Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Kingdoms of the Flood: The Gyre

    Sometime ago I wrote some posts about a campaign idea set in the world of Stephen Baxter’s Flood, where sea levels had risen to cover the entire earth and what little remained of the human population had been forced to make its life on the open ocean. I envisaged raft cities and OTEC remnants, and tried to bend the physics of the world to imagine some way that it might be possible for humanity to survive in such an unforgiving environment. Early next year I plan to run a one-shot adventure set in this world, using the Cyberpunk rules, and set in a region of the post-diluvian world that I will call the Gyre.

    I have decided that this will be a gentler version of the Flood: sea levels have only risen by about 6000m, so there is a small swathe of land in one part of the Himalayan plateau that is still above the water, as well as a handful of mountain peaks in the Andes. The areas around these peaks are the new continental shelves, narrow zones of teeming ocean life, and other mountain ranges, such as the Alps and the Rockies, though completely submerged, are perhaps close enough to the surface to support an ecology of sorts, and maybe even to allow undersea arcologies to exist, though life in them would likely not be pleasant. Unfortunately in this version of the Flood the remaining tiny landmasses are or have been warzones, heavily damaged in battles for possession during the final years of the flooding, so although they are rich in land in the new world, the residents of these little archipelagoes live in a constant state of conflict, and are not capable of leading humanity forward to a new world. Life on the open seas still holds some allure to those who wish to escape war and death, but it comes with its own risks – of starvation, thirst and storm. By a freak of fluid dynamics and history, the Gyre is an example of a uniquely fortunate open ocean community, and it is here that I will set the adventure, perhaps 100 years after all of human civilization drowned.

    What and where is the Gyre?

    The gyre is a huge fluid dynamic phenomenon, which has carved out an area of relatively placid and protected seas in the centre of what was once the Tibetan plateau. After the Flood the oceans are unconstrained by land masses, and huge and powerful currents sweep across the planet, bringing with them powerful storms and huge waves that make life on the open seas difficult and terrifying, but there are spots where strange local phenomena serve to create calmer, relatively storm free environments. The Gyre is a community of floating remnants built in one such region. Powerful currents flow from west to east above the tropics, but when they reach the Himalayan landmass they separate, and the currents passing the north side of the mountains slow down and curve, like the low pressure eddies above an aircraft wing. Curling off the spur of the mountains, they hit the relatively shallow and even expanse of the Tibetan plateau, forming an arc of swirling chaos around the plateau. A weaker version of the same phenomenon on the northern edge of the plateau completes the circle, and in the centre of this tear-drop shaped border of constantly stormy water is a broad expanse of relative calm, perhaps a couple of hundred kilometres across and maybe 500 kms from the warring states of the Himalayan Archipelago. Protected by this storm zone from both war and unstable waters, the Gyre has formed into its own small autonomous community. While its stability arises from the protective storm zone, its wealth and relative modernity derive from another fluke of fate: huge flood-survival facilities that were build in Europe and Central Asia, but drifted on the currents into the Gyre where, stranded, they slowly formed their own covenant. The centre piece is the towering arcology of plastic and steel called The Arc, but there are several others that became stranded in the Gyre and give it its unique prosperity. The Gyre is a kingdom of constantly floating, slowly rotating parts, a constellation of abandoned facilities from the Drowning Time: a floating archipelago of remnants.

    Facilities of the Gyre

    The facilities of the Gyre float in a constantly evolving and reorienting constellation, always spinning around some unknown central axis in slow but chaotic patterns, and forever trapped within the teardrop boundaries of the storm zone. At their centre is the Arc, to which all residents direct all their efforts, but in reality few people live there or even ever visit. Each facility is unique in its culture and origins, and functions as a kind of independent city within the complex of the Gyre.

    The Arc

    The most prominent of the remnants is the Arc, a massive floating arcology that was thrown together in desperation by the combined industry of France, Germany and Britain as they realized the Drowning was not going to end. Being low countries they were the first to have to abandon the land, and the least prepared, so their solution was low-tech at first and enhanced later. They bound together six oil rigs in a rough hexagon, the edges of the hexagon formed from abandoned oil rigs, and joined the whole thing together with anything that would float. The walls were initially an amalgam of wood, tires, shipping containers, anything that would float. Near the end someone developed a technology to extrude plastic from sea water and a kind of algae, and all of the industrial power of three nations was devoted to covering the whole structure in extruded plastic. By the time the waters finally took the last of the cities of France and Germany the Arc had been built into a kilometre deep monstrosity of plastic, wood and steel, designed so that much of its depth would be underwater, but enough above water to protect the centre of the space from even the most ferocious storms. Beneath the surface they built wave-powered generators, and on the sides they installed solar panels; inside the structure they dumped hundreds of tons of soil, and planted trees and grass. An army of workers slaved night and day to complete it before the waves took it, but at the end there was a revolution, when those workers realized they weren’t going to be allowed to live on the object of their toil. The thing eventually took float half finished, and fighting in and around it lasted for years. It drifted across the new flood plains of Europe, often running aground and then freed as the waters rose, coming into conflict with every new nation that took to the sea as the waters rose. But it also drifted east, and in the chaos of the final years of the Drowning it was lost to history, eventually reappearing with its lucky surviving residents in the Gyre.

    The Arc is an ecosystem all of its own. It has trees and grass above ground, and great plastic and steel strakes protruding from its keel host reefs teeming with fish. The outer walls of the rigs on its corners, pock marked with holes and breaches, are home to thousands of screaming sea birds; their guano keeps the fields within fertilized and provides chemicals for explosives. Near the water line it hosts fields of barnacles, which are harvested for silicates; the corals of its reefs too are recycled for their essential nutrients. The wave generators provide enough power for essential function, and it hosts an array of batteries that can be used to power the many ships that dock with it and feed it. Those generators also maintain a last, barely-functional plastics lab, that continues to extrude plastics from sea water and algae, though in decreasingly small amounts. The Arc also hosts a seed bank and a huge repository of the scientific and historical knowledge of the world before the Drowning, though much was damaged or lost in the battles for possession of its riches. During its drift East the Arc has gathered a wide range of folk from across the old world, so that amongst its few thousand residents can be found perhaps a hundred languages, not all spoken easily, and it has slowly built its own language that is a mixture of all of them. The Arc has never been sunk or even seriously damaged by storm or tempest, but it is too big to move under its own power, and its residents are lucky that it found the Gyre; without power it might eventually have drifted into colder waters, and everyone frozen there. Instead it floats at the centre of the Gyre, moving perhaps only a few hundred metres a year and mostly in a circle. It is the centre of it all.

    The Towers

    No one knows why the Towers were built. Some contend out of hubris, that the peoples of Europe wanted to preserve their most poignant architecture, thinking that even if it drifted untended on empty seas for an eternity at least some part of their noble past would be preserved; others think that the Towers were simply a desperate gift to the newly stateless residents of whichever place they were built, a kind of offering to the world of the Drowning. Labourers and great machines toiled day and night to throw together a bizarre agglomeration of ships, rafts and crates – all the old oil-powered vessels that would be useless once the last oil rig was torn from its fields and left to drift. Once they had crushed and bound together a large enough base of old shipping, the engineers of old hoisted on top some great tower, for no one knows what purpose, though some guess; the whole was then set adrift. Most likely it was intended to be a permanent floating source of steel and glass, and indeed legend holds that one of the towers held in its base a huge store of wood and coal, and another of chemicals. Two of the towers are telecommunications towers, one rumoured to have once been emblazoned with the flag of a lost state and both possibly purpose built; the last is the Eiffel tower, listing slightly to one side and partly submerged in the base of ships and rigs that hold it.

    Though no one knows why the towers were built, everyone understands their current use: birds and binoculars. Each of the towers has a microwave relay station at the top, a mirror for laser ranging, and a small communications room. The towers themselves swarm with birds, and provide the Gyre with three breeding colonies for one of its main sources of food and fibre. The ships at the base are covered in guano and now also bound together by accretions of seaweed, coral, rust and salt. Some of the ships are partially broken in order to fit them together well, and the whole structure is unstable, constantly battered by waves, and full of unsafe structures. The Towers are not for living on, but for harvesting; one of them (named “the Russian” after its fading flag) even holds a breeding colony of oysters, and the eels from beneath the Eiffel are considered a delicacy. Rumour has it that the O2 Tower has not been fully looted even after a hundred years, and deep in the bowels of its complex superstructure one can find treasures still, if one is brave enough to look.

    The Towers are the least stable of the remnants, and float rapidly around the perimeter of the Gyre orbiting the Arc at a great distance perhaps once every decade. Occasionally people will live on them temporarily, but mostly people visit them to harvest shellfish and guano, and occasionally steel, though steel is taken only with the permission of the Arc, and in carefully controlled quantities. A small squad of guards lives on each Tower, and anyone caught harvesting anything without a permit is killed without mercy. Some hulks are too precious to leave to scavengers.

    The OTEC

    The OTEC was built by the Chinese when they realized their world was going to be lost, and is the only remnant that started its life on the Tibetan plateau. The shallow seas of the plateau have a steeper temperature gradient than the rest of the world ocean, and the OTEC was built to harness that heat gradient for power. This power is used to provide energy to a state-of-the-art facility designed house the elite of China’s military and political  establishment after the drowning. The cold water from the depths that rises through its systems is used in aquaculture, and also separated into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. The OTEC is huge, the size of the largest oil rig at its centre and even bigger beneath the surface in order to ensure its stability. It was designed to be serviced by several small submarines and ships, and the Chinese built it to last: 100 years after the Drowning it is not a pretty sight but it is still seaworthy and robust, if a little drafty.

    Unfortunately for the Chinese their plan did not come to fruition. Starvation, thirst and disease took their toll on the residents, and the difficulties of life on the open seas led to rebellion and chaos. The wars for control of the Himalayan archipelago sucked in what little was left of the Chinese navy, and those who could escaped to what then seemed like the greener shores of the Himalayan archipelago, never to return as the war for land drained their blood and treasure. The OTEC was forgotten, its skeleton crew left to try as best they could to keep it functioning and to feed themselves, until one day outriggers from the Arc arrived and, realizing what they had found, made the Chinese technicians an offer they could not refuse. Now the OTEC powers laboratories and spends a large portion of its energy on charging power cells and filling hydrogen tanks for gas power. It also fuels light industry, and in amongst its sprawling substructure are an array of facilities for electrolysing seawater into metals. Scientists in the OTEC attempt to find new technologies for living on the ocean, and also run a computer facility that serves an essential purpose in the Drowned World: keeping track of the world’s slowly falling satellites.

    The OTEC is a deep and heavy structure, and barely moves in its place. Some of its prodigious power generation is spent on huge undersea motors to hold it in place over the most promising stretches of water. Still it moves, slowly, and it is the policy of the Arc that it should move into the Gyre not towards the edge of the Gyre where the waters are more mixed and the risk of losing it greater. The OTEC is that little spark of civilization that keeps the people of the Gyre from falling back into barbarism, and also that keeps them independent of any other powers that might rise up in the distant Himalayas, and start looking to the floating world for new conquests …

    The Hulks

    If the OTEC is the Gyre’s last remnant of civilization, the Hulks are its vanguard of barbarism. The Hulks are a collection of old ships that have entered the Gyre through its currents – ghost ships adrift on the oceans – or whose crew surrendered them to the Gyre in hopes of admission to a better world. These Hulks were lashed together, interspersed with rafts and flotsam, and turned into living space for the ordinary workers of the Gyre. It is on the Hulks that all the grinding soul-crushing labour of the Gyre is performed. Here are the low-grade chemical factories producing fertilizer and explosives; the net repairers and weavers who constantly repair the crucial daily materials of life on the sea; the fishermen and labourers who keep the people of the Hulks fed and rebuild the homes that the sea constantly damages.

    The Hulks are always swarming with activity. No one rests, because this sprawling complex of interlocked rafts and ships is at constant risk from the sea, and the bonds that lock them all together in a great carpet of teeming humanity need constant repair. Children swarm over chains, cables, ropes and anchors, making sure they are fast, rubbing off rust, checking pieces that need reweaving or resealing, reapplying rust-repellent materials and testing for weakness. On the bigger ships, chemical factories churn out compounds and pump waste into the sea; recyclers move from house to house and business to business, picking over every tiny object of rubbish to remake and reuse. What is lost to the sea is lost forever, and even the smallest thing may prove to be a precious treasure during hard times, so no one in the Hulks rests when they could be repairing, recycling or gathering.

