A decade of 'war' is over. The last fifteen years have seen economic collapses, civil wars, and proud nations brought to their knees by terror attacks. With a number of landmark settlements finally made over the last year, people now dare to show the hope they had kept secret for so long.
It promises to be an exciting new era. Technology that has been taboo since the beginning of the century is finally making its way out of testing, through the committees and onto the high street. Decades of science fiction is gradually becoming not only technically viable but commercially useful and socially acceptable. And a new generation of 'depression children' are finally getting the space to go wild over it all.
The owner of a new London nightclub is looking for staff. The place needs security personnel, an events manager, a technical team, and various other employees. The club may also take on some in-house entertainment, and the owner might even consider additional applications for the position of general manager. All are needed in time for the club's landmark opening, on December 31st, 2019. We hope to see you there.
If you're asking what genre it is, it's a cyberpunk game, by which I mean you should go and watch Strange Days and Blade Runner. Read Neuromancer, of course, but don't take it too seriously; I'm not going for the 21st century Chiba envisioned in the '80s.
If you're asking what system it is, then stop worrying about mechanics. It'll use some stuff from CP2020 (Interlock), maybe a little Fuzion and certainly a few nice ideas from the World of Darkness. But really it'll be whatever mechanics (or lack of) that fit the game.
If you'd like to know when and where it will be run, then you should expect it to be an in-person RPG (rather than a forum-based or PBeM one), either down the pub or around some unwitting player's house. If you aren't connected to Tigars then you may have trouble finding us.
If I run this, I'll want character submissions beforehand, in the form of in-character curricula vitarum, maybe even application forms. Then I'll help people work out game mechanics based on that (with appropriate bonuses per concept). The first session will be a group interview (note that if the game is oversubscribed I might get tempted to run the interview and actually use it to decide who is playing).
Herein I will add the IC and OOC articles and things that I plan to write, giving you more insight into the setting and the rules.
This document is still in draft, and is now published so that players can make comment. Details on it may change before I consider them finalised.
Since I planned part of this, some time ago, some of it has already gone out of date (A UK General election is likely before the latest it could possibly be, for example). The inevitable divergence from the real world has already started...
To tide you over until I get around to writing some fancy background stuff, here's a quick-fire list of what sort of thing you can expect in the world of Screaming Twenties.
The information here pertains mainly to this campaign setting: 2019 London. Some details differ throughout the game world.
I seem to have gotten carried away with politics now. Please bear with me for some technology and popular culture information which will come later.
In general: For the most part, available technology is much as it was thirteen years ago: few things are done now that weren't really possible then. What the last decade has seen is many of the predicted side-effects of the previous one becoming feasible as high-street products.
Transport:
The most common mode of personal transport is still the automobile. They now reliably drive themselves in all but the most taxing of conditions, although in the UK a vehicle moving on public roads must still be supervised by a licensed driver. A number of people have been convicted of Dangerous Driving after being found not to have been properly supervising their vehicle immediately prior to an accident. In remote areas, some roads are considered unsafe for automated driving, generally because the lines aren't repainted often enough.
For domestic use, electric and ethanol vehicles have performance comparable to petrol ones; the rising cost of fossil fuels has made high-performance petrol vehicles something of a status symbol among the young corporate elite. Besides gradual progress in safety, performance and fuel efficiency, the main difference is the extent of in-car entertainment: most cars now have a complete suite of consumer electronics for each seat (apart from the 'supervisor's').
Electric power is also available for small aircraft, whose easier access to sunlight makes them quite cheap to run. Small helicopters are quite reasonable to own and run, although various taxes and the required qualifications tend to restrict them to businesses and some wealthy individuals. Fixed-wing aircraft are cheaper, but the inconvenience of airfields has made them less popular.
One thing that does still require fossil fuels is the jet engine. The largest and fastest aircraft, as well as all vectored thrust vehicles, are very expensive to run, and hence quite unusual. For VTOL scenarios, tiltrotor aircraft provide a cost-effective alternative to VTs.
