, is literally that: a box where you keep ice, so you can put butter and other perishables in cold storage. Once the ice brick you bought melts, you buy another one. Selling ice was a major line of business, in the days before refrigerators. It's something people have been doing since before the birth of Christ, and only came to an end relatively recently.
But here's the kicker: Rear Window can only exist because there is no television, and because there is no air conditioning. As a result, people live outdoors more, open their windows more - which lets Jefferies peer into their private lives, and provides the inciting incident that kicks the entire movie into gear.
New York still exists. If you looked hard enough you could probably find a neighborhood like the one Jefferies lives in. The film's shot on a Paramount stage built especially for the occasion, but it shouldn't be that difficult to find somewhere in Greenwich Village that looks like Rear Window. What you won't find are a lot of open windows. The landlord will have made sure they can't be opened, since the law changed in the 1970s so as to stop kids plummeting to their doom. You also won't find many people looking outdoors; either they're watching television, or their mobile devices, or both.
Rear Window's New York is as dead as dead can be, which is probably one of the reasons why the 1999 remake with Christopher Reeve didn't work.
When designing a setting, think about how people live and what they have to do in order to live well. Not just the big stuff, like which Camarilla faction holds political sway after dark, or whether ghosts are secretly controlling the police force. I mean the small stuff. What do people do for fun? How do they get their food? Do they have light when night falls, and if so how is that managed? What happens when it's hot? What happens in the rainy season? What happens when it snows? What happens to all the shit - literally, the shit - that your average city produces every day? Is someone hauling that off to the tanner's vats, or the farmer's fields? Are there public toilets, public baths? Do people just fling their waste into the streets?
Not that you, as GM, have to answer all those questions, but even answering one or two can lend a lot of atmosphere to your setting. Say that street lights are had by capturing souls and setting them on fire, which is something that happens to the souls of the poorest of the poor who can't afford proper burial. In Sword of the Serpentine's Eversink everyone tries to make statues for their dead, but there are always going to be people who can't manage that, or whose statues break. What if the alternative is an eternity roasting in hellfire so the wealthy can have decent street lighting? What kind of ghost catcher would the city have to employ to make that system work? How would the poor feel about that? Would there be riots, with people demanding that instead of using the poverty-stricken the city burns foreign souls instead? How do the characters feel about that?
Let's go from the general to the slightly more specific. What I want to talk about this time is the Building, as setting and as plot device.
Rear Window wouldn't work if all Jefferies did was stare at the murderer all day. He has an entire world at his disposal, from Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyhearts to the sculptor, the newlyweds, the old married couple, the composer, and dozens of others who appear and disappear like mayflies. They all exist within an artificial concept which I'm going to call The Building, even though the concept extends outside the walls of the structure to the coffee shops and railway stations of the film's 'outside world'. In the film's conceit the Building is literally that, and Jefferies is tied to that spot because he has a broken leg. The audience hardly ever sees anything from any perspective other than Jefferies' room.
Loadingreadyrun recently finished a short series directed by Jacob Burgess called Not A Drop To Drink, a Vampire chronicle set in Vancouver Island. I recommend it to anyone thinking about getting into tabletop but isn't sure how best to do it. However I bring it up now because of something Jacob said in the Q&A.
In answer to the question, was there anything you changed about the campaign due to decisions taken during session 0 (about 1.09.54 in), Jacob replies:
I had nothing planned going in ... I made a city, I wrote a city and all of the people in it ... and then you drop four [players] into it. I really didn't plan anything ahead of time and I used the elements people gave me, what they wanted, what they said some of the characters' desires were because those are sometimes different things and sometimes they even conflict ... to then feed in and fold everything in, so we all created the space we got to play in.
Jacob created a city and all of the people in it. Many settings do the same; Swords of the Serpentine again is a classic example of this, where the GM has an entire city at her disposal ready to be populated.
I'm going to suggest to you now, as GM to GM, that this conceit is the Building. It is the structure in which the action happens, and in which people meet the players, creating plot. It can be as large or small as you need it to be. Some games need entire planets. Some stories can play out within a single structure.
Most of Rear Window happens within one apartment; Jefferies can see other apartments, other people, but he's as locked in as any prisoner in Sing Sing. If he wants to talk to other people, they either have to be in the room with him or he needs to call them on the phone. Half the tension in the final act is precisely because the audience is locked in there with Jefferies; they can't move any more or any further than he can.
The Building is that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. It is player interaction, not NPC action, that makes plot.
For example, in a Cyberpunk session that I'm creating for some friends of mine, I've created:
Zhirafa Alley: For whatever reason the Zhirafa police drones have a bug in their programming about this crossroads. There used to be a CHOOH2 station here, run by some of the Aldecaldos. That went up in the third strafe. Nobody knows what happened to piss the drones off, but they regularly zap moving targets and complaints to Precinct #2 are ignored. Shooting back does not help; it only summons more Zhirafas.
