2. City & Corporation

The Social Statement.

The game will have several implied social statements: 

• Radicalised distribution of wealth, 

• Thoughtless and abusive use of technology for the benefit of the Few, 

• Oppression by a godlike minority over the mass of humanity, 

• The Struggle for freedom, 

• Sarcastic commentary on Capitalism and the Corporate Structure, 

• Bigotry and Prejudice and Racism on a social and economic level.

I make no apology for them, they are in there to set the scene and support the scenario. These are issues that we already face in our real world, I hope (or despair) that your players rise above them, in true Heroic style.

Players will be selected from ‘The Grounded’ (people who live on the ground), for their optimal genetic parameters, modified to a degree to make them better than they should be. So player characters are better than normal people to begin with. The City will take them in at about age 9-10, educate, indoctrinate and train them to be soldiers of the City. At age 18 they are sent to their Team assignments. The Rich will consider them only slightly better than tools.  They are weapons of the City to be deployed as the City wishes, to fulfill its needs.

The Big Lie: Cleaners (what your characters are called by the City) are told that if they serve the City well for 20 years they will be retired and given citizenship to the City. Stories will exist amongst the Cleaner teams of soldiers who have achieved this, but these are simply propaganda spread by the City. The City would never allow such filth into their perfect world.  The GM should at all times toe the line that this is true, of course it is! Players know the truth (you just read it), that is to be expected.  Their characters do not, and should play that way (at least initially).

Many of the cities that have survived will be based on a Corporate model, either built and owned by a mega-corp, or populated by people who got where they are via the Corporate System and believe it is The Answer (because it worked for them).  The People of The City have told themselves a Big Lie as well, and over the years have totally come to believe it.

The Cleaners.

The players will be assigned a Commander from the City/Corporation, who will control their missions and assets and review their performance. There will be several teams working for the City, and the corporate system will have them compete against each other to ensure ‘performance’. Their Commanders will be on Performance Pay and will run their team as a business, ruthlessly. They will conduct ‘performance reviews’ of each member of the team, using guidelines they develop and which the players will need to learn. As in any such autocratic system, those guidelines can be changed without your permission, or even your awareness. The GM is encouraged to change the performance parameters regularly.  You are a pawn of the City.  Despair is just one of the tools The City uses.

Your Commanders loath you, generally.  A Commander's job is considered a severe punishment for any citizen of the City, the lowest of the low without actually losing citizenship. Commanders get out of their jobs by getting their Teams to perform, to collect MIASMA. Commanders think you are nothing more than hairless apes (with apologies to apes). The GM should act with contempt, condescension and hatred, resignation, depression, hopelessness, anger etc. Get your Thesaurus out and look up all the synonyms for disgusting racist bigots, and use them for the mood and attitude of your Commander toward your team. Work with the incongruity of the fact that you are genetically better than them, but you are the oppressed.

Your mission is to make your players seek HOPE as a way of escaping the vicious spiral of despair that the City, and the surrounding city, offers. 

If you want an excellent idea of how your Commander might treat you, watch a clip of Full Metal Jacket (movie) where the Drill Sergeant introduces himself to his troops. 

Not all Commanders have to be portrayed this way, some could be depressed and suicidal, some could be simply insanely angry. NO matter what, they should never be someone the characters like, or would trust or turn to (and they aren’t interested anyway).

History & Setting.

The story begins about 130 years into our future, so roughly 2150CE.

Wealth has become concentrated in the top 1% to an unhealthy level. The world economy is dominated by corporate entities that have worked to reduce costs via the reduction of wages and conditions, as well as mass production and automation. The middle class as a social entity has been destroyed, replaced with a larger ‘working class’ that has been neutered via automation and internationalisation. Poverty and unemployment is rampant in nearly all areas of the world, but token relief programs (mass produced and automated) are offered by those ‘in power’ to ensure starvation and disease do not get out of control. Life is still bleak for the poor. 