Trains are faster and more reliable than ever, although the quality of track in the UK still leaves a lot to be desired. The London Underground continues to run, those annoying anti-suicide barriers having by now been fitted in all stations and well-maintained trains and track making the system very reliable.
Slow shipping by huge tanker remains common, and smaller water-borne vessels have seen many of the same improvements as land vehicles.
Human Augmentation:
The term 'human augmentation' is used to refer to biological and genetic manipulations as well as high-performance prosthetics and other technologies intended to permanently alter the human body for better performance. Although almost any alteration is now legal, that legislation was a careful balance between protecting the consumer and protecting the manufacturer, and many are put off by the disclaimers a patient must sign.
Various treatments are available to increase pure physical performance: muscle & bone strengthening, reflex enhancements and so on. These are not as common as one might think (at least among normal, law-abiding citizens); they are absolutely illegal in traditional sports, and a new range of so-called cybersports are mired in conflicts of regulation as they try and establish rules that avoid their competitions devolving into corporate spend-offs.
The mental improvements are less well developed but more sought-after. An implanted microcomputer is a popular choice (see Direct Neural Interface, below), but direct improvements to mental and social faculties are limited to expensive and/or experimental biochemical and biogenetic therapies.
Outright replacement of perfectly good body parts is frowned on in most circles, especially since the benefit is usually purely physical. Artificial skin is good enough to make prosthetics virtually undetectable to the unaided eye, although some youth cultures see a raw metal arm as a daring fashion statement.
Improved senses, especially eyes, are surprisingly common (although still very unusual, across the populace). A replacement eye may have - depending on the patient's requirements - active aperture control, sensitivity to non-visible light (IR and/or UV), or even a camera. Heads-up display for a visual feed (from an internal computer or DNI (below) is almost standard.
Direct Neural Interface: The Holy Grail of cybernetics is a workable universal neural interface, and it isn't quite here yet. Current neural interfaces consist of an implanted network connection (wireless generally, although some prefer wires) and a 'thought recognition' processor to turn the operator's thoughts into digital instructions.
The thought recognition is comparable to late twentieth century speech recognition: a properly 'trained' interface can read the thoughts with a very high accuracy, although giving the device instructions effectively requires quite a lot of practice on the part of the user, both to frame the impulses in a coherent way and to be able to continue other surface thoughts without the interface trying to interpret them.
A practiced user can control a computer by DNI significantly faster than with a traditional keyboard/mouse arrangement, and dictation by thought recognition is much faster than by speech recognition. Other scenarios show less improvement. Vehicular controls tend to be sufficiently slow that the improvement in response time from the operator makes little or no difference, and the interface programs currently make it as difficult to learn to control the vehicle by DNI as manually, if not harder. A DNI is normally combined with a full implanted microcomputer, to add extra functionality to the link.
Direct neural interfaces are common among those who work with computers in a technical capacity, but unusual otherwise. Certainly they are not expected of anyone (in the UK it is illegal to require an employee to accept alterations, or to discriminate against applicants for a job on the basis of their augmentation or lack thereof, and on the face of it most employers have taken this to heart).
Health Implications: The long-term effects of human improvement technologies are largely unknown. There are many recorded cases of patients having adverse psychological reactions to augmentations, but this not expected to be a physical result of the alteration. Most people are unsure of the improvements, unhappy with the idea of having such invasive alteration and with the lack of reassurance from the research into the matter.
Computers:
Computers have continued to get more powerful, but perhaps more importantly more widespread. Embedded microcomputers are everywhere, to the extent that the typical consumer takes them for granted and nobody spares them much thought (while they work). Most of them have little or no human interaction, but those that do (the refrigerator that reorders when its inventory is low [and helps manage diets by withholding food], the fact that practically anything with a screen has internet access, and so on) are a defining feature of modern life.
