R. E. S. E. T.
Inspired by Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex, and Altered Carbon
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Everyone in Fortuna had heard the words shouted out over the herds from some hologram or another. Everyone knows what it claims to be. Yet so few have ever seen a shred of proof it works that it’s commonly called “rich man’s fools gold” on the streets. The rich who could afford such miracles live forty stories above the landings: the maze of bridges and balconies that support a whole city suspended in air. The upper landing still saw sun, but with sun comes easy access for C-Sec. A few levels down, the lower landing lives in its shadow. Most of the working class that hasn’t succumbed to gangs and crime lords or crippling injuries and rampant disease live here. The failures of urban planning left a cramped, poorly lit, poorly drained clusterfuck of bridges and overhangs and pathways branching from complexes and open-air plazas cut into the skyscrapers that stretch above the clouds themselves. The gangs, crime lords, crippling injuries, and rampant diseases were all that awaited those cast out to ground level. Such poor condemned souls could say goodbye to any form of law and order, health and sanitation, or safety and shelter. Ground level is home to the worst of Fortuna: a haven for everything the corporate overlords have effectively buried beneath dozens of stories of concrete and steel.
Welcome to Fortuna.
ROLEPLAY
PLOTYou must pull the resistance together. You alone can rebuild what was and carry the flag to even greater heights. This defeat was a reminder of the power of those that you are doing battle with, but it is not your ultimate demise. Fortuna United is the underdog. It has been since its inception and continues to be so. You will have to fight smarter than your enemies to overcome insurmountable odds. In the face of a brutal smackdown, a bunch of Fortuna United rookies have to step up, take charge, and save the rebellion.
CHARACTERS
None of the player characters are particularly ranking within the resistance movement. They either escaped the raid early, or were simply not present. They may have a little bit of veterancy or be completely new recruits. It will be up to the players to re-establish a hierarchy and rebuild. The Fortuna United movement as it existed a week ago is gone. What comes next, even if it bears a familiar name, will be something new.
The resistance movement is in shambles. Characters will not be particularly well equipped or well trained. While the streets of ground level may be rife with gang warfare, that hardly passes for experience versus C-Sec troopers. Characters will grow with the rebellion; they are its new heart and soul ... if they can save it.
RULES
My rules as GM are always simple. Any submission of character sheets is an acceptance of my rules & expectations. I will not accept ignorance as a defense. I reserve the right to suspend or eject any participant at any time for any reason. That power reserved, I will refrain from taking action without a rules violation or a significant disruption to normal RP operation.
- No godmodding
- No powerplaying
- No metagaming
- No disrespecting fellow players
- Be prepared for unnerving material (this will not be a romanticized version of a rebellion)
- Be prepared to maintain weekly posting frequency
- Notify GM in advance if you are unable to do so
- Notify GM if writing collab posts
- Collab posts are not an excuse to hold up the IC for extended periods of time
- Characters of departed players will be managed by the GM and cleanly removed from play as early as possible
DEATH
Death is not permanent. Before it was beheaded, the Fortuna United resistance had established a closed-loop R.E.S.E.T. network using stolen hardware. Unlike the next-generation globe-spanning equipment that Eden Star provides, the resistance’s system is severely limited in range and capability. When the Fortuna United leadership was assassinated, the wireless network was jammed by C-Sec, leaving them no escape options.
It is possible for player characters to be effectively resurrected from death by this system. The network the resistance controls is limited in area, with setup of a new node being an important step to preparing an operation. It is limited in its capacity to grow and individualize blanks, generic template bodies with no distinguishing features assigned, which limits the rate people can be brought back. Despite the ability to cheat death, the wait can be up to 48 hours for reimplantation per deceased individual.
The system is not infallible. The players will be made aware as the RP progresses when R.E.S.E.T. is not available. When this is the case, death is very permanent. There will be times when your safety net is taken away from you, though this will not be all the time. Be aware of this when deciding whether to take risks or not.
METAGAME
The actions of the player-run resistance will affect the world around you. Relations with locals, police, and the C-Sec groups of different corporations will change the course of events, affect your access to equipment and manpower, and shift the political landscape for or against Fortuna United on a day to day basis. While access to large amounts of military grade hardware is not available at the start of the roleplay, support from local arms dealers or even the occasional police officer will earn better equipment and valuable information.
The player characters may enlist the help of the recruits of Fortuna United as grunts on missions. When morale is high and the movement is popular, a steady stream of volunteers will pour in. But be wary, as heavy losses may hurt your recruitment and the supply of individuals willing to join the fight could even go into the negative.
The metagame components are handled entirely behind the scenes by the GM. All developments from such will be publicized. As a player, everything will be handled automatically. The most important takeaway is to remember the world is not static. Your actions will have consequences, for better or worse.
CHARACTER SHEET
Please send full character sheets via private message only. The subject line should clearly denote the message as a character sheet for R.E.S.E.T. to ensure proper prioritization. Please avoid posting full sheets publicly due to spoilers. As GM I need to be privy to more character details than other players in order to vet them (and the players behind them to an extent). However, I encourage redacting of all information not plausibly known to other characters before posting sheets publicly.
The party will ultimately have to work together in order to succeed, but that does not require the party to be fully functional, particularly in the wake of the events that precede the commencement of this RP. Characters will have to make hard decisions which include trusting their lives to someone they might not want to, or choosing between saving themself by screwing someone else or risking their life to be a hero.
The Fortuna United rebellion does not have plot armor. It will succeed or fail on the characters’ shoulders. I will not allow actively working against that goal. However, that does not mean that passive obstacles will not come up. Player characters will be in positions to be near-constantly afraid for their lives. That level of stress can easily override reason.
