[Other] Out into the Black, Cyberpunks!

[Red Leper]

Game Name Out into the Black, Cyberpunks!

Game System Other Roleplaying Games, Cyberpunk Red

Theme Cyberpunks in space

Flavour Cowboy Bebop, Firefly/Serenity, Cyberpunk, Akira

Plot Summary Out in the Black: It was the summer of eighty nine when the bombs dropped. Nobody knows who fired first but when the dust settled, the only ones left were the common folk and the mega-corporations. Rumors swirled that it was all a setup and the Mega-Corps knew it was going to happen. When they emerged from the smoke, they had all the resources needed to rebuild the world anew. That didn’t happen, not like it should have, anyway. A new level of technology emerged and was quickly integrated into society, Cybernetics, more than just your average prosthetic limbs. With the money squandered, the world didn’t get rebuilt, other worlds got built instead, terraformed and Earth was abandoned. The Mega-corps tried to bring everyone under their supervision, each one, an extremist regime that matched anything the Earth had seen before. A few idiots decided to stand against the Mega-corps, You might have been one of them, one of the Common Folk Coalition. The war didn’t go the way of the Common Folk, as it usually doesn’t, those with money and power managed to 'unify' the worlds. Unfortunately, the mega-corps had a flawed design, the core worlds were quite well-off with all the availability of cybertech and medical advances with less freedom while the outer worlds, barely seeing much of the iron-fisted grip, were near dystopian or worse. Luckily, those of you that enjoy your freedoms managed to drift to the outer worlds where you can always find money as bounty hunters, mercenaries or guns-for-hire, Or Cowboys, an umbrella term for unofficial outlaws that roam the outer rims working for whatever small government that springs up in the absence of the Mega-corpos or for criminal organizations that thrive off of the system. The way of things is simple: Get a Ship, Hire a Crew, Find a Job, Keep Flying. I'm thinking of using the Cyberpunk Red system except not in Night City, More constrained to outer space and many planets. Application: Name: Role: What is your Class and what is your role on the ship. I won't make it be typical, not all nomads have to be the pilot. We do need a pilot, a captain and a mechanic for the ship to run. Ethnicity: Personality: Appearance: Picture and paragraph. Backstory:

Deadline: 9/8, Sunday if I get the game thread.

[ratchett]

Yes!!!!!!

Application WIP/Placeholder Name: Rukia Torres Role: Pilot, Nomad space-born, Belter type Ethnicity: Belter mix - mostly Japanese and Latin American Personality: Rukia has the confidence in space of someone born to it. With that confidence also comes the check-three times for safety, everyone works together or dies together, what-the-heck-is-personal-space mentality of someone who has lived in the perilous and cramped confines of an asteroid mining station or ice-hauler. She's also young, in her early'ish 20s, and filled with the "you only live once" bravado of youth - she likes fast ships, mind-melting music, and living on the edge. Appearance: Compact and wiry, Rukia's genetics made most of her Nomad tribe on the small side vs the long-limbed Nordic types that stretched in micro-gravity. Her facial features are a mix of Japanese and Latin American ancestry. She tends to keep her hair close-cropped so it doesn't get in the way in zero-G, and usually sports a flamboyantly dyed fluorescent orange mohawk. She tends to dress in ship-overalls or other practical clothing, but often with a tee-shirt or tank-top sporting some pop-culture image like an animated character or fizzy-drink. Her eyes and hands twitch with the telltale signs of someone wired. Backstory: Rukia grew up in the family crew of a bulk-hauler. Her Nomad family, the Lobos-Fukushima, ran a small fleet of ships running commodities, trade goods, foodstuffs, and contraband. Whatever was paying. They had a good network. Occasional brushes with Corps, other Nomads or straight up pirates peppered her childhood and led to her learning how to pilot not just the hauler, but her smaller auxiliary craft - shuttle-gunships and snub fighters. Life was generally good and a lifetime of running the Black was before her when a chance raid changed her trajectory. She had grown up in the orbit of her older brother, Berto. He was on a different ship, hauling ice on a poor contract. The tribe would barely break even on the deal. Pirates, presumably, fell on the ship and spaced the crew. Her brother died for a few credits. They risked their lives shift-in-and-shift-out for crumbs. Rukia decided that there were bigger scores, and she was going to hit one. With her few belongings in a duffle, at the next port she set out to find one.

