State of the FATEPunk

Oh no, now I’ve started thinking about old projects, I may have gone too far!

 

As I said in the last post, I stole borrowed the Pacific setting of my FATE-based cyberpunk game on a game I played in 2011 or thereabouts, which I enjoyed thoroughly. But the game fell down and stopped at more or less a denouement for my character, in the middle of a combat sequence, possibly in the vein of ‘one last job’ before I retired the character and played something a little more in keeping with the rest of the group (all more or less affiliated with the police department, whilst I was a Yakuza-style underboss).

Which is probably why I didn’t let it go.

 

Now, after idly pondering in the last post and in one of my old A-Z posts, I feel like maybe moving the setting around to make it more my own would be a much better idea. And that’s probably why I’ve fallen down a reading rabbit hole.

What am I reading? Well, after googling “where should I put my space elevator?” and reading this search result, it became obvious from the map halfway down that maybe the Asian Pacific and Central America / the Caribbean were a bad idea just based on weather, but areas near the Horn of Africa look much better.

Which led me to start thinking about how little I actually know about that area, and how that world might look, and now I’m down a warren of Afrofuturism, Afropunk and language maps.

 

So what might it look like, from a couple of days of reading? Well, probably not too different from the old idea of a sea-based platform for the base of the space elevator, some islands built around to service it, and so on. But the cultural reality would be different.

If we follow from that old A-Z post, this elevator wasn’t the sole product of a Megacorp investment group, and the subsequent governance of the area wasn’t under the umbrella of that group. Instead, we have a Pan-African investment, probably with Megacorp contributors, and maybe with nearby governments hoping to chip in and work on the project.

We could use China’s current ties to African investment to create a Special Administrative Region on the coast of Africa, a sort of New Hong Kong independent from any one nation by treaty, but administered by African Union. And since we’re in the locality, let’s call this New Mogadishu. We’ll have to come up with what caused the AU to step in for control of Somalia’s capital, or perhaps all of Somalia.

Then, we have to think about what kind of cultural melting pot we have. This is a big project, a big city, we’ll pull in people speaking Somali, Malagasy, Swahili, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, and why not Marathi, Gujurati and Tamil, Afrikaans, Hindi and any other African and European languages could be thrown in too.

Being able to understand the environment means Augmented Reality for comprehension becomes almost necessary, or else a selection of pidgins, creoles and lingua francas (franci?) spoken by the majority just to get by. But a few words here and there would make sense (how many languages can I at least say please and thank you in currently? Ten?).

And the messy cultural setting plays well with an idea of a war on cultural loss in the face of globalisation.

 

For setting flavour, I need to do some more digging on Afrofuturism and Afropunk and read some books and listen to some music and watch some movies, but I think I’m building a foundation.

I hope I can get the Ginnungagap out of the way before I do something silly like start learning Swahili!

 

As for rules, well the FATE Core rules started to get a bit clunky when I was adding cybernetics to them. I’ve been looking at Fate Accelerated recently, which looks a bit more promising. Maybe the Fate Accelerated Plus hack, which uses both approaches and professions could be played around with. I don’t know, I need more time to ponder on that.

Or maybe I’ll give up and go back to the idea of using Cortex. Not sure.

More soon.