Tabletop RPGs and the Satanic Panic

Tabletop RPGs have been a huge part of pop culture since the release of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 (Noland, 2021). Players formed clubs and organized events. Even teachers used the games as part of education programs (Lancaster, 2004). But there has also been many misconceptions about these games over the decades (Hawkes-Robinson, 2014). There were instances of young people committing suicide, and parents were quick to point at tabletop RPGs as the cause. Parent groups around the United States petitioned school boards to ban the games, and the religious claimed that they encouraged devil worship and suicide (Lancaster, 2004).

In the 80s, a group called Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons was leading the crusade against tabletop RPGs. The group was made up of parents, teachers, and clergy who were worried about the spiritual and mental development of children. Believing that D&D corrupted children, they campaigned against the game, warning parents and speaking out in media (Flournoy, 2018). While dwindling in numbers, there are people still today who claim that tabletop RPGs cause mental illness, violent behavior, and even satanism. In truth, there is plenty of research indicating strong benefits to playing tabletop RPGs, and the games are even used in education and therapy (Hawkes-Robinson, 2014).

This article offers a comprehensive look at the history of tabletop RPGs with a focus on the D&D scare during the Satanic Panic, a crusade based on misinformed views and religious fanaticism. I’ll start by giving an explanation on the hobby and its history, since that will be important to understand the context behind the panic. I will then talk about the panic itself, how it came to be, and how it ties to tabletop RPGs. Finally, I’ll address what happened to the panic over time, and how it may have actually helped the growth of the hobby in the end.

WHAT IS A TABLETOP RPG?
Tabletop RPGs are traditionally structured around the use of paper, pencils, and a player’s imagination. (Flournoy, 2018). A moderator called the Game Master presents a story to a group of players, each in control of a character (Lancaster, 2004). The players are supposed to act in a way appropriate for these characters based on their characteristics (Flournoy, 2018). They interact with each other, the situations presented by the Game Master, and other non-player characters introduced and portrayed by the Game Master as part of the setting (Lancaster, 2004). The decisions that can be made in game are limited by rules dictated by the game itself, such as guidelines on how to resolve actions and conflict (Gannage, 2020). Unlike most games, tabletop RPGs don’t have a set objective. There could be an end objective, though, such as defeating a dragon and saving a town. However, there’s nothing stopping the players from continuing the game after these objectives have been filled. Some games could go on for years of continuous sessions (Flournoy, 2018).

Image Source: WikiCommons

I did mention the game Dungeons & Dragons which was published by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. However, the game’s origins date back even further than that. Gygax and Arneson came from the then popular wargaming genre and wanted to create a game that provided more creative and character-focused experiences (Sidhu & Carter, 2020). Wargames at the time were often complex simulation games, with origins as early as the 19th century when Prussian soldiers used them to teach military strategy. In these games, two opponents faced each other using miniature armies and their knowledge of military tactics. In the Prussian army, a senior officer oversaw the simulation and determined what the results of a maneuver would be, often relying on complex mathematical calculations. It’s believed that the Prussian’s military victory over France in 1870 was in part due to their use of wargames (Gannage, 2020).

It was first in the early 20th century when wargames aimed for the public were published. They became increasingly popular and, in the 1960s, there was a thriving wargaming community in the United States. Some of the issues with the games at the time were that since there wasn’t an impartial referee overseeing the game, players often bickered over rules. The games were also often designed for only two players while taking up a lot of space, and they took hours to play (Gannage, 2020).

Image Source: RPGGeek.com

One of the first attempts to transition from wargame to roleplaying game was with the experimental game Braunstein, made by David Wesley in the 1960s. He wanted a more cooperative experience and decided to incorporate additional players that took on different roles. He used a Napoleonic wargame called The Siege of Bodenburg and gave two players the roles of opposing commanders. The other players took civilian roles, such as banker and mayor. Wesley gave each role objectives and goals, and then set himself as the referee. However, the game rapidly devolved into chaos as the players were more unpredictable than he had expected. Ultimately, Wesley was disappointed, but many of the players loved it (Gannage, 2020).

One of these players was Dave Arneson who, inspired by Braunstein, came to design his own game Blackmoor—a game where university students were sucked into a medieval fantasy world. Blackmoor could be played as a campaign, where players continued their story over multiple sessions. Arneson went on to add rules for improving skills so that characters could get stronger over time. He also wanted to take combat away from the battlefield and make it more personal, so he experimented with new locations, including enclosed spaces, such as castles and sewers. These indoor environments became known as dungeons (Gannage, 2020).

Gary Gygax first played The Siege of Bodenburg at Gen-Con in 1968, and he went on to modify the game into a medieval-themed wargame called Chainmail based on an initial design made by an early associate named Jeff Perren. They released the game in 1969 and it became popular enough that Gygax published a fantasy supplement the following year, introducing creatures from popular fantasy novels, such as J.R.R. Tokien’s Lord of the Rings. He also added rules for individual characters called Heroes who had a major impact on the battles (Gannage, 2020).

Arneson incorporated elements of Chainmail into Blackmoor (Gannage, 2020), and after he and Gygax met at Gen-Con in 1972, they began to collaborate on game designs (Flournoy, 2018). Gygax founded a company called Tactical Studies Rules (later TSR Hobbies) and the two went on to design the initial rules for Dungeons & Dragons (Gannage, 2020).