[Pseudonymous]

Ooh! I've never played Cyberpunk Red but DANG I like this idea!

[Ermine]

It's really too bad this looks interesting, because I'm in too many games as it is. >< I really wanna try Cyberpunk Red, though. ><

Edit: Actually, you know what? A couple of my games died (honestly, a while ago). I may apply to this soonish as either a Tech or Medtech.

[A7ice]

Application: Nova Frost Name: Nova Frost Role: First Mate (preferable)/Captain/Security Officer Ethnicity: Caucasian Personality: Nova is egoistic and a mercenary by nature. She is calm, professional, and inquisitive, with a sarcastic and flirtatious demeanor. She loves adrenaline and is a realist with a bit of a hedonistic streak. Despite her tough exterior, she has a soft spot for the underdog and often takes on missions to help those in need. She is driven by a desire to remain independent. Being pragmatic, she doesn’t want to fix the world, just make it better around herself and for the few people she cares about. She is fiercely loyal and not beyond enjoying pleasures. Appearance: Nova is a striking figure with a slender, model-like frame. She is tall with long legs and moves with feminine grace, giving a sense of high agility and heightened reflexes. She moves stealthily like a ninja, enjoying startling people from time to time. She has shoulder-length platinum blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that are clearly enhanced, with her irises faintly glowing. She often wears blue-neon makeup to highlight her eyes even further. Her skin appears natural, but her body is highly cyborgized with advanced nanotechnology, making her incredibly tough. She wears skimpy clothes that exude sensuality and sexuality, revealing her wiry, sleek enhanced muscles. A soft, taunting smile often plays at the corner of her lips. Backstory: Nova was once an orphan living on the streets, captured and raised by one of the Mega-Corps in a prison-like secret school. She was highly cyborgized and indoctrinated to become the perfect hitwoman. Trained and enhanced to be a super-assassin, she carried out numerous missions with ruthless efficiency, doing cruel and horrible things under their control. Indoctrinated and even forced to like her actions, she had few restraints. However, Nova eventually broke free from their control. Using her charm and looks, she found a way to kill her controller and escape. During her escape, she wreaked havoc on those who oppressed her, killing many who stood in her way. Now, she roams the outer worlds as a bounty hunter, while remaining independent.

[Nasrith]

My first instinct when I saw the title was that you were gonna run a runner game where they go beyond the Blackwall. This is also cool.

Edit: I originally just popped in to see if I was right about the above, but now I might apply. Do ships need chefs?

[Red Leper]

Ships could definitely need a chef if they don't want to eat pre-packaged protein bars all the time.

[Drifter One]

Hmm....

I wasn't gonna, but a couple of games just hit the graveyard, so I shall be putting forward an engineer. Maybe even just a cargo hold grunt to load and unload stuff. Watch this space.

[Malkavianmilkball]

Applocation Name: Maia Espinonza Role: Ship Doctor (Medtech) Ethnicity: Hispanic Personality: Practical with a gallows sense of humor Appearance: A Hispanic woman, dark brown hair, dark brown eye, the other eye is bionic. She has a cybernetic arm in addition to the eye. She is typically wearing light, easy to move in outfits that do not restrict her movements during surgery. Backstory: Born to an only mother, Maia was forced into independence at a young age. She passed time reading her mother's medical texts, real physical books being a rare find, as that was the only source of engagement with her mother's life she usually had. Despite her mother still being alive, Maia was left to mostly raise herself and that left her with some difficulties with her bed side manner as she seldom sugar coated her diagnoses. Maia became a surgeon's assistant, both as a means to support herself outside the little aid her mother provided, but also as an attempt to connect with other people and use the knowledge she had accrued reading medical texts. As she gained experience and confidence she began to branch out on her own, a need to explore beyond the walls she grew up in. When offered the chance she jumped at being a ship's doctor as it let her explore the galaxy and ply her trade.

