the underdark. Under and dark.
Biopunk
Also known as "ribofunk" after that story collection by Paul di
Filippo. Science fiction where the technology is alive...
aliiiiiiive!
Of course, since I'm using GURPS, I could just include a bunch of
crap from the Bio-Tech sourcebook and call it punk. But I want to
go deeper. What makes bio, punk? What makes punk... aliiiiiiive?!
Let's see what TVTropes has to say about biopunk.
Punk Punk with Organic Technology, usually centered around genetic engineering. Expect to see a lot of Organic Technology, sculpted physiques and Petting Zoo People walking around... or hopping, swimming, flying, slithering, etc. Many buildings and ships will be grown, and a general Womb Level aesthetic will usually prevail. Issues examined may include Gattaca Babies, What Measure Is a Non-Human?, what is human, various aspects of ecology and effects of modified crops/animals/bacteria. And you'll see Aesops (particularly Green Aesops about creating what you can't control), both real and Fantastic.
Punk Punk seems to show up a lot around here. What's that?
Common for all such genres is that the technology (and/or magic)
level is turned way up, an ultra-modern sensibility is grafted on,
and that the protagonists are somewhere along the Sliding Scale of
Anti-Heroes living in a Privately Owned Society. The world is also
on a sliding scale, from a World Half Empty to A World Half Full
(or, rarely, even more optimistic).
OK, so I have a campaign set twenty minutes into the future, and
the technological breakthrough of the day always involves meat. Or
plants. Sometimes meat that grows from plants.
The Nerve!
The trait that all the PCs share in common is a genetically
enhanced nervous system. This was intended to let them access the benefits of an enhanced sensorium, and it does. Turns out, that's also what gets them access to psi powers.
GURPS distinguishes psi from magic by modeling psi powers in a way that doesn't use spells. This mainly makes a difference in character creation; you still end up rolling against your skill with the psi power in order to do stuff in play, and you still have to pay fatigue points to do that stuff, just like with magic. But instead of spending points on every little thing you want to do, as you must with magic, psionics let you buy individual, highly expensive powers that are rather broadly defined.
I anticipate this will make it difficult to balance the psi powers, so the game operates on the premise that psi powers have only just been discovered and nobody really knows how to use them effectively. The PCs might begin play with awesome powers, but they won't be able to rely on them. They probably won't want to use them openly, either, because there are some NPC groups that I haven't figured out yet who would just love to lock the PCs up and perform experiments on them forever.
Anyway, apart from the psi powers, the enhanced nervous system provides a number of other benefits. Fast learning is always permitted in both GURPS and tabletop roleplay generally, but in this case I'll make a habit of rewarding good play with a direct and immediate increase in character skill, rather than waiting to award character points and then allowing the player to spend them.
Telepathy over Internet Protocol
The most common psi power is telepathy, only it isn't really a psi power. It's an implant that communicates over radio. It doesn't intercept every single neural impulse, so your brain needs to learn how to send stuff to it, and in order to get the best results with that learning process, you need to persuade your brain to grow new neurons on the implant itself. It doesn't normally do that, so you have to cheat--either by sprinkling on cloned neurons, or by being born with a modified genome that gives your brain the ability to do such things. The latter is very rare, but the PCs might have it anyway.
Telepathy implants can normally only send messages to other telepathy implants. In principle you can send unadorned sounds or images, but these turn out to be suboptimal, because the brain that receives an image needs to interpret it all over again, which usually requires either REM sleep, or for the user to mentally call up the image and analyze it. The latter is a fairly obscure skill--not actually difficult to do, but you don't have any real way of confirming that you've done it. You might well have imagined the image you think you've decoded.
So, if you really want to communicate via telepathy, you need to send "meaning". This includes sensory impressions--which are not at all the same as "images". They're not made of pixels, they're made of symbols. Usually the symbology is not very complex, but you need to use a symbology that your intended recipient also uses. The information will still get across if you don't, but the recipient won't understand it; worse, there's a good chance they'll interpret it in a way that makes sense to them, but is not at all what you intended. This is a constant risk in telepathic communication, which means that if you haven't spent at least eight hours practicing it with the particular partner you're messaging, the two of you are considered to be deficient in whatever language you're using. Mental stress, unusual concepts, and general adventuring shenanigans can cause the communication to regress to this level.
The PCs have done this already, before the game starts--establishing the PCs' shared background is going to be a part of character generation. But it will make things a bit difficult when they want to call for help.
