1KM1KT Free RPG Community

I'm also one of those people that won't do it unless I tell you guys, and my business is just scraping by in the recession and I'm facing unexpected medical bills so I may lose a few months declaring bankruptcy and moving back in with my folks, so I still might not get it in on time.

So I definitely want to get my thoughts out here as they occur to me.

I watched all Rob's links to TED videos and this is what they inspired in me.

Some sort of modified FATE mechanic.

Rough sketch for my cyberpunk set in the 2110 decade.

Global warming causes rising ocean levels. In the next hundred years we might see a 3C temperature increase, which would be enough to rise global ocean levels by 7 or 8 meters. (The glaciers of Greenland melting would be where all the water comes from. The average temperature of the Antarctic would still be about -33C, so no totally melted ice caps.) Let's say that we only see a 6 meter increase in sea level. That means that all coastal cities would lay underneath 20 feet of water. A few good hurricanes (or what we call noreasters) and even a mighty city like New York would have to be evacuated and abandoned.

This happens all over the world, and since most nations have coasts, national governments all over the planet just give up under the weight of the epic levels of refugees. (Why? Because Robert Neuwirth predicts that a third to half of the world population will live in squatter communities within 60 years. I want to make it so that more than two thirds of any of my cyberpunk cities would be totally unofficial shanty towns or squatter communities.)

As governments in the west fail, Israel's future looks catastrophically bleak. The Israelis become more certain on a daily basis that the rising water levels will push them out of their homeland, and they will be massacred in horrible anti-Jewish pograms.

A group of artist and craft kibbutzim (basically hippy communes) come up with a solution. Why are Jews safe from prejudice in America? At one time, the general American population was fairly anti-semitic. It wasn't weird for places like country clubs to not allow Jews to join, but then it all kind of just went away. Well a generation of Jewish comedians transformed the way Americans thought about Judaism. Jews went from being secretive, clannish, separatists with filthy customs to being funny nerds who practiced quaint ancient customs.

So this kibbutz network set out to recreate that success on a global scale. The set out to found a network of PR cities, based on their kibbutz models, with the help of local populations, where refugees could go, to be part of these new cities. Even if the refugees didn't fit in and couldn't live happily in a kibbutz that was a whole city, they could still freely establish squatter communities outside the city limits to take advantage of the wealth and opportunity of the urban lifestyle.

Because they pioneered this type of set up, and they called it 'iyr-resheth (networked cities, or city network), the name that the world uses for this type of set up became erreshet. An erreshet is an empire that has no homeland, only colonies. An erreshet is an investment development corporation. An erreshet is a religion. An erreshet is a set of rules that everyone simply lives by. The first erreshet was The Semitic Socialist Erreshet. Because the Israelis who started it were largely secular, they had no trouble finding and partnering with other socialist, communist and secular groups in Africa and the Middle East. Hoards of Libyan refugees joined their network and they spread across North Africa. Azeris joined in the Caucas, and soon the network stretched from West Africa all the way to Central Asia.

The idea of charter cities wasn't new. And the idea of manufacturing a set of cultural values for a town went back to Celebration, Florida, or even farther. But this cultural movement that set up hippy city/states that ignored the old borders of the failing nations was kind of new. And soon others were trying it with much larger popular success.

The major erreshets that I'm thinking of will be.

Astro Erreshet – started by a number of space agencies banding together to maintain the semi-permanent habitats they had established in orbit, since the nations they had counted on for support had withdrawn funding to deal with their massively displaced populations. habitats in space are very delicate, and strict military discipline is necessary to make them work, trade for resources with Zu and Hobbes. The one thing they're concerned with is not having squatters. This means their communities are small and wholly concerned with the daily necessities of living permanently in space. Technological and scientific progress comes to them from other societies.

Hobbes Erreshet – founded by EU nations in order to maintain hospital and university resources, very strictly scientific, the only erreshet that has developed regenerative and mutational technology. Other erreshets have steered away from cloning, stem cell research and technology for altering an adult creature's genetic code. (This way we can still have cybernetic prosthetics. Only the high ups of any city would be able to go to a Hobbes hospital to get their part regrown. The ordinary soldier, security guard, or squatter will have to get a Battle-Angel-Alita-style prosthetic.) Members of Hobbes Erreshet cannot (are not allowed to) believe in God, the soul, or even human free will. Some of their methods of population control are so scary that even the marketing departments of Zu Erreshet won't touch them. The Hobbesians don't care if the state gives them drugs and hypnosis and subliminal suggestions to make them happy. People in the squats and other erreshets have to acquire their own drugs and porn and media lies in order to be happy. If the state does it, that saves me some trouble.