The ‘poor’ and ‘working class’ are controlled and monitored, privacy is a right only for the ‘rich’. ‘Hope’ is offered in the form of ‘Lotteries’ and ‘Internships’. The Lotteries offer the dream of wealth. Internships offer the hope of improvement and social mobility, but in reality siphon off those who show talent and independence into the ‘rich’, depriving the ‘workers’ of leadership and inspiration that might stimulate revolt (ie most of them are rigged).

The wealth of the Rich however is so great that they can use their technology and resources to continue to oppress the workers and the poor without fear of them rising up. The Rich isolate themselves in ‘country villas/estates’, ‘private enclaves’ and ‘city precincts’. All of these are walled and guarded areas, even to the point of having a ‘green barrier’ (parklands) around them for increased protection. 

The working class get power for essentials and for mass media to keep them ‘entertained’. Food is provided free of charge for those who cannot provide their own, but it is a form of ‘gruel’ provided through ‘Community Centres’. The barest medical services are maintained, mostly to control outbreaks of sickness that might impinge on the Rich or work performance. 

Fusion power is available and power is no longer an issue to those who can control it. The working class however still pay at a scale dating back 100 years as the rich use this as a form of tax to milk them of income and hope.  Infrastructure is outdated and poorly maintained, except for the Rich.

The world is a starkly contrasting place of luxury and bland survival.

A limited form of anti-gravity engine (AGE) is developed. This allows a bubble/ovoid of anti-gravity to be created that can control the amount of gravity exerted on the bubble and its contents, the net effect of which is that the bubbles and their contents can be moved away from the surface of the earth, but NOT out of the gravity-well altogether. There are some tolerance issues that cannot be overcome.  Effectively it means the bubble can lift to about a height of 500m, after which the physics become dangerous and unstable. There is a maximum size to this bubble, around 5 km in diameter, but optimal size will be around 2 km in diameter. Smaller than 500m the bubbles become unstable and require exponential power supplies.

The development of this technology was initially driven by the mining industry, giving them the ability to lift a huge amount of dirt in a semi-controlled fashion and gaining fast and easy access to resources below the surface via a new form of ‘open cut’ mining. Once the technology became feasible and went into proto-typing other industries jumped on the band wagon, such as entertainment/fun park enterprises, gambling casinos and eventually The Rich.

These bubbles must be maintained, requiring a fusion reactor within the bubble providing power. If the bubble fails the contents crash to the ground. For that reason everyone agreed that bubbles did not move, they remained over their craters. Not to mention that the energy required to move one laterally was enormous (the AGE only worked against gravity, not inertia). And to top it all off we will say that moving the bubble puts stress on it. Not to say that the craters were not then developed by real-estate companies and sold off to those workers who could afford it, or were housed within it for ease of access to the enclave above it.

Once the technology was proven to be fail safe (as safe as fusion reactors), the Rich leapt on it. Those ‘precincts’ in cities became airborne, they were LIFTED away from the dangers of the surface world and the ‘surface people’. Rich Precincts around the world were LIFTED, in small numbers initially but then in greater numbers as it became obvious that a new class of people were being created (The Lifted). The Rich now not only controlled the vast majority of the world’s wealth but they were essentially also separated from the rest of the world’s population.

However.

Around 30 years after the first permanent LIFTED bubble was created - Skynet Adventure World - (mining bubbles were lifted and then DROPPED back after the crater had been exploited), the first RIFT appeared. Apparently the Anti-gravity field caused damage to the barriers between our dimension and another dimension. With time the damage increased and the other side was able to penetrate into our world. The first RIFT was the first successful breach of the barrier by the other side… and the monsters moved in.

Once a RIFT occurs the region around the RIFT changes, the physics of the two worlds mix and overlap. This results in the anti-gravity engine failing and the disc DROPPING (suddenly).  