    Life is cheap in the Hulks. It is a world of power, crime and abuse. The only way out is down, or into “service,” working on the Arc or the OTEC. Even becoming an adventurer is almost impossible on the Hulks, since to be a real adventurer requires that most precious of commodities – a ship – and for all its wealth the Gyre does not have the capacity to make spare ships. In the Hulks, only the fishermen have ships – and only the bravest of folk ride in those. So for most people there is no way off the Hulks, just a life of squalor and hard scrabble. But to the Rafters, the Delvers and many of the Himalayans, such a life holds riches beyond imagination …

    The Booms

    The booms are a complex of nets floating in the edge of the Gyre, near the swirling currents of the storm zone. These currents draw flotsam from far away outside the Gyre, but they also dredge up material from the plateau 1000 metres below, and sometimes this includes that most precious of commodities, soil, or even large pieces of plastic washed free of some ancient town or encampment. Sometimes these wash into the Booms, where they are trapped and gathered by the little colony of workers who always live here. They gather driftwood – especially driftwood – plastic, soil, little scraps of rubbish that might have fallen from a colony 1000 kilometres away, and many small fish, and carefully collect them together. The fish are separated into flesh and bone, the bone to be used in weaving and surgical instruments, the flesh dried and shipped to the Hulks for cheap sustenance. Sometimes a rare treasure falls into the nets – a bottle or a piece of flotsam containing metal, or driftwood, or some large sea animal with valuable bone – and the ever-vigilant workers will quickly claim it.

    Work at the Booms is hard. They must be constantly watched for something valuable that might be quickly lost, and they are also constantly in need of repair and cleaning. The nets are an irreplaceable treasure, many kilometres of net of different sizes and weights that have been shepherded through 100 years of use, and they are constantly in need of repair and care. The people who work them are like a spider in its web, always checking for breaks, fixing damage, and quick to make a judgment about whether a prize snared is more danger to the nets than it is worth. The Booms are privileged work for residents of the Hulks, but they are also hard work, and dangerous. But life in the Hulks is hard, and the Booms offer promise of wealth delivered by the sea, so many come to work here, and work hard for the chance at something special. Work and risk are the essence of life in the Gyre.

    Life in the Gyre

    Life in the Gyre is about what is needed and what should be done. Of course in their personal lives people act according to morality, love and the concerns of daily affection, but on a political level the Gyre is ruled by expediency and efficiency. The world ocean does not care about morality, and all of humanity is powerless before the ocean’s force. Living on the ocean means acceding to its whims, and finding ways to live with its power, and the first lesson that this new and harsh world teaches humanity is that society must be organized according to what is needed, and not what is right. The single biggest demand in the Gyre is work – there is always more work to be done – and society is built around the mobilization of labour. No one is allowed to be lazy, and no one is allowed to be unemployed. There is no retirement, and to a large extent no education. The entire society is built on a system of centrally planned and organized labour, and skills are learnt through apprenticeships rather than schooling. Every year the scientists of the labs travel through the stations of the Gyre, seeking out talented individuals to join them for training. So too do the stormguards, the functionaries of the Arc, the fisher guilds … anyone who is not picked up by these elite societies is left to work as manual labour, working long and exhausting days in service to the Arc, a kind of serf in a post-apocalyptic feudal ocean. Nor is there room for rebellion or resistance, which is punished viciously and quickly by the stormguards – though in reality there is little desire for resistance, because no one who floats on the vast and cruel ocean can imagine a better world where freedom and self-expression matter. There is work, or death.

    People in the Gyre are small, because food is scarce. But although food is scarce there is no starvation, and the people of the Gyre enjoy a diverse diet. They eat seabirds, guinea pigs, rats and fish; occasionally they are able to hunt or, more likely, scavenge whale meat. Although their diet is primarily protein, they also eat plantains and potatoes, grown on the arc but also in small amounts on the Hulks. Mushrooms are plentiful, and they have a wide range of vegetables that are grown wherever there is space. Seaweed is, of course, ubiquitous, as are shellfish grown on the outskirts of the remnants, and squid. Vine fruit such as passion fruit, grapes and gooseberries are to be found growing on every structure, and in certain seasons the Hulks blaze with the flowers of these omnipresent vines. Stunted lemons and pineapples grow on the outer slopes of the Arc, and everyone grows tomatoes. Occasionally a trader from the Himalayan war zone passes, selling rice or buckwheat, and those who can afford it bloat themselves on this exotic food; there are a few sheep on the Arc, mostly used to grow wool, and on special occasions it is possible to eat strong cheese. There is a large stock of wines and spirits from before the Drowning on the Arc, and the leaders of the Gyre will open these once a year to celebrate their continuing survival; everyone else drinks cheap alcohol made from waste plant material. There are many rituals around food, eating and community, and festivals in every season and every month. The people of the Gyre are bound together by their shared experience of the Ocean’s bounty; they do not starve, and though life is tough they are confident of tomorrow’s meal.

    The Gyre’s rulers are not selected by any known rule. There is no system of government in the Gyre; a few people run the system, and these people are chosen by those already running the system. The people who rise to rule are ruthlessly selected for talent, because there is no space in the Gyre to appoint idiots or psychos to positions of power, and the ruling clique must choose their successors very carefully. Tradition has it that the ruling clique should always include a representative from the fisher’s guild, someone from the Hulks, someone from the OTEC, and a member of the stormguard; beyond this the clique’s size depends on circumstance and expedience. They rule with the consent of the governed, and a healthy dose of stormguard violence; no one expects justice, only expedience. What choice does anyone have?

    This is the world of the Gyre, one of the best places to live after the Drowning. It is a world without space for complaint, dissent or resistance, a world of work and endurance. It is also a world of sunshine and freedom, a relatively stable society living on the great, free and liberated world of the open ocean. Life is clean, pure and intense, free of war and starvation and hopeful of a future, so very different to the violence of the Himalayas or the slow, sad madness of the Delvers; and much, much richer than the bare-naked subsistence life of the rafters. Slowly the people of the Gyre recover from the Drowning and hope to build a society that can grow and be more stable; perhaps one day a real human society can rebuild in this strange storm-wracked post-apocalyptic world. If it does, there is a good chance it will arise from the Gyre – or look to the little constellation of remnants as its main rival …

    Update: Commenter Paul has suggested these two extra remnants to make the Gyre more likely to survive, and to add to the sense of lost past and pressing survival needs. See the comments for elaboration on the justification.

    The Earthen Geyser: Near the western edge of the Gyre the constant motion of the tides picks up matter from far below and returns the forgotten earth to those high above it. The Earthen Geyser is an area of light brown water under a kilometer across rich in actual soil washed within human reach by an up-swelling current. The actual location varies constantly as the current moves, but is always located too close to the storm zone for a sane sailor’s comfort. The Harvesters dare lowering makeshift containers into the choppy waters from some of the sturdiest boats controlled by the Arc. They track the Geyser and dart in when the storm fronts retreat or the current drifts into the safe zone. These advances are matched with desperate retreats with the wind at their back when the clear period comes to its inevitable abrupt end.

    Only the precious materials retrieved from the endless dance with doom justifies such risk taking. The silty water retrieved is taken to the Pans, sheets of thick plastics stretched out under the sun, and poured out there for evaporation to leave their reward. This effort provides the single largest source of new material into the community, replacing that lost to the wind or vagaries of chance. It is also critical to enabling the growth of the forest.

    The Forest: Actually a series of small artificial islands created after the Drowning, these tree laden refuges are held in nigh-religious veneration by the inhabitants of the Hulks. The most recent structures are built from wood and each is filled precious soil and fertilizer extracted from human and seabird waste. In this soil grows some of the largest non-aquatic plants still alive in the world – swift growing pines and even a single raft with rot-resistant dense woods that won’t be usable for another century. The tress are carefully tended by caretakers who possess one of the most desired roles in the Gyre. Once grown to an acceptable size the tree is dug out and cut and carved to a dedicated use identified while the tree was still a sapling.

    The Forests are never visited by most residents of the Gyre and drift far beyond the sight of almost all. Despite that, everyone is aware of their presence. 2 new wooden ships have been launched in the last 5 years and all know that for their community to survive the wood must grow.

  • Cyberpunk 5: In the Thrall of the Failing Moon

    Always prepare the right outfit for a Disaster Party ...
    Always prepare the right outfit for a Disaster Party …

    Date: 4th October, 2177

    Weather: Rainy

    Mood: So so so happy! I got to see Fae Ling Moon! She played her new anthem and the lights were amazing and I only missed the last two songs because of rioting, and Alt spoilt it a bit but we did good business. I didn’t get to kill anyone so it went much smoother than the last Fae Ling Moon concert I went to, it’s sooo annoying spending an hour hiding in a gutter avoiding the Goliath stompers just because some ugly dude put his hand up your skirt, but this time I had to lug all those stupid books around in my backpack so I guess that’s probably almost as annoying.

    Outfit: Someone had to carry the books in disguise, in a safe container, so guess who got the job of lugging them around in a Landoseru? But that was cool really because it means I got to wear my schoolgirl outfit, the one with the white leg warmers and the little sailor shirt. Sooo retro! Pops didn’t want me wearing the skirt so short but I told him the story about that the ugly dude I shot, and he seemed to relax. But then he told me not to shoot anyone! Honestly, there’s no pleasing some people! Most of the guys I worked with were more than happy with my schoolgirl outfit and they always wanted me to be shooting more people! Pops made up for it by looking after the backpack most of the time, so I went off dancing with glowsticks and this really suave water bottle I bought at the New Horizon airport when I was coming back from a brief bit of wetwork on an oil rig. It looks like a piece of an alien, it’s by this accessories company called Gigerized, it really suits Disaster Parties! But even with the weird alienhead bottle I still looked really conservative, Disaster Parties are soooo crazy.

    News: Now that Pops is back online we get a constant stream of ranting about the news, and now that his knee is cybered up I can’t short circuit the ranting by unplugging the power cord behind the fridge. I guess next time he has to take cover in a firefight I’ll appreciate that he doesn’t grunt and groan about it, but his decrepit joints did give me the occasional respite from his obssession with facts and social commentary and all his other weird obssessions. I’ve noticed Coyote is really into this news stuff too, and I bet from the dozy look in his eye that Ghost is surfing a whole bunch of news sites. Boys! Always worried about such trivial things! Like whether this new glut of cyberpsychos with cheap cybered workups is something to do with Sentech’s work on the docks, and all these accusations of corruption flying between corporate reps in the High Council. Like, who knew? A corporation was corrupt! Pops thinks I should be worried that Arasaka have withdrawn from the Indo warzone, since that means they will have more corporate Solos to send hunting me, which is like, a little from column A and a little from Column B, because how can little people like us know anything about what they’re doing, and if we can’t know why would we care?

    Well anyway, I was thinking that but then I remembered something I read from that psycho Dialectical Ephemeralist visionary prophet chick, who said

    There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.

    And I started thinking about what I could do about that Arasaka contract. Nothing yet, but I don’t like having people out to get me, and sometime I’m going to have to do something about it. That pscyho prophet chick also said

    In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

    I know what the price is for what I did, and I guess I don’t want to be the one who has to pay. So I should pay more attention to what Arasaka are doing. Maybe they’ll mistake hiding for the perfume of my silence, and I’ll get to kill a few of their panthers…

    Oh yeah, and the News also had a thing about rumours of some mutant kid who can access the Husk without a cyberdeck, how cool is that? Ghost told me not to believe anything I see on TV but hey, he was lapping up that news about Arasaka in the Indo Zone. I wanna find the Husk boy and see if he can hack me a year’s free nail designs just by thinking about it … I bet Alt would pay a lot to get access to that kid …

    Speaking of Alt, we decided to give back her diaries. Well, we decided to sell her back her diaries. We’re not as stupid as Coyote looks, Dear Diary!  Alt wanted us to meet her at a Disaster Party that was planned for an old overpass, and that’s when I discovered that Fae Ling Moon was playing there. Fae Ling Moon is soooo cool, she’s so cute and energetic and she does these awesome trance anthems with these great light shows that are coordinated to match the music and the mood of the party, which she can somehow judge through some kind of cyber connection she has. Which has got to be sooo illegal. She often plays Disaster Parties too, because the crowd energy is really intense and she can up the sympathetic cybereffects. This time was no exception, she was really beautiful and everything was amazing. The old flyover was from back in the time when hover vehicles were new, and people weren’t allowed to drive their AVs freely wherever they want, so they had to travel on these big roads that were like half a tube and half open to the air. The roads are still there but no one uses them anymore, so it was the perfect place for a disaster party. The party crew set up their speakers and stage on one side of the road, and then all of Fae Ling Moon‘s lightshow was projected against the arc of the closed side of the tube, and we could all dance and have fun in the road beneath it. The Disaster Party crew made sure to bring fast-packing stages and sound, so when the Disaster starts they can flee, but it didn’t affect Fae Ling‘s show – she was still great.

    Did a Transhumanist break the dance set???
    Did a Transhumanist break the dance set???

    Alt affected Fae Ling‘s show though. When she arrived she hacked Fae Ling‘s lights and system, so when she flew in in her AVs she sent this wave of lights through the performance and jacked the music. That’s rude! But then her lackeys handed out these drugs to everyone, and once the party was really going – and after she met us – she did some stupid hacker thing that gave her control of all the neural systems of the people on the drugs. Then she triggered some kind of light show on Fae Ling‘s set that made all the drugged audience start twitching and spazzing. I think she did it just to impress us, and I think Ghost things she’s a stupid show off.

