​Now I know I said I'd talk more about the setting than the system but what if I can do both? The mechanics of some of the items and equipment in the setting. Project Powerpunk takes place in an alternative near future, what we've been referring to as "The day before cyberpunk" but I can hear you ask, what the hell does that even mean ... technologically?! Technologically it means; body modification just below cybernetics, Rudimentary AIs are available on the open market, automated workers if allowed to are only permitted to function under close supervision by a trained professional, energy weapons are now seeing military application. But right now I just want to focus on Computer Hardware, software and the ways people are using them in world 

Let's start with computers; Computers are advanced enough to be worn as jewelry[Diamonds On my fingers] or travel beside you as a silicone pet, with levels of modification that are mind alluring. Example: You can have ring computers, a computer that is divided amongst several rings themselves being powered by a bracelet battery and all of this is connected together by conductive tattoos!

You can have the aforementioned silicone pet resemble a snake that can give you your insulin injections by "biting" you. One of the testers for the game is planning on using a tricked out server and his henchmen's sidekick smartphones as nodes to establish his own private network. It's flipping nuts! That same player wanted to know if it was possible to build a bullet with retractable arms and legs. Then program the bullet to throw itself at targets the player shoots at but misses. Afterwards he wanted that bullet to return to him. Which means if the cops were to investigate the scene of one of his gunfights: they'd find dead people with tiny bloody footprints leading away from the bodies! Long story short, we were able to build them and I am looking forward to the chaos created by them.

Those robo bullets wouldn't be possible without Programs, specifically Hard and Fluid H.Is(Heuristic intelligence). Which are Lesser AI programs that can perform tasks and actions separate from the player. You give it a task and it'll complete it to the best of its abilities. Hard H.Is can be programmed to perform certain actions and have a flat result to said action but they can take more time to perform these actions in order to lower the difficulty of the task(anything is possible if given enough time). Fluid H.Is on the other hand can be programmed with traits allowing them to take all actions under that trait. They roll this trait to perform actions but they have the ability to raise the floor of the roll; insuring they cannot roll below a certain number.

The private military company Rayven specializes in utilizing remote H.Is in the field. Why H.Is; it's like having a digital A team at your fingertips. Put this A-lgorithmic team on a server that only Rayven agents have access to; you have yourself a digital fireteam that can function autonomously anytime and anywhere with a data-line. Punctuate this with a world where almost Everything and Everyone has a digital Silhouette and you get "Manes ex Machina" ghosts from the machine or ghosts in the machine. Rayven likes to put a large number of their agents into deep cover; with this they can, have access to their companies tools from any data device. They now have the power to spin up a new life online, take the digital form of an inactive person, have the H.Is deepfake themselves into different forms of media(photos, videos, documents and audio) to better sale their alias'. Oh did I mention that Rayven won the PMC Contract to police the borough of Brooklyn? Is that new barista really into Future Islands, did your friend from Junior High always have Hazel hair, where in Tampa did Mailroom Bob say he was from and How long has your aunt been dating this person with anisocoria.

This equipment has turned Rayven agents into cyberspace skinwalkers, true spectres. Did I slide that last setting detail in at the end because I forgot this was supposed to be more setting focused?! No, not entirely because "In spite of mechanics" should be a foreign saying to GMs and players alike. In my view good Mechanics should help settings be more immersive and characters reach greater agency.

In the world of Powerpunk, science and technology occupy a funny space. During the Cold War, technology was viewed as a necessary median; “the only true measuring stick for a nation’s greatness” necessity. It was a grand love affair, with the known limits of science being reestablished almost quarterly and the great nations treating scientists like rock stars. The East and West both took to collecting doctors, professors and engineers, like children collecting trading cards. Giving them larger budgets than many of them had ever dared to imagine, these scientific minds were tasked with finding and cultivating any potential advantage against the opposing bloc.

It was amidst this age of political desperation that all avenues of science, including the fringe sciences, were being treated with open minds and open wallets. This was a glorious time for scientists who started signing up with grant after grant and put real effort into experiments and inventions that they hadn’t ever thought they could complete. This was the age of “hypertech”. 
Super-science tools capable of bending terrestrial and celestial energies into fuel for weapons and vehicles, bending minds, transforming the body of a person into a walking arsenal of bio-weaponry. These tools that pushed through the established limits of the scientific field and into storied fiction appeared in every field. All the while the tensions of the Cold War grew closer and closer to the brink of open conflict. 

The era came to a screeching halt as prolific communist agents  like “Soviet Supreme” and other frequent criminal collaborators from soviet nations were caught time and again by the U.S Government’s special forces, D.A.N.G.E.R. These communist agents seemed to favor the use of hypertech knockoffs from the Eastern bloc that never seemed to quite work as intended under pressure. They favored it so much that although the USSR was pretty far behind the U.S in production of hypertech in both number and quality it became, in the eyes of the public, communist or”pinko” tech. 

This stigma brought an end to free and unchecked scientific experimentation and discovery and saw the rise of tighter restrictions on independent laboratories. Hypertech faded into obscurity, a technological oddity known for being highly unreliable for some to marvel at while the wider world passed it by. However, the turn of the millennium saw a drastic slowdown in hardware innovations across all markets.