The RIFT happens out to about 20-30 times the radius of the bubble, so a 1 mile bubble will have a 20 mile radius RIFT zone. Within the RIFT zone a Fog appears, covering the entire area in a heavy fog like vapour that is risky for humans over extended periods of exposure (Rift radiation). The fog has a reddish tinge to it, combined with the fogs reduction of sunlight, this causes a unsettling blood colour to blanket the area. It also has a subtle bitter, metallic taste.

Then the monsters move in. The monsters appear as a thick sparkling vapour, difficult to see within the fog, but those trained to spot them can. This ‘natural’ form of the aliens, a vapourous/liquid form, makes them mostly immune to conventional weapons, but new means have been discovered as will be explained later. 

The alien will move to possess (as in a spirit) any non-living material, including vehicles, buildings, the ground or dead bodies. Once the creature has possessed the item it will control it, repair or rebuild it, animate it.  Eg a car or bus will move as if controlled by a driver and having a working engine (and usable wheels). A building will be haunted and the creature will have poltergeist like powers. A body will become a zombie or a collection of zombie parts. 

The creatures will then begin to customise their ‘body’, to whatever macabre self image it may have. 

The creatures are very good with metals, being able to radically change their forms, and quickly.

Once the Rifts started it was eventually realised what was happening and all anti-gravity engines were required to DROP, but the ‘Rich’ had other ideas.  Instead of abandoning their positions of invulnerability they developed an alternative, the RAISED PLATFORM. Using materials developed for the Space Elevator (carbon fibre fullerenes-buckyballs), they constructed platforms that would carry the weight of their domains at a height of 100-200 meters above the crater they came from. This took time of course and in that time more and more RIFTS began appearing and discs DROPPING. 

But converting to a RAISED city didn’t stop the RIFTs, once they began they kept appearing everywhere that an anti-gravity machine had been turned on. 

The world economy crashed. Panic. Disaster. Apocalypse, at least for most.

The world the players will exist in is post apocalyptic for most purposes. The world economy is mostly destroyed. International and intercontinental infrastructure is mostly disrupted. Air travel is almost gone as most of the worlds major airports are within Rifts. Even sea travel has some issues as ‘Lifts’ were done over some ocean areas for mining. Most of the Lowlands of Holland and the Netherlands are one huge Rift as they had raised the land and then re-settled it at a higher level.

Several hundred major cities or Corporate Estates, (the rich ones who could ‘Lift’ themselves first, and thus ‘Dropped’ first) have crashed back to earth catastrophically. The remainder of the ‘Lifted’ cities and estates have converted to ‘Raised’ platforms, standing on pillared superstructures, or have ‘resettled’ back on the ground. Rifts have now appeared beneath, or over, all of them, where-ever an AGE was turned on. 

Welcome to the Present.

Its around 200 years after the first Rift appeared, roughly 2350.

A world where Raised Cities sit on platforms 100-200 meters above the ground, inhabited by the Rich. Where the Poor and desperate huddle under its shadow and around its feet. Where the Rift covers all the surrounding land in a thick fog of despair. Where Aliens stalk, possessing things, and turning them into horrors.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver in this case is MIASMA. When an Alien in its natural form is slain its remains transform into silvery MIASMA, a goo like substance that contains the secrets of eternal youth and good health. The Rich know how to use this, and they keep it to themselves mostly. In fact they desire more of it, so they have created elite soldier teams, Cleaners, who they send out to kill Aliens and collect their MIASMA, among other things.

This is what you, the players, are. Cleaners. Mercenary elites serving the all craving City.

The City.

Is just a city, not a specific city. 

