I was reading Shadowrun and Cyberpunk books and while I'm creating the broad strokes of the setting I want to run it got me thinking about the punk-aesthetic and ideologies they wanna make for the runners. Does the kind of antiestablishment behavior still fit a setting inspired by 2020s? From what I can tell, cyberpunk/shadowrun settings are caricatures of the 80s-90s corporate culture, which isn't really a thing anymore. Used to be you can just slap a cyberpunk paint on "generic republican hypercapitalist" and you have an enemy faction but in the modern world the corpos and powerful people are all over the ideological spectrum. How exactly do you "punk" in a cyberpunk future if it's based on what we have now?
>>98263244It really all depends on what lens you are using to project cyberpunk;Are we in an age of political and social upheavel and the 'punks' are fighting against an oppresive corpo/government?Are we just clandestine terrorist for hire to harass another corp/government?Or are we corpo/glowies dealing with internal politics and how we feel about the actions of our faction?
>>98263244Keep in mind that in the modern era, we can clearly see how most predictions of the future are wrong, and even stuff that is properly predicted don't quite go far enough, think communicators from Trek into modern cell phones. If you want to make this realistic, focus on brain implants and self driving cars, stuff like that. Unfortunately, very few of your predictions are likely to happen, but it could still be fun for your players!
>>98263244>but in the modern world the corpos and powerful people are all over the ideological spectrumThe only thing that changed since then is that with the fall of the Soviet block, they don't have to pretend to like liberalism and democracy even if it doesn't make their line go up.What's more, you're living in an age where decolonization has been brought to completion, and butthurt Africas are actively trying to destroy the western world for fun and profit and because they have theories about race they hold dear.
>>98263244>How exactly do you "punk" in a cyberpunk future if it's based on what we have now?OG cyberpunk supposed that everyone but the oligarchs would be more or less equally oppressed by the system, they didn't count on corporations having unironic fans who do it for free. I guess you would have to live like OBL to be punk now
>>98263861>Corporations are given AI robot bodies with souls and allowed to vote proportionate to how good their stocks are doing.
>>98263872Now I'm curious how this could be used as a way of handicapping a megacorp. Imagine if governments had to do the same thing and actualize their countries mascot/avatar as an independent being that has a significant stake in their country's well being and the consequences of being taken over/absorbed by another one.
>>98263945>Forum debates on different mergers or battles.>"I think Pepsi would totally fizz bomb Gatorade into next week if they went head to head in Stock Market Arena!"
>>98263967Think of the family/social web of different corporations and how they relate to each other.
>>98263977>SpaceX and Nvidia arguing at the dinner while Twitter and Youtube bicker at the kiddie table.
>>98263244Read Gibson's Blue Ant stuff
>>98263244I am not sure why people think they need to go back to almost half a century ago when we are in a cyberpunk society (or probably post-cyberpunk) already.I mean, you can be an AI right now, contributing to the biggest upward climate change since I don't even remember what geological epoch while directing human sociopolitical thought at large. Do neons, synthwave and trenchcoats really matter for a vision of the future? We ARE the punks, and yes, we're not doing a goog job at it.That being said: >>98263861 is in the right direction. If anything, most old-school corps are the good guys now, or at least they're slightly less worse than your political bogeyman. So if that's the point, go to your average techbro, make him perhaps a little more cultish than he already is, and you're set.
>>98264016It goes back and forth. It's funny that cyberpunk imagined that governments would be subservient to the corpos when in reality its very much a give and take relationship where the scales tipping in either direction more than others at any given moment.
>>98263244You just can't have a single sub culture of "punks" that all uniformly have the same "down with the system" mentality; instead you have different groups with their own goals and ways of achieving them. Some will seek to pull down the existing system (with the smart ones of this group wanting to be the new power brokers) while you have other sub groups that seek to take over and manipulate the corps from within.And adding to that, any large corporation is not going to be monolithic, and have its own sub factions with their own goals. And some of those factions will stretch across corporations, actively aiding other members of the group even at the cost of their own employer. A mission idea, for example, would be a high up exec hiring the players to kill the top people of the HR dept; they can't just be fired since they have some good dirt on the top execs. The executive is the classic greedy scumbag, who want HR gone because they keep hiring idiots who happen to match the HR members' political desires.