    But hacking other people’s cyberware is a big deal, and it would be really cool if Ghost had some power to do that. So I asked her, and she gave Ghost some software she said he can use to hack the cyberware of our enemies. We had a chat, see, before the Disaster started and the Party started turning violent. She made a deal with us – that she will give us anything we want if we can find her sister Samantha, the girl in the video. She is sure that Samantha is still alive and she has some ideas about how to start looking for her. That seems to be the reason that Lima came to New Horizon. She said she won’t pay us for jobs we do in the search for Samantha, but she’ll let us take any money or gear we find on the jobs, she’ll give us as much time as we want to look, and if we find Samantha she’ll give us anything we want.We didn’t get to find out fully the limits of what that means, because our polite little chat was broken up by a rival Disaster Party coming to crash the events, and that’s when the shooting and the rioting started. Fae Ling Moon wasn’t bothered of course – her bodyguards are ex space marines and well used to sudden violent evacuations, she didn’t even break her last song as she was leaving. But we had to scamper fast, and we didn’t have time for pleasantries at that point. But we’re pretty sure Alt has a lot of money and influence, and whatever we want is going to be doable. Especially when you think about how unimaginative Coyote and Ghost and Pops are! (Though even Alt can’t bring Pops’s daughter back … though she could probably make him a clone …)

    Alt also said she’ll pay us living expenses and medical costs if we get shot doing work for her. It’s a bit of a rough deal but we all want to do it. I think we all must have something we want from Alt.

    My reasons are obvious – I want Arasaka’s contract off my back, and it will take a powerful hacker to make that happen. But Alt also hooked me in with her first job for us. There was a truck driver called Hog who was doing some kind of drug running for Lima, and he went missing a few days before we iced Lima. It turns out he got suddenly declared cyberpsychotic and taken to a high class cyberpsychosis treatment centre on Deck 1. Alt can get us in, and she wants us to get Hog out for questioning, and also the cybershrink who’s been treating him. This facility on Deck 1 is the facility that recycles cyberpsychotics and prepares them to become Full Body Reconstructions, these full-cybered android cops that have got to be seriously mentally damaged. If we can get out one of their cybershrinks, we can sell him to another corporation for huge money. Plus, we get to kill the rest of the cybershrinks on the way out.

    I’ve got a debt to repay to that profession. I don’t like them, and I don’t like the way they decide who has a soul and who hasn’t. I think I’ve got something to tell that profession: that there’s a cost to be borne, and maybe this time I’m the swamp panther, and they’re the ones that are gonna be expected to bear the cost.

    What do you think, Dear Diary? Is it time we got nihilistic?

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Fixing Dump Stats, Fumbles and Combat

    Good girls don't fumble ...
    Good girls don’t fumble …

    The Cyberpunk system is stupidly simple and easy to play, but in its basic form it is also quite broken, and especially it is broken in favour of Solos (fighters in Cyberpunk terms), and ideally designed for min-maxing your character. Basically in the rules as written there are only two stats that matter, Body and Reflexes, and a whole bunch of other stats that could be really cool but just have no value. Furthermore, the combat system is heavily stacked in favour of the person who acts first. The consequence of the rules as they are written is a rush to heavy armour, certain specific types of cyberwear, and characters that are largely an array of dump stats.

    At the same time, the system is unbalanced in such a way that no matter how good your character becomes there is always a huge risk that they will fumble, with generally catastrophic effects. In the basic rules there is no escaping from the fact that no matter how good you are, no matter what you are doing, you will fumble 10% of the time. Even if your Luck stat is 10 (the maximum possible), you will fumble 10% of the time. In combat this means your shot automatically misses but it also means you have to roll above the reliability of your weapon or it jams for 1d6 rounds. The most reliable weapon has a reliability of 4, so there is a 40% chance of being out of combat for 1d6 rounds every time you fumble. With the best weapons. For the first three sessions of this campaign I have been rolling a loaded die and getting huge runs of fumbles – I think I had 5 fumbles out of 8 rolls in one session. This is punishing for the player, and also tough for the group if their theoretically most destructive solo is consistently incapable of firing. It also means that you need to carry two assault rifles, for when the first one jams …

    The basic combat roll in Cyberpunk is a d10, with a roll of 1 being a fumble and 10 being critical success. On a 10 you reroll and add, and keep doing so until the 10s stop. Your basic target to hit someone at short range is 15, unmodified by any attribute or skill of theirs (you’re shooting a target). You add your attribute and skill to the roll, and if you’re doing a 3-round burst you get +3. Drew, with Reflexes 6 in armour and rifle skill of 6, a smartlink and an accurate rifle, gets a basic bonus of +15, +18 on a 3 round burst. So she has a 90% chance of hitting and a 10% chance of her gun jamming. This is what one might call a bimodal distribution … but worse than this, you can use multiple actions, each additional action incurring a -3 penalty. So Drew can fire 6 three round bursts in a round, at 0/-3/-6, etc. The first three are guaranteed to hit (or fumble); the next 2 have some chance of hitting; the last one will hit on a critical. Each three round burst delivers 1-3 hits to the target, so basically Drew delivers 1-3 hits until she rolls a 1, at which point she has to switch weapons. Given her gun does 6d6+2 damage and the best armour anyone normal can field takes 15 damage off that, if she wins initiative her targets are going to be so trashed that they won’t be able to fire back.

    This makes the first round of combat way too important, and basically eliminates tactics from combat because if you don’t win the initiative you’re dead. So we set about fixing this through a series of house rules that widen the range of attributes a Solo needs to boost to win a battle, balances out the role of fumbles, and gives non-Solos a fighting chance of at least staying alive long enough to run away.

    Using Luck to beat fumbles

    Every character has a Luck stat, but it doesn’t apply to any skill checks, and as far as anyone can tell it has no relationship to how the game is played at all. It just draws points from the important stats. We decided that you have your Luck stat in Luck points that you can use every session for three purposes:

    • Use one Luck point to neutralize a fumble, so that it remains a failure but does not do anything catastrophic
    • On a critical success, increase the result by 1 per Luck point you expend (so you could actually increase your critical roll enough to hit)
    • On a critical success, increase the damage your weapon does by one die per Luck point expended, up to the original dice pool of the weapon (so Drew’s rifle could be boosted to a maximum of 12d6+2 damage)
    • Use a Luck point to reroll a failure on a death or shock roll

    This means a person with a weak rifle still has a chance of beating serious armour, if they’re willing to stake their luck on it, and means that when people are highly skilled they can reduce their fumble rate, even though they still have a 10% chance of failure under any circumstances (which is fine with me).

    Using Movement Allowance to limit actions

    Another stat no one cares about is the Movement Allowance stat, which determines how fast you move when you walk and run, but since moving in combat is extremely dangerous no one really cares about it. It’s another of many dump stats. We fixed this by making Movement Allowance the maximum number of actions a PC can perform in a round, and ditching the concept of the Run movement rate. Basically, every point of movement allowance gives you an attack action or 3m of movement, and you can act a maximum of your Movement Allowance in one round. Drew, with an MA of 6, can perform 6 actions. Under the original rules this is 6 three round bursts at +3/0/-3/-6/-9/-12. Even the last one has an 8% chance of hitting, so with the new fumble rules guaranteeing she can complete the full range of her shots, she should expect to deliver 3-9 bullets with certainty, have a marginal chance of getting another 2-6 in, and maybe a critical hit on the last 1-3.

    That would kill a combat-armoured elephant. So we also introduced a different approach to penalizing multiple actions …

    Restricting multiple actions

    Instead of having the -3 penalty for additional actions accumulate only on those additional actions, our house rules apply the maximum penalty across all actions. So if Drew does three actions in one round, all three of them occur at -6. This is intended to reflect the fact that fitting in more actions requires rushing the earlier ones as well as the later ones. This also gets around the strange problem in the original rules where moving at the end of your shooting actions doesn’t penalize them – so Drew can squeeze off three short bursts and then run 9m, but if she does this in a different order her shots are horribly penalized. The implication of such a rule is that whether she does 1 action or 6 in a round, Drew only rushes the later actions … this is weird. The revised rule also stops Drew from laying down intense death as soon as combat starts. Instead of her first three of six actions being guaranteed to hit, all of them would need a critical to hit. With three actions at -6, once you factor in the +3 for short bursts, she is still guaranteed to hit with all of them; but adding more actions will make all of them have a high risk of failure. So she actually has to trade off higher possible damage against higher minimum damage, and the combat is much more likely to extend into 2 or 3 rounds, which forces everyone involved to actually do things like look for cover, try to flank enemes, etc.  Instead of just walking in and emptying the cartridge on the biggest, toughest dude.

    Calling actions

    The idea that Drew has to rush all her actions to fit in later ones only really works if she has determined her whole sequence of actions before she starts. Combat rounds in Cyberpunk are really fast – 10 seconds I think – so it makes sense that you can’t run 12 m and then suddenly decide to reel off three unsteady shots. To reflect this, we have a called action house rule. At the beginning of every round, every player has to call the action of their PC for that round, and the GM calls what his characters will do. These actions are called in order of initiative from lowest to highest, so the person acting first in the round will know what everyone else is doing, but the person acting last will not. So if the slowest person says “I’m running across the road to cover” the fastest person can say “I will lay down suppressive fire on the road.” PCs can change their actions halfway through the round, but this uses one action itself, so changing your action halfway through will penalize all remaining actions by -3.

    This system took a bit of getting used to but it is really good, because it creates the element of chaos in the battle where everyone is acting in their own little bubble, based on their own perceptions of the fight, and for the non-Solos this usually means that things happen around them that they weren’t expecting, because they can’t act fast enough to comprehend the battle. Usually (assuming she doesn’t roll a 1!) this means Drew stays serenely in command of the battlefield, while people like Ghost and Coyote blunder in and out of fields of fire and shoot at targets who are no longer where they thought they were. It’s a really dramatic and cinematic addition to the rules.

    Example: Drew’s head shot

    In session 3 Drew took a bullet to the head, in a classic moment of dramatic action that flowed directly from two of these house rules: called actions and the revised luck rules. At this point we hadn’t yet introduced the new rules on multiple actions, which might have saved her, but these two rules alone made a lot of damage happen to her. For this battle Drew had rolled a 1 on her initiative, so she was acting second to last (ahead of Ghost, I think). Lima was down and crawling, but his lackey was still putting up a serious fight. Drew needed to move to a position from which she could gun down this guy and stop him putting suppressing fire on the door, so she declared she would sprint to a new position and fire a couple of three-shot bursts. This dude, being ahead of the initiative, responded to Drew’s recklessness by sinking three three-shot bursts into her as she ran. One of these hit on a critical (one was a normal hit and one missed). I think she took a total of four bullets, from memory. Each bullet has its location rolled randomly, and the GM declared that the first one, being a critical, would be boosted with three of the dude’s Luck points, so it would do 7d6 damage instead of 4d6. The GM rolled the hit location and got … head!

    Drew has 24 points of armour on her head but the dude was using armour piercing bullets. This means the armour counts for half but he does half damage. The upshot of this was that Drew took 6 points of damage on her head (he rolled 24 on his damage roll on 7d6!) After her Body is subtracted this leaves 3 points of damage, which on the head is doubled to 6 – almost enough to kill her (8 hits to the head is instant coma). She had to roll a shock check, which she fumbled, and we completely forgot that she could use a Luck point to reroll this. So down she went, and at this point Pops went psycho. Had she remembered the Luck point she could have rerolled the shock check, stayed upright, and probably killed the dude immediately – though then she would want to be keeping her head down, because one more hit there for even one point of damage would be the end of her.

    This was a nice example of the combination of called actions and Luck adjustments raining evil fate down on Drew’s pretty little head. Fun times!

    Additional rule changes

    These rule changes have dragged Luck and MA from the Dump Stat pile, but Cool and Empathy are still there. Empathy is meant to be important, but it doesn’t have any significance to anyone who is not a Fixer, so we need to find a way to make it more important. If we don’t, then basically everyone will cyber up as soon as possible, and Empathy goes from being a measure of your ability to interact with humans to a measure of cybernetic capacity. Given that cyberpsychosis is a core part of the game as it was originally envisaged, the complete uselessness of Empathy as a stat is a bit annoying. We also made some changes to damage rules which I will report in a subsequent post.

    With these changes, Cyberpunk offers a really simple and effective system for resolving skills, and an extremely deadly and vicious set of combat rules. It’s a little slow because of all the hit locations and damage rolls, but when you’re in the thick of battle you really feel it. It’s a fun and nasty system, though as originally written it is just frustrating and stupid. So if you are playing Cyberpunk, I recommend trying these House Rules.

     

  • Cyberpunk 4: Dialectical Ephemeralism

    The prophet of the interstices...?
    The prophet of the interstices…?

    The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn’t offer this assurance, so it’s very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you’re in control.

    – Credited to an Ephemeralist prophet

    Date: 1st October, 2177

    Weather: Rainy

    Mood: Confused and bored. DIY home repairs are not what I signed up for, and all this study is making my head swim!