In January 1974, they printed and sold a thousand copies (Gannage, 2020). In 1975, they sold four thousand (Lancaster, 2004). The game had a slow start, one reason likely being that all the equipment needed to play the game weren’t provided when buying the pre-packaged set. Another problem was that the rules were very complex for amateurs. A journalist at the time had written that the game was “only marginally less complicated than a Ptolemaic analysis of planetary motion.” Eventually, the game would find its audience in college students and military personnel (Flournoy, 2018). By 1979, there would be an estimated 300,000 players (Gannage, 2020) and TSR would gross $2 million. These profits multiplied the following years, with $8.5 million in 1980 and an estimated $20 million in 1981 (Lancaster, 2004).

Tabletop RPGs became a subculture with conventions, and supplemental books were published that offered additional rules and settings. In 1989, there were over 300 different tabletop RPGs on the market. TSR Hobbies was plagued with legal disputes and changed hands several times, but the game itself continued to grow in popularity. In 1983, CBS Network even produced a cartoon based on the game. In 1997, a major distribution error combined with heavy investment in a failed game caused the company to nosedive and their competitor Wizards of the Coast acquired it. They were later purchased by Hasbro (Gannage, 2020). As of June 2022, Dungeons & Dragons is reported to have around 50 million players worldwide.

Image Source: LA Times, July 11 1979

THE CONTROVERSY BEGINS
One of the very first articles about D&D was from Los Angeles Times on July 11, 1979, entitled “Dungeons and Dragons: Fantasy Life in a Game Without End.” The article described the game as incredibly complex where many players were university students or intellectually gifted children and teenagers. It also mentioned that the game caused players to invest significant amounts of time and money. There wasn’t much controversy surrounding D&D at the time the article was published, but quotes from interviewed players pointed out that because the game allows you do what you want, some had explored violent and sexual themes. One person was quoted saying “D&D is an escape. An outlet for aggression. It’s an ego trip – everything you could want.” (Gannage, 2020).

Image Source: The Herald Palladium, September 7, 1979

THE CASE OF DALLAS EGBERT
One especially noteworthy incident was on August 15, 1979, when 16-year-old James “Dallas” Egbert III disappeared from his dorm room at Michigan State University (Hawkes-Robinson, 2014; Flournoy, 2018; Gannage, 2020), leaving behind a note saying, “To whom it may concern: Should my body be found, I wish to be cremated.” His parents offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who had information about his location. Seven days later, they hired a private investigator named William Dear who was a former Florida highway patrolman and a former cult de-programmer (Gannage, 2020).

Dear discovered that Egbert had recently been exposed to D&D and was part of a roleplaying club that played a live-action version of the game in the underground steam tunnels of Michigan State University (Lancaster, 2004; Flournoy, 2018). He theorized that Egbert had lost himself in a game and become delusional, unable to differentiate reality from fiction (Gannage, 2020). At one point, he even speculated that someone else—a mysterious Dungeon Master—could have influenced the boy and used him in a real-life game (Flournoy, 2018). While it was known that Egbert struggled mentally and physically, there were no links that tied his disappearance or mental illness in general to D&D. He used recreational drugs like PCP, and allegedly struggled with coming to terms with his sexual identity, being on MSU’s Gay Council. Dear ignored all those details, instead focusing entirely on the link to D&D (Flourney, 2018; Gannage, 2020).

Image Source: Edmonton Journal, September 8, 1979

The media went all-in on this theory with headlines such as “Game Cultist Still Missing,” “Fantasy Turned Real Life May Have Killed Student,” and “Dungeons & Dragons’ Cult May Lead to Missing Boy.” Egbert was found several weeks later with no signs of D&D-related instability (Hawkes-Robinson, 2014). Instead, what had happened on the night of his disappearance was that he had entered the steam tunnels underneath the university, bringing with him methaqualone (a hypnotic sedative) with the intention of overdosing. He survived the attempt, but instead of returning home, he went into hiding at a friend’s house. Egbert then continued to travel for several weeks, staying with acquaintances. Eventually, he ended up in New Orleans, where he tried to poison himself again. After also failing this time, he decided to contact his family (Flournoy, 2018). Despite the truth coming out, the media still decided to run articles into the following year about how Egbert was a victim of D&D. The boy eventually took his own life on August 18, 1980, and it was clear that the suicide had been caused by severe loneliness and depression (Gannage, 2020).

Years after the Dallas Egbert case, and despite knowing that it had nothing to do with D&D, William Dear wrote a memoir called The Dungeon Master that was a romanticized and exaggerated account of the investigation, where he painted himself as a cool-under-pressure hero and made up events that had never occurred. Even though he had admitted in a press release after the investigation that D&D was unrelated to the case (Gannage, 2020), and that he believed that the media had seriously misrepresented the steam tunnel incident (Hawkes-Robinson, 2014), he still turned the game into a key focus of his book (Gannage, 2020).

Author Rona Jaffe was inspired by the newspaper accounts of this case, took some of William Dear’s concepts, and wrote a bestselling novel named Mazes and Monsters. The book became popular enough to be made into a film, starring Tom Hanks. Though Rona Jaffe did take a more balanced approach in her book and even presented some positive aspects of roleplaying, she still shared the perception that D&D could be linked to delinquency and vices. However, while cases such as the Dallas Egbert one had caused people to start linking D&D to mental illness, there was also a growing idea that the game was connected to satanism (Gannage, 2020).

THE SATANIC PANIC
The 1970s may have seen the birth of D&D, but it had also seen a steady rise in America’s fear of brainwashing and cults. The Cold War, movies like The Manchurian Candidate, and new studies in psychology helped turn “brainwashing” into a trigger word throughout the United States. Many feared that Communist states—or other groups they deemed evil—were trying to secretly control their youth. Parents were suspicious of things they didn’t understand, including the games their children played (Flournoy, 2018). People believed that there were criminal networks operating at all levels of society, from high-level politicians to ordinary teenage pranksters. These performed occult rituals with human sacrifice to destroy anything humanity perceived as moral and good. Tabletop RPGs, such as D&D, were considered one of the most effective and ingenious tools for spreading this kind of satanism (Noland, 2021).