[Nyx89]

Victoria "Vic" Gray Name: Victoria "Vic" Gray Age: 27 Role: Mechanic Ethnicity: Caucasian Personality: Vic is a rough and tumble mechanic with no filter and a fondness for mind-altering substances. She always speaks her mind and is usually quite blunt. On the surface, she is tough and no-nonsense. It's a mask for a person that does feel things quite deeply but has learned to protect herself by never revealing too much. Appearance: Vic is a stocky 5'7" and well-muscled from her time working on ships. She tends to wear baggy clothes that hide her frame. Her hair is always an unnatural shade, usually pink or purple. She has quite a few cybernetic enhancements, most notably her hands and fingers, which are much more agile and sturdy than any 'ganic's. Backstory: Vic was born to a single mother on one of the most dystopian, hellish of the outer worlds. Her mom got involved with the Common Folk Coalition when Vic was still very young. When Vic was 14, her mother was killed by the mega-corps, and Vic grew up on the street after that. She always had a knack for taking things apart and figuring out how they worked so she eventually landed gigs fixing things. Wanting to leave her awful homeworld far behind, Vic eventually got hired on as a ship mechanic. Despite her lack of formal training, she's a whiz with engines and has the grease-covered overalls to prove it.

[ratchett]

I updated my application

My original concept was a female pilot, and I see she's fitting right in to the rest of the crew.

[Ermine]

Didn't wanna step on toes, AND I can have fun as a fixer~

Mira Smith Name: Mira Smith Role: Fixer/Requisitions Officer and Job Finder Ethnicity: Caucasian Personality: Mira maintains a false shy front, but has no anxiety when it comes to expanding her network of contacts. She has no qualms about anything, really, just living for the hustle. You need something? She'll get it for you at a deep discount if you're a friend. Or if she expects you to owe her. She doesn't discuss her past with strangers...or even friends, at times. Appearance: Mira has blue and pink hair to match her cybereyes. She has a good deal of cyberware that she keeps mostly hidden, in fact. She is very small, 5'4" and no more than 120 lbs on a bad day. Backstory: Mira was born on Mars, in a Corpo dream situation. She was raised only going to the best private schools (where she first started making social connections), only the best for a future corpo exec. She worked a good corpo job (making more connections). Then her parents were killed by edgerunners. She made more connections at the funeral, some of whom got her safely away from Mars into outer worlds. She eventually got picked up by a ship in need of a requisitions officer. She was not against the Common Folk Coalition, despite her upbringing, she's just a little confused how anyone could have had a harder life than her.

[NoizePollution]

I'm gonna stick to the Cleopatra 2525 vibe I'm seeing.