    Outfit: Recently we’ve been redecorating the bottom level of Ragut’s warehouse, which is gonna be our new base, so I’m in these overalls I picked up cheap at J Lo, which is some fashion brand started by a z-list Oil Age starlet. No one knows how her brand lasted a hundred years but if you wanna hazard a guess I’d say it’s because her clothes have lots of arse space, which was a big thing back when sugar was still cheap and genetic modification was illegal (can you imagine!?) When you’re lugging crates and bossing the boys around and making claims to the spare toilet, you need to be wearing pants and they need a big arse. So there I a in my oversized overalls, crop top, skin dusked down to hide the dust, and more than enough oil to clean my entire arsenal. It’s dirty work down here in Ragut’s basement, but once it’s carved out we get our own rooms and a bit of breathing space. So it’s worth getting dirty for!

    News: I’ve been in hospital for a week watching talent shows through one eye, and Pops has been in hospital for three weeks watching reruns of his life flashing before his eyes, which has gotta be even more boring than the news he hasn’t been watching, so for once I’ve been spared his lectures about corporate power and injustice and all manner of other old-fashioned ideas. So I don’t know what’s been happening outside our little nest. Yay!

    Dear Diary! Pops came out of hospital a few days ago after a couple of weeks of convalescence, with a shiny new cyberleg in place of that tattered old fleshy thing he had hanging off there, which I guess means we will get half as many complaints about his flakey knees, and straight away he was bossing everyone around again with orders about how to set up our new hideout and what we’re gonna do about Alt and Lima and stuff. I guess we paid for a slightly cheaper intensive care unit so they must have had him dosed up on old-fashioned narcotics, because I could swear most of his behavior is classic narcotic withdrawal. But then, he’s such a grumpy old beast that it’s kind of hard to tell whether he’s in withdrawal or just being an old man. He got us all studying this old-fashioned thing called “Dialectical Materialism” because he says it’s the idea that grumpy old men like him had before the funky young scientist chicks of the solar age invented cyberware and we all stopped worrying about justice and equality and stuff. Can you believe that there were once beardy old men like Pops – who, to his credit (and I only credit him very rarely, not even when he buys me a drink, which I’m usually really strict about repaying because boys always get the impression I’m gonna put out just because they bought me some fizzy stuff I don’t even like, which is so ick, but that’s not a problem with Pops because he’s about 2 centuries too old to think about gross things like that, and that’s one of the reasons I really trust him) doesn’t have a beard – who wrote whole books about the political consequences of different classes of people disagreeing with each other about who should be richer and who should own the spanners? Weird, right? But the beardiest of them all, this European dude called Marx, had this idea that all human societies are progressing through stages towards utopia. Of course because he was an Oil Age beardy dude he thought that utopia would be some kind of weird world where all the men worked in factories with big oil-powered machines and were bossed around by old beardy men, and he didn’t realize that utopia would actually be a world where young chicks with boosted adrenal systems could do whatever they wanted because they had big guns and digital targeting systems in their retina. Case in point: most of those beardy guys seem to have ended up getting themselves shot, except one less beardy one who got ice-picked to death. But points for trying, I guess.

    But it looks like Lima and whatever crew he was rolling with over in the Inca mountains had some kind of new theory that was like a reboot of this dumb beardy materialism, which they call “Dialectical Ephemeralism” (the e-word means not really being here or something, which I guess applies to Lima since he was off in the clouds cyber-psychotic before we got to him, and now he’s dead). This “Dialectical Ephemeralism” is like the same idea of society going through stages to a utopia, but the utopia is some kind of transhumanist transsubstantiation (that’s more trans than a bar in District 65!) where people leave their bodies behind and live in the net, and their minds are all merged together, except for a few crazies like Lima who managed to get to be in charge. Which is like plus ca meme plus ce change, or however you would say that in French. And that’s what we killed back there in D70, and we don’t know for sure but Ghost says there were huge amounts of information going in and out of the hospital when we raided it, and maybe this was something to do with transsubstantiated minds. But we don’t know.

    We only worked this stuff out this week though, because we’ve been busy. Coyote has been busy shifting guns and drugs and bits of cyberware; Ghost has been helping him. Pops has been busy not dying, because he was so wrecked from the siege while we waited for Alt that he had to get emergency trauma surgery. Two weeks in ICU, then a week in my bed (I had to sleep on the couch! Gross!) and now he’s up and grumbling again like he always used to, though his new leg is very shiny and chrome, and he feels violated or something but at least one of his knees works now. I spent a week in recovery too, and got a new eye, and some boosterware that they put in while I was under. Alt dropped the 15k nuyen for the job and we used most of that to patch up me and Pops, and to pay some dodgy dude in D69 to run a set of nanoscanners over all the books we lifted from Lima’s lair. That’s how we found out about Lima’s weird political gig. Some of the books were diaries, some were history books, and because the diaries were in Spanish only Pops could read them. So the rest of the books were divided up between me and Ghost to read and research, so now I’m like New Horizon’s greatest living expert on this kooky communist liberation ideology of transsubstantiation, CLIT for short! I call it CLITorism. Pops doesn’t like me calling it that for some reason.

    I’m also now like the world’s biggest expert on recycling beer bottles, because we’ve spent the evenings of this last week eating pizza and drinking beer and talking about what it all means. I’ve never got hooked into the narrative of my wetwork before, but there’s something about everything going on in Lima’s past that really gets you in, like a crime movie. Maybe it’s that video of the girl saying she found it, on a loop, looking at us like she’s really there, you know? Or maybe it’s because Lima was crazy enough to write his story in actual books, not on a digital diary like this one, that gives it this extra weight. But it’s a really crazy story and we seem to have become a part of it, and we want to figure out what Lima meant to Alt and what Alt’s looking for, because we’re worried she’s gonna try and rub us out for even glancing sideways at that girl in the video, or maybe she is gonna want us to help her with future jobs, and if she does we need to know what we’re up against.

    So the way we figure it, based on the diaries we read and the books, Lima and Alt and this girl Samantha were in some kind of experimental research institute in south America somewhere, from when they were kids, and they had some kind of experiments in transubstantiation. Samantha found the technique of getting out of her body first, but Alt and Lima got it too and Lima thought he was stronger than Alt, and somehow they all got away from that institute (I guess you can do that when you aren’t tied to your body). Alt came to New Horizon to get famous in her 22nd century Scarlet Pimpernel gig, and Lima went on some CLIToralist rampage through the mountains of south America. Once he’d got his mob of CLIT fanatics up to steam he came to New Horizon to find Alt, because they’ve got some kind of hate on for each other that we don’t know why. And he set himself up in that ruined hospital with the kids and everything while he was hunting Alt. But we aren’t sure if that was his whole purpose, and we think maybe he was doing experiments on the kids or actually taking their minds out of their bodies – transubstantiating them – and using them as tools for his hacking.

    And his hacking was good. The chip that I took from his head had some secret videos of him hacking Alt, and he could beat her down in microseconds and get complete control of her. She regularly attacked him in the Husk and he beat her every time. We are keeping that info secret, diary, because of Alt knew we’d even seen those videos we’d be more extinct than the polar bears. But we have seen what Lima can do. Also we think maybe he’s not dead, but trapped inside his hacking equipment, which is why Alt didn’t want us touching his stuff and didn’t care about him dying, and wanted us to call it in quickly – because she can extract him from his hacking gear without needing his body. These CLITorites are weird and scary.

    Was this in Pops' knee?
    Was this in Pops’ knee?

    So we decided that we’ll give all the diaries back to Alt, not mention that we have the chip with the video of her getting digitally pwned, and see if we can swing more work from her – seems like a good idea to be on her good side. In the meantime, during the day when we weren’t gorging on pizza and yelling dumb plans over beer, we had a lot of redecorating work to do. Ragut joined our team as a member, and gave us a whole level of this decrepit warehouse that he works from for us to live in. It’s basically 5 aparments in size, so we get an apartment each and one spare that we can use for guests. We had to clean all of Ragut’s mechanical crap out, repaint, and all that stuff. It’s a decent place, except for the small problem that it’s all made out of shipping crates – the warehouse was just one big open space and he made the rooms out of crates. So it feels a bit temporary. But it’s as good a place as any, and we get to stay here and get Ragut’s services cheap and his protection of our stuff when we’re on jobs. I like it. Gotta work out how to lay out my room though, but I haven’t had time because we’ve been so busy cleaning and repairing and dealing drugs and guns and stuff. But now we have a home!

    Dreams of a better world
    Dreams of a better world

    Coyote also got us some better gear, he tried to buy me a sniper rifle but they’re still illegal and he couldn’t get one easily – he promised he’d keep trying so long as we have the money. I tried pointing out to him that maybe if we spend some of our loot on making him look a little less like a monster from hell and a bit more like a fixer we might actually be able to buy gear from decent people, but he just frowned and muttered something about being a psycho. I didn’t realize he was a psycho too! But it stands to reason, no balanced mind would pay to have that garish glow in the dark tattoo on their actual face. It explains a lot. Sometimes I think I’m the only sane person in this team, which I guess is why I’m the only one who actually enjoys shooting people, and understands the CLITorists.

    What, dear diary, would they do without me?

    We did spend a lot of time (and beer!) talking about what to do next, and this whole week has just been consumed with shopping and repairing and talking, talking, talking about what to do with Alt and the information we’ve got. We all have this feeling of trouble coming, and we had to make plans and contingencies. Everyone seems satisfied with our direction now, but I am not so convinced. So I thought I’d finish this diary entry with a quote from one of the Ephemeralists’ spiritual leaders, some latin American chick who was full of sage advice for maniacs. She said

    If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first

    And I think that’s what we just did. But I promised myself I’m not gonna lose anymore fights, and since Pops found me in that motel room and we started fighting together I haven’t lost anything or anyone. I’m not gonna start losing now. So, Dear Diary, let’s look forward to the next fight, and prove that Ephemeralist chick and all her CLITorites wrong.

    We spent a lot of time talking, now it’s time to start fighting.

     

    —
    Editor’s note: all the quotes here are taken from Quellchrist Falconer, the angry marxist leninist prophet in the Altered Carbon books by Richard Morgan.

  • Getting GLLAMM to Converge for Tough Datasets: An Example and a Proposed Method

    I have a dataset of about 40 million records covering rare events over a 30 year period, with about 600,000 events in total. The data are clustered in about 50 regions, and in the latter years of the file there are only about 4000 events a year (they increase in frequency in the early years). This means that in one year there may be only 80 events in any one region. I want to conduct a multi-level Poisson regression of the events, with about four or five categorical covariates plus year and a random effect for region. I’m doing this using GLLAMM in Stata on an Apple computer with 32Gb of RAM, 12 cores and Stata/MP optimized for all 12 cores (this is not a cheap setup!) The raw dataset takes about 16Gb but I can collapse it to a dataset of counts of events and populations at risk, which reduces it to (I think, from memory) about 170,000 records. I’m using a Poisson distribution, so essentially a loglinear model, but I should probably ideally use negative binomial for zero-inflated data – unfortunately GLLAMM doesn’t handle negative binomial data and I have read of problems with the xtnegbin procedure, so I just have to suck it up and use the Poisson family. I’m also not adjusting for serial dependence, because that would mean extra random effects and/or correlation structures and it would just get too nasty.

    The problem here is that GLLAMM just won’t converge. If you set it running with relatively standard settings you can first run it with the NOEST command to get the coefficients, then feed them as starting values into a model with adaptive quadrature and 12 integration points, but it just won’t converge: after 3 or 4 days and 150 iterations (one estimation cycle takes about an hour) it still hasn’t converged, and the maximum likelihood estimate is not concave. The maximization process seems to be proceeding in some fashion, because every 10 iterations or so the likelihood decreases slightly, but it just won’t seem to stop. Interestingly you can’t set the tolerance in the estimation process in GLLAMM, so I can’t stop it when the MLE is decreasing by less than 0.01 (which it is doing now) but more than 0.00001.

    This non-convergence is not a data issue – it works fine in a standard Poisson regression, there are no warnings about combinations of covariates with all zeros or all 1s, and this also seems to be the case when the data is divided up into regions (as best I can tell). I think the problem is just that the events are rare, there are a lot of dimensions over which the likelihood needs to change, and it’s just a very tough optimization problem. I have run into this problem with non-linear multi-level models before, and it appears to be a problem of big data with rare events and large numbers of regions. So what to do?

    I have noticed in the past that estimation in GLLAMM is more likely to be successful if there are more integration points, which slow down the time to converge but improve stability. I’ve also noticed that the initial estimates can really kill the model, and also I’ve noticed that a big part of the estimation procedure is about getting standard errors, not estimates. Also, although you can’t control tolerance you can limit the number of iterations (a rough version of the same thing). Each iteration taking an hour, if one wants to get actual results it is helpful to run as few iterations as possible[1]. So today I tried a new method for getting convergence, which works in stages like this:

    • Start with the NOEST option to get initial coefficients for starting values
    • Feed these into a model with 1 integration point (Laplace Approximation) and 1 iteration
    • Feed the coefficients from this as starting values to a model with 2 integration points and 2 iterations
    • Keep running new models, slowly increasing integration points and iterations

    If I did this a few times, I found that my models started converging after just two Newton-Raphson cycles. By the fifth model (with nip(12) and iterate(8)) the coefficients had all become stable to 4 decimal places, and the variances were largely fixed: all that remained was small changes in the variance of the random effect. At the fourth model some of the variances were out of whack, but the coefficients close to their final value. The fourth and fifth models converged on the second Newton-Raphson step. I set it running last night and it’s basically now fine-tuning, using a model with 24 integration points and a maximum of 32 iterations. That will be the final model, it’s probably going to be done by tomorrow morning.