The people of the City are just people. They have no specific colour, religion or nationality. They are RICH! Wealth has put them beyond the concepts of nationality, race or religion, and arguably beyond morale responsibility for their actions.  The people of the City are healthy and very intelligent. They are genetically enhanced to be exceptional beings, both physically and mentally. Cleaners get modified also, but only to enhance what they need to perform their work. The people of the City prosper, live fruitful and long, content lives. They have children and material advantages undreamed of. They are all highly educated using the most advanced mind training available. Some of them are geniuses. They have very few problems they cannot solve if they apply themselves to it. They believe that theirs is the only manner via which humanity will prosper. They believe that nothing can be done for the Poor, and to waste resources trying to save them is a waste. They believe that the Poor are merely a resource that they can use to support their way of life. They are indoctrinated by their own system to believe this. They embrace it.

The players do not get to visit the City, they only exist within the sealed enclave of the Cleaners world, in the ground beneath the City. The only City person who interacts with them is their Commander. A team of support staff exist who tend to the needs of the Cleaners, but they are ‘Ground’ people who have been elevated to the role, and part of that role is they do not form any attachment to the Cleaners they serve. They are rotated frequently, or disposed of, there are plenty more where they come from. A scene where the players discover what happens to rotated staff would be an appropriate ‘despair’ moment (tossed out an airlock?).

The City, what the players do know of it from glimpses during their training, is paradise. What they have seen, what they have been told, every piece of evidence they have supports this fact. To be a Citizen of the City is something to be desired, to be craved. As Cleaners, one of your offered rewards is to gain Citizenship of the City, after appropriate service. You have never met anyone who has attained this, why would you, as Citizens you never met them. You have no reason to doubt that this is true, Cleaners do grow older, leave and become Citizens, don’t they?

The City has infinite power in the form of a fusion reactor. It is capable to making its own fuel for the reactor, so it will last forever. The City also still has an Anti-Gravity Engine. Currently it is turned off due to problems getting it to work with the Rift present. The City one day hopes to solve this problem and take to the sky again.

The physical world of the City is divided into several distinct areas. The Citizens area consists of buildings and parks and whatever other structures they feel they need. They have the technology to build anything they want, they may not have the resources to do so however. The Citizens world is on top of the disc, in the sunlight, away from the ground and the Poor. It rises into the sky and the clouds.

Beneath the Citizens area is the Underground section of the disc. This is a labyrinth of tunnels and rooms where the rest of the people of the City live. The Cleaners, the support staff, the servants and workers who keep the City running. Nearly all of them are sealed off from the surface world.

Beneath the disc is the Platform, a massive structure with pillars that hold the City raised above the ground some 100-300 metres, and the crater from which it was raised. The Platform is constructed from amazing materials that will last long past the end of this story, and can never be damaged or brought down by any means available to the ‘Revolution’.  The Aliens cannot touch it either, the entire structure is electrified to prevent them coming anywhere near it. (And no the electrical fields will not fail, or be sabotaged. They have multiple layers of redundancy so that short of an earthquake of monumental proportions, they will remain functioning). Hmmm monumental earth quakes….

The City only has a few needs. It needs some raw materials as it’s recycling is not perfect. It gains these by paying for the poor to bring them to the City Market where they trade technology, health and education. If the Revolution could create an embargo on the City, it might have problems after about 20 years with raw materials needs. At worst the City might have to fly off and gather its own raw materials (they have short range VTOLs).

The other really valuable thing the City wants, and cannot get from anywhere else, is MIASMA.

To get this the city created the Cleaners, who hunt down and kill the Aliens and collect MIASMA. The Poor occasionally luck out and kill an Alien, and will trade MIASMA at the market, but the City needs, craves, more. This is where a Revolution could hurt the City, by cutting off its supply of MIASMA. That is unlikely however, as the Cleaners and the City, with its technology, could easily wipe out any resistance that could be raised.

In fact why does the City even bother with Cleaners? They have robots and flying machines and bombs. The reason of course is MIASMA, which requires human skills, human touch, human understanding, to collect. The Aliens have no problems dealing with robots, they just possess them (or at least the non-electrical parts)! But human soldiers cannot be possessed, they can only be killed (and then possessed).

Bringing the City down, literally or metaphorically, is not part of the story. Do not even bother with it. At the EndGame the future of the City will be decided, not before. The City is there to support the Cleaners and their mission - Hope or Despair.

