My Future’s So Dark, I Need to Wear Mirrorshades

At some point in the 1980′s, a new trend in Sci-Fi came along. Before, you had bright happy utopias and gray, dreary dystopias, and not much else. Science would either save us or enslave us, with little ground in-between. The utopias tended to be marvels of western-style mixed economies and representative government. The dystopias were either Orwellian bureaucracies or true utopias that had stagnated. Then, what became known as Cyberpunk began to evolve. Bright and vibrant dystopias with capitalism run amok and governments turned harsh. Imagine if the nightmares of the anti-globalization protesters in Seattle and right-wing militias in Montana all came true at once. That’s Cyberpunk. Movies like “Bladerunner” and “Escape From New York”, books like “Neuromancer” and “Snow Crash”, and TV shows like “Max Headroom” set the look and feel for the genre. Gaming companies were amongst the first to spot the trend, responding with R. Talsorian’s “Cyberpunk” (later changed to “Cyberpunk 2020″, once they found out you can’t really trademark a genre), FASA’s “Shadowrun”, and SJ Games’ “GURPS: Cyberpunk” and “GURPS: Cyberworld”. But let’s say that you want to make your own dark future to play around in. What needs to happen to make the police use armored cars for regular patrols or put the big corporations in charge?

This event is generally known as The Crash. Something brings society to a screeching, skidding halt, without quite overthrowing the Old Order. The Crash usually kills a whole bunch of people right off, and scares the pants off of the survivors. The Powers That Be take advantage of the chaos by declaring some sort of martial law. The usual suspects for starting The Crash are as follows:

Disease: Either a bug escaped from a weapons lab, like in “The Stand”, or the latest tropical disease on the rampage, like in “Outbreak”, decimates the world’s population. Those who don’t catch it are terrified they might do so. Lynchings and riots spread, and the Haves isolate themselves from the Have-Nots by any means necessary.

Earthquake: The Big One, and then some. Generally not enough to do the deed by itself , since the damage is somewhat localized. A modern repeat of the 1811 New Madrid quake might do it, though. (An estimated 11.5 to 12 on the Richter Scale, centered in southern Missouri.) It generally serves as icing on the cake or a trigger for one of the other disasters. Also good for making prison islands on the West Coast.

Economic Meltdown: Well, something’s got to account for the massive unemployment that is part and parcel of the genre. Often a side-effect of the other types of The Crash, but the 1929 style stock market crash was the original Crash with a capital “C”.

Environmental Meltdown: A bit old-fashioned and quaint for The Crash. It’s mostly used as window dressing in Cyberpunk, but featured heavily in the 1970′s post-holocaust stories that fed into what is now Cyberpunk. If you want to go that route, remember that back then, aerosols and car exhaust were about to trigger the next Ice Age, instead of Global Warming. Temperatures had been dropping slightly since the 1940′s and we had a few really bad winters back to back. Folks were as up in arms over global cooling as they are about warming now. Heck, Niven and Pournelle are still convinced that we’re gonna be glaciated. Poisoned rust-belt blight slowly turning into wilderness is a common sight here.

Societal Collapse: Again, this is more often a symptom, rather than the disease itself. Still, depending on how you count them, two or three classic cyberpunk movies use this as The Crash. (“Robocop” and “Strange Days”, for certain, and you could make the case for “Escape From New York”, though that one also has a Big War in its history.) This one fills the same niche on the right, as Environmental Collapse fills on the left. Remember, this genre developed in the late 80′s and early 90′s when the big news was drive-by shootings and Rodney King. It wasn’t as far fetched that spiraling crime rates could trigger the formation of a police state, had the then current trends continued.

War: Huh! What is it good for? Wars in Cyberpunk back-histories come in two flavors. Small Wars are drawn out guerrilla fights in third world countries. The classic choice is for the US Army to be literally fighting the Drug War in Columbia. This serves as a source for disillusioned veterans with robotic limbs and strange addictions. Big Wars are what makes The Crash. In the past, Big Wars were long drawn-out affairs. Then, sometime in the Sixties, we crossed a line. Weapon systems like tanks, ships, and jets became too complex for rapid production. Even without nukes being used, a modern Big War would be nasty, brutish, and short. Early predictions of how Desert Storm would go are an example of how Big Wars are fought. Just change the venue to someplace civilized, with lots of urban combat to grind your divisions up. Add in limited nuclear strikes to spice things up, and you’ve got a reason for your government to declare Martial Law.