    Because this modeling process starts with the final coefficients from the previous model, it seems to bypass a lot of the convergence problems that arise from starting with a model that has coefficients very far from the final values and then waiting. Instead, you get rough coefficients halfway through the process and then restart. Since much of the challenge for the estimation process seems to be in calculating variances rather than coefficients, this saves you a lot of time waiting to get values. It seems to have shortcircuited a lot of convergence issues. I don’t know if it would work for every problem (GLLAMM seems to be a temperamental beast, and every time I use GLLAMM a new problem seems to rear its ugly head), but if you are having convergence problems and you are confident that they are not caused by bad data, then maybe give my method a try. And let me know if it works! (Or if it doesn’t!)

    —

    fn1: Actually this model process takes so long that there are some sensitivity analyses we just have to skip. There is one method we use in preparing the data that I would like to check through resampling and sensitivity analysis, but if every model is going to take 2 days, then you can’t even do a paltry 100-sample bootstrap and get a meaningful answer in half a year. Crazy!

  • Cyberpunk Downtime 2: Escape from Neverland

    Last stand at the Okay Cryotank
    Last stand at the Okay Cryotank

    [Editor note: This is the second Cyberpunk Facebook downtime, cleaned up and stripped of faffing. It describes what happened after we finally decided what to do with the loot we scored after killing Lima, and shows the dangers of hanging around to debate logistics in a world where the biggest guns rule. Fortunately in this case we had the biggest guns and the best cyberware … but it still came very close at the end …

    For this part of the Downtime Ghost was not present – he had taken the whaler down the deep shaft into the water beneath District 70. We would later find out his escape was almost hairier than ours …

    Because this happened on Facebook it was entirely narrative. No dice were rolled. It took several hours interspersed with changing locations, travelling, working, meeting friends etc.]

    GM: The three of you head up, senses on full alert. As you climb up the stairs you hear the sounds of some shouting. The top floor is clear, but it seems a group of ragged men and women are coming in and are close to the same entrance you guys used to walk in. The goldfishnator stands in the middle of the surgery room, prepped and heavily loaded with guns and cyberparts. The rain is raging and nightfall is close. Afternoon sun is orange in the distance. The blood of all the guys you killed is being washed out and is falling off the edges of the bridge, and through the fallen walls. Coyote’s magnifying cybereye detects 5 or 6 guys taking cover in the broken building in the distance. Behind them three other guys are jeering at each other, one of then seems to be arguing while the other two are laughing or screaming happily, a lot of them are carrying SMGs in bad condition or rifles. They are all dirty, young and most seem twitchy even from this distance. Only a few seem to be wearing any armor or cybernetics, but something tells you there are more of them somewhere.

    [Coyote, Drew, Hartigan ask some questions about fighting, dropping dynamite.]

    GM: The three behind are not fighting each other per se but they are being loud and a bit violent. Hard to know what really is going on. The 6 in front are quietly moving forward, crouched and taking cover on broken building parts.

    A TNT drop might be hard, you are expecting Coyote to fly over them, fully loaded and slow, and drop from the window a TNT with a fuse. Doesnt sound very solid. The way to the vehicle and the entrance are free so far, you can either take cover in around the surgery room in front of the vehicle, or in the vat rooms (where rapey dude was), protected from the rain but giving the assailants more ground to walk into the building.

    Coyote: Coyote will take off and we will find cover to keep the miscreants away long enough for him to get out.

    Drew: Drew will look at Pops and gesture to the south room, with a questioning look

    Hartigan: Hartigan nods and they both move towards the south room.

    Drew: We will start picking off people as they are moving forward. Coyote can get the ship out once they are forced to take cover.

    GM: The three of you rush out of the stairs, pass the north wing and cross the gap between the two wings. Coyote quickly jumps into the back of the Goldfishnator, picks two M16s and a few magazines and throws them out of the vehicle. He jumps over the driver seat and starts take off routine on it.

    At the same time Hartigan and Drew close in and surround the goldfishantor, moving towards the entrance of the complex and taking cover. You sight on the goons and get ready to shoot, then at that moment the goldfishnator comes to life, its thrusters roaring, the sound alerts the approaching goons who start to shout in alarm, their screams get drowned by the sound of Hartigan and Drew opening fire on them, the surprise killing two of them out of hand. The rest take cover, and you notice the three on the distance shouting torwards something behind them and then moving forward and taking cover as well. Soon bullets are answering your attack, but the van seems safe so far, but you know the moment the van breaks upward and into the sky its bound to get shot at.

    Drew: [OOC, as I realize just how deep we are submerged in shit] oh well, this is as good a day to die as any other … Anyone who pokes their head up to take a shot at the vehicle gets iced.

    Hartigan: [also OOC] Same with me. I think Hartigan and Drew would be quite at home in this atmosphere by now!

    GM: Equipment and skill wise you clearly have the advantage, a few moments in and another guy is down. You do realize that, any shot that hits is probably going to drop them. The problem is that the battle has become an interchange of suppressive fire and people taking cover. You could quickly end this if they were less people, but the sheer amount of them makes there counter attack a cloud of bullets that force you to keep your head down. They are slowly creeping in, not much strategy to it; the ones closer shoot randomly trying to evaporate the general area were you are, as the ones further away creep in closer running from cover to cover. They are screaming like madmen and laughing, until the point Hartigan drops another of them. They get a bit mad then and answer, the volley of bullets blowing a hole were hartigan was a moment before. Hartigan gets a bit closer to cover and reloads. Drew you notice one of the bullets have grazed his neck and there is some blood coming down. It doesnt seems very serious though.

    The goldfishnator starts with a small blast that raises it off the ground, Coyote spins it a bit so the front (and not the back where the kids are) is facing the goons as they take off, and with the background sound of bullets and goons screaming the goldfishnator starts taking off slowly, crossing the ceiling mark.

    Drew: We will lay down some suppressive fire while he rises. Then I think we should move back to the stairwell entrance. They will be funneled into our field of fire on the bridge across the two rooms, and we can take them down as they cross.

    GM: Excellent, Hartigan takes a slightly more solid position and you both get ready to retreat as the ship takes to air. Unfortunately at that moment Drew notices the goons at the back yelling and pointing at the ship, you quickly realize they are about to open fire on her, at the same time the ones in the front bring up aim and open suppressive fire again. You have a moment for yourself, you can face the new supressive wave and shoot at the ones in the back, hopefully making most of the them take cover before they can open on the ship. Or you can let then waste bullets and hit them when they are reloading, safe from the bullet storm but risking a volley hitting the ship.

    Drew: Drew will take the high risk option, assuming that Hartigan is going to cut down some of hte suppressor dudes…

    Hartigan: Hartigan will hit the guys trying suppressing fire whilst Drew takes out those at the back.

    GM: Got it, you both only need a nod to understand each other and you bring barrels forward. The ship breaks the ceiling line and is floating, nose front to the fight and coyote flipping off the goons.

    Drew sees the guys aiming at the ship, in the open and she bathes them in bullets, most of them get caught off guard and only a few bursts make it to the ship. You see the ship’s windows crack, but coyote seems unharmed. Drew’s horizontal burst of lead brings down two more of the guys, and the rest curse, taking cover. At the same moment Hartigan opens on the closer goons laying down suppressive fire, but both fire volleys come at the same time, there is an eerie instant where time seems to slow down and both volleys of fire intersect each other, then continue their travel torwards each other’s target. Hartigan sees it and turns his head, bullets hit all over him, his ears ringing. He yells at Drew to get her head down but it’s too late. A burst of bullets decorates the area around drew, as she coldly and steadily drops off goons in the distance. Most of them miss, but Hartigan heart skips a beat when a burst explodes next to drews face, blowing up the wall close to it. Debris blows up, as tiny pebbles scar drew’s right side.

    Drew you are blind for an instant, and you feel warm liquid all over your cheeks. Hartigan you notice that drew right eye is busted, a chunk of concrete inside it. It enrages you, but then you remember Drew has cybereyes. It appears most of the damage was luckily on the eye, otherwise Drew would be rolling for death, she is stunned for a second, but her body reacts for her and Drew drops down and takes cover behind a more solid wall. Her left cybereye gives a screech and comes back online after a split second of interference.

    Oh drew.. they done ruined your make up.

    GM: Drew is not thinking about her make-up, she is back against the wall, reloading and muttering “Too fast, too fast, it’s all too fast.” Then she motions to Pops to indicate she will cover him as he retreats inward. [OOC: (He is further from the entrance in my imagination, so needs to leave first – if the opposite is the case, seh will leave first)]. Drew’s cool is 9, it takes more than a chunk of concrete taking out half her face to faze her!
    GM: Fortunally the ship has a good window of non-bulletness. You hear Coyote’s cheer of joy on the intercom and the ship flies over the goons, cripping real close. The goons scream scared its going to crash on them, at the last moment coyote pulls up, the bottom of the ship actually hits one of the goons, smashing his head into a cloud of red mist, and the ship darts up first, then down into the abyss. You see it come back up again farther away, flying back into D68.

    Drew: [OOC] I don’t know anything about military tactics but I’m thinking Drew should take a position at one of the rooms around the cryotanks, while Pops drops into the stairwell. Then we will establish a crossfire zone at the entry to the second room and they won’t be able to take cover from both of us at once – but it will mean Drew has to run across to the stairwell if we need to retreat again.

    [Editor note: at this point there is a separate Facebook chat going on between me and the GM, in which I am told that Drew’s dodgy Russian boosterware is starting to come onto the scene. I initially decided Drew would fight it off, because now is no time for heroics, as I wrote the above out of character comment; but then I realized that this would be terrible role-playing, and Drew would have to take the high risk path. Below is what happened then].

    Drew: [OOC] actually that’s not what happens at all

    [The following is what actually happens, GM can change details as needed]

    Drew crouches down for a moment reloading, muttering “too fast, too fast!” to herself. There is a thread of blood and cybergoo coming out from under her helmet. Pops is taking a breather and gesturing back to the inner room when he notices that Drew has stopped moving. She goes very still, looking down, as if she has briefly fainted. Then she starts twitching, shifting the gun to her left hand and her right arm moving aggressively in jerks. The rippers in her arm come out and back in a few times in rapid succession. She looks up as if recovering consciousness, looks around, then suddenly leaps to her feet and goes charging out of the doorway towards the Gangers. You can’t see or understand what she’s thinking because you can’t see her face through the goldfish-patterned helmet.

    She leaves a blood-curdling scream in her wake and surges across the gap to the first line of gangers at incredible speed, firing at an insane rate from her left hand, her rippers out.

    The outside area is streaked with lights from the vehicles and some distant half-repaired streetlights, and sleek with rain and mud; Drew flits through this like a shadow, almost too fast to follow and speeding up. The gangers have time to stand up and look at her for a moment but they are still swinging their guns up when she hits them and full combat is joined. As soon as she hits the group her rifle drops and she starts laying into them with her rippers, screaming in this weird, thin, keen wail that you can’t hear physically but distorted through your helmet headphones. Then you can’t really see her; a guy is slumped on a wall, bleeding and grunting; there is a cloud of blood behind her and some fast movements, and a guy staggers away from the circle, his arm ripped with what looks like four or five blows of the rippers.

    The fight lasts for a few seconds at most, you’re dizzied by the speed of it, and then you can see Drew on your side of the wall the gangers were using for cover, on one knee, rifle back in hand, slicked with bood and gore.

    She looks like she’s about to faint.

    GM: [ hell yeah. ]

    Drew: In the aftermath of her little killing spree the whole battle zone has sunk into a kind of shocked silence. But Drew has left her helmet mic on so you can hear her whispering to herself in her native inuit, which you have never heard before. Whatever she is saying is soft and mellifluous, but reverential. It sounds like an invocation or a prayer.

    GM: Everyone is blinking. The back row of goons has its guns up but they are frozen in shock as the the front row disappears in a matter of seconds. The only sound is the screams and curses of one guy in the back, eyes away from the battlefield, who was actual still popping random shots at the disappearing goldfishnator.

    Hartigan sees the guy slowly turn his eyes back torwards the frontline and his eyes going over the scene, he cocks his head, looks at his fellow mates, then back at Drew standing alone. The goon grins and starts to slowly rise his rifle and train it on Drew.

    Hartigan: Hartigan moves without thought, his sole purpose to make sure that he doesn’t lose his little girl…. again. He sprints, head down across the open space, pausing to take a knee and put two quick successive shots through the head of the grinning goon, a faint sense of satisfaction as they hit home and then he is running again. He grabs Drew around the waist, turning the run into a roll to the right as bullets begin to pepper the ground around them. He gets Drew behind the cover and then turns.

    There is no expression on his face and he snaps up the rifle, moving forward again. He snaps of shots at the nearest of the interlopers, pausing to grunt as a stray round goes through his left arm. Every three feet he drops to one knee and snaps off a killing shot before methodically moving forward again. In contrast to Drews berserk fury, his advance is cold and calculated, each shot counting.