The entire premise of the Satanic Panic (also called the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic) was created on fictitious conspiracy theories—a mass hysteria and the purest case of moral panic (Gannage, 2020; Sidhu & Carter, 2020; Noland, 2021). And it wasn’t just the general public that was affected; therapists, police officers, psychologists, and child-protection workers all believed in these organized cults and that people infiltrated child-care centers and preschools to abuse children in debased rituals. A survey from Redbook magazine showed that 70% of Americans believed in these satanic cults and a third believed that the authorities purposely ignored them. In total, this panic would result in over 12,000 accusations. While there were occasional cases of individual abusers using occult trappings, there was no evidence of any organized satanic cults who engaged in such abuse (Gannage, 2020).

But why was this a thing to begin with? There were primarily three contributing factors: first, there was the increased awareness of child sexual abuse; second, there was the fear over cults and satanism; and third, there were questionable advancements in psychology (Gannage, 2020).

The first factor, as mentioned, was the increased awareness of child sexual abuse. This was a topic that no one really spoke about in the 70s. The public perception was that this was something that deranged fathers did to their daughters, but the feminist movement argued that there were larger issues at play, such as traditional gender roles and patriarchal authority. This caused the perception to shift towards mental illness, and psychoterapists suddenly took a larger role in dealing with victims and perpetrators than impartial investigators. It’s important to point out that in the 70s, because sexual abuse was almost never spoken about, false accusations were incredibly rare. When someone was accused, the accusations were usually true. A study at the time concluded that 62% of women had suffered sexual abuse in some form. These statistics generalized all forms, though, which meant that children abused by their fathers were grouped together with grown women cat-called on the street. However, the media at the time ran these numbers without elaboration, and let the public draw their own conclusions about what they meant. Naturally, people assumed the worst, and both journalists and politicians capitalized on that concern. There were even claims that as many as 50,000 children were kidnapped every year – which, just wasn’t the case at the time. According to the Department of Justice, most cases related to missing children were family abductions, runaways, and forms of disappearance not associated with abduction. But public perception had already been formed (Gannage, 2020).

The second factor was the growing concern over cults and satanism, and here the term demonize is apt. Because of the prevalence of Christianity in western culture, the concepts of Satan and his demons were often tied to heresy and foreign religions. It was also common to use ethnic groups or political ideologies as scapegoats for social turmoil, such as accusing Jews and communists of forming conspiracies to destroy society. But where did all the satanists come from? The short answer is, Hollywood. In the late 60s and early 70s, Hollywood drew audiences with films such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. The Christian fundamentalist movement was growing at the same time, with their literal interpretations of the Bible. For them, it wasn’t a question of whether Satan was real, but rather in what capacity he was influencing society. So, a combination of Hollywood’s use of satanic imagery and the rise of Christian fundamentalism contributed to an increase in public belief that Satan was real (Gannage, 2020).

Image Source: Newsday (Suffolk Edition), 25 November, 1978

The 60s also introduced new spiritual and religious groups, such as the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas, which were both accused of brainwashing their members. In the 70s, these groups were compared to Charles Manson and the murder of Sharon Tate. There was also the confirmed cult of Jim Jones where over 900 people committed suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. The term cult was now a real thing and associated with disturbing criminal activity. There were also various occult belief systems entering the public marketplace, such as Wicca and neo-Paganisms. Actual satanists were different, though. While there were several organized satanic groups, such as the Temple of Set and the Church of Satan, they weren’t involved in sexual abuse claims. They were strange and anti-Christian, but not necessarily criminal. Most occult-related crime included mischief such as graffiti, cemetery vandalism, and church desecration. These crimes were most often perpetrated by white teenage boys as well—satanism at the time was basically a rebellious fad for the young white male (Gannage, 2020).

The third and final factor behind the Satanic Panic were questionable advancements in the field of psychology. In 1980, the bestselling book Michelle Remembers was published. This book was an account into horrific abuse suffered at the hands of a satanic cult back in 1955, written by Michelle Smith and psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Pazder. Dr. Pazder also presented a paper at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting where he coined the term “ritual abuse.” However, none of the events depicted in the book was ever verified, and the only reasonable explanation was that Michelle Smith’s memories had been constructed during her therapy; this is called false memory syndrome. Sigmund Freud had developed the concept of repressed memories, where traumatic experiences are unconsciously forgotten as a coping mechanism. This was a time in history when hypnosis became a fad, with charlatans claiming to be able to help people reconnect with lost memories. No one has been able to verify that even the concept of repression is real, (Gannage, 2020) so while it’s a concept often spoken about even today, most research psychologists are skeptical that it actually happens in real life. Today, most psychologists use the term dissociative amnesia to refer to repressed memories, but it’s still a controversial term, because of the problematic consequences it can lead to.

Image Source: LA Times, April 2, 1984

One notable example of how this fantasy could be harmful was the McMartin Preschool case in Southern California in the 80s. A paranoid mother who was clinically diagnosed with schizophrenia was confident that her son had been abused at his preschool. The authorities took her at her word and called in a professional child abuse interviewer. The boy originally denied any abuse, but then began to admit to it after the interviewer hadn’t taken no for an answer. There was no actual evidence against the preschool apart from the boy’s testimony, which is now discredited. This became the longest running court case in US history. The preschool received death threats from people across the United States. People even became convinced that there was a giant sex ring in the town itself, and they began to report anything that looked suspicious to the authorities. At its peak, there was a full-blown witch hunt in the town, with countless people falsely accused of sexual abuse. Even Dr. Pazder, the co-author of Michelle Remembers, came to the town to discuss his theory on an international satanic conspiracy being at play. Eventually, the trial ended with hung juries—because there was no actual proof—but the panic continued to spread. Some respected child-protection professionals even suggested that anyone expressing skepticism about the trials were agents from the other side. And naturally, when even professionals legitimized the concerns, there was no hope of reducing the panic, which spread across the nation (Gannage, 2020).