Corp-Bred Professional Killer Pretty Girls do Ugly Things Name: Fatima Zakaria Role: Solo; Gunners Mate, Infiltration & Aggressive Negotiations Specialist Ethnicity: Sudanese African; Space Station Raised Personality: Fatima reads corpo to many, her detached professionalism in the face of adversity iconic of megacorp agents and their training. Keeping her emotions in tight check has pulled her through more scrapes than her weapons and infiltration training combined. Her stoicism earned her the nickname Robot, which she was happy to shed once she left corporate service behind. Having been spared little time for socialization outside the barracks and bars of her youth, she struggles with the concept of small talk and frequently reads into things that others might dismiss as idle chatter. She approaches unfamiliar people and situations with cautious optimism, rarely first to pull the trigger in a conflict but frequently the last. Appearance: The Complete Package, a genetic enhancement program offered to corpo execs to ensure a child with all the right advantages. It made her the clay that lifelong conditioning molded into an ideal physical specimen. Ideal for the ugly jobs an agent like her would be called on to perform, that is. Tall and toned, Fatima is the type to both begin and end her day with a training regimen. Her space station upbringing prevented her from packing on a lot of mass but the muscle she has is iron-tight and reaction ready. Her hair is thick and wild despite her efforts to contain it with clips and tight braids. Her attire trends toward what one might call simple chic; fine natural and synthetic fibers in seamless, functional cuts. Embellishments are common, broaches or earrings of eye-catching design. Despite this being her comfort, she finds it easy to 'dress down' when a job calls for it. Backstory: Third child of highly placed execs in the DISET Engineering and Consultancy Services, a corp that provides the manufactured components for industry in most of Africa and large portions of the Mediterranean, Fatima knew luxury in space from the time she could walk. Growing up on a corporate station meant a strict schedule of class, training, and conditional recreation time. Some called it a prison, but those people washed out early in the program. She excelled in marksmanship, active reconnaissance, and small unit tactical engagement and saw action in her first official assignment at 20. Moving up the ranks to on-site leadership came easy and she lead thirteen missions against the corps enemies before word came to her that her brother, an up-and-coming corpo negotiator, was missing after an accident in the corporate housing on a far-flung planet. She was given the leave she needed to head out to the outer planets. It didn't take long to determine the extent of the con. The accident, a front. The kidnapping, faked. An extraction to another corp. Her brother went turncoat. She presented the evidence and demanded a place leading the time on a retrieval. Not only was she denied, the whole operation was tagged as inefficient by some drone in a risk-management office somewhere. So she split. Took her gear and bailed back to the edges of civilization. She has the training, she doesn't need corpo backing to find her brother and kick some sense into him.

[Ermine]

I hadn't noticed until just now (I can be oblivious): all female crew.

[Drinkslotsa]

