Companero

Also:

I discovered it by complete accident and it isn't Cyberpunk - given that it was written 5 years before the genre existed by a "literary" author - but if you like Gibson's recent stuff Don DiLilo's novel Running Dog covers a lot of the same territory in terms of theme and emotional stance, and IMO kinda does it better.

So Ken Macleod wrote a bunch of really great CP stories at the beginning of his career - the Star Fraction, et al - but then moved into the realms of new space opera and kinda left me behind, through no fault of his own. But in the last few years he's moved back into near future stories and written entire series of them. So i'm making an effort to catch up...

...i'd really forgotten just how much I like a ) great spy fiction and b ) Ken Macleod on a roll...

The Execution Channel is very much a War on Terror zeitgeist book although the tagline on the novel is basically inaccurate. Essentially, it describes various members of the Travis family, survivalists and activists and spooks, who stumble into a conspiracy surrounding a terrorist attack on an American military base, along with an American conspiracy blogger who tries to put all the pieces together. Small teams of spies pursue each other across a disintegrating UK while State sponsored disinformation basically fucks with everyone.

There are a few things I wasn't keen on - firstly, there's an unnecessary alternative history element that I think doesn't add anything to the book. Second: I liked the ending but it strikes me as potentially divisive!

But there's lots to like about it - it's terse and tense and characters experience wrenching emotional and ideological experiences and it's really, really readable - I went through it very quickly indeed (the third time this week i've violated my 'don't start any new books until you've finished the half-finished pile...). I really liked all the little tradecraft ideas and sequences, but then that's always prose-crack to me.

Adding to the list of forgotten or fringe CP weirdness - Left to his own Devices is an odd little novel by Mary Gentle I read a couple of nights ago.

It's part of this series of books about a pair of heroes who turn up in various fantasy settings, or in this case a loosely described Cyberpunk future. An earlier book called Rats and Gargoyles is regarded as a real fantasy classic.

I put it here because LthoD is a CP novel i'd not really heard about before. It wasn't entirely to my taste - a little self absorbed and pleased with itself, IMO (unlike the other White Crow stories i've read, which were very good). There's some interesting, almost metaphysical stuff about the nature of artificial intelligence and I liked the characters a fair bit.

While i'm adding to this list, there's a proto-CP novel called the Cold Cash War by Robert Asprin that I know Chrysalis recommended baaaack in the day. It has a really awesome cover...

I have to say its one of the few books i've read recently that really disappointed me - i'm normally pretty good at picking them out!

I don't know - there's a kind of nothingness to it. Basically, a small group of infalliable mercenaries go up against the governments of the world in a battle that never really seems to have any personal stakes in it. There's nothing really memorable about any part of the novel past the cover, IMO. Kinda a pity, because I like his Thieves World stuff quite a lot.

So I finally got around to it, and since I know Interrupt was reading through it a couple of weeks ago I thought i'd put up a post about it.

Zero History is a part of Gibson's informal Bigend/modern day series. I wouldn't quite call it standalone - there are quiet callbacks to characters from the earlier two books, some memorable ones from Pattern Recognition and some frankly less so ones from Spook Country. As usual, the creepy Hubertus Bigend assembles a group of freelancers to discover some weird facet of advertising/art, and spy games ensue.

This time its all about the link between the military and fashion, with some interesting and thought provoking stuff there. The middle section has some great, tense spy-novel sequences. I kinda felt the tension tailed off a little towards the end as the main characters seemed to get relegated to the sidelines of their own plan, just observing the mysterious professionals at work. That said, it's still a fun, tense sequence. The entire plot is quite low key - small groups of people with limited resources dealing with other small groups over relatively small stakes. There are some awesome tradecraft sequences, which I always find the best inspiration for PCs.

On a related note, it's interesting how things that were effective atmosphere building things in SF Gibson stuff - all the stuff around branding - starts to seem like product placement in a modern day book...