WORLD
FORTUNA
The city of fantasies and nightmares. Massive high-rises pierce the clouds, punctuating a landscape that epitomises the phrase “urban sprawl.” The towers themselves are beacons, bastions, and fortresses of luxury in a world otherwise plated in concrete and glowing with neon and holograms. Hundreds of square miles of land have been conquered by the city marching westward, its eastward expansion only halted by running out of land. Its sheer area has been multiplied tenfold moving in the last direction finally possible: up.
The landings make up most of the city beyond the ivory towers. Roads, footbridges, plazas, balconies, and every manner of structure imaginable exists at every level of civilization built atop the last. The levels that can still see the sky are referred to as the upper landing. Rent is higher, but the city is tolerable, even nice, at this level. The inhabitants are mostly low-level corpo workers in suits and ties, filling out paperwork and punching keyboards day in and day out. Life is something close to comfortable in the naturally lit regions of Fortuna. The residents of the upper landing are unlikely to take kindly to a rebellion for now.
The topmost level of the landings is just the most recent construction. Many came before, now resting in the upper’s shadow. As one descends through the levels, construction decays. The city becomes darker, dirtier, wetter, more entangled. These structures define the lower landing. Each level down becomes more of a maze of bridges to get lost in, forced into places they never should have fit by engineers who never should have graduated. It's a grim place to live, but the vast majority of Fortuna’s residents are stuck here working on hourly wages in industrial areas or retail or some other poorly-compensated job. Street vehicles are less common and air traffic is banned. What little airspace there is gets reserved for C-Sec, whose presence is varied and enforcement is draconian. Fortuna United survived here for months under the nose of C-Sec.
The true streets of the original city, before it reached into the sky above, are now a hellhole. Law enforcement and security is basically nonexistent on ground level. Gangs and crime are rampant. Disease and crippling injury fuel black market augmentation businesses. Most permanent residents are more machine than man if they’ve survived any length of time. Even the resistance avoids a constant presence in this abyss.
C-SEC
Corporate security forces are not beholden to the laws and guidelines that local police are. They exist not to keep peace, or protect people, but to protect the interests of whatever corporation employs them. Many C-Sec groups are subsidiaries that act at the direction of their parent company. Many more are unaffiliated corporations of their own that work on a contractual basis.
While C-Sec can often operate extrajudicially or even illegally, they do so at the backing of entities too powerful for local law enforcement to dare challenge. They are better equipped, better trained, and better funded, bordering on private military rather than a security detail. As long as their actions fall roughly within the purview of their assignment, they are as good as untouchable. Down in the lower districts of Fortuna, even police can sometimes be an ally, but C-Sec is never your friend.
RESISTANCE
The idea of armed rebellion is a contentious topic in Fortuna, often for fear of retaliation. The Fortuna United movement has existed for less than a year. Many street gangs see a revolt as disruptive to the natural order they’ve come to thrive in. The working class simply cannot afford to take such a gamble of long odds. Low-level executives are at least comfortable enough to not want to rock the boat. The idea of rebellion was a hard flame to kindle, but will burn for a long time once lit. Fortuna United is that flame.
In its short life, it has worked to nurture a strong working relationship with the local populace of lower district 23. (The city districts are numbered for utility maintenance purposes and at some point, civilians stopped caring about the proper names the politicians used.) The former, now-deceased leadership believed in fighting the poor man’s battles, rather than waging a war on their own. They were the brave who dared to stand between civilians and C-Sec forces. The purely defensive strategy won them adoration and a spike in recent volunteers, but not much else. It notably attracted the ire of the C-Sec org whose work was stymied by their hand, and thus their subsequent downfall.
One thing is clear in the aftermath: the role of righteous defender didn’t work. It earned them legitimacy and the favor of the locals, but failed to improve conditions and only succeeded in getting themselves slaughtered. Fortuna United is hemorrhaging members in the wake of the beating. The loyalists who still wear the banner have been driven underground, with the streets being too dangerous to even speak the name until the storm blows over. It now falls to those volunteers ... the rookies of Fortuna United to take the reins and salvage the impossible situation.
TECHNOLOGY
Human mechanical augmentation as a science has been around for decades at this point. Virtually any physical malady can be resolved with hardware that is as capable as the organic original, or better if the individual can afford it. “Enhanced” cybernetics, hardware with significant improvement of normal functions like extreme strength or speed, or with functions not considered normal such as concealed tools or weapons, are far more expensive and strictly regulated. An individual with enhanced cybernetics caught participating in illegal activities is subject to far more severe penalties.
Magnetic propulsion technology has revolutionized everything from transport to defense. Mag-rail trains to railguns all exist in plenty. Most weapons available are either pure magnetic acceleration in some variety or another, or a hybrid of chemical and magnetic propulsion. Modern firearm power supplies can last for as many as 600 rounds in rifles and must be reloaded far less frequently than the ammunition magazines.
Computerized Neural Emulations, the ability to digitize the human brain in fully dynamic real-time state, is the biggest breakthrough of the last 20 years. The development has fueled a quantum surge in brain-technology interfacing, including the titular R.E.S.E.T. system by Eden Star Medical Technologies. The skyrocketing availability of cybernetics directly interfacing with the brain more completely than ever before has led to some concerns over the security of such devices and the risk of “brain hacking.” Public trepidation has widely ignored the concept of long-term emulation, the potential risks of which are largely unknown.
Active Flow Support is they key to the sky-piercing constructs of the super rich that tower over the rest of Fortuna. Though the mechanisms behind it are engineering marvels, the principle is simply Isaac Newton's third law applied to high-rise construction. Matter gets launched up to the top where its stopped, and launched back down. The technology has enabled the construction of ornate skyscrapers whose shape could not exist under the strength of its building materials alone.