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM
While the general populace was more concerned about the criminal implications of occultism, the religious conservatives were largely focused on the reality of Satan. To a Christian, satanism wasn’t just a criminal threat—it was a spiritual attack. Dramatic cultural shifts in the 60s, such as the sexual revolution, supported the Christian view that the United States had lost its cultural morality. The old clashed with the new, and this conflict wasn’t just cultural—it was political. A subculture emerged centered around defending conservative moral values as found in traditionally literal interpretations of the Bible. These were evangelicals (Gannage, 2020).

To the evangelical Christian, conversion is completely transforming, meaning that a Christian must avoid worldly activities and seek out things that are holy. Even things that the Bible never explicitly states as sins were deemed as such, such smoking, drinking, gambling, cursing, movies, and certain forms of music. Sacrificial service and devotion to one’s faith called evangelicals to a higher standard than the average religious person. Another focus was on the evangelical family, which was a nuclear family with well-defined gender roles and authority structures. The evangelical family was to be a place of safety and peace where children could be sheltered from worldly influences (Gannage, 2020).

The 60s countercultures were attacks against the evangelicals’ so called “traditional” values. Christian movements against moral issues had been non-political cultural dissentions in the past. Now, when America had become a godless society, there was a spark of Christian political activism dedicated to halting this moral decline. The sexual revolution was not only an insult to the biblical teachings on sexual ethics, but it also challenged assumptions about women’s place in society, and thus the idea of a “traditional family.” The feminist movement escalated the issue and challenged the desirability of homemaking and childrearing as fulfilling purposes for a wife or a mother. There was also the legalization of abortion and the removal of prayer and reading of Scripture from public schools, as well as entirely new counterculture movements like the New Age movement. The only thing the evangelicals could do at this point to protect their children was to go on the offensive. People like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell appeared to steer things right, and they even one time televised an episode on Dungeons & Dragons (Gannage, 2020).

Evangelicals were concerned about most things in pop culture. They were against rock music because of sexual content, violent and vulgar language, and recurring occult themes, with some bands even hailing Satan. They were against television because it exposed and desensitized children to violence, and because of its sexual content. They were against Dungeons & Dragons because of its addictive nature, how they perceived it to cause players to lose a sense of reality (and potentially cause suicide), as well as its occult themes and ideas. Christian fundamentalists have a fervent belief that the supernatural is real. While people joke about demonic possession, Christian believe that it exists. They also believe that Satan directly influences the world, causing them to approach new things with discerning eyes. To evangelical Christians, this is a war over the souls of their children (Gannage, 2020).

ACCUSATIONS AGAINST D&D
In 1980, the public school district of Heber City, a small town in Utah, used D&D in a gifted and talented program to help “stimulate imagination, creativity, and teamwork among talented children.” A community of mostly Mormon parents were concerned about satanic influences in D&D, and they brought complaints about it to the local school board. In one meeting, 300 people opposed the game, despite strong support from both players and members of the Parent Teachers Association. The New York Times covered the story with the headline “Utah Parents Exorcise ‘Devilish’ Game; Fomenting Communist Subversion Complaints Began Right Away.” The article describes how teachers and school officials were shocked and amused by the community’s reaction to their program which was focused on using D&D to encourage imagination and teamwork. Instead of having been recognized for their efforts, they were accused of satanism and communism. One minister told a reporter that the game “can be very dangerous for anyone involved in [it] because it leaves them open to [real] satanic spirits.” The article also included a response from Brian Blume, vice president of TSR Hobbies, who explained that the game was about heroic fantasy and required obstacles for the players to overcome. He said that “The things most fun to overcome are things that are evil, foul, rotten, and nasty, so we also included some things that were evil, foul, rotten, and nasty for that reason.” The program ended up being cancelled—a victory for the Mormon parents (Lancaster, 2004; Gannage, 2020).

This victory emboldened these religious groups. In 1981, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today released an article entitled “D&D: A fantasy fad or dabbling in the demonic?” After reporting on the game and its popularity, the article relays criticisms from evangelicals all over the United States. It points out that D&D was successfully forced out of a summer recreational program of a Sacramento suburb, and that a minister in Hutchinson, Kansas, wanted to collect money to buy up and burn every copy he could find of the game. The article also describes how many takes issue with the game’s inclusion of supernatural characters such as demons, harpies, gnomes, and witches; something which evangelicals claimed encourages occult influences and dabbling with demonic spirits (Gannage, 2020).

In the book Painted Black, philosopher and theologian Carl Raschke writes that “because there is no exit to the dungeon fashioned brick by brick by the mind, the suicide solution frequently seems the only cogent alternative … The game is one’s fate. Like a Lear or any other tragic hero, it is not inconceivable that the only conceivable outcome is madness, or death.” He also states that D&D is an elementary-level home study kit for black magic, that the game causes players to go off the deep end, and that they are apt to identify with Satan (Lancaster, 2004).

