UCP: Intro

[[ Welcome to the Rue-de-le-Ronde, Section 19, Citibrite-884.

It is the year 20×8. Earth is a neon and oil ruin. Humanity is a skin-and-silicon mess. Look at a person, it’s hard to tell where the human ends and the robot starts.

You wish you lived out there – the outer reaches, where life is simple. But you don’t. You live down here, where only three things matter: the MAN, the GOV, and the CREWS.

The MAN is distant, unfeeling. He is the beast. He is your burden. He’s chromed steel and polished nightmare, and his every whim is more grief for you. But he can be fought, he can be beaten. If you stopped believing that you’d have laid down long ago.

The GOV is what keeps the world turning and dust running. They’re there to keep the Man wealthy, which means keeping the people healthy. You almost feel sorry for them, with their starched suits and synthwool pillows and never-ending spreadsheets. For them to do their job, sometimes they got to make a deal with the Crews. More often, it means dealing with the devil in the tailored suit upstairs.

We’re part of the CREWS. We don’t want what the Man and Gov want. We want a piece of home we can call our own, to do with as we wish. We’re tired of scrounging a life out of the trash of our great-grandfathers. We’re ready to burn twice as bright, even if it means living half as long.

(What will the Crews do? Will the Gov help, or hinder? How will the Man react? Let’s play to find out.) ]]

I’ve been playing with the idea of a Cyberpunk project for years. (I mean, who hasn’t got their sci-fi heartbreaker, right?) This thing has been a LARP, a Megagame, the start of a fiction novel, a skirmish game, and an OSR-leaning RPG. Often it’s been several of those things at the same time. The bit of intro you just read has remained basically unchanged since I first thought of it, though.

The one thing it’s always been? Top secret. I dunno why. Shame of showing off something unfinished, I guess. Anyway, G+ is dying and my life is changing and there’s blog posts to make, so let’s party like it’s 20XX and see what the public thinks.

Oh, it’s called UCP. Stands for “Untitled Cyberpunk Project”. (Might be funny if this thing got big and this place is the only time I actually write that, right?)