Digimon Hackers: Jormungundr
Tokyo, Japan; 2045
Japan leads the world in world class virtual reality technology and a company rises from apparent nothingness to greatness as they release the EDEN Digital Device. The company, Hatsu Softworks, was founded by a woman named Ayako Hatsu. What started as a one woman project was quickly funded by mixture of crowdfunding and happy corporate partners. The EDEN headsets were easy to mass produce within 8 years and is available to most people even today, 8 years later.
The headset itself is revolutionary. It allows for what is called a “Digital Dive”. A full Virtual Reality where you leave your body connected to the device and your mind travels to the different worlds in the system with the main one known as EDEN Central. Design-wise, it looks like a park of sorts. There are trees, open grass fields and other things that exist in real-world parks. One caveat however, is that no matter where you go in EDEN things feel… Off. By any account one could describe it as digital. Weird digital. At times, textures will be missing and replaced by a static look, weird rectangular outlines of non-existent things… Basically, they’re all things to remind people that they are in a fake world.
Eden has few rules as most are hard to enforce. The first of which is that there are to be no major changes to your avatar as it is basically a copy of you. The changes that are allowed are not majorly radical. Clothes, hairstyles, etc. This is checked by the system when you “log” into a public server. Most other rules are typical ones that most normal people follow or don’t have to bother with.
Then there are those that go against those rules every day. Hackers. Groups of people, many without a particular affiliation even. It is said that three years after EDEN was opened to the public, one individual found an exploit in the system that allowed them to mess with the system itself. What one could do, really, was only stopped by one’s skill.
And with that came about the top Hacker Groups. Among them, one was extremely notable as many of the most skilled Hackers joined, Jormungundr. Their activities were varied from recovering accounts to erasing one’s social life. After two to three years of operating like this, a group rose up to stomp them out, Thor. Named specifically for the god that killed the snake in Norse Mythology.
Within months, Jormungundr’s virtual empire fell. Many of its members left with some defecting to Thor. Soon, Jormungundr was gone and Thor took the spot left vacant by the dead group.
In the wake of Jormungundr’s fall, a new addition was implemented to the system. Digital Monsters, more often called “Digimon”. Well, rather than implemented, it’s safer to say that they were brought out as a practical virus from Hackers who had somehow found a way behind a couple of firewalls to a new project. They found these monsters and unleashed them on the world.
In public servers, they’re used as AI friends and pets while in the private and back servers there are many different uses. Some use them as slaves while others use them as partners. Between hackers however, they are tools. Weapons even. Digimon are used to fight, more often than not with hackers backing them up with orders, information and sometimes support hacking.
The current state of affairs is that while Hatsu Softworks runs Eden’s public side, Thor runs it’s top Hacker groups with an iron fist. It’s leader, Tohru Okami, has a hard lock on many of the other top groups with the exception of the only thing that can be considered a rival, Fenrir. Fenrir being one of the few resistance groups to Thor. On the other hand, small
Now, a woman named Manaka reaches out with an invitation to a small number of hackers-to-be. An invitation to join Jormungundr.
Hello everyone reading this! I hope you’ve read through the jumbled mess up there and that it was enough to give you an idea of this world. Yes, I have definitely based this idea on the Cyber Sleuth games but other than a few Digimon cliches I hope this feels fairly entertaining.
Now, a few things to note. The biggest difference between today and the near future is the developed VR tech and smartphones being a bit better of course. Japan societally functions basically as it does today.
For human characters, I’d like to have the characters be between 16 and 24. Much younger and I don’t think they would receive the invitation and older than that and I don’t think they’d receive one either. Now, for skills, Jormungundr is looking for two things. Hacking abilitiy and Digimon raising ability. Both are needed they’re even willing to take in people that are good at the Digimon battling end of things and not so much the hacking end. One thing they are NOT looking for is lone wolves however. Teamwork makes the dream work, so don’t make an edgy lone wolf.
Now, digimon are going to start off at Champion this time around. Champions aren’t too difficult to reach but it does show experience in some way, shape or form. If you want to deviate from your evolution path you’ve set out, that should be fine so long as you have it be something that makes sense or we can talk about it. OH, and not only are we starting at Champion, everyone gets two! If you wanted to do something like Agumon and Gabumon to get Omnimon there you go!
Now, here’s the character sheet.