Semitic Socialist Erreshet – founded by Jewish hippies as a publicity maneuver. Arabic and Hebrew hippy towns, very secular and socialist even though they may be Muslim or Jewish. This erreshet is most willing to accept squatter communities as official neighborhoods within the formal city, so the squatters generally try really hard to conform to the ideals of being perfect hippies, so their communities will become official neighborhoods and enjoy the benefits of being official. By the way, the PR campaign aspect worked. In the world of 2110, the word Jew is synonymous with hippy. Fairly innovative and extremely efficient, but low environmental profile, so no huge supercolliders in hippy cities.

Holy Catholic Erreshet – a new model of church life for a changing world. The Italian government had collapsed, but most of Rome and especially the Holy See were above the new sea level. A network of cities loyal to the Pope in the Vatican. By far the largest erreshet.

Avasatha Erreshet – founded by a Bollywood entertainment company partnered with amusement park developers all over the world. They have several 1950s towns around America, idyllic English hamlets, Bavarian towns, all catering to the charm of small town life. Powerful and popular, offering enormous employment opportunities to the people forced to live in the squatter communities outside the formal city, but ultimately not innovative I should rewatch Westworld and Futureworld, or actually read the books. There might be some good ideas there.

Ithna'shar Erreshet – City/states ruled by a network of Ayatollahs, established following yet another revolution and reinvention of what Islam is “really” supposed to be about. Another large and powerful erreshet

Zu Erreshet – founded by Hong Kong and Singapore development firms, Asian hyper-capitalists, fairly Libertarian, faddish rather than innovative. Why innovate when you can just steal the discoveries of the Hobbesies and the engineering solutions of squatters and Astros.


Corporations
Corporations can exist in Hobbes Erreshet, Holy Catholic Erreshet, Avasath Erreshet, Ithna'shar Erreshet (but not banks), and Zu Erreshet. Corporations are rare in Zu Erreshet, where tax codes are simple, and monopoly laws non-existent. So in Zu Erreshet they have a thing they call “shangye shidzu” a business controlled by a specific clan.


Multidãos
Multidãos are groups of people who are all into the same thing in on-line communities. It's a Portuguese word that went global after a number of Brazilian companies began dominating their markets globally by getting the hobbyists in their markets to tell the companies what to do. “What do you want us to sell? OK” No surprise they outsold everyone else in their industry. In the world of 2110, all businesses and even some erreshets use multidãos, and people form their own multidãos without any business or government prodding.

For example, the Meteorology Multidão consists of a web app that collects weather data from a million people all over the world (and some that live in space) that voluntarily submit their local weather conditions. Sign up and you can learn the weather anywhere, for free.

The Pathogen Multidão monitors the spread of various chemicals, virii and bacteria that make people sick, new ones being discovered all the time, and old ones spreading to new areas. It's highly active and people always check it to see what medicines they need if they are going to travel anywhere. Some areas of the globe are dangerous to go to unless you grew up there, places that are heavily infected with bioweapons, the way places in Africa and the Caucus in the 20th century used to be heavily mined.

The RPG Multidão still uses the URL 1km1kt.net, originally established by the, now legendary, Keeton Harrington. The Hobbes Erreshet apparently named their open-source, tactical / game theory AI project after Keeton, and there's a separate multidão that's sprung up around that.

There are several Astro multidãos. It's just really cool to live in space, moving asteroids around to get the iron to build new ships and living spaces, to get dirt and ice for green houses. The ice can be broken up into hydrogen for fusion rockets and oxygen for breathing. It's just really cool, so people on-line are always talking about and coming up with new ideas to try and make it better and easier. Even some squatters are rich enough to get a ticket on an Astro trans-orbital plane and visit the Astro habitats for a week or two.


