What to play?

Maybe we should summarise the ideas so far as well 😅

Yeah, I'm confused now. How about we start with the basics.
Things it seems like everyone agrees on:

1. Setting: Cyberpunk future with sci-fi elements. Mankind colonizing the stars.
2. There's a space station.
3. A plague caused superpowers.
4. No more pictures of muffins.

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Other Details

Tech Level
- Beginning of space colonization (Intersolar system)
- Maybe one or two colonies on other planets that are either working camps for the extremely poor (maybe even a prison colony like Australia back in the day) or only accessible for the extremely rich.
- Self regulated and sustainable cities, space exploration, AI maybe before singularity, close to unified conscience, highly automated
My two cents: I'm good with pretty much any cyberpunk/sci-fi tech level.

Who is the evil tyrant?
- The AI Godfather Designed to oversee and protect mankind insuring it's survival and expansion
- Some time ago, people created an AI to be the perfect ruler and now the ruling class is blindly following its orders to stay in control while nobody actually understands its reasonings anymore.
- No evil tyrant. I think the "government " cover up or witch hunt ideas could work. Maybe just a plain struggle for survival where the elements are the "evil".
- We could be playing in a setting about to hit singularity, where AÍ, governments and private corps are playing each other and supers are an unwanted side effects (of someone’s accident)
My two cents: I like the idea of multiple bad guys, all powerful, all with their own agenda. Like the idea immediately above this note.

Who are some important key figures
- World and Corporate Leaders
- The AI, the agents trying to cover up the accident and maybe a split faction that is against the witch hunt.
My two cents: If there are leaders, there are opposition leaders. If there are agents and an AI trying to cover up an accident, there is someone trying to bust it wide open and make it public. One of my favorite rules when worldbuilding is
What does average life look like?
- Average person is immortal or near enough living in sleeve bodies and kept entertained, advertised to and monitored by various corporate interests. People work, make copies of their selves to work allowing them to enjoy time to enjoy life. People trade swap ideas, perfection of 3-D printing. Some people sell their bodies to advertise products etc.
- This idea is interesting but a bit to sci-fi for my taste. Near immortality might be possible for the richest of the rich but not the average person. The idea with the sleeve bodies is interesting as well but it should be implemented in a way that's amazing for the elite but terrible for the average/poor person.

How common are superpowers?
- Not common at all maybe one in a million.
- If multiple of us want to have powers and we want to be able to encounter others as well, I would make them a bit more common than that. Maybe somewhere between one in ten thousand and one in a hundred thousand
- They are uncommon, but most survivors would probably awake at some point.

Background: so, handwaving that a virus can induce superpowers, you’d need an highly variable viral strain to cause a wide range f superpowers. Such a high rate of mutation is not great for survival, so I’d say most people infected develop some sort of super cancer and die, and the game starts in that "plague" scenario. Survivors slowly awake to their new powers.

Also, if the focus is on relationships and drama, we probably want the PCs to be stuck into a restricted space: lots of people in small places = drama :slight_smile: so I’d say a small skate colony, a bio dome or a spaceship
Quick brainstorm before boarding

Thanks tao! This looks great! My first impressions on the summary:

1. cyberpunk setting (or some sort of post-"catastrophe" dystopian sci-fi?)
2. something big happened, maybe some global virus or a cosmic phenomenon, that randomly gave some people superpowers. I’ve tried to have some scientifically "sound" event here, where only an highly mutable virus would cause a variety of superpowers, but also very deadly effects due to the disadvantageous mutations.
3. Super powered people could be hunted to be killed or reeducated because they are a threat to the established order.
4. Tech Level: all options fit with space exploration. If we go for a wide world, we may need to refine it, but if we start of with a city sized setting, I think most distinctions are more for flavour and mood. But i’d say something in space seems like a well received idea
5. Who is the evil tyrant? A lot of AI in those options. Adding multiple opposing forces can easily include the remaining options (corporation, secret agents, government, etc) including there being various AI systems!
6.What does average life look like? Not many options explored. There seems to be a tendency for richer getting immortality mind transfer like tech, and poor being worse off. I guess it depends on the actual setting and tech level, but would turning on the common rich vs poor theme be something doable? (Maybe everyone is worse off after the plague? Or maybe people are generally ok but being ok hides, or costs, something?)
7. How common are superpowers? Everyone seems to be ok with rare supers, but the question seems to be if it is static or more supers may appear. As I told bowl, i’d guess 1:5000 incidence is already a pretty rare "medical condition", specially if the "symptoms" are not obvious.