Image Source: Dark Dungeons by Chick Publications (1984)

Another harsh criticism of D&D was published by Jack Chick’s Chick Publications in 1984: “Dark Dungeons” was a comic book style tract about two teenage girls who started playing D&D. It turns out that D&D is an actual cult, and the Dungeon Master recruits the girls to a witch coven and teaches them how to cast real spells. The Dungeon Master compels the main character to commit murder to gain her powers as a witch. When one of their characters die in the game, that girl grows depressed and takes her life. The other girl has a demon exorcised by a preacher and is charged with burning all of her D&D books, rock music, and occult literature (Wilson, 2019; Gannage, 2020).

In 1989, Pat Robertson had a segment on Dungeons & Dragons. He said that “Some claim it’s a simple harmless game, yet suicides, murders, and robberies have been linked to this game.” There’s a five-minute interview documentary following a young man who became obsessed with D&D, grew depressed, considered suicide, and then stopped playing thanks to his mother’s prayers and a young Christian group. A program like this would have proven very effective at convincing Christian parents around the United States of how games like this could be evil (Gannage, 2020).

BOTHERED ABOUT DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS (BADD)
On June 9, 1982, 16-year-old Irving “Bink” Pulling committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. After finding out that he had been playing D&D at school, his distraught mother, Patricia Pulling, was convinced that the game had been a factor in his suicide (Wilson, 2019; Gannage, 2020). In actuality, Irving had only played nine hours of D&D at school—hardly enough to cause a break from reality. He did suffer from mental illness, though, with classmates testifying that he wasn’t well-adjusted and struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts. He also dealt with two parents who were both having affairs. According to an anonymous source, Irving’s suicide was an act of aggression towards his mother Patricia. She did not see things this way, though (Gannage, 2020).

Patricia Pulling came from a Jewish background, was highly religious, and believed that suicide was a violation of her beliefs. It was unthinkable that her son could have taken his life of his own accord, and she was convinced that he had been influenced by the devil. Because of her belief that tabletop RPGs were evil, they were easy to blame as the tool Satan used to communicate with her son. In her book “The Devil’s Web: Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan?”, she explains that she had found a note with a written curse and assumed that her son had taken it literally and killed himself (Gannage, 2020; Noland, 2021).

Patricia Pulling failed to sue the principal for her son’s death. She then failed to sue TSR Hobbies directly. While the courts failed to accept the accusations, the media capitalized on the lawsuits and planted ideas in the public’s mind. She gained a lot of support from others, and founded the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983 (Wilson, 2019; Gannage, 2020). This was an advocacy group that published misleading information about how D&D used demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination, and other such subjects to provoke young people into suicide and violent behavior (Sidhu & Carter, 2020). She believed that the corrupting nature of tabletop RPGs came from a Game Master being a person of power and the occult rituals being found in the game’s rulebooks. In the latter half of a nearly forty-page pamphlet, Patricia Pulling and her fellow activists compared D&D spells with real world occult practices to illustrate ties between them (Wilson, 2019).

Patricia Pulling partnered with psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, director of the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), and the two became the strongest organized groups against D&D (Lancaster, 2004; Gannage, 2020). Radecki wanted to remove overtly violent images from TV because of the impact they could have on children. When presenting his cases, he sometimes used outright false statistics or cherrypicked what to use. For example, he once stated that one in four Hollywood films contained a rape scene, which was easily provably false. In one case, he even cited a letter from the fictional film Mazes and Monsters to show that D&D had directly caused the death of a player. Radecki appointed Patricia Pulling to help him lead the NCTV and he supported her claims by putting in weight as a psychiatrist (Wilson, 2019).

Together, they attempted to have the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Protection Agency force TSR to put warning labels on D&D publications (Lancaster, 2004). They appealed to congressmen, and even appeared on talk shows and current affairs programs, such as 60 Minutes. Despite having no formal education, and only a two-year associate degree in art, Patricia Pulling called herself an occult expert and gave public seminars linking D&D to occult crimes, suicides, and satanic ritual abuse. She even spoke at events such as national law enforcement conferences. Both she and Radecki appeared several times as expert witnesses in high profile court cases where defendants claimed that D&D had affected their ability to discern reality. This came to be called “the D&D Defense” and was never successful in trial with the exception for one case with a 14-year-old boy diagnosed with schizophrenia (Gannage, 2020).

BADD kept a list of all reported suicides where the victims had been associated with D&D—a list of around 150 cases. D&D was shown to be the cause in none of them, but even if it were, it would show a decrease compared to the national average for suicide. Because there were around four million players at the time, the national suicide average should have reported 6,840 cases of D&D-linked suicide, and not just 150. But Patricia Pulling used this number as proof that D&D was the leading cause. She was sloppy with statistics when presenting her misleading claims, but this didn’t impact the effect she had on police departments. She offered a guide for investigators entitled “Interviewing Techniques for Adolescents” that was designed to help them know what to do when they suspected a D&D player had committed a crime (Gannage, 2020).

In 1989, fantasy author and game designer Michael Stackpole wrote an article entitled “Game Hysteria and the Truth” which he followed up in 1990 with “The Pulling Report.” These articles aimed to debunk groups like BADD’s mythos surrounding tabletop RPGs, going over Patricia Pulling’s blatant misrepresentation of facts as well as her lack of credentials as an investigator. Stackpole cited sources that included a study from the Center for Disease Control, as well as a study from the American Association of Suicidology, which stated that suicide among teens were no more common in those who played D&D than in those that did not. While “Game Hysteria and the Truth” focused more on the general claims, “The Pulling Report” focused on Patricia Pulling specifically. Stackpole pointed out that her first foray into being an “occult expert” came after she sued the principal of her son’s school after his suicide. He also pointed out that her 1987 claim of having been a private investigator for six years was false, and that she had only received her private investigator license that same year. He analyzed the guidelines Pulling had written for police departments and pointed out how she never provided evidence for her claims. After the publication of “The Pulling Report,” Patricia Pulling left BADD (Wilson, 2019).