Technology

They only have the one type of versatile nanotech, programmable catalysts. Because people have these molecules that can change shape with the touch of a button, they can make materials that are a layer of one type of substance only a few molecules thick, then another type of substance, etc. making tremendously strong laminates. They can make carbon nanotube cables. But the most important use of this tech in the squats is in making pharmaceuticals. Phrams in the squats make medicines for the people with just a few vats of nanotech catalysts and a few vats of bacteria that they can write the DNA of.

Most guns are magnetic accelerator weapons. With the amount of tech floating around, even in a squat that's a tent city, kids can usually scrounge up the stuff to make a magnetic sling-shot.

Spies, sabotage and skirmishes still exist, but the last wars happened to the PCs' grandparents, and they were nasty affairs involving huge mismatches in technology, tanks verses corrosive bioweapons, stuff like that. When everyone started living in and around erreshets, and the erreshets weren't interested in controlling the territory outside their own city/states, wars kind of stopped. Erreshets even overlap. A fanatical Shi'ite city could be 30 km from a hippy Jewish city and any violence that happens is kept constantly under the radar. People still use the word war, like “civil war in the vegan gourmand multidão, on the pizza forum! Check it out.” but old people complain that kids don't understand what the word means.

Right now I'm thinking that the main area that I want to detail will be the Caspian. The Caspian isn't connected with any other body of water. In 2010 the Caspian is 28 feet below sea level. So raising the sea level by another 20 feet wouldn't necessarily affect the maps of that area. The Black Sea would get bigger, but not big enough to join up. The PCs would be squatters living outside the cities of that area. There would still be Baku, Astrakhan, and Tehran, but some cities would be gone, and new ones would have been founded by the erreshets. If I can get global warming maps of the Caribbean / Gulf of Mexico, then I may switch. The PCs have to have weird relationships to the people in their squats, relationships that get them into trouble, so they have to go on adventures. Because the PCs are unofficial, they have to solve their problems themselves, and because the erreshets don't care what happens in the squats, (like don't even care about the squatters stealing water, electricity and bandwidth), bad things can happen in the squats and it's up to the PCs to do something about it. The PCs can be crooks, trying to steal things from the wealthy among them or break into the cities to get at the real wealth, or they can be trouble shooters, or they could be smugglers flying in ecranoplanes they made themselves to smuggle vodka from Astrakhan to Tehran.

The main theme of the setting would be significance. You see, in the erreshets, even the hippy erreshets, you absolutely have to fit in, ideologically, physically, immunologically, etc. If you get an STD in the hippy erreshet, that's enough to be put in the squats. If you question the ayatollah, in the Twelver erreshet, get ready to be homeless, or even dead. I want a vibe kind of like the movie Code 46. (Except no viruses that make you smart, and in this world there will be condoms so you can safely have sex with the woman who is genetically your half-sister. Seriously, no condoms? WTF?)

That which makes you different and unique in the official communities makes you troublesome. Inside, you fit in, shut up, and keep your head down.

That which makes you different and unique in the unofficial communities makes you significant. Here, you can make a difference. Here, you matter.

I need some way for the PCs to screw each other up, some incentive that allows one player to complicate what another player's character is doing, like maybe you can tell your PCs backstory starting with his or her parents, but you cannot say if your parents were orphans or only children or what, so another player could try to earn a fate point by stating that a certain NPC is your character's uncle, or the players can earn fate points by tripping each other up, like say if your character is going to try to sneak up to a building in the sewers to try to get close enough to get on the building's wifi, one of the other players might say something like, “That sounded too big to be a rat.” and the more the players trash talk and throw complications at the GM, for every one the GM accepts, he hands out a fate point.

That's just my first idea. I'm trying to think of other ways I might do it. But I want this game to kind of encourage adventures like the films Snatch and Taken meet the novel Miguel Street.

Stunts would be renamed Edges and besides traditional stunts, cyberwear would go there, mostly implants, like in the When Gravity Fails cyberpunk setting, so like you don't get cyber-eyes unless you're blind. If you want to see in the dark, you get an implant that retasks some of your brain to reprocessing dark visual signals. The more brain power you get, the more details you can make out in a dark room. Cyborg animals would be common, like a pig brain in a robot that thinks it's digging up truffles but really it's digging up landmines. But characters could get cybernetic eyes or arms or legs if they have an appropriate aspect, like blind, or crippled, or veteran, etc.