I’m not sure we’ve heard what cosmic thinks about it ;)

I guess those things seem ok.

When I'm world building like this, I like to think of what the world was like prior to the plague/phenomena. Then define the event that changes things, what happened, the immediate effects, how it progressed, and the long term prognosis for life in general. Then figure out how people adapted, who reacted in what way, why, and where things went wrong for them.

So in this case we have an intrasolar or interstellar civilization. AIs control entire colonies. Tech is sufficiently advanced to allow ease of travel between colonies (some sort of quantum drive or something suitably timey-wimey-handwavey to allow travel between colonies in days or weeks rather than years or decades, but not the instantaneous. What does daily life look like? High tech, lots of luxury, hardships on new colonies, but overall positive, upbeat, and hopeful. (more details are better here)

Then the virus hits. Millions die, tens of thousands are crippled with mutations that make them essentially monsters. Some escape seemingly unscathed, while others... change. The immediate effect would be devastation on a massive scale. A society built to support millions suddenly loses a huge percentage of its population before a cure is found. Economies collapse, every industry falters without the manpower to support it, a society of technology and hope collapses unable to support its own weight.

Within the ruins, survivors band together into pockets of society, struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy. Global cityscapes are post-apocalyptic wastelands, with only small sections maintained by the survivors. Naturally quarantined areas like small colonies, space stations, and large ships remain largely unaffected by the virus, but the loss of industry and agriculture has a major impact as imported food and other supplies become scarce.

Into this world is born a new race of superhumans, with powers unlike anything know from technology or legend. Possible enemies of supers:
1. AIs who wish to study them
2. Goverments and corporations who want to use them as weapons
3. criminal organizations who want supers in their arsenal
4. Religious organizations who want to stomp them out as an abomination in the eyes of their God
5. Religious organizations who believe supers are their saviors
6. The organization that created the virus who wants them all destroyed so their secret doesn't get out
7. a thousand little clandestine organizations with a thousand different nefarious purposes
8. the muffin man (because I have a weakness for continuing bad inside jokes far longer than they're amusing)

I'm just along for the ride. I'll throw ideas out there, but at the end of the day, I'll defer to all you more experienced types. :)

Same goes for me.

See Above

We should start making one of those character maps not as sure about Cortex Plus as I am Smallville.

We're just working with the Smallville rulebook so you should be fine, Cube.

For those who don't have it, we'll go through it step by step.

Very cool ! Glad to hear that.
I am looking at Nova Praxis and Interface Zero for Transhuman and Cyberpunky ideas

Do you have the Cortex plus hackers guide? There’s a trans human hack and a cyberpunk hack (which is more of an actual scenario but it puts some good ideas down on paper.)

Do you want me to setup a character map over at Miro? It’s the BEST way to do them, imho. The one I setup for our real life group is super complex but you can zoom in and see whatever you want.

I don't have it.

Yes, the map you made for the last game was pretty good. That sounds like a good plan.

I'll get the ball rolling on the relationship map creation tomorrow and then we slowly go through the steps together.
I'll also make another summary of the setting but everyone should already have a rough understanding of what we're playing in so you can already think a bit about what you want to play like generally, as in characteristics and powers (if any)...

I'm trying to think of a name for the interplanetary government and all I have in my head is
Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation, we have assumed control

Alright, I wrote up a setting description based on what has been discussed in this thread. Fair Warning: This is just a quick thing I wrote down so don't expect it to sound very polished xD

If someone is unhappy with parts of it or wants to add/remove/change anything, let me know and we'll do that!

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Technology has progressed a lot from today. Improvements in medicine ranging from better medication to tissue and organ cloning and replacement and perfectly working cyberlimbs mean that those who can afford it, don’t have to fear death or injury anymore. The rich and powerful can live centuries while staying eternally young (at least in theory – the technology is still young enough that even the oldest people alive are still barely 150, although they have no reason to assume they will die within the next 300 years at least). The poor only profit from these advances in so far as it keeps from becoming unable to work. They still have to face death after an average lifespan of around 90 years, although death from disease or injury before that is much less likely than it used to be.

