______________________________________________________________________________________"The future. Dark, dirty, and dangerous. You're loners, punks, and criminals, marginalized by society by birth, choice, or violence. Parasites, living symbiotic existences in the shadows cast by the arcologies, feeding from the scraps dangled by the megacorporations and then scurrying back to the shadows to avoid their dismissive, destructive gaze. Those vast multinational corporations squat over everything, pulling the strings, controlling the flow of money, information, goods, and people. Governments scamper around their feet, begging for scraps. Hydrophilic lubricious polymers and automated cleaners keep their arcologies shining amidst the grey-brown urban sprawl which surrounds them. Corporate financial muscle pushes people around the city like blood. The megacorporations. Humanity's most successful artificial organism."
This is Tʜᴇ Sᴘʀᴀᴡʟ, a cyberpunk game about rugged and desperate urban operators who work the dirty jobs that the ubiquitous corps find best to sweep under the rug, and their struggle to both make bank and keep their meat and chrome all in one piece. More or less. The system is designed to display a gritty, neon-laden window into the future, shuttle the players into tense situations, and force their characters to make hard decisions. It is based on the Apocalypse World Engine, and thus focuses on wracking up tension and setting up interesting narrative opportunities. In this game, the dice play a greater role than simply determining success or failure. They set up new situations, complicated success, growing stress on the current situation, and always push the narrative forward whether they come up to success or failure. All of this combines to keep the pressure on, set a hard edge to the world, and keep the story going.
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The year is 2061, a century after the Iron Curtain that never fell.
The year is 2061, a century after the Iron Curtain that never fell.
A history lesson for those of you fresh off the boat: The Cantonese United Enterprise State is owned by the corps. Literally. A conglomerate of some of the most bloated megacorps declared sovereignty back in the '30s and dropped a not-so-small country's worth of cred on China for the pleasure. Ate up most of the Guangdong province, sacking Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Macau without a single shot fired. Trained meat's too expensive to lose over a silly war, anyway. The Russians almost tried to take the whole thing down, claiming it as an affront to the USSR. Didn't last long. Enough dirt was dug, assassins hired, and families kidnapped before the whole affair that after threats surfaced, nearly a third the higher-ups in the Russian government were unseated, killed, bought out, or extorted in retaliation by the corps. Including the First Secretary. The lesson here, kids, is don't fuck with the corps, or they'll burn down everything you've got before even considering the mercy of letting lead caps break into your skull.
And to celebrate, or just add insult to injury, the newly-instated CUES decided to build. And build big. Massive towers of synth and steel rose into the sky, taking up a huge sprawl of their new land. Neighborhoods were demolished, homes repossessed, and entire mountains flattened to make room for the rampant construction. Within a few years, what they had built dwarfed the neighboring cities they had already acquired. And when it all went online, the dizzying array of neon lights, holographic displays, and enormous adscreens set up their display of dominance. It wasn't long before the infant city became known as the eastern jewel of international trade. Soon, factories sprung up and people crammed themselves in the outer reaches of the city lines to make new lives for themselves. It was a new land of opportunity, it seemed. Like fucking clockwork, the freshly built slums overfilled. Shantytowns sprung up on the rooftops of public housing centers, with entire communities of the poor setting up scrap metal shelters for themselves. Which all just shows that where there's suffering, there's profit.
Welcome to New Canton, our beloved shithole.
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The Player-Corporations
S I N S E K CORP
-Written by corneredbliss"The enterprise responsible for the many pleasures of the modern world!"
A megacorp that sells flesh for profit via disguised businesses such as bath houses, academies, hotels, and more of the like. Originally created with a targeted group of wealthy, unfaithful corporate men in mind, Sinsek finds the most beautiful and the most resilient to provide with their bodies at these establishments - no matter the noncompliance. Have a fetish that can't be satisfies? No problem! Seeking the company of another male without wanting the ire of the public eye? You've got it! Anything one may want or need is provided, granted the proper payment is made.
In an effort for expansion, Sinsek Corp has recently launched similar services for women, complete with beauty services that include cosmetic redecoration and euphoric stimulant; perfect for dealing with those lonely nights when the husband is still at work.
A megacorp that sells flesh for profit via disguised businesses such as bath houses, academies, hotels, and more of the like. Originally created with a targeted group of wealthy, unfaithful corporate men in mind, Sinsek finds the most beautiful and the most resilient to provide with their bodies at these establishments - no matter the noncompliance. Have a fetish that can't be satisfies? No problem! Seeking the company of another male without wanting the ire of the public eye? You've got it! Anything one may want or need is provided, granted the proper payment is made.
