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.