O'Borg

So, the players walk into a store and fire their guns in the air, who's there.

I'm pretty much throwing ideas out here just too see what makes sense in the cold light of day.

In the example of The PCs walk into a Shop....

I'd base the crowd size on the size of the Business, with a modifier for Type of business, and subdivide that figure into Antagonists (Who the PCs interact with) and Extras (the faceless crowd who dont matter until someone pays attention), and add a Wildcard just in case the PCs get unlucky and run into a Badass Eurosolo in the queue at the fried chicken shop.

Assuming that if the PCs enter a business and they aren't after a specific individual, then the Antagonists are most likely to be the Staff of the business, and any Customers can probably be counted as Extras (save the Wildcard)

Very rough, needs balancing out by likelyhood of store existing :

Business Type

1 Banking

2 Fast Food - Extras x 4

3 Resturant - Extras x 2

4 Bar - Extras x 10, (Higher chance of Wildcards?)

5 Retail Store - Extras x 3

6 Showroom - Antagonists/2

7 Service industry - Antagonists/2

8 Adminstrative Office - Antagonists x5, No Extras

9 Automated - No Antagonists, Extras x2

10 Gambling / Entertainment - Antagonists/2.

Business size

1 Tiny, 1 Antagonists D3-1 Extras

2 Small, 1 Antagonists D3 Extras

3 Medium, D6/2 Antagonists, D6/2 Extras

4 Large, D6+2 Antagonists, D10+1 Extras

5 Very Large, D10+2 Antagonists, 2D10+2 Extras

6 Extra Large, 2D10+4 Antagonists, D100+10 Extras

7 Huge, 2D10+4 Antagonists, D100+10 Extras

8 Superstore, 2D10+4 Antagonists, 2D100+10 Extras

9 Bigger superstore 3D10+3 Antagonists, 3D100+10 Extras

10 I'm running out of adjectives but you get the idea.

Obviously not all options make sense - a fully automated Superstore with Zero Staff and 200 Customers is a little unlikely.

Also for the bigger businesses that's still a lot of Antagonists to generate, and the PCs probably wont interact with most of them, so that number can probably be reduced quite a lot.

I havent figured out a way to add in the Wildcard option yet. If the Antagonist D10 rolls a 0, perhaps?

Oh, slight tangent -

If we're doing an NPC generator is it worth including a Random Name generation table?

I know there are dozens of them on the Internet, but it might be worth putting something in.

If I was playing a CP game and every corpse we looted had one or more weird items along with their guns, gear, cash and slightly bloodstained armour, I'd think something was up.

OTOH, if every corpse we looted were only carrying guns, gear and cash I'd start thinking we were running into covert black ops teams who'd been cleaned of identifying items before they were let out.

Pocket litter is an important concept in undercover work.

The question with all of this stuff is, do the players care if they find a bag of moist towelettes or a bottle of coke on a corpse?

Rename Moist Towelettes as Antiseptic Wipes and the players have just found a handy addition to their first aid kit.

As for food and drink, I guess it depends if the GM requires the Characters to eat and drink occasionally. Or they might trade it to a homeless person for a snippet of info.

If it isn't supporting some kind of conversation at the table or reinforcing the setting somehow, it probably isn't worth putting on a list, because what's the point? The players could have spent the 45 seconds spent generating a moist towelette and saying "we leave the moist towelette" looking for/creating more interesting corpses to loot.

The things I put in my list could either prove useful or valuable to the party (tools, keys, equipment, parts) or as an indicator to Who the corpse was, Where he had been or What he did. If you're running an investigative game, going through the deceased pockets and finding a matchbook from a local bar, a paper napkin from a local fast food joint, a train ticket, a complementary pen from a hotel, and a pack of triplicate forms detailing the time date and location of the last job he worked, might just prove beneficial.

Everything is useful to someone, even if its just giving a Moist Towelette to an NPC with a messy faced kid, which allays the fact your PCs are heavily armed murder hobos, and raises the disposition of surrounding NPCs towards the party.

But I guess this assumes the PCs either deliberately targeted the Victim, or somehow managed to come across a fresh corpse before it's killers or other denizens of the game world had the chance to strip it naked and sell the squishy bits to a backstreet ripperdoc for recycling.

And I'm looking to do a table of 50 items you'd find on a corpse - small items in their pockets, packs etc. - again, they need to be quirkily futuristic.

 

 

Uh... quirkily futuristic? I'm a more mundane type of a "guy who carries an entire home on his back"

But let's try.

 

(snipped)

 

In my current job I'm spending a lot of time wandering around London carrying a lot of kit in a backpack, I can add a thing or two from experience ;

7. Small personal cosmetics (lipstick, moist towelettes, perfume). Usually associated with females, but not a rule set in stone. Includes personal hygiene items, condoms (might be of novelty variety) and spare contact lenses.