Aspects could also refer to the character's stuff rather than to the character himself. After all, aspects already detail character's relationships. An aspect that says you built your own super cool, but glitchy hacking computer sounds valid.

Aspects should also cover if the character was ever part of an erreshet, if the character belongs to any multidãos, if the character ever lived somewhere that had deadly viruses or bacteria (developed or was born with an immunity), if the character was ever part of any huge business or corporation or unusual industry, personal characteristics, attributes, professions, the PCs relationships with each other and NPCs, etc.

And I think I'm going to have an option to choose to suck at something. You know how you have 4 skills at one above Average, 3 at two above, 2 at three above, 1 at four above, well you should be able to get up to 3 or maybe 6 more skill levels for choosing to be below Average at stuff, but maybe only if it encroaches on one off your aspects, like if you are a Former Security Officer, you could choose to be below average in Incredulity and that would explain why you aren't a security officer anymore.

I think this will work, the conflict of ideologies, overlapping, sometimes right next to each other (like the schism in American politics), but in my world too terrified by the prospect of sabotage or terrorists with bioweapons to actually initiate violence with each other, unscrupulous businesses ruled by individuals who can't be touched (like Rupert Murdock), religious and ideological intolerance, global warming, horrible natural disasters, refugee communities, fabulously wealthy haves, right next to have-nots living in tents, etc. I think that captures a more modern idea of what people are afraid the future might be like.

Sweet baby Jesus, I found it!



If I make it an 8 meter rise in sea level, this makes the Bahamas practically disappear, and puts the ruins of Miami on a bunch of islands off of the significantly shrunk Florida (the Everglades, gone). The ruins of New Orleans would be pretty far out to sea. A big swath of Louisiana would be gone.

8 meters is reasonable if the Greenland glaciers are totally melted, the north pole shrunk a lot, the south pole shrunk a little, and warmer water is slightly less dense so takes up more space.

Oh, an 8 m rise in water level doesn't cause the Mediterranean to encroach on Israel. But wait, if the Sea of Galilee raised 8 meters it would swallow a huge chunk of an already small country. Whoa, the West Bank isn't too important is it? Let's hope not, because there won't be much of it left. Hooray, Jewish hippy networked city culture thingie is still on.

Moving the most detailed part of the setting to the gulf coast means it's a place I've actually lived. The culture conflict would be different but I know plenty of Jewish hippies here in Atlanta. The two girls that I helped build the clay clubhouse in that community garden were both Jewish. (Now that I think about it, working hard on that danged clay architecture in the middle of the summer with insufficient water is probably one of the reasons I have this cursed rock in my kidney.)

I imagine Atlanta will be a ghost town too. When Katrina trashed New Orleans the rise in population here caused a drought. This town isn't meant for the future either.

Hmm, tough choice, rising ocean levels more prominent, different culture clash, or fascinating and exotic Caspian Sea.

I think I'll write what I know, and if I still have time, or after the contest, I'll go back and do the Caspian as well.

Incidentally, I checked London too. Major flooding along the Thames would submerge a big chunk of the city. If we put an Asavatha residential park and a Hobbes campus right outside the old city of London, we can do a setting there where we use the partially submerged London as a squatter town for both erreshets, the one where the aristocrats try to pretend the world isn't changing, guarded by storm troopers, allowing the below-the-stairs outsiders to work in the underground maintenance tunnels, and the one with the doctors and academics with their GM everything, and the wrecked London in the middle, just left to the residents to do with as they see fit.

I hope you feel better soon! I'm sorry to hear about your situation, but hopefully this will inspire your hatred of THE MAN! Perhaps you can write from your hospital bed? If it's good, and you win you can use the £30 to pay your bill.

That sounds really interesting. Except for the crystallised pain growing in one's body. That just sounds really painful.

I'm not really clear on how you are addressing national sovereignty issues. After all, the main point of having power is to keep having power.