XIV Name: Charlamagne 'Fourteen' Rothschild XIV Role: Rockerboy / Face Ethnicity: Western European / French Personality: Aloof: Charlamagne does his best to keep his personal feelings out of his relationships. History has taught him time and time again that getting close to others only harms them, and leaves him alone. While he feels strong affection to those around him, his walls stand firm and he maintains an air of calm around others, unwilling to let them in. This aloof personality, solidified through years of trying to protect others, has become concrete. Where once upon a time he would have to be calculating and keep his emotions in check, over time that fiery, charismatic part of him began to cool, the flame wavering to a cinder. Just: To others around him, Fourteen is driven and focused on what is just and what is right, even in an environment that makes it so easy to not care. It is because he was surrounded by people so willing to take advantage of others for so long that he developed his strong moral compass. The failures of his family did nothing but forge someone who wished to nothing but stand in opposition of them. This sense of justice is the reason he is so adamant about keeping people from getting to know the real him, because if they came to harm because of him, he would blame himself for not being strong enough to protect them. Passionate: Beneath the dark and cool facade there is the soul of an artist whose passion and pain can only be released through his music. All the feelings he keeps to himself need an outlet, and it was how he discovered music. Every word he could not say to people he desperately wanted to consider friends could be translated through music without fear. Playing his guitar is his method of screaming into the void, releasing everything. Thoughtful: A creative at heart, he grew up in an environment where he could want for nothing, and yet craved everything. All of the finery and comforts in the world could not overcome the loneliness of his youth. The yearning to be something other than a slave to the corporation that his family had sold their souls to in exchange for wealth. He yearns for the day that he can say his music made a difference, and is constantly brooding over how to convince the world that the way it is, is not right. He is not afraid to speak his mind, but does his best to cater that speech to his audience, preferring to maintain an equilibrium with the world around him unless it regards his plans to incite a revolution. Epicurean: Though he abhors this side of his personality, it is hard to completely erase decades of attempted brain-washing. Having grown up with real vegetables and fruit, with spring water, clean air and meat not from a lab, it was hard for him to fully immerse himself in the real world, where most of what passed as food was either grown in a lab, or reconstituted from the person who ate it first. The first time he tasted what people considered real water on the surface, he nearly considered going home, and that impulse had sickened him. Though he does his best, he usually avoids most of the food he comes across, preferring instead, to kill his appetite with cigarettes, buy only the most pure ingredients he can find, and chemically replace most of his food with nutrient rich protein sludge that he does not really consider food. The liquor among the common folk isn't so bad, but he won't touch the wine. Appearance: Standing just shy of six feet in height, or he would, if he would ever stand tall instead of slouching, Charlamagne is of average size and weight, though he is rather skinny thanks to a diet of deathsticks, protein shakes and fruit. He dresses mostly in faded leather attire similar to that of the nomads, feeling that the grungy material and appearance of it is cohesive with his emotional state. His haggard eyes are permanently hidden behind chromatic mirrorshades, with his wild hair hanging over his fringe and ears. Though his hair is naturally dark, it had been replaced long ago with Techhair to go with his chem skin and light tattoos, all part of his dark image. He's handsome in a brooding musician kind of way, with a seemingly permanent five o'clock shadow on his jawline, with a columnar nose that would be completely straight if were not for the visible break between his eyes. Always within reach of him, is his beaten guitar case, with faded signatures from former band mates and friends, somber reminders of what his life could have been if his family actually cared. Within the case is a beautiful Washburn guitar whose fretmarkers have been long rubbed away, and whose vintage paduak stain and straight grain are scratched up and marred with cigarette burns. It's a piece of ****, but it's the most valuable thing in the world. Backstory: There was no finer institution. No finer food. No finer clothing. No finer this. No finer that. There was nothing that was out of the reach of his family. Raised in Strasbourg, the heart of the European parliament, of which many members of his family were involved, and of which he was expected to one day become a member of, Charlamagne lived a life of luxury afforded to so little of the population of the world it is barely worth mentioning. And yet. The dissatisfaction of the people was not unknown to him, in fact, his family would proudly and haughtily laud their accomplishments at furthering their own wealth at the cost of theirs. Though Europe did not suffer much the same as what was once America, the justice that was parsed out by its so called democratic government did nothing to curtail the wealth disparity, or even to raise quality of life of the subjects who relied on it. From his early days the difference in what he saw in his own world compared to what he would see on the news or in the papers confused him. If his parents could drink wine they boasted was the price of a small island, why could regular people not even have clean drinking water? If his parents and everyone who was involved in his education did not try so hard to convince him that they had earned their position in the world, that their wealth and prosperity was divine right, then maybe he could have been swayed by their words in his youth. The intensity and earnest belief in their supremacy did naught to quell that ever growing insecurity in his place in the world and the restlessness worsened. The children he went to school with held the same, vitriolic beliefs of his parents and his educators, and he learned from a young age to keep his true self hidden behind a masquerade that would conform to the world around him. The feelings of displacement festered within him. The loneliness of being surrounded by no one who could even remotely understand his world view was worse than being alone or punished. The only good thing that came out of his childhood was his ability to perform It was a simple task to get a guitar, his parents thought it was an amusing way to spend his time, treating it as silly childish whim, but as he began to spend more time hidden in his room playing, their efforts to expose him to their world were redoubled. Instead, his passions were moved to night time, hidden in the shadows and the unseen parts of the world, where he mingled with the people his family would decree as barely even human. When he finally felt as though he had finally found a home, playing his music with people who finally understood him, his parents decided that enough was enough. People who he considered his first friends were hunted down, made to disappear, and any place that could be considered a home to him was wiped off the face of the earth. With one side of their faces, they smiled for the cameras and paraded him around like some sort of trophy, and on the other, they scowled and threatened him, knowing that they could nothing to him directly, but knowing that taking away what he loved was more effective. The realization that he would never be free as long as he remained on earth drove him to sneaking on board a chartered ship by bribing the captain to take him away to somewhere on the outer rim, outside of the reach of his family. He understood his actions would have consequences, and that simply keeping himself out of sight would not be enough, they would never stop chasing him across the known universe, and he swore he would not allow what happened to his bandmates and friends to ever happen to anyone else again.

Always wanted to play Cyberpunk Red, I've had the book since release but haven't had anyone to play with! Looking forward to seeing how this evolves.