I carry a pack of moist towlettes (or baby wipes) with me, not just for when I get dirty hands at work but also to clean up before eating if I've been commuting on public transport and using the same hand rails as every other unhygenic slob in the city. I'd guess dystopian future people might well do the same.

8. Ubiquitous paper handkerchiefs (Kleenex is a brand name, isn't it?)

Mine are all from various cafe's & fast food shops I've eaten at and often branded, which may be useful as a clue if the corpse is important in game.

Also, you can't blow your nose very well with a wet wipe...

9. Handy foodstuffs - candies, chocolate, granola or protein bars, chewing gum, small bottles of drinks (water, soda, etc - anything that can be opened and closed multiple times). Might be pretty exotic (how about biltong / jerky bars made of dried / compressed mealworms?)

You should list food and drink separately. Many people I see carrying a bottle of water or soft drink, not everybody takes a packed lunch or bar of chocolate with them.

17. Keys (or equivalent). What do they open...?

You could split this down further into -

Keys - Personal dwelling

Keys - Vehicle

Keys - Commercial / industrial types such as Office, Hotel/Motel, Equipment racks, Storage lockers etc.

Keys - Utility box (such as square or triangular keys used to open gas meter cupboards or manholes)

Also based on what I usually carry :

Newspaper, current on the day the corpse became a corpse. Choose whether local or national.

Box of matches / matchbook. (Literary convention say a matchbook should be of the last place the corpse visited before death)

Travel related ticket (bus, train, tram, car park ticket)

Receipts for personal expenses (travel, food, equipment purchase)

Work ID card / nametag, possibly more than one.

Laptop PC or Cyberdeck

Mains power adaptor for a laptop PC or Cyberdeck

Mains Phone or Tablet charger

Smartphone handsfree kit / bluetooth headset

Battery - For a specific model of Smartphone or Tablet

Battery bank - portable rechargable power bank with a generic charging cable and/or adaptor to fit the particular devices the corpse was carrying.

Batteries - generic type eg AAA, AA, C or D cell. 50/50 chances between single-use and rechargable types, 75% chance they're still charged either way.

Interface cables, generic or perhaps for a specific item of equipment

Interface extention cable or joining block

Small tools such as a couple of screwdrivers, adjustable wrench.

Zip ties, small to medium

Tape measure (or a laser measure, if you want to be quirky futuristic. I prefer tape measures as they go around corners a lot easier than lasers do) Likely metal retracting type of 3-5m, possibly fabric tailors tape of 2m, or a 1m disposable paper tape if the corpse died after visiting Ikea.

Adhesive tape - Duct tape, Gaffer tape or similar.

Adhesive tape - Clear sellotape or parcel tape

Adhesive tape - Masking tape / painters tape.

Adhesive tape - Electrical insulation tape in various colours.

Writing device - Felt tip, permanent marker or highligter

Writing device - Regular ink, fountain pen or biro

Writing device - Pencil or erasable pen

Sticky labels / Post-It notes

Paper notepad. I can still write faster than I can type and I've never had a notepad and pencil crash or run out of battery.

Employment specific small test equipment, meters or tools

Employment specific paperwork (I work in IT, yet I still have to carry a pad of triplicate forms, fill them out by hand and get customer sign off. Then I take a photo of one with my smartphone and email it to my office...)

Employment specific reference manual in paper hardcopy.

Printed or handwritten notes relating to the corpse's employment.

Employment specific small spare components - eg electrical fuses, computer parts, ink cartridges, nuts & bolts etc. The sort of things that regularly need replacing or get lost/broken.

And in case you're wondering, my rucksack averages 7.5kg and on a bad day the boss says "Can you pick up X and take it to Y..." and I find myself carting a Cisco switch across London on public transport during the rush hour...

Note: I'm not happy with #3 table. The basic police seems underrepresented (30%) while I'd say they should be at least 40-50%. But I can't drop below 10% chunks in a 1d10 based table, unless I roll some police agencies into a single entry. Say, national police agency together with specialzied police agencies. and / or rob private security out of half of their chance to show up. Or do the same with corporate guards.

Why not combine tables 1 & 3 and use D100? This would let you bias the table more towards uniform beat cops and reduce the odds of running into a Corporate CSwat team.

Okay heres a few, some useful, some not, some possible plot hooks for a side quest?

Discarded police/security plasticuffs, have been cut open.

Collapsable umbrella, might be usable.

Small oil patch leaked from a car. (Or brake fluid...)

Recently discarded business card from a high ranking corp exec.

Urban scavenger - fox or raccoon, alive and not happy with being disturbed.