But overall I liked it a lot. There's lots of great little details to be looted for games. The small ad-hoc teams of wannabe spec-ops, adrenaline junkies and improvisers, assembled and manipulated by one or two scary people, provides all sorts of character inspiration for lower key games.

Finally got round to actually reading this.

Firstly, it's really great. For those who don't know, Zeitgeist is basically a Bruce Sterling story about Leggy Starlitz, his Jerry Cornelius-esque fixer/hustler character. At the end of the 20th century Starlitz sets out to create the fakest, glitziest girlband possible, only to have members of the Turkish Deep State try to steal it out from under him (I wouldn't have realized it unless i'd heard about the real story, but the character Ozbey is based on a real person, and the thing that happens to him at the end of the book really happened).

It's basically a really great fixer story. There are a bunch of other Starlitz short stories set before Zeitgeist, and i'd suggest that Hollywood Kremlin is probably the best fixer story.

As to Zeitgeist being Cyberpunk - sure it is, in the same way that Gibson can write novels in the modern world with the same plots, character archetypes and themes as his CP stuff (very literally and obviously, in Pattern Recognition!). And the magical realist stuff fits in fine. It's just a reminder that CP is really the next phase of the "inner space" SF tradition developed in the 1960s British New Wave, which is something that Sterling likes to talk about in interviews (and frankly, his early novels are basically what happens if you try to ram American hard sci-fi styles through a New Wave sensibility, which is probably why I love them so much...).

I'd say you guys always lower the tone, but i'm not sure there's much tone left to be lowered at this point

On a related note:

"The Rapid Equipping Force"

At Camp Nathan Smith outside of Kandahar, there's a 20-foot cargo container loaded with a 3D printer, a computer-controlled machine for cutting metal, and a couple of Ph.D.s. It's one of three REF "expeditionary labs" placed around Afghanistan that can quickly design and prototype tools for troops on the ground right now.

 

The Nathan Smith team, on the screen above, printed up new bolt links for the M240 machine gun on their remote weapons system when the old ones broke. They coded a program that plots enemy attacks on Google Earth. And over the course of three weeks, they built in the lab new adapters that extended the battery life of their metal detectors from 45 minutes to 30 hours. The Army liked the adapters so much, they ordered up another 2,000, which will be distributed all over Afghanistan.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/new-army-arsenal/

I've got a copy of Protect and Serve!

Even better than that, I acquired it by convincing Interrupt to come to London and give me his copy in person, which I feel is a major achievement. He could have mailed it, after all.

Things that were discovered during this historic meeting:

- Interrupt is indeed as tall, if not somewhat taller, than I imagined he would be.

- There are people in the world who will travel 5437m/8750km for a kebab.

- There are actually Americans in the world who understand my accent the first time they hear it, contrary to all previously observed evidence.

- London's Portobello Road is a place that actually exists, and lacks cash machines. There are people on that street who will claim that their £20 pipe would be worth 4 grand with the addition of some gold plating.

- Shops that would be normal in CP2020 (like the "Spy Store") seem out of place and frankly ridiculous in real life.

- It's possible to meet people you only know through the internet without being murdered. And, you know, discover them to be awesome

There's also this:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

The best general resource on the "famous" conspiracies is GURPS Illuminati. It's probably out of date, but really the basics of these things don't seem to change very much.

Well, in that case!

(and to get back on to the OP topic, since people could use those ideas with or without a wall around the CZ...)