I would suggest adding mechanics tied into the values that different erreshet espouse. For example, one needs three points in each of: devout, eco-conscious, literate, obedient, and technological, to be part of a certain group. Personally, I'd use these as replacements for attributes. Each erreshet, multidao, etc. has its own set of requirements. This gives you instant stats for NPC's, and explains why the pc's don't fit in: their value sets don't match.

I'm kind of imagining the national governments going the way of Haiti's government. You can't blame Haiti's government. It was never a strong government and what happened is horrible on a level that I can't imagine (and I have learned to imagine quite a lot).

So check this, it looks like the US government will probably not get too involved in the medical care that the citizens receive. What if 10 years from now, or 20, we still do things the way we do them now, and some terrorist cell gets a bioweapon into the American populace. The American government will ignore the spreading disease just long enough for it to be too late, and then the number of dead will be so catastrophic that the American government will collapse just like Haiti's did. People will be boarded up in their houses with guns. Cities will try to quarantine themselves, but they will still not be able to stop a well designed bioweapon. There will be witch hunts. The military will be called in but will be overwhelmed. The police will have long since given up. Bandits will take over hospitals in an attempt to safeguard their own health. (Just an example of how ugly America can get concerning health. Some study somewhere found that AIDS was a problem among African American men. When I lived in New Orleans, people were putting up stickers quoting the statistic and saying, "Don't have sex with black men.") People will find scapegoats to blame and murder because they refuse to blame who is really making them sick, their own children sharing germs in the schools.

By then, "President? I heard he got sick and died. But I got my money, and Asavatha development corporation is opening up a residential park with it's own farmland and private security forces. My commodities firm is already openning an office there, so I'm buying a house and going to live behind those walls while everyone else goes to hell."

Or if you're talking to someone who doesn't have money, "I heard there's a hippy commune started in the mountains, bunch of guys learned from Libyan socialists and Israeli kibbutzim. They got bionic greyhounds and falcons protecting the place. Even if they don't let me in, I'll just go and camp out on the outskirts. They're bound to have stuff for me to do and they can't be so uncool that they would just let bandits pick me off."

I have to come up with a different, at least slightly different, reason for the British government collapsing, because there's the NHS that does protect the British citizens from ill health. A bioweapon would sideswipe England vastly less.

The erreshets are the people in power staying in power. If you have power because you have wealth, you join Athavasa or Zu. But Zu Erreshet was created to preserve a slightly different type of power, less old money, more money derived from technological prowess. If you have power because of your religious standing, you join Ithna'shar or the Catholic erreshets. If you have power because of your resourcefulness, you join the hippies. If you have power because of your discipline, adaptability and ingenuity, you join Astro Erreshet. If you have power because knowledge is power, you join Hobbes Erreshet.

The more I think about it, the more I dig it, because these camps of entrenched ideology can be used to highlight today's conflicts, like the conflict over evolution and intelligent design in American public schools. I could just put a Hobbes campus near a Papal congregation in what was once the state of Alabama (most of it's still there). The Hobbesians could claim that the religious folks are intentionally lying to the people to keep them ignorant and subjugated. The Catholics could claim that the Hobbesians preach a philosophy of despair, and low self esteem. Memetic conflict could spark squatter riots outside either erreshet. But even if it doesn't come up as the core of any adventure, it's still cool and contemporary backdrop material. (In 20 or 30 years we'll have to run this contest again, once the stuff we're doing today seems weird and dated.)

As far as requiring values tied to the game mechanics... Dear God! That is a sweet idea! I don't even need to add anything to the FATE mechanics to implement it, just require that to belong to an erreshet, you need to have certain aspects, but like, a lot of them, like 7 or 8 aspects that must be exactly as listed. Since PCs only start with 10 aspects, this gives the players the option of creating someone who can come and go in the cities as he pleases, but the players who create squatter character (most players, I'm imagining) would have characters with stats that are much more useful, flexible, and tailored to their own liking.

As for the multidaos, most will be easy to join, just one aspect or none, just fluff ("My character is an active and respected member of the gluten-free gourmet multidao." you don't need to spend an aspect on that). But some multidaos, say for example, the Diamondstein Virtual Environment Design and Coding multidao, perhaps you need to have two aspects that say you can do two specific jobs or some skill at a certain level before you can get that aspect (Member of DVEDC), but that would be worth something, maybe offering you jobs, giving you a paycheck, like it would kind of serve as a guild.