The early 21st century, as the short lived Russo-American alliance went to war against extremists in the middle east, was perhaps the last time new hardware was released. Very quickly companies had to turn to releasing re-packaged versions of the same model already on the market over and over as programs grew in complexity to sell the illusion of breakthroughs. Cracking into the hypertech market had made anything less seem paltry by comparison.

A generation of people grew up with the knowledge that advancement was out there and being kept just outside their reach and so some turned to expensive, custom goods that could grow as they needed. Still a few companies have re-discovered the idea of Hypertech and with clever re-branding are eagerly rushing to market determined to ride at the forefront of an inevitable tech-boom. 
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This is where characters in Powerpunk find themselves currently; mostly recycled tech that has inched on slowly for more than two decades. Programming has grown at a reasonable pace but has seemingly caught up to hardware now and both are growing at a controlled, predictable pace. All the while, visible on the horizon, is the dreaded return of hypertech.
​

We’ve been quiet for a minute; don’t worry we haven’t just been playing FFXIV … . We’ve been cleaning up Project Powerpunk; the wording of the system and making sure all the rules are running off of the same 0.98 rules. Now we’re solidifying the story threads and Npcs in the setting. When that’s done it’s all going into our first Beta core book. While we’re doing that in the background, we’ll be posting bits of the setting. Why setting? Because we said we would. We’ll be covering the book’s main location; an archipelago city in the northeast of America(New York City). Made up of three islands and a peninsula and has become a proxy battleground for a number larger world encapsulating problems.

Last thing; we’ve finally come up with a cover idea for the core book, we’ll be shopping the idea around to see if it's a hit or miss. Oh and if you want to keep up with what we’re up to join our mailing list and follow us on the society destroying social media sites.


Ethereal Deep Diver & Dev-X | Stock & Bull Entertainment

Been working really hard while trapped in our apartments. We're trying!

Ethereal Deep Diver & Dev-X

Amalgams are not like the rest of the listed exim both in their catalogs of powers and how their powers function. First, Their catalog of powers won’t be listed due to their innate affinity to learning the powers of the other classifications. It is rumored that some have exhibited powers from less known or uncategorized Exim. Second; unlike other Exims who can activate a power at different ranks up to their current maximum or even, in a number of cases, push themselves farther; Amalgams can not. Everytime their power activates it's at their current maximum, no more and no less. This post will explore the options that are open to the versatile Amalgams:

True Flight & Mind Blast: While most are unsure if this combination is wielded by someone the absence of evidence is not “the evidence of absence”. Think of it, a person flying about untethered from the earth and able to wipe the memories of any that might catch sight of them. They could be out of sight and out of mind, quite LITERALLY! 

Natural Weaponry & Density Manipulation: This power mix is horror incarnate. Strands of living hair riggling through the pores of solid matter, taking the shape of lethal weapons and striking out at all in it’s reach. Worse, cutting the hair is near impossible, it’s like trying to cut animated tar.  

Radiation Control & Mind Control: When CJ agents mistook an Amalgam for an improperly released Kin asset, the agents had their minds warped by “Psychic” energies and their bodies warped, as well, by waves of unnatural radiation. They were then made to act out fan written Super Sentai episodes by their Amalgam puppet master!

We will stop here because part of the fun is seeing these combinations that no other Exim can play with and how you can implement them in your game. 

 Ethereal Deep Diver & Dev-X | Stock & Bull Entertainment

Possible variants or an evolution of the Quarks, the Kin do not wield the forces of earthly energy but instead embrace their role as dominators of cosmic powers. With skin flushed by the radiation of solar flares, muscles pulled taut with gravitational pull and a mind rippling with magnetic waves from out in the void. Gravity, Kinetic, Magnetic, Radiation, Temperature and Vibration are the celestial toolkit of these exim. Not more than but certainly not less than their Quark contemporaries, the Kin are the other face to a powerful coin.

Absorption: Turn a cell phone into an anabolic steroid, a microwave into a lifeline, the l000 degree temp from a fire into a zero calorie snack to stave off starvation, or a howitzer shell to the face to rude, albeit, harmless tap from metal.

Density Manipulation: This is actually two powers that combine to become one greater than the sum of its parts. On one hand, you can increase your density till your skin is like steel and the city of towering steel and concrete feels like cardboard and paste. Or increase the density of your favorite item till it rivals some dwarven crafted alloy of adamantium and mithril. On the other hand, you can reduce density to the point where the space between molecules serves as a new doorway to you and a molecular cage to others.  The body can flow like water, is as malleable as clay, and deadly attacks can harmlessly pass through. But What if we combine them…?

Super Speed: As noted before, move like a blur, strike like a flash, escape like lightning greased in the blood of a cheetah...that was...struck by lightning. That’s SPEED-CEPTION!

Native Element Control: Back at it again, this scoundrel two-timing power has been described before but instead of Fire, Electricity, water etc, you harness the harness of gravity, master magnetism, redirect radiation, drumbeat the world with vibration, temper heat and frost and even control kinetic output (I can’t make a kinetic pun or witticism) like a punch, a bullet or the freight train at the end of the tunnel coming your way.

Dev-X & Ethereal Deep Diver | Stock & Bull Entertainment