    Drew: Pops hitting her in the belly and rolling her over will bring Drew back to somewhere near reality. As he moves forward she will rise up behind him from cover, and offer covering fire where she can. By now though her vision is beginning to blur from the damage to her eye, so she can’t offer much support.

    GM: Hartigan walks through hell, but he is hotter than anything the devil can bring against him. His mind is in thorough and ultimate focus, with one thought: defend my little girl. The goons have no chance, after Hartigan walks through them granting them the gift of lead bullets, they quickly change their mind and run for the hills.

    As Hartigan does his highway to hell thing, Drew tries to shakes off her rage, and rises up to defend Pops. Fight is not over she thinks, but her body has other ideas. Her vision blurs completely before she gets a shot out, she feels a shriek of pain on the side of her head and her body shakes, and she feels a wave of bile rising up from inside her. Her body curves, and she pukes over the side. Its weird, it feels cold. So damn cold.

    You have an instant of peace as the looters run away, but from far away you hear the screams and more shots being fired. Something tells you this firefight will only attract a new wave of assholes.
    Drew: Well Drew isn’t going anywhere quickly. She is sweating and shaking and cold. She will wait for Pops to help her back to cover.

    Hartigan: Once Hartigan sees the goons turn tail and run he will return to Drew. Checking her optics he gives a grimace and studies the damage. “Eye is busted and will need to be replaced. You’ve lost a lot of blood too… I think it might have hit some tissue in there as well.” He staunches the wound as best he can before wrapping it in a makeshift bandage. “He quickly checks her over for any other wounds “You can’t keep going, we’re going to move back and get to better cover.” You can see that he is clearly distraught at Drew but his combat instincts are keeping him in the now. Hartigan checks the area and finds a high ground with a vantage that looks over the area. With the time they have bought themselves, it will be a good place to hold up. He points it out to Drew “There, we can set up and keep anyone who comes near at bay until Alt’s people arrive.”

    Drew: So we will stagger up to the high point and take prone positions with cover. Drew will be very frustrated at her sudden weakness. At one point she grabs Pops by the collar, weakly, and says “She came back Pops, she came back! The ghost in my shell, she came back to me. How many did I kill? Did you see??!” When she isn’t shaking and wheezing she is wearing an expression of ecstasy, and has a faraway look in her eyes.

    GM: You gather up, Hartigan pointing to the fallen building that has a look of the “courtyard”, you won’t be between the bad guys and the building anymore, but there’s nothing to guard anymore. You also have a clear view of anyone coming in and a few moments of much needed rest.

    [We chill for about 15 minutes]

    Then you hear it, the hoots and screams of another wave of loonies. You see them coming, crawling out of the ducts west of your position. They are oblivious to your presence, and seem very excited about the dead bodies in front of them. They seem slightly better armed, some of them even wearing armor. They are all smiles and raving mad. One of them seems to be giving orders, screaming at them to check for enemies, they nod and smile, but they seem more interested in looting the bodies than anything else.

    Hartigan: Hartigan pats Drews shoulder “I saw it kid, you did great. I’m proud of you.” He then settles in for the long wait, his rifle perched and trained on the entrance.

    Hartigan watches and carefully lines up his rifle on the leader. “Goodnight” and pulls the trigger.

    OOC: I am hoping for an awesome shock and awe moment when the leaders head explodes and they all shit themselves.

    GM: Time stops, the bullet flies out of the barrell, your intent is meaningless to its path of destruction, but luck has it, today your intent and the bullet’s destiny seem to match nicely.

    Drew: Drew will wait for the bullet to hit the hapless leader and blow his face off, give the bad guys a moment to take in the demise of their boss, and then let rip on them, blowing them away as quick as she can, in the hope of instilling maximum panic. She won’t aim for anything specific because she’s woozy.

    Hartigan: Hartigan follows suit, starting a more controlled picking off of enemies, using the chaos created by Drew to draw a bead on anyone who sticks their head out. Hartigan and Drew will keep them there until there is enough organised resistance to be a problem and then systematically retreat to a new position and start again.

    GM: Time bends back to “normal” the bullet finishes its short travel towards ultimate bliss and you are presented with a satisfactory *thunk* followed by mushy sounds, and moaning as the leader finds himself without half of his brain mid-sentence. The leader plops to the ground, the rest stop laughing, they take a split second to figure out what is happening.

    Fortunately a split second is all Drew needs as she whales on them with a new shower of lead. Now their screams are not as merry, they scatter and jump for cover. And the game starts again.

    This is getting a bit old, both of you have had fights like this too many times to record the little details of who died/how/when/why. Doesn’t really matter, bullets are given and bullets are received. You continue your little game for a few minutes.

    It’s been three times already that you change position, pushing upwards in the abandoned building, and getting closer to the middle (where it is broken apart and you can see the ceiling of the hospital.)

    This is the last stop, and you are running out of lead presents to give back to your new friends.

    Hartigan helps Drew get into position, and she doesnt waste a second and goes back to firing. Now she has reduced her ROF from MACHINE GUN OF HELL to “careful aim and shoot, one baddie at a time”-mode.

    Hartigan leans against the wall next to drew, and Drew notices something odd from the bad guys. There is one coming with what looks like a heavy assault rifle, and he puts down goggles that shine in a reddish tone. The goon grins a wild smile and rises the rifle. Drew is confused, her mind slower than usual, “where the fuck is he aiming at?” you ask yourself, then you notice the barrel is pointed directly at Hartigan, THE GOON CAN SEE THROUGH THE COVER!!!

    You want to scream, you want to push Hartigan off the way, you want to do so many things, but your body is in fuck off mode.

    The goon mercilessly pulls the trigger and you see a wave of retribution fall on Hartigan. The bullets cut through the cement like butter.

    Hartigan you see get to see Drew’s worried eyes before the pain explodes. The wall blows up under you and bullets cover you all around. The vast majority are stopped by your skinweave and armor, but you feel a few cut deep into your leg. Your body takes a moment to tally up your pain debt, then gives it to you full on. Your leg is on fire, it buckles and bends funny-like under you and you fall, hitting your shoulder against the wall. You slide towards the corner where the wall is thicker and that saves you from getting wounded further.

    Drew answers the goons by the same token, blasting bullets down, but her clip gives out and she kneels down next to Hartigan, reloading. Last clip.

    Drew: Drew now starts trying actively to wake herself up again. She is reloading even as she checks Pops. Is he alive? Also where is our fucking team? [Drew of course doesn’t swear]

    GM: Pops: You dropped the gun. That’s bad. Knee is gone, that’s worse. Bleeding all over, that’s the worst. You hear guns blasting away at the wall next to you, they are getting excited now that there’s no one shooting back at them. You hear them mocking and cursing.

    “C’mon white devils!! Lets play motherfuckers!!!”

    The eerie sounds of boots closing in on the building follow the insults.

    Hartigan: Hartigan is on the ground. He feels the agony of his leg coursing through him. He knows it’s bad. His rifle is on the floor and he can’t seem to reach towards it. He draws out his pistol and aims through the hole that the goon has created. He needs to buy them some time, enough to give Drew a chance to escape. He looks towards her “I can cover you. Get back and head through the hole in the wall. I will keep them busy and you find some more ammunition or weapons. I can’t move and you know the first rule, don’t hold the other back.”

    He fires six shots, careful counting them off against his limited pistol ammunition. Hoping to take down the goon and force the others to pause.

    GM: Hartigan shots make them think twice. They scramble again. You dropped a few of them, but the bastards are laughing. Crazy sods are probably so gone into drugs and misery, death is just a joke for them. Well you give them the punchline of their lives a few times, the old gun answering to your commands. Still… they have the numbers on you two. There’s not enough bullets to stop all of them.

    Drew: Drew slides her makeup case to hartigan. “Superglue’s in there pops. Patch up quick, we aren’t dying here.” Quickly assess the situation, is there a leader whose death would change the flow of battle, or are they a rabble?

    Hartigan: Hartigan takes the glue and quickly assesses the damage. He applies the glue and grimaces as he pulls the hole together. Keep it together old man. Just hold out a bit longer. She’s depending on you.

    When it sets he growls and ties it tight. “You know who I am?” He roars out towards the goons “I am Hartigan! You better remember that name! I’m coming you hear! And Hell’s coming with me!”

    He takes down another ganger for effect.

    GM: The glue work is messy, it mixes with the blood. The blood flow you gotta stop it. The “leader” tactic didn’t quite work, you did that from the beginning but the fuckers just got bloodlusty.

    There’s still a few out there, but you just don’t have enough bullets. You hold for while, but you run out of lead. There’s still five of them out there, these guys have got to be high as fuck to keep on going even with 2/3 of their group flatlined.

    Drew: Drew is wondering if she can move from here to get to the big gun that the dead arsehole was carrying, or to the M16s that Coyote left in the hovercar room?

    GM: [I was already counting M16 bullets]. Anyway; things boil down to Drew jumping on them, Drew waiting for them to crawl up the building or Drew escaping through the back of the building with some climbing.

    Fortunately for you the sound of AV thrusters in the distance take this difficult moral/tactical/funsical decision away from you.

    The remaining goons look up and around, thinking more loot has come. You see them grinning.

    A black, smooth surfaced and quite shining medium-sized AV (twice the Goldfishnator) cuts into the scene. It stops suddenly on top of the hospital, rotating sharply to its side to counter its inertia.

    Drew’s infrared allows her to see it is emitting thousands of infrared laser beams in what you recognize as surface scanning. It otherwise remains immobile floating on place.

    The goons are all grinning and raising their guns to aim at it. You guys see 4 of the goons keep aim on the ship, as one stands on a elevated vent and hails it, swinging his arms around smiling.

    Drew you see the ship lasers focus on the group for a moment, then move around the general area. There is an eerie moment where the lasers lock on your and Hartigan’s position.

    The ship shudders a bit, and moves on to float above the courtyard where the goons are. The ship is now vertically at your same level. You can see inside the cockpit, there is three guys. The pilot seems non-plussed, checking equipment. One guy is looking at a set of monitors, hands on the control panel leaning slightly forward. Another has an assault rifle aimed directly at you from inside the cockpit.

    They are close enough that you can see their equipment, they are all cybered up, the pilot’s head is almost like a hub, lots of cables coming in and out of his head and neck and connecting to the ship. The one aiming at you seems to have really thick greyish tone skin, you notice he has small horns coming out of his forehead.

    The one leaning checking on the monitors looks like the leader, you actually recognize him as the guy that was right next to Alt in the meeting. Metalman. The guys body is fully covered in exoskeletal metal plates, he looks like a strange form of an FBR.

    Mana from heaven
    Mana from heaven

    Drew: Drew stands up. She takes off her helmet.

    Give a girly wave.

    Then point at the dudes on the ground and do a big expressive thumbs down.

    GM: You see the metalman stand and look in your direction, having no face it is hard to detect his emotions. He doesn’t move, but you figure he must be saying something because horny man loses the rifle and walks out of the cockpit into the back of the vehicle. You see metalman nod at you and put his hand forward, signing you to keep your head down. He then walks into the back of the AV as well.

    Drew: Head down, helmet on!!

    GM: The ship starts emitting a very high pitched sound that get higher and higher, and louder and louder. Soon the sound is so high frequency you can’t detect it.

    For a very brief moment you are deaf and your eardrums hurt. Then there is a loud, dry and implosion-like sounding *THUMPH* that pops your ears back into normal and the ground shudders a bit. There is a visible shockwave that pushes dust and pebbles, and the wall you are taking cover at vibrates. Rubble falls from the roof near you. Then you hear the sound of a heavy object hitting the ground on the courtyard, followed by five gunshots.

    When you look Metal man is standing on top of a small crater done on the roof, all goons are dead. There is around 10 more guys, armored, coming down from the AV using ziplines. They quickly spread bringing up SMGs and rifles, you see metalman point at your location and four of the guys rush into the building you are taking cover at.

    You hear the boots coming up the stairs, the 4 troops make their way quickly, checking corners in silence. They walk into the area were you are, all pointing arms at you. They stand like that for moment, and you get a sense that there’s information being transferred from someone without the need of actually speaking.

    “ID confirmed.” One of them says, probably more to you than because he needs to. The rest lower their guns but remain in position. One of them moves forward, and takes off his helmet. His face is tattooed, and he has big protruding cybereyes. He takes a kit out of his backpack and starts treating Hartigan.

    Hartigan you see him rip your pants around the wound, spray some sort of disinfectant that stings a bit. He takes out a metal band that claps around your thigh, stopping the blood flow. He then sprays another thing, and you see a thin layer of thick white liquid around the wound. The liquid solidifies suddenly, taking a skin colour, sealing the wound. He injects you something, and you feel the pain subside.

    He takes out a very sophisticated-looking syringe, filled with a metallic liquid, when you look at it carefully it appears to move on its own.

    “You will be okey for a while, but we cant promise anything. Alt says she can offer nanobots, faster healing. Take money off the top of the deal. Might allow you to keep the leg, or not. In any case with the bots you will be back in action a lot faster.”

    He speaks clearly but fast, no emotion behind his words. He looks at you patiently.