Entirely in the ridiculous Escape from NY mode:

The entire infrastructure for a complicated underground gladiator fighting league:

Several different arenas

A costume/armour engineer for independents

As above, for different teams

The offices of the refereeing association, surrounded by drone machine guns

The offices of the media team who keep the videos online

A prop manufacturer for the arena

A front for the ticket office

A limo service that carries outside gamblers and audience members in and out

The offices of the bodyguard unit that serves them

The offices of the anti-banditry squad, 12 fucking psychopaths hired and paid for by all parties involved in the gladiator circuit to brutally murder anyone who thinks about attacking the limos

A training hall

A much nastier training hall, for personality chipped slaves

A guy who rebuilds humanoid robots he finds in the junk to make teleoperated training drones

A ridiculous local "branded" soft drink manufacturer, selling sugary filth brewed in a scop tank beloved by local CZ'ers and almost undrinkable by anyone else, gladiator team special offers!

http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/05/tower...-vertical-farm/

I love these things, in and out of game. For years i've been calling them "stacks" and assuming they dominated the skylines of CP cities (admittedly, mainly inspired by this article on Canadian drug producing improv bunkers, but...).

In game, they provide all sorts of weird levels and environmental effects and movement options and a feeling that it isn't just the modern world with metal arms (although I guess that's gone now...).

Out of game they apparently only take 60W of electricity per day to run

If the Combat Zone is new, that process of consolidation might not have started yet. I agree that one of the gangs or organisations will eventually triumph (and then the walled off area will become a hostile city within a city!).

It's a good plotline. Especially as the people who instigated the wall realise that

a ) the people they put there aren't going to just die or disappear like they want

b ) they've now completely alienated all those people

and

c ) the gang powerful enough to seize the zone will control that area of the city absolutely and probably have a large and organised force of veteran cyber-troopers.

(or, scarier for the Wallbuilders, the Hezbollah option - where the gangs are pushed aside by a well organised religious or anti-corporate citizen militia force who gain the loyalty of the zoners by implemented functioning infrastructure and order, before turning on the establishment forces that ostracised them...)

As the the rising organisation becomes evident and the corpzoners realise just how shortsighted their plan was, they'll start throwing everything into the zone to keep it destabilised and chaotic. Meanwhile, the rising gangs will be building a counter-infrastructure in the zone (profitable pirate manufacturing, etc), bringing in cash and equipment and subverting the other gangs. A full scale street war erupts as every Edgerunner in the city gets thrown into the war for control of the zone, while the corps illicitly pump guns and drugs into it in a deperate attempt to keep it disunited until they can retake the place.

I don't believe I forgot about coffin hotels

I think Interrupt's community centre idea is important because it gives a great base of operations for PCs or source of stories - i'm pretty sure "defend the community centre from the evil gang" has been a source of starting adventures in this genre for decades.

===============================================

A really quick and dirty way to flesh out the businesses in a city quickly would be to get a list of every role archetype in the game (especially the Wildside fixer list!) and the contact archetypes in Shadowrun (from the Contacts and Adventures supplement if available, of Mr Johnson's Handbook for 3e). You then duplicate a few of them if you see a good story potential for a rivalry.

You then put this all into a list and create a business where each person operates from. This doesn't have to be a business *they* own - a fixer could operate from a bar or even, Marlo style, a park.

Even if you were just going to start from the Core Book, Wildside, and Contacts and Adventures, that's a good 50 locations right there...

They'd be easy for any edgerunner to defeat. All you need to do is confuse them with

do what now?

Some providing false identities and SINS.

Had a think while making tea...:

A health outreach centre (a charity providing contraceptives and blood tests, etc)

A free clinic

A missionary centre and urban outreach place (possibly Scientologist!)

The political offices of an anti-corporate party

A company that provides protection to "coolhunters" looking for trends in the zone to co-opt

A hairdressers with lots of dyes and weird devices for gang hair

A completely unlicensed plastic surgeon

A place that that builds and operates motor rickshaws

A psychic rolling dice to determine the fate of the gangs from day to day

A safety deposit place defended not by massive fortifications but by the mutual agreement of all the local gangs

A place making really cheap movies

An apparently reputable doctor that specialises in making meat puppets/bunraku

A programming place that makes illegal chips/personality implants

A bootleg chip vendor

A bootleg chip factory

A "head shop" selling experiment pharmaceuticals

A virtual reality "Total Recall"-esque place with only one programme, a trip to the Niagra falls on a loop

3d Print Shops making pirate weapons and cyberware (there has to be a reason why it's still affordable!).