Old xmas tree and/or festive decorations from the most recent holiday.

Latex Haloween/fancy dress masks

Car jack (the small scissor type that often comes with the car, nothing fancy)

Half used can of builders expanding foam.

Half used tube of decorators caulk or instant nails.

Childrens toy ride-in car, plastic.

Half box of unused diapers.

Perscription spectacles, one lens badly scuffed - who still wears them in 2020?

Bloodstained field dressing, still damp.

Dog lead, retractable.

Empty gun magazine, disposable but recyclable with a little effort.

I just had a hollowed out Winnebago with a big tank stuffed inside.

...and a custom engine.

...and drivetrain.

...and military spec HUD with night vision.

Eastbound and down

At the moment, playing Buggerall™ with the Procrastination© expansion pack, the game of always seeming to have something more important to not get done rather than write/run/find a game.

What about the more everyday road encounters?

Roadkill (Hey Brandine,we're havin' barbeque tonight!)

Oil/Fuel/Water spill on road (force a vehicle control check)

Rubble / Debris on road

Flat tyre / mechanical issue

Broken down vehicle with persons attending

Abandoned vehicle

Birdstrike (less fun if you're wearing an open face helmet)

Insect strike (funny, until a damn great bee / hornet gets blown through your open car window into the cabin)

Insect swarm (as above, but more likely loss of visibility)

Smoke from roadside fire

Plus the usual environmental stuff like heavy rain, sudden dust storm or blizzard, unexpected high winds etc.

I've done a couple of short Star Trek fics where the protagonists have a mission on a pre-contact planet which is in a roughly Cyberpunk phase of socio-economic development. This being Star Trek the party have to operate under cover and thus limit their ultra-tech to blend in with the locals.

You could probably run a short campaign on the above premise for any sci-fi gaming group.

What, no picatinny rail or bayonet lug?

There's a CP2020 group on Facebook. It's slightly more lively than here.

Could make for an interesting game scenario...

By 'interesting' you mean 'short'. I seriously would phone in my chargen for that game as I know there'd be multiple PC deaths before you made it halfway through act I.

You could probably make a decent short story out of the idea though.

Last CP game I played was a couple of years back on TBP, two of the players went awol mid game and it just collapsed before we really got anywhere.

Funnily enough I've been thinking about converting a CP influenced short story of mine into a scenario...and I'm currently at a loose end...though I think it'd be one of those games where the plotline wouldnt survive first contact with the players. It's more of a meta-scenario slash plot-arc rather than a one-shot.

I was in a group where most of us would travel 15-25miles to the GMs house every couple of weeks for a long game session. Twice before we'd gotten to the GMs house to be turned away at the door as someone had just called to say they couldnt make it so there was no point in gaming today.

Once however the GM really wanted to advance the plot to the next stage so with only three of us there he began to tell us what was happening to our characters....and several hours later he stopped.

Us players had about 5 mins talk time and a couple of die rolls each in the whole nights session.

We left the house with the usual pleasantries, walked quietly across the road to my car, looked at each other across the roof and said "What the f*** just happened?"

Oddly enough the GM had trouble retaining players for his groups and when I had to stop going due to other commitments a month or two later he gave up on the game.

I've played GTA, and never yet have I had the desire to steal a BMX bike and ride it around in tight circles shooting myself in the leg screaming "muthaf***er' at passing hookers.

Just because I could...

 

For those of you who do not follow Compy's Viricade Blog, he wants to run a "fighter squadron aviationpunk" woth dogfights and all. Think X-Wing: Rogue Squadron or any of the classic WW 2 / Korean War / Vietnam War air battle settings.

 

Now, the setting itself is another kettle of fish (I'm suggesting a God-forsaken brush war in Africa, with merc squadron flying COIN planes and military trainers to keep the tech level of combat down to rockets, dumb bombs and aertial dogfights with machineguns a'blazin', simply because blasting each other with long range AA missiles doesn't leave much space for fun...).

 

We need rules.

 

I'd be tempted to grab a copy of Car Wars /Aeroduel off eBay and crib a lot of the rules from there. It's not exactly highly realistic, but there's a fine line between realism and fun to play and IMO Car Wars is usually on the fun side.

ISTR looking at COIN aircraft a while back and one of the more interesting options was basically a new-build P51 outfitted with modern avionics and weapons, which opens up a wealth of research into WW2 in-theatre operations and temporary airfields for info.