    “Where’s the rest of your team? has the area been cleared?” asks the leader of the four, without taking his helmet off. He is looking at Drew, examining her wounds, but it looks like he decides they are not urgent.

    Hartigan: Hartigan grimaces but shakes his head “I will heal, don’t worry. The rest of the team are transporting our salvage from this site. We stayed behind to ensure that Lima’s body and system would be available for you when you arrived. We unfortunately seemed to run out of bullets before we ran out of guys to shoot.” He slowly pulls himself up, testing the injury gingerly. “Lima and the system are downstairs. We have not attempted to access it as per our deal.”

    GM: [Pops, you can’t stand. It’s bad.][Your leg is pretty much busted, the guy has sealed up the wounds, but the knee is literally blown to pieces.]

    Drew: Drew will add, “Pops, perhaps we should take the money for the nanobots? Nobody likes a cripple.”

    Hartigan: Hartigan scowls and then nods “Fine.” He motions to the guy to inject him.

    GM: The man nods and injects Hartigan with the bots. Hartigan you feel the cold liquid spread around your wound, you have an eerie sensation of millions of tiny bugs crawling under your skin, but it fades after a moment. Whatever he put into you, had both painkillers and boost, you feel the pain fade to the background and your mind grow a bit sharper. The medic then stands, looks at Drew. “We treat you downstairs.” You see two of the troops move towards Hartigan to help him stand.

    Drew: “I think Pops can stay here. By the way, we’re expecting one of our team to come back for us. He’ll be in a different hovercar to the one from the club, so please ID before shooting. It’s a big black thing with a badly painted mutant goldfish on the side.”

    GM: He remains silent for a moment. “Got it. We won’t knock it down.” Leader looks at Hartigan. “Anyway, we have to move him to the flat area for AV pick up, we could load him through the breach in the wall here, but you’d be risking him falling. Anyway, he stays here until your AV returns. Would you follow me miss? We got some questions and once we ID the target and confirm the mission is done.” You see he thinks, looks at you and Hartigan, then nods. “Yes, we have to do it quickly. That way boss can call off the other teams, that way we will have clearer skies.” You feel he added this either in respect, awe or pity for your situation.

    Drew: Drew will crouch next to Pops, putting her helmet next to him, and next to that her bags. “Superglue’s in here, Pops” she says, opening one bag just enough to show him her fully loaded automatic pistol next to her make up case.

    “Let’s go!” she says airily

    GM: Leader nods, medic and one of the other troops stay with Hartigan as you walk down into the building. You see metalman standing in still in the same place, in the middle of the small crater. The rest of the troops are spread around, you see two of them in the ceiling aiming down.

    The leader nods to metalman and stands to the side. You see metalman look at you up and down. Then he says in a metallic deep voice.

    “Did you hold down? Is there anyone else left inside? Is there anything we need to know before we proceed?”

    “Did you hold the line and didnt let anyone else inside?”

    Drew: “We held the line, we cleared everyone out, and these gangers were too busy with us to go in.”

    GM: Metalman nods. “Alright, lets go inside then.” You see the team move in ahead of you, checking everything. You move in through the complex, when you get close to the vats/resting room area. Metalman stands a moment to look at the dead bodies in a pile. He looks at you, then at the pile.

    Drew: Drew puts her head to one side like a little girl, one finger on her lips, looks back at him.

    GM: Expressionless face is expressionless. He points at the vats and the rooms. “What happened here? the vats are on.”

    Drew: Innocent face is innocent. “One of them was healing. Or something. We stopped the process.”

    GM: “Hmmm..” you see him examine the rooms and the vats, but there seem to be no more questions. You head towards the midfloor, dining area and supply room are passed quickly. Metalman takes a look around, and moves on without comment. Then you get to the place where the mainframe is. Here you see a bunch of guys already dealing with the equipment. Metalman looks at the dead kids in the beds. “What about that?”

    Drew: “I dunno man, I just work here. We came in and they were dead. I think Ghost, our hacker, he maybe knew. They had a few captive kids, but they were dead.”

    [Editor’s note: at this point Drew is trying to make it seem as if we didn’t take any kids or any weird maps, without actually lying]

    GM: “Captured kids?” He looks at you straight on. He stays quiet for a long time, you dont know what is going on his mind.

    “… no.” He says after a moment, you don’t know what he is talking about, metalman shakes his head comes back to his senses. Without any orders being said you see two of the troops split from the group and start unloading the kids from the cyberdecks chairs.

    He turns back to you and seems to read you. “None of them alive?” His voice has a slightly different tone, if anything can be said about digital voices, but this time is not as cold as a moment ago.

    Drew:  “Not that I saw. But I guess we could have killed these or the ones upstairs in the gunfight? I dunno. It was dark and nasty in here man.” Plays the bimbo …

    GM: You are not that good at lying, more used to simple pulling the trigger or making people scream, but metalman says nothing else. He either bought it or isn’t showing it. “Hmmm..” he says and you move on. Leaving a part of the troops behind dismantling everything. Metalman walks straight through the explosion zone, without any comment. But you hear one of the troops say “wooow…..”

    Drew: Give that troop a winning smile.

    Not very winning, considering they’ve just seen my dark side, and I’m covered in blood.

    GM: You move on, metalman walks straight down the stairs. Looks at the bodies and spots Lima’s body, he moves towards it, and stops in front of him. He takes a moment then kneels in front of him. What follows is a bit wierd, metalman gently takes limas head on his hands and turns it around checking it. He seems to stay there looking at the man for a long time.

    Metalman says something leans forward and seems to say something on lima’s ear. He then takes the head and presses on it, it cracks then bursts in a spray on blood that covers all of metalman, he stands and says still looking down at the body. “Target has been ID’ed, job has been completed. We will transfer the money once the netrunner checks for no manipulation.”

    After a moment you see one of the troopers notice the lima room. The group of men all lift their eyes to it in unison, so does metalman but slower than the rest. Metalman walks in, alone.

    Drew: Go watch from the door …

    GM: You see the troopers a bit nervous, but they keep their distance as you walk torwards the room.

    From the door you see metalman staring at the video of the looping girl. “Samantha…” He says in a very small whisper, you barely catch it, your battle senses helping you. The voice its not his own, is weird, feminine and oddly familiar. He suddenly jerks and notices you, he turns around and looks straight at you. He looks at the wall and the table then he speaks, His voice back to normal digital, male and deep. “Did you took anything from this room?”

    Drew: “Yeah, I think we took some stuff from the walls.”

    “Papers, weird shit like that.”

    Act all unconcerned like. “Who’s the chick?”

    GM: “The.. diaries, Sacarias kept diaries. Where are they?” [This guy calls Lima “Sacarias”]

    Drew: “Diaries? We didn’t touch his cyberstuff, I don’t know anything about diaries.” [OOC: Here Drew tries to act ignorant by assuming a diary must be kept in a cyber form]

    GM: You see metalman man step in closer, closing the gap between you . “Books Drew… the fucking books. You took them or not?”

    Drew: “Books? What are you talking about? We just took some stuff off of the walls, like weird pictures and stuff. Look man, Alt said we can take anything we want but don’t interfere with the cyberjunk. That there is a video so we left it. We took what was ours by rights. You want books, I don’t know how to help you.”

    GM: Metalman doesnt answer for a long time. He stays as he is, very close to you and cold. Then suddenly he jerks a bit. “If… it so happens you find that you took the books without noticing, you will inform Alt… yes? She is very interested in them. Willing to pay for them even… but they are delicate things, yes? Real old. Dont go around opening them or anything stupid.”

    Drew: Drew will take a step back, go a little cool. “Sure, I’ll mention it to the others and we’ll dig through what we found. But you should maybe look down the other room, maybe the equipment room and the tunnels have stuff in them – we didn’t even explore the shaft.” She waves her arm down towards the other exit. “Are we done here man, I’m beat?”

    GM: He again, takes a moment. Then nods and goes back to the console, and looking at the video.

    Drew: Drew will take that as her sign to leave. “Nice doing business with you, man. Give my regards to Alt, and tell Alt that we would be more than happy to work for your group again.” Constructs a clumsy sentence trying to not give Alt a gender.

    GM: “I will pass down your message. I’m sure Alt will contact you further on. You have proven to be very… effective.”

    Okay so after that is pretty smooth sailing, two troops walk along Drew as she walks out of the building again, and you guys gather up again in the roof. I will continue with Coyote and Ghost’s stuff tomorrow and hopefully give you guys time to set up looting talks.

    [Editor’s note: and with that a fairly epic Downtime battle ended, with Hartigan only losing one leg and needing three weeks of very expensive intensive care, and me only losing one eye and needing a week of intensive care. We also managed to escape retribution for stealing some old books, and got a few hints that Alt’s animus against Lima was personal. This was all necessary background for our next actual physical session. So there you have it … you can get severely messed up in Downtime!]

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • My Tiny Contribution to the History of Aboriginal Struggle

    Rebellion Pastiche!
    Rebellion Pastiche!

    Many years ago now I lived in Newtown, Sydney, and the areas surrounding it (Stanmore, Marrickville, etc), all of which have a recent history as the home of a large number of Aboriginal people and a bit of a hotbed of street activism (far left and far right), largely probably due to their proximity to the University of Sydney, some large inner city areas of Aboriginal housing, and some industrial areas. Marrickville, where I also lived, has a long tradition of Greek, Italian and then Vietnamese migration, and the whole area is a wide swathe of light industrial zoning with a long and proud history of unionism. As part of the post-60s wave of Aboriginal rights and green activism a large number of murals were painted in various areas of the inner west. From the train line between Redfern and Newtown passengers used to be able to see a rendering of the Black Panther Olympic salute, entitled “Three proud men”; and on the road to Stanmore there was a really creepy old guy perving on a girl on a tricycle. But the most famous mural is the “I have a dream” mural, pictured above, which was painted on the side of a terraced house in the very centre of the main commercial road, King Street, very close to the station. This mural combines a picture of Martin Luther King, his most famous phrase, the earth with Australia red in the centre, and the Aboriginal flag (the black and red squares with the gold disc in the middle). It’s a bit tacky but also a proud reminder of Indigenous struggle, painted there by a local couple many years ago. In my opinion the Aboriginal flag is a really powerful symbol, and should be used as Australia’s official flag in place of the Southern Cross[1], which is nowhere near as cool, and this mural combines that strong image of Australia with a couple of international ideas about liberation and freedom. I’m not entirely in favour of importing American ideals of freedom and struggle to other countries, but I hope my reader(s) can see the intent and appreciate its strength.

    Anyway, back when I lived in Newtown this mural was starting to decay, the paint was starting to crumble, but worst of all a lot of posters were beginning to appear, mostly on the bottom left of the red part of the flag but also in the golden disc. Rather embarrassingly, most of these posters were either for far left political groups, or for illegal raves (“doofs”) that would regularly spring up in the inner west and which were also largely associated with the far left/green movement. This was in the 1990s, before the Reconciliation movement had really taken off, probably 10-12 years before the apology, and a lot of the far left hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that Aboriginal reconciliation and land rights were becoming a really important part of the political landscape – Aboriginal activism generally was seen as strongly connected to the Labour party and the Democrats, and viewed with suspicion by the far left. This might explain their willingness to put up posters on such an iconic mural (the far right couldn’t, because they had either died of heroin overdoses, been sent to prison, or been driven out of the inner city by unionist violence). My friends and I weren’t happy with this though, because as the posters accumulated and damaged the paint, and the mural got scrappier, the incentive to post more posters and slowly destroy it was growing – like litter or broken windows, the damage was encouraging more damage. So one sunny Saturday morning we got up early, grabbed a ladder, some paintbrushes and a few scrapers and some paint, and set about restoring it. We didn’t organize it with any official organs because no one was officially in charge of this mural – we just rocked up and started cleaning it. The version you can see above is probably from about 10 years after we did this, because it is still clean and in the bottom left corner you can see my contribution to the project. That corner was where most of the posters were stuck, and after I scraped them off and we repainted it I wrote this in my bad freehand:

    My tiny piece of history, badly drawn
    My tiny piece of history, badly drawn

    I took this photo of my contribution in 2006, probably 8-9 years after I painted it, just before I left for Japan, and at this time no one had posted any bills anywhere on the mural – you can see on the wall to the side that they are using nearby wall space for a thick layer of posters, but they aren’t putting them on the mural itself. Sadly, this situation no longer pertains today, another 8 years after I took that picture. The Marrickville facebook page has a link to the picture which in March this year had comments saying that someone needs to put the “Don’t poster here” order back on. Someone must have painted over it after I left the country, and now the posters are returning. However, after many years, the mural has finally received some official respect, and the Marrickville Council have decided to Heritage List it, which means that they are now officially responsible for maintaining and protecting it. I hope this means that the posters will be removed and no new ones added. Maybe they’ll even repaint it with a better and more consistent colour palette than my friends and I used …

    This was my sole real contribution to the urban community of Newtown. My friends and I got pissed at the mess, went up there and (I guess!) risked a graffiti charge in broad daylight on a sunny Saturday to repair the damage. While we worked lots of people came up to thank us and express their approval (I think one person wandered across the road to buy us a coffee or a drink or something), and I guess the police must have cruised by at some point and done nothing. Everyone seemed to treat our efforts as if they were as natural as the presence of this unclaimed and unprotected mural in the heart of the little shopping area. It was like everyone accepted it and respected it, but everyone thought it was everyone else’s responsibility. Maybe that unfocused view of its place in Newtown is part of the reason that people were able to damage it without any trouble being raised – because everyone just assumed someone else knew who was responsible for its upkeep. But in truth no one was, and our action was the only time I know of in the entire time I lived in the area that anyone took responsibility for it. And it worked! That little two sentence demand I wrote there on the wall kept the entire mural clean and free of damage for 10 years, and my guess is that if someone hadn’t painted over it the mural would still be free of damage today. Now that it is Heritage listed I guess it will get a little plaque and a bit of care and respect, and my bodgy handwritten warning won’t be needed anymore. It will be forgotten soon enough, but I am proud of my little tiny effort in preserving an emblem of a struggle that, over the time I lived in Australia, really began to assert itself and push itself into the mainstream. I hope people will remember the long slow path to acceptance of Aboriginal rights in Australia when they look at that mural, and I like to think that my tiny contribution went a little way towards preserving that mural long enough for it to make the heritage list. Hardly a radical or brave act, it’s true, but I’m proud of my little tiny contribution to one of the most important political movements in Australian history.