I haven't written any more than that. I shouldn't need to. There's enough here to paint a scene and give the players something to interact with. Whether or not they go any further than that is up to them. They might never encounter Zhirafa Alley. I certainly haven't splattered stats all over the page, any more than (I suspect) Jacob gave each and every one of the dozens of NPCs in Not a Drop full stats. What would be the point?
Of course, if the players start paying close attention to Zhirafa Alley, that's a different story. That's the point at which I start thinking about stats, and motives, and other player-engagement things. Just as (I suspect) Jacob at least partially statted out the more important Not a Drop NPCs, like the Sherriff, as soon as he realized that NPC could become plot-critical.
Moving from the slightly more specific to the very specific, consider this potential Cyberpunk answer to the question, where do the characters live?
If you've existed on the internet for longer than five minutes you've probably seen at least one story or video about Hong Kong's coffin homes:
With the obvious caveat that the rich can buy much nicer coffins than the one in the Hong Kong video.
This is nothing new. We tend to think that the ideal middle class environment is the detached suburban house with garage, back yard, decent schools nearby for the 2.5 kids we intend to have and so on. We forget that suburbs are a very recent creation - late 19th century, with England's Metroland - and only came about because the train, and later the car, extended our reach. Before them, we could only ever go within walking distance of work and food. People lived in tiny houses or stuffed whole families into single rooms in big cities because there was no other affordable space.
Public transport was an incredible boon that allowed places like London to burst their boundaries, with buses, trains and highways creating new suburban opportunities. Trouble being, nobody's invented anything better since then, and the boomer generation's greying suburbs means installing more highways or better rail networks is almost impossible because grandpa doesn't want that in his backyard. That creates more pressure on the existing habitable space, which in turn creates demand for even the smallest of city habitats.
In the world of CP RED space is at a premium. After the nuke dropped, refugees ran away from the hot zone and set up temporary-but-permanent tent housing in what was the former Beavertown of Rancho Coronado. Many people don't have the luxury of four walls and a roof. As for public transport ...
Surprise, surprise. Contrary to expectations, the Dark Future has not yielded any staggering new developments in transportation. Years of economic strife and civil unrest have discouraged research into new ways to travel—in fact, the very act of travel has become very restricted. Don't expect the inner-city world of the Time of the Red to be much like the 20th century—a network of crowded freeways, packed trains, and swarming airports. Instead, think of it as a patchwork of badly up-kept roads, abandoned airports, and trains plagued by gangs and intermittent service. (Main Book, Everyday Life p 322).
So if you want any kind of work at all you need to live close to where you work. Odds are unless you have a lot of cash in your pocket you can't afford whatever travel networks exist, and that assumes those networks are safe(ish) to use - which they almost certainly aren't. When Rancho Coronado was a Corporate-controlled Beavertown with actual transport options this wasn't a problem. Nowadays, though, when you can't even reliably drive anywhere and Rancho Coronado is basically a tangled slum, we have:
Crystal Rock
Nobody remembers how Crystal Rock got its name, but it probably wasn't a compliment. When refugees first started flooding into Rancho Coronado many of them were temporarily housed in this old sports stadium. Over time, as Rancho Coronado devolved and it became clear there were few options for the forcibly evacuated, enterprising businessmen started adding portable Cubes, as a kind of an upgrade to tent housing and uncovered sleeping pallets. After all, it's not like the Rancho Raiders were ever going to play here again. Cubes piled on top of Cubes, and a couple of Cargo Containers were added to the mix for those who could afford luxury accommodation.
Cubes: You live in a single windowless room with a nice strong lock where you can touch both walls if you spread your arms. Flatpack furniture folds out of the walls, converting your cell from a chair with a desk to a bed with a small television. [Notice how even this is better than the Hong Kong coffin; there's space to sit, and a desk. You could work from home in this environment. It wouldn't be pleasant, but it would be doable.]
Cargo Containers: You'll have plenty of places to store your things, a bed to sleep comfortably, a desk, electricity, a refrigerator, microwave, and sink, protected by the security of a strong lock.
None of this was designed by any kind of qualified architect. It just grew like Topsy, built on top of what was intended to be temporary tent housing inside a sports stadium. Think of it like a ring fort, with the outer ring being the old stadium (now basically a kind of glorified strip mall catering mainly to residents), the next ring being open air tents and sleeping pallets, the next ring being Cubes, and the innermost ring being Cargo Containers. The final two rings are piled on top of each other, on foundations of building rubble and old abandoned Cubes. Sometimes there's a shift underneath that shakes the whole structure. It probably doesn't mean anything. You get from low to tall by means of escalators, which don't always work. Climbing all the way up to Container level when the escalators don't work is a real five-storey-brownstone pain in the ass. Luckily some enterprising folks have set up little mobile kibble wagons at each level, some even with seating, so climbers can take a break when they need to.
Many of the people who live here are in construction and entertainment. Company transport wagons bus them over to Pacifica Playground to the West, where there are plenty of jobs. The ones who don't work in Pacifica either work in one of the nearby construction or factory zones, or they have a hard time getting by.