Full-function computers are becoming less common in homes, their useful abilities often being replicated in less complicated multi-function devices. In businesses computers are small desktop units that are more powerful than ever running software that takes more resources than ever, for little overall change since the turn of the century.
Wireless networks are everywhere; a recent survey of the capital estimated that around 99.8% of Inner London was within gigabit WiFi coverage, and new billing models from ISPs make it easy to get internet access through any of it. Properly implemented wireless security is very difficult to get through, but the ease of establishing a network and the relative difficulty of securing it properly mean that tens of thousands of devices are more or less waiting for someone to break in.
The internet itself hasn't changed much. Various communications protocols have moved on a generation or two, but there have been few real new developments. The quality of web content continues to improve and the use of remote login protocols has almost peaked, but the promised age of virtual realities filled with geometric shapes hasn't materialised.
Miscellaneous Innovations:
ClearGlassTM presents no reflections: it is so transparent as to be essentially invisible. It is available for all manner of styles and purposes, although the bullet-resistant version is not quite as clear as the regular grade.
Holotubes: A laser array shines into a sealed glass chamber containing a mix of inert gases, where it has the abilitiy to project points of light into three-dimensional space. The full effect is a full image in 3D throughout the chamber. The output is from a digital feed, and can be anything that will fit in the chamber. Some problems still exist with opacity (since the projection is generally translucent, you can normally see the far side of the projected body, looking through the near side) but careful choice of nearby lighting will almost cover this, and reduce the 'glow' associated with an active video display. The units are common as part of entertainment systems, and also in shop windows and other places where they can be used for demonstration purposes.
More later, maybe. What more do people want to know about on the technology front?
This section contains brief explanations of key rules. It's not the entire rulebook, for two reasons: firstly that I don't want to write an entire rulebook, and secondly that even if I did there might be parts I wouldn't show to the players.
These rules may eventually be firmed up a little and used for other games, besides the Screaming Twenties. For that reason they're a little more general in scope than I expect to be necessary in that game. If you're playing in that, don't expect masses of firearms combat just because I happen to include a few pieces on it.
So, we're on an Interlock (CP2020) variant: variable target numbers for skill rolls of:
Attribute + Skill + Bonuses + d10
The Attributes we're going to use are the following:
I know, they're not the normal Interlock stats. I've split the functions of Reflexes down into Reflexes and Coordination so that a single trait isn't so key to combat characters. I've taken Move Allowance away because I don't think there should be such a broad range of movement speeds along humans (Run is likely to be calculated as 10 + Reflexes + Body rather than 3*MA). I've replaced Attractiveness with Charisma, because I wanted to make it slightly more generic than what has traditionally been considered by players to be little more than sex appeal. Cool/Will is now called Willpower, shortened to Will, because somehow using the word 'Cool' to describe the beautiful people of 2020 seems trivial or worse.
Luck remains. Although the exact mechanics of using it aren't yet settled, Luck will not be a dump stat; people who have it unreasonably low may find themselves in trouble.
Normal human range for these is 2-10.
A skill list will be produced later. Skills won't be specifically related to particular attributes, but there will generally be one or two common combinations, much as in the Storyteller system.
Skills run from 0 (unskilled) to 10. The referee will be left to decide which rolls can be attempted unskilled, or whether alternate skills may be used instead.
The main category of bonuses is from a set of nWoD-style Advantages. These run from 1-10, and may offer different bonuses at different levels. For example, the new Combat Sense adds a cumulative +1 to awareness rolls in combat situations at each odd level, and +1 to initiative at each even level.
Other bonuses added into skill rolls will generally include equipment bonuses, or others that the player is responsible for keeping track of. Circumstantial modifiers will generally be applied to the target number instead.
When the d10 comes up 10, roll again and add results. If necessary, keep rolling and adding until something other than 10 is rolled.
If the initial d10 (not extra d10s for rolling 10s) comes up 1, roll another die and take it away. Inform the ref if this penalty die equals or exceeds your Luck.