>>98263244Anon, just use the cool stuff.Sure, maybe anti-establishment aesthetics based on 2020's would different than 2020/Shadowrun, but who cares? Don't get hanged up on "accuracy".
>>98263861>they didn't count on corporations having unironic fans who do it for freeThe RPGs do have people who defend corps, but they do it out of loyalty because the megacorp is treated like a nation that rewards loyalty.It's based on how japanese businesses used to work.
>>98264064This is a good post.I’d like to imagine the “punks” are mostly a decentralized collective of violent rebels with different goals against the system and corporate forces all loosely allied to not get stomped one by one.But their goals after toppling the system and corpos differs. Some want to wipe the slate clean by burning everything, others want to take over and remove the excesses for fairness.Others just want to loot and destroy and move somewhere else with their looted wealth.So the punks while forced to be united via pragmatism are very tense in knowing they’re probably turn on each other if they succeed in defeating the common enemies.
Have the trillion dollar corpos just fake broadcast that they care about the punks ideological views and watch as the punks align with them thinking they truly care lmaoI.e gay pride parades by Skynet, unisex bathrooms installed in Datadyne headquarters, non binary awareness day with free pizza!
>>98263244Remember those niggas who shot up those power converters in 2013 never got caught.
>>98263244Commodification of the idea of "punk" has really killed a lot of old Shadowrun's culture. Mostly, the idea of a rebel fighting against certain injustice has been redirected, packaged, and sold back to people to shape their anger away from the things that would actually cause them.I would say if you wanted a true idea of punk today, you'd have to take something despised by the people in charge and by extension the masses they've influenced and write a game on it. That means whatever you go with won't have broad appeal at the moment, it'll be true counter-cultural in the sense that it's likely to be generally disliked by most and outright hated by a vocal subsection of the population.The ideas you could pick could be radical or reactionary. For example, I chose a fanatic need for a certain faction to uncover and disseminate information for a previous setting I had worked on. It started as the group distributing copyrighted works in a massive pirate network and then eventually became stealing corporate and state secrets to be posted for the public to see. Naturally, this made the group public enemy number one when it blew open a propaganda arrangement between two corporations towards the public and caused a slight downturn in their stock valuations.On the reactionary side, maybe your punk group functions somewhere between a mafia and a feudal state, protecting people under their wing from the abuses of the law on one hand while forcing their cooperation on the other. It's half practical so people have somewhere to turn to when the system screws them and half political to rectify that system entirely. While 80s punks have usually focused on more liberal causes, that's not to say there weren't other groups going in the opposite direction just as deserving of the title of punk.Either way, you have to avoid the things that go with the grain. If your players aren't on board with that, you're better off playing something else.
>>98270258I've said before that I believe there's a lot of overlap between cyberpunks and (literal, historical) pirates.* Living on the periphery due to terminal misfit syndrome* Getting involuntarily pulled into a life of violence by the state, and then abandoned the moment you're surplus to requirements* Criminal status makes you literally unable to return to civilian life, probably under pain of death* Living off the proceeds of armed robbery* Deniable ops for megacorps (EIC, for example)* Evade the cops sometimes, fight them if the odds look OK* Absolute necessity of keeping a good rapport with local civilian populations - you have to trade and careen somewhere* Tension between being violent enough and not so violent it's a problem* Limb replacement* Being on the forefront of contemporary technology (naval gunnery, navigation, computer hacking, etc.)* Getting rich, then getting fat and going straight* Swordfights on moving vehicles* Making money in the Americas and Europe to buy cool stuff from Asia (cyberware, opium)* A sick logo and/or hat makes a huge difference to your credibility* Getting drunk on hard liquor as often as possible* Burying caches of gold/paydata* Sick tattoos and piercingsI'm sure there's more.