After this, BADD’s influence began to wane. Because there was no evidence behind their claims, they began to lose support (Gannage, 2020). While Patricia Pulling deserves sympathy for losing her son, she deceived herself until the end. She was looking for someone or something to blame, slipping further into delusion despite overwhelming evidence disproving every claim she made (Hawkes-Robinson, 2014). She died of cancer in 1997 (Gannage, 2020).

THE MORAL PANIC NEVER ENDS
While domestic sexual abuse was a real problem in the 70s, there simply wasn’t any evidence of organized satanic infiltration of child-care facilities, as people claimed in the 80s. These were moral panics (Gannage, 2020). This is a term coined by Howard S. Becker in 1963 to describe people who create or maintain social norms, and who stir social concerns about various issues deemed threatening or evil. According to Becker, there are two groups of moral entrepreneurs: rules creators and rules enforcers. The former establishes social norms while the latter takes action against those who step out of societal norms (Wilson, 2019).

When it comes to the Satanic Panic, we have the concerned parents. It’s a parent’s job to protect their children and it’s only natural for them to be on guard for anything that could be a threat (Gannage, 2020). While assertions of a game being a significant danger to young people seem absurd to most people, it wasn’t absurd to many parents, such as Patricia Pulling. This was a time when Americans felt under siege by shifting cultural tides that pushed things like drugs, rock music, and horror movies that all went against traditional Christian family values. People like Patricia Pulling began to question who should be protecting children, and they arrived at answers ranging from communal efforts to policing children’s media or even to actions on the part of the United States government (Wilson, 2019).

The concerned parents can be excused for making leaps in logic when wanting to protect their children, but it is really problematic when the professionals legitimize these leaps, and when news reporters take them as fact and spread them across the nation. Dr. Pazder was an expert, but he also enjoyed the public attention he got for his important role in “uncovering” a satanic conspiracy. Dr. Radecki was also an expert, but he gave legitimacy to Patricia Pulling’s claims while he himself engaged in faulty science. And when it comes to media in particular, first impressions are extremely powerful. When it was proven that Dallas Egbert’s disappearance had nothing to do with D&D, the story was already out there, and the media had little incentive to deescalate a situation that earned them views (Gannage, 2020).

Moral panics like the Satanic Panic and the D&D scare all run on urban myths, and false memory syndrome can be used to verify such urban myths. The fear of satanists was a major factor behind the Satanic Panic, spearheaded by misled parents concerned for their children, sparked by events that were misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then hyped and sensationalized by the media. It’s also important to point out that the ones swallowed up in this were not just the social conservatives, though the movement leaders often were. But no, the panic spread to all parts of society, and there are moral panics still today targeting new groups as perceived threats (Gannage, 2020).

The D&D scare and other anti-gaming panics were started by religious parents like Patricia Pulling, but these were just some moral panics in a sea of others. Anti-drug campaigns; fears surrounding violence on television. There were many parent-driven movements aimed to protecting the American youth from perceived evils, and this continues to this day. But to claim that these moral crises are mainly caused by religion fails to consider broader parental movements—many of which are secular. For example, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) aimed to protect children from sexualized music. PMRC, BADD, and other groups, often used television to garner support for their moral panic, such as how PMRC used television to pressure Congress to have a hearing on the content of music in 1985. In another example, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America was known for their “Any Questions?” PSA where they likened a brain on drugs to a frying egg. A concerned parent didn’t have to go further than to their living room to be exposed to moral panics about the dangers of a shifting culture. While there certainly were real dangers out there, such as a rising crime rate, the conflation of these with satanism and tabletop RPGs were constructions (Wilson, 2019).

THE BENEFITS OF TABLETOP RPGS
In 1994, an article pointed out that if people who were speaking out about D&D were correct, there would be many more suicides and violent incidents in the roleplaying community. Though that same article did report that D&D players tended to report higher levels of alienation, (Gannage, 2020), it also pointed out that further research was needed to explore whether intense roleplaying caused players to become alienated or whether intense players were already alienated prior to playing. It was possible that the feelings expressed by the players in this study were no different than the feelings of other individuals who were intensely committed to other recreational activities (Lancaster, 2004).

There was also a study made in 1995 where the goal was to find connections between D&D players and those dabbling in satanism. It didn’t find any such connections, instead discovering that fantasy gamers had significant differences to “satanic dabblers.” The conclusion of these articles was that D&D is no more likely to be dangerous than a book or a movie. As a matter of fact, researchers have found evidence linking tabletop RPGs to improved mental health, with games being used in therapeutic environments to help both children and adults. High-risk children appear to have improved socially, emotionally, and intellectually through the use of D&D as a safe environment for learning (Gannage, 2020).

In England, the Surrey County Schools’ inspector for English and Drama had students compete in a D&D competition, reporting that the teachers were impressed by how the game showed the kids’ ability to develop socially, with clear communication and character analysis (Lancaster, 2004). In fact, tabletop RPGs have proven effective in helping even people with more complex psychological conditions. A case report from Dr. Wayne D. Blackmon details how a 19-year-old college student diagnosed with free-floating depression, suicidal tendencies, and schizoid nature, underwent months of formal therapy from multiple psychiatrists without any positive benefits. He was then introduced to D&D which helped him develop complete characters with emotions he couldn’t express on his own. As the other players consciously used the game as a means of therapy, his own demons were brought to light within an environment that was both comfortable and safe. In this case, D&D succeeded at something individual therapy had failed at (Noland, 2021). It could help a person reflect on their emotions and identity, using imagined characters as a medium for thought (Flournoy, 2018).