As for fuel consumption? IMHO forget about it. Reduce it to the concept of "You have X miles of range at optimum speed and altitude per gallon, or Y minutes of combat. Adjust by percentages for differences in load, speed, altitude or weather"

I need ideas for a game about corporate crossover. Think: new rose hotel and count zero

 

Hooks and ideas so far:

 

My PC wants the game to be "high end corporate". He is a fixer who has some minor corporate connections to biotechnica, but he is interested in coming up in the world, I want a theme of the game to be how hard it is to come up in the world of cyberpunk. Have him in situations where he is so close to making it big, then doesn't. But still be rewarding enough with cool moments so that he likes the progression.

 

I want the game to be about corporate crossover. I like the idea of him forcefully recruiting researchers for the Megatechnix corporation from v.3 (yeah I know what you're gonna say about v.3 but I just use it as a source, not my "main book")

 

After reading the book "starfish" I want to introduce Oceanpunk which works because his biotechnica contact travels between NC and Aqua-Delphi (I have no idea why yet)

 

My PC will be forced to work with a corporate spook from MGTX who fucked up and let some high level people get killed and they need to be replaced by people of equal skill levels.

 

My PC is being hunted by a netrunner for not being able to pay her for a previous job. I want him to 'feel' her digital ghost as she tracks him, slowly. I want him to be paranoid for a while before she finally finds him and makes him pay up.

 

In my PC's possession is a modified memchip with the basic framework for a personality construct of a dead prostitute. Basically some wack job killed a hooker and was able to map her brain before she cooled off. The guy's motivation was to make a "love bot" with the brain of a real women in it... My PC has no idea that this is what's on the chip but I want him to develop some type of a relationship with her and have her become important somehow.

 

Part of my PC's lifepath is that he grew up with corporate parents who had a fairly substantial life insurance policy which he was supposed to collect upon their demise. Well 'markham solutions' the insurance corp did not pay up when they were both killed in an "accident". (I don't have a lot of info on this - sorry) but I want my PC to have a way to get revenge on markham solutions somehow. Are one or both of his parents maybe still alive? need a lot there~

 

well this is what I got so far... I know asking for ideas is kinda lame but ya'll have never let me down in the past!

I've never had much luck translating complex storylines into RPG campaigns. The players never seem to do what they ought to in the book

However in your case I'd relegate the memchip-hookerbot to a side story, and I'd work on linking his parents and Markham Solutions into the endgame. (NB unless your parents were working on a memchip-hookerbot, things went a bit awry and the project was buried along with certain of the research team who expressed moral qualms..)

So how do you hurt a corp who refused to pay up on a life insurance policy? Odds are it was a computer algorythm somewhere that said no - perhaps with the oversight of a faceless mid-rank wageslave who was just doing their job. You could hire someone to kill off the wageslave - net gain of bupkiss but an impending corp backed counterstrike - or you could hire a netrunner to hack their systems and tip the software in your favour.

So maybe thats what the netrunner was hired for and circumstances beyond their control stopped the payout, but she wants her fee anyway?

Of course what if the faceless wageslave is now higher up the corp chain of command as a result of unofficial tampering with the life insurance payout algorythms? Then it becomes a matter of hurting the company enough that the faceless wageslave loses their power and protection.

You hire hackers and edgerunners to tarnish their public image. You curry favours with people with more money and power than you who'll bankroll your plans, or put up the cash to do a pump and dump on their stock and buy it up again when the price hits the floor.

See Hardwired as Cowboy and Reno take down an Orbital corp with a mixture of stock manipulation, bad publicity and a little direct action.

(And if you can work panzers and delta's into it...even cooler)

"Using a macbook connected to the OBD port..."

It does require the hacker to be directly connected to the car, or to have already broken into your car and installed a remote access device previously. I'm not too worried about a hacker with a wi-fi and laptop taking control of my car as I speed along the motorway.

To me, hearing "Mike Pondsmith is going to update CP2020" gives me the same feeling as hearing "George Lucas is going to update Star Wars"

A team in the US have refined previous neural interface work to the point where paralyzed patients have been able to control a robotic arm by means of an implant in the motor cortex.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18092653

The means to attach metal directly to bone and pass through flesh is already in existance ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5140090.stm )

Looks like Cp2020 cyberlimbs aren't that far off after all.

Getting reamed for months is irritating.

I'm busy with moving house & redecorating at the moment (plus an 11th hour unscheduled job change), but once I've got that out of the way I'll be starting up my own game. If you want in on that, you've got it

His game just folded over at RPG.net due to GM/Players friction.

And here I was thinking you'd really been looking forward to roleplaying your guy being tortured to death!

Welcome aboard T.

My least favorite character types are medias and rockers. I

You may not like Rockerboys, but your name has just given me inspiration for a Rocker to replace the late Jonny Tyso.

Theophallus T. Wildebeeste, Soul Singer who don't need to Mister Stud

And yes, he is a ripoff of a Lenny Henry character

Hasn't PsychoPhipps got Portland as his location in his profile here?