The Cleaners.

The players are elite soldiers, selected from the population for specific traits and abilities. They are trained and educated from about 10 years of age to be soldiers, within the City. Most of them are drawn from the ‘workers’, but occasionally a ‘Citizen’ is selected or volunteers (although it is considered a drop in status by other Citizens). They are kept in separate enclaves, sealed off from the City proper. 

You will work as part of a team of ‘Cleaners’ that are sent out into the Rift to kill aliens, and to clean away the detritus.

Cleaners are selected not only for their physical and mental superiority, but also for genetic traits that suggest they have, or may gain what are called ‘Rift Powers’. These are what we would call ‘psychic powers’, but nearly all of them have manifested since the arrival of the Rifts. Continued exposure to the Rift results in the accumulation of Rift Radiation that causes mutations within the human body. Some of these changes are good, and some of them are bad, a lot of them are both.

Their ROLES:

Characters will be formed into TEAMS by their sponsor city, equipped, trained, indoctrinated and sent out on missions to collect MIASMA (alien remains), amongst other things.

Players will run as a bonded team; raised, educated and trained together. It is assumed (for the most part) that the players will be working together to achieve the goal of making a better world, indirectly through the generation of Hope.  

The Players and their Characters are deliberately inserted into one side of a constructed situation, that is generally considered ‘bad’ (or evil, but that is a strong word). They are part of the badness, enforcers and mindless slaves of an entity that is both admirable and repulsive. The game is about their journey of awareness, or awakening, to the other side of the story. The use of Hope and Despair is an attempt to raise their characters awareness of exactly what they are doing. It is the GMs task to show the characters, and their players, both the horror and repercussions of their actions, as well as to encourage them to see the bright shining light of Hope that is the alternative to many of their actions.

But the fix is in. The characters have little freedom of choice in a real sense. They are expected to play creatures who are fully into the vision of the City and its Masters, and only through the generation of Hope can they alter their world view, broaden their moral compass, and see the horror that is The City.  Hope is the currency of change. Despair is the status quo.

The Ruins of Man

Beneath the Raised City is a crater, the same size as the Cities disc, from which it was originally lifted using the Anti-Gravity Engine. The poor have moved into this place, thinking it provides shelter, seeking raw materials exposed by the half mile deep hole.  It is a shadow world. The City above it provides permanent cover from the sun, the Fog smothers much of the rest, spilling into the pit to create a massive cloud cauldron. Sufficient light gets in around the edge to help during the daylight hours so that it is not pitch dark, but the further down you go the darker it becomes (after about 100m it will be pitch dark without artificial illumination).

Outside the crater is the remains of what the City once was, a thriving metropolis of a million people. Suburbs and Malls, streets, cars and trains, thousands of homes, factories and parks. All gone. Smothered by Fog, contaminated by radiation, stalked by Aliens, buried in the remains of the dead, haunted by the memories of what once was. The sounds of life and laughter, long gone, waft silently through what remains. Despair is king in this domain.

Nature doesn’t care however. In fact nature is thriving. It has been 200 years roughly since the Rift, and Nature, even with reduced light, is re-conquering the land that humanity stole from it. Mind you some of the plants seem a little weird, maybe strange in colour and form, but mostly harmless, mostly.

The Poor.

The Poor are always with us. In the world of the Rift, the poor seem to be in ever greater numbers, especially within the Fog. 

If you looked around outside the Fog you will find that humanity is actually doing reasonably ok. The technology has reverted back to darker times, the population numbers have plummeted, but food is being grown and people are surviving. Nature is normal.

But something about the Fog keeps dragging a lot of people into it. The promise of quick rewards. The danger. The thrill. The Mystery. The need to drive those damn Aliens out of our world. The chance of getting into the City.  All of these things attract a certain kind of person. 

