Let's Break Shit... (Part II?)

Last time on “Let’s Break Shit…” I was discussing creating my own role playing game. After a couple of days of researching, I have come to the conclusion that I am truly creating something that hasn’t been combined in the way I’m creating yet.

Cyberpunk Dystopia, magnified with Space Opera expanse, with just enough Anime Shenanigans to balance the darkness. This is going to be EpiC! (say it aloud with a dip in the middle and elongating the last syllable come on, I know ya wanna!)

Anyway, after this morning, I think I’ve got the core system pretty much fleshed out. I’ll need to do some Alpha Testing to ensure that it’s actually workable, but so far, if my math is right, this should work fine. I’ve also got a crap-ton of random tables to generate. That’s going to probably take a week or longer. Good thing I’ve got lots of time during my subway/bus commute!

But today, I’ve been working on the Setting. How do I combine the typical dystopia of a typical Cyberpunk city to the expanse of an entire galaxy? No, this won’t be Star Wars. There needs to be a glue that meshes everything together. What’s the main plot in a Cyberpunk setting? Money. Control. Greed. Maybe Lust. And this game is set in the far future. It has to be for star-travel to be possible. Money is a problem because what resource would be scarce enough within an entire galaxy?

I’m not going to spoil it just yet, but I’ll give you a hint: It’s not a rare metal or element!

And it’s the perfect currency too! It degrades with time, meaning it can’t be stored long-term. The Elite CEO’s of this galactic Network will stop at nothing to have it. But this is only part of the economics. I had an epiphany last night. As in our current model, where Capitalism is rotting the bed we sleep in, the future, although it has some really cool stuff, isn’t too much different. I mean, we are talking about Cyberpunk here. So, much like how there’s two tiers of Justice, the natural evolution of this system would mean that there is two tiers of currency. The one the CEOs and Powerful use, and the one that the Common-folk use. (I’m still working on a vernacular term to call this group.) Anyway, because the Galaxy is divided up into factions that are ruled over by specific corporations, to keep people from rising up and causing trouble, there needs to be some mechanism in place that’s deplete-able, and addictive. Everything in the Universe is powered by Energy, the movement of energy. Whether it’s labor or fusion, everything boils down to energy. The future is going to conduct every transaction using the Quantum Universal Energy Exchange Framework. (Yes, that’s an acronym!) Of course, normal people slaving away aren’t going to use such official jargon. We got no time for correctness!

But keep in in mind that the Elites aren’t using QUEEFs, they use something far more sinister. To find out what, you’ll have to eventually buy the book I’m creating and find out!

Moving on… because my setting is so far in the future, I can also introduce something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: Temporal Travel. So now you as a SolarPunk or whatever I decide to call your typical Corporate Bitch (errand runner) can travel all across the Galaxy in your custom made Starships to extract resources and people, smuggle illegal crap, and just shoot things up, not only here and there, but also back in the past too! I’m thinking of restricting time travel to only include the past because of the very nature of how unpredictable traveling into the future is. There’s probably some Law of Temporal-Crap I need to discover.

Yes, I want people to be able to create and build things with my game. Right now, I’m leaning on using a flexible Tag system rather than straight up Build Points. I want creation to be fast but also fun. So you’ll get to build your freaky species, cyber-armorment, weapons, spaceship… all that stuff using words rather than numbers. I’ll be brainstorming more about this over the next couple of days.