Utilities (power and water) are handled on-site by filtration plants and solar generators. The Cubes and Containers aren't plumbed-in (though some of the more expensive Containers do have micro-shower cubicles). Instead there are public lavatories and showers inside the Stadium, accessed by private keys issued to tenants. The company that manages the utilities, toilets and showers, River Bend Management, is every tenant's love-to-hate company. Brownouts are common in the hot months, when everyone tries to run a fan or some kind of air conditioning.
Wireless Nodes nearby are run by three different service providers, of which the most popular is Feebus, with its cartoon winged man logo. Feebus isn't more reliable than the others, but it's cheaper.
Gang activity was a big problem in Crystal Rock's early days, but it's less of a problem now thanks in part to BozoByeBye, a loosely organized neighborhood watch. Originally set up by a Solo who's since moved out of Crystal Rock, BozoByeBye was created to deal with a persistent Bozo infestation in the Stadium. Nearly every permanent resident has the BBB app installed in their Agent, and it's generally assumed that when an alert pings someone in the group will deal with the problem. Eventually.
There is no security per se. River Bend keeps a remote eye on its installation and occasionally a Precinct #2 Zhirafa flies over, but there are no armed guards on patrol.
OK, so that's the Building. More than enough information there to keep the players entertained. What about the people?
Let's stick to three per area to keep things as simple as possible. So what are the areas? Broadly: the Stadium, the Tents, the Cubes, the Containers.
Stadium: Khan a cheerful little man in his early thirties (Aikido 6) who owns and operates PatchIt, a clothing repair store, bullet holes a specialty. He's dry cleaner, leatherworker and tailor to all of Crystal Rock. When this was still a sports stadium his store was a souvenir shop, and he hasn't changed the layout much. He also runs a self-defense class for Crystal Rock tenants.
Mulligan a broad-faced woman in her early forties, techie, River Bend's main maintenance operative. Big fan of BBB, will abandon a job in progress to go hunting with her shotgun.
Hooman an acne-scarred Fixer in his mid-twenties, the unofficial pharmacist for Crystal Rock. Limited medical skills, nothing like a ripperdoc or even a competent medtech but he can at least fill you full of narcotics, slap your ass and send you on your way.
Tents:Alice, formerly a dancer with minor exotic body mods (cat), lost her main gig after a bout with cyberpsychosis. Scrapes a living refilling noodle Vendits in the Stadium, dreams of getting back into Pacifica. Local strip joint TropicalMotion keeps offering her work and she keeps turning it down.
El Nagar, a Solo lying low after a really bad gig. Light tattoos indicate Triad affiliations. Enhanced Antibodies, Skin Weave, Vampyres. Keeps a machete and an SMG on him at all times. Likes to play chess.
Sudo, a gambling fanatic who sometimes has a Cube but more often than not is out in the tents again. His main game is poker. His prize possession is his Netrunning deck (500eb), the only thing he's never sold or pawned.
Cubes: Dirty Dirty, affiliated with theAldecaldos, is Crystal Rock's Shylock. Mid-forties, broad and brawny. If you want a loan and have something to pawn, he's your guy. He doesn't really live in his Cube; it's more of a storage space for the stuff people give him. The lock's much better than average, and you won't get the combination from Dirty Dirty even at gunpoint. Day in, day out, you'll find him sat outside his Cube waiting for business.
Mikey, construction worker (borgware Sigma, heavy lifter), eternally cheerful, to such an extent people wonder if he's permanently stoned. He does a lot of work in dangerous zones; people joke his footprints glow.
Cleo, kibble vendor who runs a stall out on the Cube's rooftops. Korean theme, has a popular sideline in medicinal foods or boyangshik. Always on the lookout for her deadbeat former girlfriend Seo-yun, who's often strung out on Hooman's latest batch.
Containers:Hibiscus, rocker/entertainer at a Pacifica nightclub, Redemption. Age impossible to guess, apparent age twenty-one. They specialize in pre-Bomb classics, more feel-good than high-intensity. One of Khan's dedicated students, and often runs the class if he's not available (Aikido 6).
Wally, corporate shark (literally - shark aquaform), works human resources for a construction firm, Premier General. He's one of the few people in Crystal Rock who was actually born in Rancho Coronado, pre-Bomb. He remembers coming to watch the Rancho Raiders with his dad when this was still a stadium.
Bobbi J, media, street scribe with a local music scene focus, a regular vidcast, Spread the Word, known in Rancho but not elsewhere. Popularly thought to have links with Network 54 talent scouts. Almost pro-level dancer, technicolor hair.
That's it. That's the Building. That's all you need.
Insert players, watch plot develop. Will they help Cleo save Seo-yun? Go Bozo hunting with Mulligan? What's the deal with El Nagar, and will some heavy hitters come looking for the Solo down on his luck? Is Dirty Dirty going to have to break Sudo's leg before Sudo coughs up the cash? Is Mikey borderline cyberpsycho or is his permanent happiness actually the real deal? Jesus, what is up with Feebus today - reception's patchy as hell. Will River Bend ever fix the fracking toilets - and what is causing that stink anyway? (My money's on a dead Bozo Mulligan chased down an HVAC vent, but you never know ...)