How's a open table/west marches style game in this genre?I read mixed things about it because hexploration isn't really as important or possible in the city.I was thinking of running a cy_borg runners guild/safehouse. Seems simple but not really sure how I'd handle the sandbox.Maybe I could run it in a 2000ad cursed earth wilderness or something. I fear that would lose the lustre of a cyberpunk setting though.
>>98273037With hexes? Sort of dumb in a city. The existence of cyberpunk public transit alone would make it very odd.An underhive, Kowloon walled city sort of area could be hexed, but you might find it easier to use a square grid to loosely approximate a block structure.
>>98273196I'm not tied to it, it's just WM games are big on exploration. I could of course just run jobs out of a safehouse but I need a way to tie sessions together and make the sandbox react.I was considering the Without Number faction rules for it.
>>98269130I do agree and think it's one of the main things a lot of cyberpunk misses; Not everyone is on the same page and the punk around the corner could be the next corpo in waiting.
>>98263244>Does the kind of antiestablishment behavior still fit a setting inspired by 2020sNigger we are getting even more doubly anal raped daily by rich tech oligarchs than any 80's punk could've ever imagine, Musk became the first trillionaire and was in the white house and Thiel literally takes the blood of young men and follows a guy who think the poor should melted for bio matter, and Larry Ellison has openly talked about wanting to create a surveillance state to monitory everyone in order to stop crime. All these guys have contracts with the military. There's flock cameras fucking everywhere now. Cyberpunk was even right about an Asian superpower threatening US economic power, but got the wrong country. The only difficult thing about a 2020's cyberpunk is the fact that no one is actually fucking cool and punk anymore.
Cyberpunk in an urban crawl like Westmarches doesn't have to be about Hexes, it can be map based. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36473/roleplaying-games/thinking-about-urbancrawls has a whole section of making Urbancrawls.The attached picture is a Scotland Yard board, which has different tokens to travel from spot to spot. There's Yellow Taxis that go one spot to the next spot, Green Buses that only stop at Green spots and follow the green lines, and Red for Underground. Mr. X also gets some Black tokens to use for the Ferries that launch and land at specific spots. This gives you different modes of transport to move around the city. You could build a similar style of map and add vertical layers to it.
>>98271146Kek good postok my next character I'm going to name like a pirate
>>98263861>they didn't count on corporations having unironic fans who do it for freeThe greatest irony of it all is it's the people who call themselves punks that do the most corporate bootlicking in this day and age.
>>98263244>Does the kind of antiestablishment behavior still fit a setting inspired by 2020s?I don't know man, depends on how much sand you have in your eyes and ears from burying it away from the metric shitton of corruption in the world.
>From what I can tell, cyberpunk/shadowrun settings are caricatures of the 80s-90s corporate culture, which isn't really a thing anymore.Really now, you have Musk, Zuck and Altman and can't cook up some fucking cyberpunk with that? Fucks sake, they even had a companion-LLM in the new Bladerunner movie.
>>98275542I think the question was that how do you even punk in a world where everything is controlled by the corporationsOG cyberpunk is actually pretty lenient if you think about it, take Mona Lisa Overdrive and the Factory — Gibson had to leave the punks some real estate to do punk stuff in which just sounds implausible
>>98275594Most of the shadowrunning community is actually a resource for corporations. Pawns for deniable ops, easy to blame them for inevitable losses (oh no, the project that wasn't working out got stolen, insurance money pweese), creates a submarket for arms AND law enforcement products, etc.It's up to the punks to use the leeway they get.
>>98263244I'd say just move with the times and make the old corporations feel more modern. Militech takes part in gay pride parades while Arasaka has an official don't ask, don't tell policy for example. The idea that all Corporations have to have the same internal politics and culture is boring and unrealistic. What is important is that you make certain they're evil enough to justify them being antagonists in the campaign. In the end they all seek power and wealth above all else and any values they have can be easily shed if they become inconvenient or affect the bottom line.As to why the Cyberpunk hasn't moved with the times and is still infatuated with kitschy 80's ideals, I'd chalk that up to writers of current Cyberpunk TTRPGs not wanting to address modern politics and update their satire. I can't speak for Shadowrun, but Cyberpunk Red's worldbuilding has always felt kinda santized and bland.