A business smuggling in the feedstock to those operations.

A backroom factory using the same route to smuggle unlicensed goods out.

A big scop tank or similar creation mushy food products.

A place building microdrones for the gangs to spy on each other.

Some kind of illegal power-hook up service.

Clothing stores, each frequented by rival gangs (the posers need their gear from somewhere!).

A private eye service specialising in helping people from outside the zone find things they want inside it (especially runaways, and the like).

The secret front company for a face bank.

An urban farm breeding rabbits en masse, in the middle of the city.

A rippervet.

The place that provides angry dogs for the rippervet.

Hope some of that works!

You could do something with the Personality Mod chips in When Gravity Fails (sourcebook or novel!). What I like about that from the Bug City POV is how invasive it is - you can imagine kidnappers taking people and forcibly implanting people with the personality chips. And When Gravity Fails and (especially!) Vacuum Flowers make personality chips into such a scary technology (and a major setting definer, to build a campaign around).

The Bugs would almost be scarier for being personality overriden humans. Animalistic humans are always the scariest thing in horror films, IMO.

Or, fuck it, just steal the plot of the (awesome) film Mimic wholesale!

Yeah. Speaking as someone who went on $70 DriveThru binge last month, I like PDFs for reading and inspiration but I really need the book to actually run something, even for G+ Hangout games.

There was, of course, the CP2020/Paranoia cross-over...

I haven't read it, but Walter Jon William's wrote a sequel to Hardwired called The Voice of the Whirlwind about a soldier in a corporate war who neglects to update his stored memories held by the clone insurance company, and wakes up one day with no memories after his 16th birthday... there's so much potential in that storyline for an adventure.

I think if you treated the cloning process as an important part of the setting as opposed to just a way for the PCs to reanimate after a bad firefight, then it becomes interesting. The difference between a Cyberpunk novel and some techno-thriller is that CP examines the social consequences of the hi-tech...

Only if those pygmies have chosen to respond to the ever increasing pressure put upon them by technological change by dehumanising themselves, either to keep up with the system or in an attempt to transcend it .

No, it doesn't, that's just the media hype. It makes rats less fearful of cats, and may increase dopamine levels in human temporarily, but that's still speculation, and there's nothing intelligent about it. Plus the direction of causation in the correlation has not been established.

I know it isn't intelligent which is why I put that whole thing about "modified or evolved or mutated" in. As for the effects on the mind, my understanding was that it's generally agreed to have some kind of effect of humans and frankly...

...well, look. I'm trying to legitimise a Shadowrun Bug Spirit game in CP2020. I'm taking what I can get! If a genetically modified version of a parasite widely believed to be brain-affecting will work for a low budget horror movie on the Sci-Fi channel, it'll work for a CP game .

Just in case I was misunderstood, that was a general statement of intent for my gaming in general, not a PbP game pitch!

The stupid thing is, hearing him talk about the origins of the game and the basic atmospheric idea - that tragic film noir romance thing that the corebook went on about - really made me remember what I loved about the game in the first place.

The funny thing is - having come to the genre through things like Cowboy Bebop - I really liked that atmosphere but i've never really tried to run it - mainly because in my heyday of regular CP GMing I wasn't really brave or experienced enough a GM to pull it off.

I'd like to actually find a way to run a really great "tragic romance noir on the dark streets" CP game sometime soon!

My favourite aspect of this whole thing is that it gave the Rock Paper Shotgun PC games blog the opportunity to refer to CP2020's creator as Mike “my buttery rasp is humanity’s most inspiring moments given voice” Pondsmith. I'm thinking of using my banstick on anyone who doesn't refer to him as that from now on