Using telepathy on a person who doesn't have an implant is generally assumed to be impossible. Perhaps the PCs will find a way around this; that could be dramatic. On the other hand, telepathic computer hacking has a number of advantages over the regular kind; for instance, if you need a password dictionary, you can use everything you remember, and you can prioritize based on what you know about the person whose password you're hacking.
Let's Meet the Meat
Since this is a biopunk setting, there should be biological modification of other sorts; I just haven't thought up anything terribly creative yet.
The biotech in this setting is fairly new, but also optimistic; so as a default, I'll suppose that any modification in GURPS Bio-Tech of tech level 9 or below is available on the open market, with the exception of psi-tech. Although psionic technology might exist, the very existence of psionics remains obscure--not because there's some conspiracy to keep it secret, but because there are so few people who have significant psionic capability, and fewer still who can do anything interesting with it. So psi-tech is obscure, and possibly secret as well.
TL10 stuff might be in prototype somewhere. The PCs could probably invent some of it, given time, effort, and money.
The player characters earn their bread reselling modified organs. Boosted Hearts are popular. They are grown in boars that local farmers keep, but can't legally be sold without first being delivered to the megacorp's processing centers. The PCs have learned how to violate that law and not get caught. They get their hearts mainly from Gazanfer 'Witchdoctor' Larson, who in turn gets his livestock by instructing his own hyperintelligent sheepdogs to steal it for him. Not too much; no more than could plausibly get lost in the savannah.
Boosted Hearts just accelerate your metabolism by default, but you can attach extra glands to them to get various drugs. Pay extra, and you can add a patch to your solar plexus that will deliver whatever you plug into it straight to your heart. The legality of this is... questionable... because the only real use is to get some awesome highs, or quicker steroids, and it makes you really easy to poison.
Punk
Cyberpunk in its classic form was all about social satire. The characters were on the fringes of society and the society was totally fucked up. This isn't what the genre looks like anymore--my favorite cyberpunk story in recent memory is Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, in which the characters sometimes fight The Man, but only when The Man is actually the guy causing the problem in question. Even so, many of the characters have odd living situations--Batoh has multiple "homes," some pretty cozy, but one is a shipping container; the behind-the-scenes protagonist of the first season got himself committed to a mental hospital for most of his life, purely as a cover.
I want to give the characters opportunities to do good and evil, serve order and chaos, and get confused about which is which. To that effect, I should map out the political situation in their immediate vicinity... which is in Turkey. Nevşehir Province. Because there are a lot of underground cities already there, see, so the premise of a mining operation with a city inside of it has extra precedent.
Conveniently, I have a friend who's been there and is Turkish, so for mundane details I have a ready source. And since this is a near-future story, I can fudge a lot of details and make up explanations if I really need to.
The Mining Operation
There are many corporations and other organizations involved in the operation, not because it's expensive per se (though it is), but because having your hand in everything is considered universally good business practice in this setting. There are corps where this is the case today; I'm just generalizing from that, such that it's a bit difficult to tell who you work for, exactly.1
The mines aren't made with drills, but bacteria. They eat the rock into nice geodesic shapes, assuming you placed them correctly, and accounted for fault lines, and... uh, there's a pretty severe risk of cave-ins, but the theory is that nobody should be in the cave while the bacteria are still alive. That's why scavengers choose to enter the caves at that time. It's pretty easy to scrape the metal off the floor of six or seven caves in a day; the challenge is carrying it all to a buyer. They don't mine near any major population centers. You'll want to sort the metal, too, and you don't have the incredibly clever chemistry equipment to do it with... probably.
Under
While the bacterial mining setup has the effect that there are a lot of weirdly shaped rooms about, the PCs still basically live in a dungeon. I'll probably get some dungeon maps online and mess with them.
Dark
All of the bacteria have bioluminescence as a safety measure. There are a lot of them that are bred for that purpose, and eat the rock as slowly as possible. So it's not actually especially dark in the mine, unless you're keeping it that way to hide your presence...which the PCs would have good reason to do, and so would their potential enemies.
What are a bunch of illegal organ traders doing in a mine like this? For one thing, it's got merit as a hideout, since there are a whole bunch of identical caves in your immediate vicinity. For another, there's electricity, and the fragmented nature of the bureaucracy makes it pretty easy to steal some. For a third, if you want to keep an organ alive, your best bet is to implant it into livestock, and there are a fair lot of herders in Nevşehir Province. Witchdoctor Larson is one, officially.
Conclusion
Next time I'll take all this and make an adventure hook of it.
- This also means I have an excuse to avoid specifying who any given NPC works for, and if I do have to specify, I can roll on a table or something. Score! ↩