In an effort for expansion, Sinsek Corp has recently launched similar services for women, complete with beauty services that include cosmetic redecoration and euphoric stimulant; perfect for dealing with those lonely nights when the husband is still at work.
Mako-Oskarson Logistics & Excavation Corporation [MOLECorp]
-Written by MuttonhawkInsignia: Three slightly curved mole claws arranged as a stylised 'M'.
"Our deepest value is professionalism!"
The undercity is where the dregs fall to. Far be it for megacorps to ignore the wealth beneath those forgotten folk. That is, if MOLECorp didn't call dibs first.
On the surface, MOLECorp's empire of dirt is based in mining, mineral processing, construction, and high-speed underground transportation. The layers run deeper into public transportation systems (mostly subway networks), seismology, geothermic power, courier networks, and resource transportation (pipes, cables, pumps, you name it). Dig deep enough and you'll find human trafficking, smuggling, holding surface property to ransom under threats of insurance-waived 'earthquakes,' and their own brand of surgical military strikes specialising in striking up at basements and ascending their assaults from there.
As you might have guessed, MOLECorp's business is under terra firma. And if you have business underground, you have business with MOLECorp. Their vast underground transportation network offers them significant advantages to those who can't risk taking air, sea, or overland routes. Their seismic probing equipment virtually guarantees that any unrented digging or trespass too far under the ground is literally undermined and neutralised until the offender pays up. If that was not bad enough, tendency for 'accidental' tunnel collapses has swallowed entire cities where they have had enough threats in them, or so rumours say. They would probably sink more places if their immediate attention wasn't fixated on fighting other mining corps elsewhere in the world.
MOLECorp's internal military goons are aesthetically recognisable by their oxygen masks, fire-retardent smocks and gloves, hardhats, and night vision goggles. They are used to working underground, making their chromes the dirtiest of them all. Albeit with clay, rocks, and loam more than grease. Explosives of all different kinds join their arsenal of small arms.
"Our deepest value is professionalism!"
The undercity is where the dregs fall to. Far be it for megacorps to ignore the wealth beneath those forgotten folk. That is, if MOLECorp didn't call dibs first.
On the surface, MOLECorp's empire of dirt is based in mining, mineral processing, construction, and high-speed underground transportation. The layers run deeper into public transportation systems (mostly subway networks), seismology, geothermic power, courier networks, and resource transportation (pipes, cables, pumps, you name it). Dig deep enough and you'll find human trafficking, smuggling, holding surface property to ransom under threats of insurance-waived 'earthquakes,' and their own brand of surgical military strikes specialising in striking up at basements and ascending their assaults from there.
As you might have guessed, MOLECorp's business is under terra firma. And if you have business underground, you have business with MOLECorp. Their vast underground transportation network offers them significant advantages to those who can't risk taking air, sea, or overland routes. Their seismic probing equipment virtually guarantees that any unrented digging or trespass too far under the ground is literally undermined and neutralised until the offender pays up. If that was not bad enough, tendency for 'accidental' tunnel collapses has swallowed entire cities where they have had enough threats in them, or so rumours say. They would probably sink more places if their immediate attention wasn't fixated on fighting other mining corps elsewhere in the world.
MOLECorp's internal military goons are aesthetically recognisable by their oxygen masks, fire-retardent smocks and gloves, hardhats, and night vision goggles. They are used to working underground, making their chromes the dirtiest of them all. Albeit with clay, rocks, and loam more than grease. Explosives of all different kinds join their arsenal of small arms.
TVPCorp
-Written by ihinkaThule military branch for research and development of Vril-empowered psi soldiers. Officially known as Theoretical Validation of Psychic phenomena. The corporation has deep ties to the ancient German occult societies that were prominent during WWII - Thule and Vril. As per their mandate, the corporation is sending its best assets to seek out children that are reported to possess a strong Vril (an occult force in which the Thule and Vril societies believed and hoped would help them win the war). The children were to be interred within special facilities of the corp where they would undergo various procedures with the intent to amplify their psi abilities. The males would be programmed to become future soldiers for the corp, while the females, in which the Vril was always reported to be much stronger, would be developed until complete maxing out of their talents, to serve as sacrifices for the purposes of harvesting their Vril for the personal use of the Thule and Vril leaders.
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