There has also been a major boom in spacefaring. Two colonies have been set up, one on Venus and one on Mars. Living conditions in these are generally pretty harsh as they are very reliant on Earth for food and supplies, so they have started out as cheap living alternatives for the very poor. Later, people of different stages of wealth have moved to these as well, giving them a similar (although still generally poorer) population spread as on Earth. Travel from one planet to the other can be accomplished in less than a month, depending on the conditions it can sometimes even take as little as ten days. A couple of smaller colonies exist on space stations circling these planets but compared to the populations living on the three planets, those are much less relevant.

The Solar Federation is ruled by the Intelligence, an AI system developed decades before the time that the game is set in. Since its inception, it has evolved and developed upgrades for itself to the point that no human actually understands how it works anymore. Its will is still carried out as law as it keeps the powerful in power. Over time, this AI has turned more and more authoritarian so that at this point, armed military patrols throughout every city are a common sight, as are random controls and checks of passersby with no reason required.
While AI research is still going on and there are many highly intelligent computers, no other true AI except for the Intelligence is known.

Other factions have risen to power recently, especially huge corporations that have the wealth to amass small armies of security forces themselves. There is an uneasy peace between the government and those corporations as neither side can risk antagonizing the other. Criminals have also been forced to band together to combat the iron military grip of the Intelligence, leading to the formation of multiple powerful criminal conglomerates that, over the years, have gained influence that rivals that of the corporations.

The average person is caught between those rivaling factions, just living their highly automated life. There is hardly any private life as surveillance of all activities, online and offline, is a universal constant.

This uneasy balance was further disrupted when five years ago, the Plague broke out. Billions of people both on Earth and Mars died while only the Venus colony was spared completely. Working together, all major factions in the system managed to contain and eventually eliminate the disease by letting those who were infected by it die out in quarantine.
What could not be predicted was that a small percentage of infected survived the infection. Many of those were crippled by the disease while others were mutated in different ways. They came out of the plague with superhuman abilities. Some were noticeably deformed or visibly changed as well while others still look completely human.

Those in power fear a return of the Plague almost as much as they fear that these superpowered individuals use their abilities to overthrow the order of the system so they began hunting down the mutated to either kill or reeducate them.
The Plague also allowed some religious extremist groups to rise to power as people flocked to them for emotional support. Seeing their influence fade after the end of the Plague, they began preaching about the dangers that the mutated pose to the human race.

The Plague also had other global consequences. Large areas of land have become uninhabitable, making agriculture difficult to impossible. Food scarcity is a real danger in the world at this point, despite the drastically decreased world population. Even for the rich, meat is a luxury. Most of the population feeds on grain and soy products and even this lifestyle will not be sustainable forever. Corporations and the government struggle to find alternative means of food production to ensure the survival of the citizens of the Solar Federation.

How will we all know each other? I don't imagine we'll all want to play schoolchildren in the same class, or workers at the same company, or anything easy like that.

I think if we're all metas or at least have meta contacts, that'll be enough justification to know each other. If metas are being hunted and oppressed, they'll probably stick together

We met at Metas Anonymous

A lot less Transhuman then I was thinking. Much closer to Cyberpunk.
I am wrapping my head around this. Thinking up character concepts today.

I think the setting looks good. I’d have some minor comments here and there, but i’d Need some proper time for that :( some points:

* why Venus? I guess we’d want to move away from the sun, not towards it (moon -> mars IRL). Venus is too warm.
* why make an AÍ to rule? Maybe it was initially an ai to manage automated processes (including food production, industry, travel optimisation. Etc) instead of ruling. That would make governments obsolete.
* why only one government? Maybe big country alliances are on a space colonisation race (pretty much like the race for te new world)
* supers can, rationally, contain viral dna, due to the retro transcription and integration property of some viruses. Turns out that induces mutations and could be a reproduction mechanism for the virus. Thus supers are a threat because they may be viral incubators (but there is not real evidence yet). As a consequence, supers may be identified by High throughput DNA insertion sequencing
* not sure why a human virus would destroy agriculture. However, the rise of the criminal organisations/corporations may be not because of the authoritarian AI but because of the lack of workforce for efficient food production (or machine maintenance for that). The corps may be forming armed cartels and paragovernamental Sepheres of influence in the colonies.

We may meet each other at the start of the game in a place where supers are. This could be prison, guettos, secret hangouts, a protest for supers rights or just the dark streets as supers are not allowed to work and are basically homeless. I guess the transhumanism may be a constant with both bionic enhancements and the supers as a new step, both pushing humanity to an evolutionary split