A company's a creature that's trying to survive; it's gotta claw and bite unless it wants to be eaten up by something bigger.
- Eliza Thornbrook, CEO of the now defunct Armitage United
- Eliza Thornbrook, CEO of the now defunct Armitage United
The year is 2098, and the world looks very different to what it did at the start of the century. Although large economic depressions were not new phenomenons, in 2029, the "Great Collapse" occurred; a total meltdown of the global economic order, with currencies falling apart in a domino effect that left billions jobless, savings eradicated and homes repossessed on a mass scale. Bread lines snaked across cities, infrastructure crumbled without the finances to maintain them, and protests raged in streets. Protests became riots, became all out civil insurrection, and with people left jobless and with nothing else to lose, governments fell like wheat to a scythe.
In the power vacuum left behind in the Great Collapse, corporations found themselves free of the regulations which bound them and quickly took the place of governments. Although many started as simple enforcers of law and order, the most successful would rapidly grow into massive, powerful, multinational megacorporations with no one to oppose them but each other. Some masqueraded behind the names and iconography of dead nations to legitimise themselves, carrying out a charade of democracy and freedom, whilst many openly flaunted their new, authoritarian rules. Although some saw the rise of these new forces as a return to law and order, others have called this new era the rise of "Capitalism Incarnate" and do not believe that any good can come from those who care only for their bottom line. Regardless, the one point everyone agrees on is that megacorporations run things very, very differently than former governments.
Credit to @ClocktowerEchos for laying the groundwork for this RP
Welcome to the world of Conglomerate. Inspired by classic cyberpunk, the show Incorporated and dystopian fiction such as Judge Dredd and Make Room! Make Room/Soylent Green, this is a dystopian near-future pessimistic look at what could come. The first thing to keep in mind is that there will be no number crunching. You won't be figuring out tax rates, purchasing x product for y amount to sell at z amount. If you were looking for a stat heavy NRP, this isn't the game for you. Equally, if you're a free market libertarian, this probably also isn't the game for you unless you're very much OK with your political philosophy being taken to its most damaging extreme.
Instead of crunching numbers, the goal of this RP is to expand the influence of your company, be that through mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers (the code form for 'open war with another company,') and more. Profits will be abstracted; maybe key resources go through shortages, or new supplies of goods are found in unexpected places. Maybe seditious elements are rabble rousing in order to undermine your authority. In the end any scheme you can think of, be they legal chicanery, underhanded tactics or straight up illegal can be used by and against every player, as long as you give me the go-ahead first.
One major difference I would like to point is that while this will be based on NRPs, it will not strictly follow NRP guidelines. First off, it’s obviously more character-based as most of the action will be done through the leaders of these corporations and their staff; CEOs, CFOs,
secretaries, bodyguards, managers, researchers and whatever other employees you can think of, up to and including corporate wage slaves with no clue of what elaborate chess moves are going on behind the screen. Secondly, although security forces will be a part of this RP, open warfare is bad for business, and is thus to be avoided unless you're playing an organisation simultaneously aggressive enough to launch a war and bull-headed enough to haemorrhage support and profit whilst doing so. Lastly, you're playing a company, not a government, and thus have entirely different priorities than in your regular nation RPs.
I have also included the 18+ tag because this RP will include mature themes. Megacorporations generally tend to deal in the sex industries, handle drugs, have a monopoly on violence, and your CEOs are rich enough to do pretty much whatever they want. That being said, follow site rules and respect your fellow players; nobody wants to be swept up in your weirdness.
In terms of technology and the state of the world, technology has been stagnating for about thirty or forty years between our time and when the RP begins at the end of the century. Climate change, mass economic collapse, famines, plagues and resource shortages all took their toll, and thus things aren't quite as advanced as they could be. Runaway Kessler Syndrome has caused space to become near-unusable for the near future without a serious rethink of interstellar spacefaring, and although the megacorps have led to some massive tech breakthroughs, the world can often seem a little schizophrenic at times.
True AI doesn't exist, but artificial learning algorithms have made leaps and bounds; moon colonies don't exist, but biodomes can support human populations in the tens of thousands on the open seas. You won't see anyone walking around with an entirely synthetic body, but replacement limbs, be they mechanical or vat grown, are becoming more and more common as the price drops. If you're in doubt as for the tech level I'm going for, feel free to ask and clarify.
(Note, remove the . from the .hr to make those tags work.)
Discord: discord.gg/yVXGpCf
