Corporation: Downsizing

Possibly may run semi-weekly with Aberrant dependent on the playerbase. Uses Corporation rules and a modified version of the setting.

Premise

All markets have booms and busts even the war market. The corporate wars have always been high-intensity skirmishing of various sorts followed by extended lulls of peacetime. Generally, the latter means extended prosperity, except for people like you.

Corporate Agents, you have been downsized by your owner megacorps for various reasons. Maybe you were a loose cannon. Maybe you've been investigated by the UIG a few times too many to be cost-effective. Maybe you just pissed off the wrong higher-up. Maybe you parted amiably. Maybe you had an ideological disagreement and quit before you could get fired.

Whatever the case, now you're a cyborg who needs to pay the bills. And well, serving synthsoy doesn't pay for maintenance on combat cybermodification. So you found others like you, maybe others you knew from previous lives, as friends or often enemies, and here you are. With your combined savings, a small startup, and no goal.

Maybe you'll change the world. Maybe you'll just see it burn. Maybe your goals aren't as grandiose as that. But even temporarily resourceless, you've got a fair amount of pull.

Setting Details

Corporation is very grungy and edgy a la its primary inspirations, Syndicate and CP2020, while in this case we're talking more Ghost in the Shell or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Everything is sleek, high-tech, shiny, but at the same time there's a reflection of the war economy underneath. Reflective black plastic, absurd fashions that celebrate the now, combat augmentation as a fashion statement. There are no Cults of Machina and mutant creatures running loose in the poor quarters are more rumor than fact, and someone probably put them there on purpose instead of turning into a horrible mutant from radioactive waste.

The world is in a gilded age, and although the lower classes can't achieve that level of prosperity they see, they're so close as to be able to almost taste it.

General Stuff

The Old Cities are lively, vibrant places, if run down and rusted. With no apocalyptic wars but rather series after series of skirmishes and a slow creeping corporate takeover, they are rather more livable, ranging from 'decent' to 'North Korea' in terms of how they are. The rich live isolated from them, in multikilometer spires or upper decks of two-layer cities, growing out of dying metropolises like shoots springing from dead forests.

Everything is sleek, sexy, and new, for the rich. Even the poor get that, living in dilapidated environments, listening to music on future-iPods, watching TV on paper-thin flatscreens. Chrome is out, thin, low-profile, and plastic are in.

Eurasian Incorporated

EI are today, but turned up a notch. The poor slave away for an ideal life they can never touch, and are addicted to consumerism with endless advertisement bombardment. The rich live in their spires and are fed endless half-truths about the poor that make them at once pity and disdain them. The European Union still exists, little more than a puppet government for the EI, a rubber-stamp to do whatever they want.

But yet, even if it is today with the divides turned up, it's not that the poor have gotten poorer. It's that the rich have gotten richer. Would you let Omelas stand? Or would you burn it down out of moral outrage?

Western Federation

On the surface, they're the best parts of the first world, hearkening back to old history that never was. They're past any forms of -ism, they're about strong family values and the good of society. They have a proud love of nation, of service, of loyalty and honor and courage, of professionalism. They are also xenophobic, militaristic, and hubristic. It is a colorblind 1950s America, seeing the world as Out To Get Them, with communists and deviants under every bed, intervening militarily more often than using money or diplomacy, throwing away lives for lost causes, conflating what feels good with what is right.

Ai-Jinn

The Ai-Jinn are singularity seekers and risk takers, pushing the edge of what's allowed in the name of profit. They are gamblers, criminals, the guys who steal alien artifacts and hook them up to advanced AIs in the hope that something cool comes out of the deal. They are engaged with an unofficial war against the UIG and its restrictions on technical development, fighting for freedom and their own pocketbook (but mostly their own pocketbook). It's a longshot, but the Ai-Jinn love to bet on the long shots, and are willing to do anything to make a buck and achieve dominance.

And sometimes they win big, even when they lose big.

Comoros

Unchanged, since they're the closest to morally grey in the canon setting. Also, because they're cool.

Shi Yukiro

Someone help me with an idea that isn't just Japan: The Japaning.

Chargen Stuff

Later if people show interest. People will start out more experienced than starting agents, and a fair bit richer.