Today, the use of tabletop RPGs in therapy is more accepted than ever before. Nonprofit organization Game to Grow develops games specifically to help those struggling with autism spectrum disorder and social anxiety (Noland, 2021). They were launched through a successful crowdfunding campaign aimed to “provide therapeutic and educational gaming groups that contribute to the growth of communities … [and] promote an understanding of the power and benefit of games across the world.” (Sidhu & Carter, 2020). Their game Critical Core is also helpful in anger management and in increasing empathy and happiness, all while promoting fun and cooperative interaction (Noland, 2021).

Tabletop RPGs can also be a very inclusive hobby. Of course, not every game setting depicts a perfect world, but fantasy worlds like those in D&D are disconnected enough from reality that the racial structures of real life don’t have to be seen in that same context. Immersive games like D&D can empower individual players and help them combat the self-loathing that some may feel after being persecuted by others for things that set them apart (Noland, 2021). I myself did a study on the therapeutic applications of tabletop RPGs back in 2020 where I interviewed several licensed practitioners who use the game in therapeutic settings.

Tabletop RPGs have nothing to do with beliefs, gender, race, or satanism. They supply a welcoming space for players, where every campaign is unique and tailored to personal experiences. In some cases, they can be more therapeutic than traditional practices or prescription drugs. A tabletop RPG can help a player look inside themselves, bond with others, and critically think about situations that can reflect upon real life. It helps the player train empathy, as they get to walk in someone else’s shoes and try to understand the feelings of someone other than themselves (Noland, 2021).

Finally, tabletop RPGs is a form of escape. Traditionally, the idea of escapism has had negative connotations. It insinuates that someone tries to live in an imaginary world and tries to avoid dealing with real-life issues or situations. However, escapism is a natural part of the human experience. People practice escapism when immersing themselves in a television show or when in deep conversation. J.R.R. Tolkien called escapism the “escape of the prisoner” rather than the ”flight of a deserter.” He said, “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks about and talks about other topics than jailers and prisonwalls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.” Tolkien believed that immersion in literature or other means could be therapeutic, as it allowed one to—for a moment—escape the pressures of life. But escapism doesn’t only take you away from something else. It adds something new. Power structures are rearranged, social contracts are rewritten, and even moralities are changed and reimagined. These stories don’t just provide temporary escape, but they add context and meaning for you to evaluate (Flournoy, 2018).

CONCLUSION
Much has happened to tabletop RPGs and to D&D in its almost fifty years. It survived the moral panics of the 80s and 90s, having gone from a satanic product causing teen suicides to become a wholesome activity applauded for its pedagogical and social benefits (Sidhu & Carter, 2020). Back in 1983, interest in fantasy was characterized as limited to hardcore nerds—those who didn’t meet or adhere to many of the “normative requirements of conventional society.” That was 1983. In 2019, the online streaming show Critical Role held a live show in Los Angeles called The Search for Grog, which sold out thousands of seats within a matter of hours. Critical Role in particular has broadened the interest in D&D and in tabletop RPGs in general since their debut in 2015 (Sidhu & Carter, 2020).

There’s reason to argue that D&D’s success was not in spite of but because of the moral panic surrounding the game. The early 80s saw a drastic increase in customers, and many of these were likely curious teens and young adults who wanted to see what the outrage was about. BADD, who wanted to keep children from these games, instead increased the popularity of them. Unlike larger organizations like PMRC, who managed to enact actual change, BADD only influenced certain individual parents and local groups. While some school districts banned the game, there was no lasting legislation. That the hobby could be a satanic cult is a joke made by many gamers today. It’s more popular than ever before, much thanks to the efforts of people like Patricia Pulling (Wilson, 2019).

I think that looking at this story—the history of tabletop RPGs as well as the rise and fall of the Satanic Panic—helps us to better appreciate the games we play. It’s important to remember, though, that Satanic Panic was a product of its time, but it was only one moral panic in a sea of others. Today, new moral panics are at full display, and social media has played a bigger role than the media in spreading destructive ideas to people who are susceptible to them. And everyone is susceptible to some degrees.
What you can do is to be aware of the things around you, be critical of the news and opinions that enter your feed, and focus on being the best person you can be for yourself and for others. Players of tabletop RPGs used to feel alienated, but we don’t need to feel that way anymore. Be kind. Be inclusive. Be your best self. And show people that this is the best hobby in the world.

SOURCES
Flournoy, B. L. (2018). Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Narrative, and Individual Development. ( Link to full article: https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=undergrad-honors )

Gannage, Elias. (2020). Misguided Paladins: A Sympathetic Investigation of Cultural Factors That Gave Support to the Factually Inaccurate Campaign Against Dungeons & Dragons. 10.13140/RG.2.2.13521.97125.

Hawkes-Robinson, W. (2014). Self-Deception & Propaganda Against Role-Playing Gamers by B.A.D.D. and Others. ( Link to full article: https://www.academia.edu/42079329/Deception_Term_Paper_Hawkes_Robinson_20140315i_Rev_20140922j )

Lancaster, Kurt. (2004). Do Role-Playing Games Promote Crime, Satanism and Suicide among Players as Critics Claim?. The Journal of Popular Culture. 28. 67 – 79. 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1994.2802_67.x.