The Poor, as the City people call them, are all the people who do not live on The City (City vs city). They generally live a subsistence level life within the Fog. Many of them leave the Fog to collect food and return to sell it. There are an endless quantity of Poor. Sufficient for some of them to always be in your way at the worst possible time. Civilian collateral damage should be a common feature of your character's efforts (see Collateral Damage Move).

The Revolution.

The Revolution is a broad term used in the game to represent the various disparate groups existing within the Rift that, in general, want to overthrow the City and improve conditions (as far as they are concerned), or maybe take control of it, or replace them.

Overthrowing the City is not an option within the scope of this game, it is merely used as an objective that can be strived for, and one day (long after the characters have passed away) achieved in some form. This long term goal is what the Hope&Despair system represents.

The characters can make contact with various Revolutionary groups, or Cells. Each will have a single skill or advantage at which they are good, and can be used to assist the characters in their missions, or in achieving their goals.

Each cell that the players gain will have a Security rating from -1 to +4, unknown to the players. A rating of -1 or 0 means they are probably passing information to the City in some manner, and may be hostile toward you, even though they act friendly. A rating of +1 or better means they are opposed to the City, mostly, or consider your team as potential allies, or useful.  Players may use the Downtime Move - Contacts to improve their relations with each Cell and effectively improve their Security, turning them against the City or toward the characters. Don’t forget though that the player’s character are ‘of the City’.

Cell ratings will vary randomly, periodically, at the discretion of the GM or the story. So unless you keep working on them they may turn against you.

During the EndGame routine, the number of cells you have, and their Security rating will contribute to the result.

The RIFT - The Physics of Two Worlds.

The Rift is a rip in the fabric separating two worlds, a place where the physical properties of both overlap. Mostly those properties are similar, but now and then strange things happen. Strange things can be properties of the Aliens world, or they can be properties of the mixing of the two worlds, producing something new and unique. Often the effect will be local and a one time thing. It is a tool of the GM.

Radiation.

The Rift leaks. Radiation and toxins from the combined physics of the two worlds slowly permeate into anyone who spends too long in the area. The Fog is a manifestation of this effect, and living in the Fog means you will eventually suffer the effects of Rift Radiation. This will be detailed elsewhere.

Physical Laws.

Most of the time the basic physical laws of our world remain in effect. The Alien may, at times, be able to bend these laws to its advantage. Effects, like the suspension of gravity, may manifest where an Alien has been present for some time. Where you chose to do this you should keep it simple, bend one law, change one thing, vary a single premise. Don’t get too concerned with consistency, or flow-on consequences, just pick an effect and use it. The distortion of one physical law does not require you to apply it fairly, it is simply a story device to add interest. You don't have to explain or justify it, it's "Alien".

Rift Tears/Breaches.

The Rift is not just a title, actual physical rifts do occur, where the fabric of reality is torn apart and a portal exists between the two dimensions. These kinds of rifts are physical things, and conditions around them tend to be extreme.

The City is able to detect when a rift opens, increased radiation will be measured by instruments placed around the city. Generally The City will respond to such an event by sending a Team to locate its exact position, investigate it and then seal it.  Occasionally they may decide to use an open rift as a trap, luring Aliens through it and killing them before they can grow stronger. Such weak aliens will yield only poor amounts of Miasma (-1 forward), but something is better than nothing.

Conditions around a rift will escalate, increased rift radiation, increased aliens, increased monsters, increased Rift weather effects, increased physical laws distortions etc.

A rift can be sealed with a Rift Sealant Charge. This is a large, specially constructed device filled with a large amount of activated carbon. When the device explodes the carbon is vapourised and its atomic bonds are disrupted, allowing them to reform and repair the local disruption, mending the tear.

Rift tears can occur suddenly, naturally or because of some side effect. They can also mend or vanish for their own reasons (at the discretion of the GM or the Story).  Generally humans cannot go into a rift tear and survive, conditions on the far side are… alien. The City might develop something and need some volunteers however?