    —

    fn1: It actually has official flag status, but is not usually used as such.

  • Defining Moments in Open Source Quality Control: R Can’t Round

    I’ve complained before about the reliability and quality of the open source statistics package, R. Sometimes I get pushback, with people suggesting that I just don’t understand what R is trying to do, or that there is an obvious way to do things differently that answers my complaints – that R is idiosyncratic but generally trustworthy.

    Well, try this exercise, which I stumbled on today while trying to teach basic programming in R:

    • Run a logistic regression model with any reasonable data set, assign the output to an object (let’s call it logit1)
    • Extract the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) from this object, using the command logit1$aic. What is the value of the AIC?
    • Now extract basic information from the logistic model by typing its name (logit1). What is the value of the AIC?
    • Now extract more detailed information from the logistic model by typing summary(logit1). What is the value of the AIC?

    When I did this today my AIC value was 54720.95. From the summary function it was 54721; from the basic output option it was 54720.

    That’s right, depending on how you extract the information, R rounds the value of the AIC up, or truncates it. R truncates a numerical value without telling you.

    Do you trust this package to conduct a maximum likelihood estimation procedure, when its developers not only can’t adhere to standard practice in rounding, but can’t even be internally consistent in their errors? And how can you convince someone who needs reliability in their numerical algorithms that they should use R, when R can’t even round numbers consistently?

    I should point out that a decision to truncate a number is not a trivial decision. That isn’t something that happens because you didn’t change the default. Someone actually consciously programmed the basic output display method in R to truncate rather than round off. At some point they faced a decision between floor() and round() for a basic, essential part of the I/O for a statistics package, and they decided floor() was the better option. And no one has changed that decision ever since. I don’t think it’s a precision error either (the default precision of the summary function is 4 digits!) because the example I stumbled across today ended with the decimal digits .95. This was a conscious programming decision that no one bothered to fix.

    The more I work with R, the more I believe that it is only good for automation, and all its output needs to be checked in a system with actual quality control. And that you should never, ever use it for any process anyone else is going to rely upon.

  • Is Candy Crush Saga a Problem in Group Theory?

    Awww, look at Snoopy trying to solve a commutativity problem!
    Awww, look at Snoopy trying to solve a commutativity problem!

    I have been playing Snoopy Drops (スヌーピー・ドロップス), which is a cute variant of Candy Crush Saga with a deep story (Snoopy is seeking Bell). It has all the same essential properties, and a fiendishly addictive bent to it, along with a pay-for-boostups routine that must surely make it a huge money-spinner. I guess Candy Crush Saga is the same …

    As I was playing it I started wondering about the patterns and structures within the game, and started thinking – is this game actually a problem in group theory? If you think of each colour of object as a group, it is largely a closed Abelian group with various operations acting within the group. Essentially, aligning the objects is like addition, but they take on special properties after some operations (yet remain within the group). Some functions apply across groups (the line-breaker objects, portrayed by the white-and-yellow-striped Woodstock in the above picture, for example, eliminate objects from as many groups as there are in the line), and the group is not convex – there are objects from other groups in between the objects of any one group. I guess this means that there is some kind of concept of a finite geometry within which the group structure operates. Hmmm … I did a brief google search on this and couldn’t find anything, but I was originally inspired to think of this by the group theoretic solution of the Rubik’s cube, which seems somehow similar (though perhaps less complex?) I found a paper, described in outline in the Daily Mail, which showed that the game might be NP-Hard, but nothing about possible group theory aspects of the game.

    I wonder if the game really is NP-Hard, or if it doesn’t permit such a simplistic description, because of its stochastic properties. The classic NP-hard problem is the Travelling Salesperson Problem, but this problem has a big difference with Snoopy Drops: although the landscape of the problem may be determined randomly (e.g. by random selection of the number of cities the salesperson has to visit), it doesn’t change once the game starts. The linked paper seems to have solved the Snoopy Drops problem by drawing circuits and gates within the board, but these change with every round – I’m not sure how the mathematicians handle this. This is also true of the Rubik’s cube, which can be handed to an enterprising mathematician with its faces randomly jumbled up, but doesn’t randomly rejumble them every time you line up three squares. Also Snoopy Drops comes with multiple conditions (in the picture above there are three: the number of moves required to complete the puzzle, the number of jellies to destroy, and a minimum score to complete the level). For the Travelling Salesperson Problem there is only one condition (time required). So I suppose Snoopy Drops is actually a multiply-constrained problem in stochastic group theory (does such a field exist?).

    I think we can agree that even someone as cool as Snoopy can’t fathom the maths of that! But I wonder if this group-theoretic aspect of the game is part of the reason for its addictive properties – when we solve it we are essentially attempting to intuitively solve enormously complex mathematical problems through cute visuals, and to the extent that our brains are keyed in to the way the world around us works, I think they must get some basic biological pleasure from revealing the fundamental building blocks of that world.

    I also wonder, if Snoopy Drops is an NP-Hard problem, and if some very smart mathematician could find an expression for its parameters, could the distributed nature of the game mean that other complex NP-Hard problems could be solved by re-expressing them as Snoopy Drops problems, then shipping them out to thousands of players as free levels? Given the number of people playing Candy Crush Saga at any time, if someone could do that they could probably solve all the world’s existing NP-Hard problems in a weekend …

  • Cyberpunk Setting: New Horizon

    epocholis_by_jonasdero-d4ca97z

    [Faustusnotes note: This post is guest content by my GM, Eddie, which he has given me permission to upload from the background document he provided to us all. Over the next few weeks I’ll be uploading more of this material in concert with Cyberpunk game reports and other background information]

    The City

    You live in New Horizon, a massive city that sprawls towards the southeast coast of the Hong Kong conglomerate. The major business area was slowly pushed out of the main land, the city growing further and further into the sea. Now, it’s centre lies on the coast and half of the biggest city in the world floats in the east china sea. All the buildings in New Horizon are massive, each with hundreds of floors and divided into decks. The city itself is then divided by districts, blocks of buildings that are “miniature” cities by themselves. The buildings are so tall that looking down the bottom becomes a dark, misty area, were only utility pipes, transport trains and water can be found. The taller you live the richer you are, the top of the buildings becoming little gardens of Eden, with synth nature, clean air and direct sunlight. The dregs of society are pushed ever downwards, some even living close enough to the bottom that their lives depend on scavenging what falls from the top. Downwards there is only shadow and eternal night, the shade of buildings upon buildings blocking the light of the sun and creating a world of darkness in which shadows and desperation only rule.

    The verticality of the city has forced transport to depend on super fast automated elevators and personal hovercrafts, making the city alive with hundreds of thousands of flying vehicles swarming and flying in the spaces between city blocks. Travel inside the decks is a combination of trains, half-automated cars and personal hovercrafts.

    In all this mess, you live in district 68, “a place so run down its one number short of a dirty joke.” It is located 6 districts south of central, and is one district short of being in the sea line (where the buildings end and a huge tsunami barrier starts). District 68 is controlled by BioTechnica Incorporated, a company that deals in pharmaceuticals and health technology. Its HQ is located in a beautiful synth nature Arcology on the very top of the district.

    Horizontally District 68 its composed of 9 building blocks, south-facing blocks being the poorest and the central block reserved mostly for BioTechnica business and residential areas. Vertically each block is divided into 5 decks of around 50 floors each. The decks are divided in: Deck 1, Corporate headquarters and residents only; Deck 2, Midway residentials, commercial zone; Deck 3, Mid-low residential, light manufacturing, red light businesses; Deck 4, industrial, low-class residential, heavy manufacturing; Deck 5, structural, transportation, illegal residential and chemical manufacturing. Both Decks and floors are counted top side first. (D2F04 is higher than D2F28) Then each floor is divided into residential, commercial and industrial zones (usually from 01 to 99), and finally a residential number. So an address would be:

    D01F20Z01 Apt203, Bldg 8, District 68, New Horizon, Hong Kong, XX Province, East Chinese State, Asian Federation.

    MFC: Quantum energy and the end of the Oil Age

    A long way from here to there ...
    A long way from here to there …

    It is indisputable now, that the Asian Federation and its Megacity project are the pinnacle of human technological, structural and social advancement. The sprawling, self-feeding, self-organizing “city” is in some aspects as alive as Billy next door (actually far more than Billy, he is quite lazy). It (the city) has a brain, the massive quantum computer ExAlta, capable of organizing and planning everything single aspect of life and structure in the city, apparently obsessed with its constant and perfectly designed growth. It also has a nervous system, an infinite self-replicating information network that spreads through every single utility, structure and even human brain, connecting everything in a network that is more than just “free, public wifi” but rather an alternate world that overlaps with the physical one, creating for all a sort of (pardon my romanticism) spiritual link with everything and everyone around you.

    And it never, never runs out of energy.

    It grows, it evolves, it is completely connected and finally it feeds itself. This is all made possible through one single amazing (and terrifying) technology: Space Folded Fusion Cells, or (wrongly, but warmly nicknamed) MFC’s (micro fusion cells). A tiny, infinitely complicated and revolutionary quantum technology.

    This “battery”, (if you are the kind of person that would call a fusion reactor a fireplace), joins all future technology into an object capable of using nanometric folds in space, allowing nearly infinite amounts of energy to be stored in a finite space, and accessed rapidly and easily. Today, MFCs can be found everywhere, they power our vehicles, our implants and cybernetics, whole buildings, and of course even the Russian spacecraft, used to travel around the solar system, run on massive versions of the MFCs. MFCs don’t generate energy themselves, but they can charge up so quick and hold so much energy that a person could live inside a road hovercraft, travelling through the wasteland, full AC on and music banging only powered with one fully charged 1x1m sized MFC, and never, for their whole life, need a recharge.

    The invention of MFCs completely changed the world; the oil super powers, along with their western partners cried in unison as they saw their power base burned from under them. It also allowed the rise of the biggest most advanced city-state ever in human history, who will carry the legacy of the greatest minds and ideas gathered from around the globe. The MegaCity plan which eventually would lead to the open border policy, the Chinese legacy of super tech that would allow it to expand in complexity without depending on any other country for energy.

    The change was also quick, MCFs and Fusion Energy were implanted with ferocity and no concern for the effects on the global economy or the Oil Age holdout states that were left floundering in the wake of this super-powered change. In a matter of ten years the Asian Federation and its sphere of influence completely restructured itself to accommodate the new super technology.

    The world shook, as the oil empires started to crack in the edges, as Asia rose, the rest of the world descended into war and desperation. US military saw itself being called back to avoid a new civil war, only so that the country would fall to disease a few years later. The Arab nations saw themselves first being consumed by the eastern menace, yet, miraculously, later united to ensure its survival. The European Union crumbled and receded to its old feuds to never rise properly again, and the Russian Federation closed its borders and ignored the chaos, to resurface years later with its master plan: escape earth forever.

    Years passed, the western worlds stopped screaming in rage and evolved to pleading in desperation. Russia came alive blooming and sending its colony ships into the vastness of space. AFed, guided by its master minds and pushed forward by its new MegaCity AI, ExAlta, stood tall and proud as the leader of the new world. And then the Crash came, and brought it all down in ruins …

    Our adventures are set in the city of New Horizon after the mysterious catastrophe called the Crash, which killed ExAlta and brought New Horizon to the edge of ruin. No utopia now, this crash and subsequent political events, coupled with the environmental pressures wrought by climate change and the slow-burning collapse of the global economy have reduced New Horizon to a teeming, hard-scrabble version of its former self. Ruled by corrupt oligarchs and corporate power-mongers, it has been reduced through chaos and the cruel logic of environmental collapse to the classic case study of Cyberpunk lore. Here, in the oily rain and wave-wracked wilds of the lower decks of District 68, we fight to survive, to get ahead … and maybe, if we’re lucky, to get out …