Now that you’ve smashed up the world, you get to decide the really important bit: Hacking, or Netrunning. “What”, you ask, “they aren’t the same thing?” Nope. Not by a long shot. William Gibson knew next to nothing about how computer networks work when he wrote “Neuromancer”, so he made up some spiffy eye-candy. Folks who knew more about computers then wrote the original game books, but kept the eye-candy, since that’s what the rabid hordes of gamers were expecting to see, and it’s makes for easier game mechanics and more exciting play than social engineering, dumpster diving, and scanning ports for known exploits. It’s a little solo dungeon-crawl, with whiz-bang set dressing, and a delver who’s just as scrawny as his player really is. On the down side, things come to a screeching halt for the rest of the party, as the GM and the netrunner go off to the side for a little solo adventure to find the one critical piece of info they need to save the day.

If you go with Hacking, you should know a little about how such things work. I’m a part-time computer geek in real life, so I can give you a few pointers. Hackers go after the weakest link in the target’s security. Instead of beating their heads against firewalls, they’ll sweet talk a remote access password out of a secretary, fast talk one out of techs who should know better, and check to see if they have patched that bug that let’s you reprogram the router using nothing but a standard web browser. Essential skills for the hacker type of character is computer programming, often specialized in networking, scrounging, and fast talk. Useful skills include forgery, disguise, stealth, lockpicking and almost any sort of craft or trade-type skills. For a good example of how this all comes together, go out and rent the movie “Sneakers”. This film will introduce the real advantage of using Hacking over Netrunning in a game. The caper from “Sneakers” took teamwork to pull off. Instead of a lone Netrunner sitting in his loft while the rest of the party sit around drinking soy-beer downstairs, you can have the whole crew involved. Weownitall Corp’s digital security is too tough to crack. But they just bought out Momanpop Ltd., who now have a port through that big, bad firewall. Momanpop’s security isn’t as good, and there’s a bunch of disgruntled ex-employees with Useful Information, if you can get to them before Weownitall does.

So, you’ve smashed up your world, and figured out how the computers work. You’re all set? Wrong. There’s still the issue of culture and fashion. Cyberpunk is a bright and vibrant dystopia. Fads come and go, and then come back again. If I were to have told you ten years ago that by the end of the decade swing music and bell-bottoms would make a comeback, you’d have thought I was nuts. Here’s your chance to make your setting more than just a high-tech Raymond Chandler novel. Twist the culture until it screams! Iranian speed-metal folk music videos compete with Sri Lankan sci-fi epics and German game shows for TV ratings. The network news can hardly be told from the latest “reality” shows. (Ok, so that’s not much of a stretch…) The world media services continue to prove Sturgeon’s Law to be true: They now just have much more to work with. Here’s a handy table for rolling up what’s on the idiot box when your PC’s tune in to try and catch the local news. Use 2d6 first two columns are who it is. Next one is what it is. The last is musical genres. If you want, you can always skip the third column and use this to decide what music is hot at the moment. Just don’t blame me if the thugs in your world end up listening to Sikh folk-rap or Korean techno-swing.

Now, let’s put it all together, and make a cyberpunk setting. Let’s use the clichéd game date of 2020, and want a Big War as our crash. Looking at the headlines, a war with Red China is a possibility within the next few years. We’ll put it in 2005, and say that they manage to nuke about 35% of our oil refining capability. (And, incidentally killing about 15 million folks) We return the favor with somewhat less restraint, and put the Taiwanese government in power as a puppet that we have to prop up with troops. Once the DC bureaucracy got a hold of the emergency powers during the war, they just never got around to giving them up. Lawmakers saw the advantages to themselves, and support the status quo. The needs of rebuilding caused the government to get nice and comfy with big business to the point where they seem to share the emergency powers. Being a real-life computer geek, I decide to go with realistic hacking as opposed to netrunning. I hand-wave it, saying that EMP from the war put the brakes on developing cyberspace and VR interfaces. On the fashion front, I pick Celtic folk-rock as the music fad de jour because I happen to like Celtic music. I also decide that with what’s seen as an occupation government in China by the majority of the population, those opposed to it start wearing queues again. (The long braided pigtail, see “Shanghai Noon” if you don’t know what I mean) This has been picked up on in the US by anti-establishment types. I pick New Orleans as the main city for the game to take place in. Between the refineries and the port, it likely sucked up a few cruise missiles, making for both urban decay and urban renewal on an epic scale.

Couldn’t be easier, right?