A friend of mine has Starblazers, so I might check out their rules for advancment, so you can create the character you want, and over time, get the skills and aspects you need to become a citizen of an erreshet or a member of a difficult to join multidao.

Heck, if I think of it, there might be rules like in Kromosome (for Amazing Engine) so you could make a character that runs a business and hires the other PCs. You can't officially own a business unless you are a member of an erreshet that guarantees those rights, but you could "own" the business in the eyes of your squatter community.

I plan on cracking open my copy of Kromosome anyway to reread the section on getting worn down by travelling a lot and visiting places with different diseases. I recall that it was simple, elegant and fits my ideas of a world soldiering on despite being ravaged by environmental change, new diseases and bioweapons.

Lazy, recovering, distracted by life, but some developments.

1. I found this awesome Diaspora SRD. Of particular note is the use of maps in their different types of combat systems. Having maps for different types of conflicts, including a map of the character's "city", someplace they could have bike chases or gunfights and run around in, use fate points to add areas when they need a shortcut, use fate points or maneuvers to add aspects to areas (a neighborhood got around to paving a road, car accident cuts off an alley, construction on a store front creates cover, etc.), all this would really help players feel connected to the places where the game takes place, and a sense of shared ownership since the players have methods in the rules for manipulating the environment.

2. The FATE yahoo group is super easy to join and has FATE Minion Cards for Spirit of the Century in the files section. It made me think I might need cards for Erreshet, not for minions, but for recurrent NPCs, childhood friends of the PCs, family members, rivals, enemies, love interests, etc. If the PCs are running around in the impromptu sewers that were the original squat, but it was built over and pipes were put in to handle utilities and nobody comes down here anymore, and they find a giant mutant rat like the alien in Alien3, it would fit the setting better if the GM could deal a random NPC onto the map. ("Uncle Fred!? What's he doing here?" GM [thinking quickly]: "He's working at the whiskey still that he's hidden down here.") If the PCs are trying to distribute a vaccine to the neighborhood because the pathology mutlidao has announced a new infection spreading to the PC's area, the GM could make a social conflict map and put different factions at different positions on the map. ("Papal agents are disseminating a meme that someone in the neighborhood has miraculous healing powers so that people ignore the vaccine, so that people will get sick and flee the diseased squats around this city to move into the squats around Catholic cities. And the person they've elevated to sudden sainthood is [deals a card].")

3. New business meetings, of particular note is an oddball courier company I may do a decent amount of marketing for, reminded me of the courier in Snow Crash, and Snow Crash's first chapter, the one about The Pizza Deliverator. It made me think that getting a pizza to a particular squat address may be an adventure all by itself, what with no official street numbers or even street names. Believe it or not, this is a problem they're having. At a bank merger, people can't keep track of who is in which office or cubicle, things keep getting reorganized. Starting to think they need a dedicated person just to keep up to date on this, maybe by reading a whole bunch of twitter feeds from the people doing the moving around, blogs, etc. Add to this, oddball cyberpunks around every corner, mutant critters, cyborg pets, inscrutable droids, subversive agents specifically disseminating directions that go through gang turf, bizarre AIs getting the PCs lost for even less understandable reasons, etc.

Some jobs we know are exciting, smuggler, bodyguard, bandit, private eye, etc.

Some jobs are easy to see will become exciting, plumber, electrician, sys-op (since they're stealing electricity, water, and connectivity), etc.

But there will probably be other jobs that aren't immediately obviously exciting, but could easily be. If your squat can't count on the city for defense against gangsters and bandits, perhaps the job of parish deacon would involve a lot of kung fu. ("Give up now ruffians, or the vicar'll open up a can of whup-arse on ya!")

I'm not a great artist but I can do corporate logos and calligraphy in several languages. I worked up this to use as a card back. I'll put 9 on an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet with crop marks in the finished game so that any of you who want to try my game, you can print up your own.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

A Jewish + Muslim hippy couple who are both research neuroscientists out in California just ordered wedding invitations from my Etsy shop! Their wedding festivities start with a 7 AM mountain hike, followed by yoga, followed by a pool party.

Life imitates art.

