Carbon 2185: Neo-Cyber Blues
| Carbon 2185: Neo-Cyber Blues | |
|---|---|
 | |
| GM | |
| Erik | |
| Status | |
| Campaign Abandoned | |
| Characters | |
|
Brick (Karen) Galen-5824 (Mark) George Donovan (Tim) Lachesis (Ben) Simone Yang (Adam) Tetra-chan (Jason) Zaahira Idrissi (Lisa) | |
| The Game | |
| Character Level: 3 | |
| Adventure Log |
The world that our cyberpunks find themselves in would be unrecognizable to their early 21st century ancestors. The environmental collapse of the late 21st century and the mishandling of power cells has left the Earth heavily polluted and irradiated. Many cities deal with the pollution by having air filters installed atop buildings. This helps to keep the pollution at livable levels, although on bad days even the cleanest of cities have visibility of less than 100ft. The areas outside of cities are heavily polluted, and not somewhere you can spend any extended amount of time.
Earth's environmental collapse led to social upheaval which in turn led to a world essentially run by mega corporations. Earth's governments are now little more than figureheads with the real power in the hands of the corporations. This is not the case off world. The colonies and free worlds like Mars enjoy stronger governments.
Cyberpunks
- Brick - Karen
- Galen-5824 - Mark
- George Donovan - Tim
- Lachesis - Ben
- Simone Yang - Adam
- Lisa's character place holder
Starting Location
The crown jewel of North America – of the planet! A dizzying microcosm of wealth, beauty, art and fashion, the highest of high life, the grandest of grandeur. The apple of the Big Apple’s eye, the place where all roads lead, the city within the City That Never Sleeps. The Capital of the World. Manhattan!
It’s a shithole, unless you’re rich.
Manhattan is a place of the severest contrasts between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, apparent beauty and inner ugliness. It is here that the megacorps of the world have decided to hold court and set up their respective embassies, creating a class of diplomatic corporate elites who compete to see who can revel in the grandest expenditure. It is also a place with a literal Underbelly, the war- rens of abandoned subways, sewers and basements, where a host of the dispossessed and parasitic live off the leavings of the people above.
Manhattan society is defined by the System, a way of life and social order that echoes medieval feudalism and Renaissance patronage. The diplomats representing the megacorps, in the salons and theatres of Broadway as well as the floor of the World Corporate Forum, are engaged in an unending competition to be seen. Their lavish expenditure on fashion artistic patronage and their obscenely huge and luxurious embassies fuels Manhattan’s economy. Everyone else on Manhattan is involved in somehow supporting this cycle of conspicuous consumption of the diplomatic class — making their fashion, entertaining them, selling them drugs, providing them with security, manning their embassies, maintaining their private transportation, making their art, driving their limos crafting their cosmetic augmentations, and a thousand other functions. Everyone locked in this cycle of service and expenditure is part of the System. Though the System has no official desig- nation, almost everyone living above street level in Manhattan is a part of it.
Manhattan is broadly divided into three area – Uptown to the north, Midtown, and Lower Manhattan to the south – though its historically significant neighborhoods have lost their definition under the various corporate regimes. Central Park still forms a rectangle of green among the concrete, though now half of it is dominated by the opaque dome of the NeueHoffnung, the Regierung Kybernetik embassy, and the other half by a dense jungle of bioengineered vegetation.
World differences from that of rule book
"Paramour" synths are not made by Shenzen Solutions, instead they are produced by the Asano Corporation, specialists in advanced replication. They are also called Maiko and not Paramour.
How different Origins are viewed and treated
Synths
Synths are a common sight both on and off world (with a few exceptions). The life of a synth is forced labor for the many corporations, both on Earth and the colonies. This enslavement is not lost on the synths, and most of them dream of escaping this life. Some of them actively pursue it.
Synths are widely considered nothing more than a machine that makes modern life convenient. However, the advanced degree of their AI and the complete nature of their biology makes them almost human.
The cruel reality of their existence is that they know, they desire, they suffer. Generally speaking human beings ignore this reality, but there are many humans who sympathize with the synths, and this sympathy helps fuel the Synth Liberation Front and its mission to free all synths and establish an independent nation with the same rights and freedoms as their creators.