If I can just convince them to cyber up their elderly pets (don't kill Old Yeller, put his brain in a robot body) I won't even have to write my game.

This entire setting, etc, sounds so awesome

It dovetails in nicely to kinda how I hope the world ends up

all cooperative, recycled, help one and another and cottage industry

Not that it will happen

Once I am done with my entry, feel free to ask me to help you out

I want to be able to print this out and hold it in my artifact inclined hands

Hi,

Think I figured out how to lay out my game.

Getting the skill list into it's final form. Working on the Edges (stunts from SoTC). I want to get the rules as short as I possibly can, punk rock rules for a punk game, short, like a punk rock song.

I kind of also want to do a corporate logo for Athavasa, but I haven't liked any of my sketches so far. I want their mascot to be Ganny, the friendly cartoon elephant, kind of Micky Mouse meets Ganesha. They will also be the only erreshet that prints money, and that money has a cartoon elephant on it. The whole rest of the world maintains BuckBuddy accounts, even hippies, except that hippies don't really need money so they're often totally broke.

Here is my first piece of in-game fiction. It is an email sent by a young man that recently moved from a Mennonite village to the city of Rio Bravo which was formed when hippies took over the old Rio Bravo nature preserve in Belize and turned it into a survivalist fortress and helped refugees from the rest of the Yucatan build new homes and lives on the outskirts of their new city/state. Remember that on a day to day level the people would not even think about that there ever was a nation of Belize or Mexico or Costa Rica, or any of it. The same way Americans are rarely aware of what Native American nations once controlled the ground they stand on. And there would be tons of refugees in that area. All coastal cities as well as the entire Mexican state of Tabasco would be submerged by the 7-8 meter rise in ocean level. The Gulf would reach all the way to Chiapas!

"My dear sister,

"I know you haven't heard from me since I moved to Ciudad Rio Bravo. You probably think that your brother is living with the hippies now, so he's too distracted by drugs and orgies to write his family, but life goes on here much as I'm sure it still does back at home. Perhaps within the city center, the life of a citizen of the Semitic Socialist Erreshet entails those things, but very few of us in the squats are ever allowed into the city, and when some of the hippies come out, they are large and strong, serene and healthy, with extravagant clothes and hair and constantly attended by their cybernetic pets. I'm not sure I would ever want to go into their city. They seem other-worldly.

"But I am not writing this email to gossip about the upper classes. I am writing to tell you about a singular thing that happened to me at work. As you may remember my interest in computer simulations was wasted back home, but here, I have been able to secure a job as a sprite technician at a small foundation that maintains a computer model of the squats around Cuidad Rio Bravo, to predict the usefulness of roads, public transit and foot paths, so the different squatter neighborhoods can keep track of who does what where, and how to make movement of people and deliveries easier. The job is easy, includes room and board, and a decent BuckBuddy allowance.

"As at home, I interact with this computer model, and all my computer's functions with my glasses that overlay the model's imagery over real life. I put them on when I leave for work in the morning, and take them off after I leave work in the evening.

"Just a few days ago my boss ran into my office in a panic and told me something so shocking that it has taken me days to compose this email to you. He died. On the day that he told me this, he had been dead for several weeks. We reviewed traffic camera tapes and surely enough, he died in a traffic accident, under a horse cart, more than a month earlier. I did not attach the footage of his death, since we both agreed it was very sad. The attacked video file is of what my glasses saw and heard when he told me he was dead. Whenever the frame pans up, it is because I am taking my glasses off to look with my own eyes and surely enough, he wasn't there. Watch the footage with the volume low because we scream an awful lot. You would have screamed too if you found out you were working with a ghost, or were yourself a ghost for several weeks. The reason I tried to call him a zombie at first in the clip is because in the old operating system Unix, when a parent process terminates and the child process continues, the child process is called a Unix zombie. And my boss, the boss I had been working with was apparently a sprite that he had built to represent himself in the virtual city. Because I always had my glasses on at work, it never occurred to me that he wasn't really there.

"Ultimately we couldn't understand why the sprite representing him was still running on the server, and we couldn't figure out what to do and eventually decided not to do anything because he was, in my opinion, a better boss since his death than he was while alive. So now I have a boss who technically died more than a month ago."