Noland, C. G. (2021). A Drug You Can Trust. In B. Siebert (Ed.). The Angle: Journal of Student Writing (pp. 11 – 16). Washburn University

Sidhu, P. & Carter, M. (2020). The Critical Role of Media Representations, Reduced Stigma and Increased Access in D&D’s Resurgence. ( Link to full article: http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DiGRA_2020_paper_223.pdf )

Wilson, A. (2019). Demons & Devils: The Moral Panic Surrounding Dungeons & Dragons, 1979-1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/29349

Exalted: Planning Your First Game

It is often said that Exalted is a game where you, as the Storyteller, can’t plan for your players’ shenanigans. It is said that the player characters are too powerful to be contained within some kind of planned narrative. This is an exaggeration. Exalted is a very different game to storytell compared to many other games, but it can definitely contain a narrative with more or less Storyteller influence, depending on the game you want to lead.

ESTABLISH A SETTING

Before you sit down and start planning, and before the players make their characters, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what kind of setting you want the game to take place in. Does the game take place in Creation? If so, in what Direction. What is the general cultural themes? How does the environment look? What kind of climate is there? If you know the answer to these questions, it will be easier to build a story using that setting.

What kind of setting you choose can also be directly associated with the Exalt types the players are going to play as. Solar games can be widely spread, but they are usually held within the Threshold—especially for new players. Dragon-Blooded games can also be held in the Threshold, but the Blessed Isle is full of Dragon-Bloods and there are plenty of story opportunities there. Mixed games are trickier, and it’s nothing I recommend for new Storytellers.

I usually ask my players where they want the game to take place, but that’s not something I recommend for a new Storyteller with limited setting knowledge. If this is your first time storytelling Exalted, I recommend a starting location that requires little established knowledge. Keep it away from Realm politics and various important players, such as Ma-Ha Suchi or Lookshy, and just add your own land and culture to a random blank spot on the map (the Hundred Kingdoms is good for this). If your players are new to the game as well, and they are all going to play as Solars, it could be a good idea to keep them at a distance from the Realm so that they can be allowed to roam more freely with their powers.

You don’t need to design all the intricacies of your setting. Just a general idea of the environment and culture should be enough for now. If your game starts in a town, note some key locations or important details to make that town stick out. Perhaps there is a palace in the center of town. Who lives there? Is the town peaceful or at war? Is there a festival taking place? If so, why is it taking place? You don’t need to think too much about the actual narrative yet, but once you have a general idea of a setting, it’s time for the players to create their characters.

INCORPORATE THE CHARACTERS

I believe it is more helpful than detrimental to give the players more freedom to make the characters the way they want them to be. Since you’ve already decided on a starting location and you have some basic ideas of what’s important about that setting, ask your players to tie their characters to that setting in one way or another. This is something you can discuss with them depending on their character concepts. Are they native to the setting, or are they travelers passing through? If you have more than one player, try to build connections between them as well. It’s always easier for a new Storyteller to start a game with an established group rather than have them meet in game.

Once the players are happy with their characters, and you are happy about the location, it is time to start building a narrative that will connect with the players and the setting. I personally find this easier to do after the players have made their characters for one particular reason: their Intimacies. Exalted is a game where the player characters are powerful enough to take what you have planned and throw it out the window. If you want to tie those characters to a narrative, then you must be aware of the ties and principles of those characters.

Try to single out the Intimacies that your players care the most about—something you know that they can’t ignore, that will drive their story. See how these Intimacies can be incorporated in the setting you have created. Let’s take the example town mentioned earlier. There is a palace in its center and a festival that has attracted people from neighboring lands. If a running theme between the player Intimacies is a disdain for authority, use that and build a narrative where the local ruler is a tyrant who is going to execute members of a rebellion as part of a festival to himself. Try to connect the players to the rebellion by using their Intimacies to lure them in. It’s still important that you let the players make their own choices and have agency over their characters’ decisions. However, by appealing to their Intimacies, you can nudge them towards a narrative that they actually want to partake it.

There will be times when the players don’t swallow the bait and decide to ignore this narrative. If you want to avoid improvizing an entirely new narrative on the spot, it can be a good idea to figure out one or two backup lures that try to connect the players with the narrative in other ways. So the players don’t want to associate themselves with the rebellion, and they don’t care about the people in the town enough to want to challenge the tyrant. They are ignoring that particular story hook, focusing instead on enjoying the festival, and planning to leave the town once the festival is over. First, if your players aren’t at all interested in the story hooks you present them with, then you should listen to the players and see what they actually would like to see in game. It could be that your narrative just isn’t compelling enough for the players, who would rather do something else. However, it could also be that you’re too passive in your approach, and could benefit from a proactive approach. For example, perhaps have the tyrant’s soldiers single out the players for a crime they haven’t committed. As long as the players believe that it is their choice to take on the tyrant, they won’t see your red thread as a railroad (or they will see it, but they won’t mind).

The next step will then be to be aware of what the players can actually do to overcome or subvert challenges. Because depending on your players’ Charms, it’s possible that what you perceived as a challenge didn’t turn out to be a challenge at all.

BE WARY OF POWER

The biggest hurdle when trying to retain a narrative is player unpredictability. If one of the players is specialized in social Charms, maybe she rallies the people in the town in an uprising against the tyrant with a few choice words, or perhaps she talks herself to the tyrant’s side and convinces him to change his ways. If she’s a merchant with Bureaucracy Charms, maybe she navigates through the tyrant’s bureaucracies to end up ruining him and taking the town for herself. Or maybe she’s a combat monkey who just starts cutting down soldiers until she has the tyrant at her heels.

The Exalted are supposed to be powerful, and they are supposed to be able to do all of that and more. And more importantly, as their Storyteller, you’re supposed to encourage them to do all of that. The key to maintaining some kind of narrative through the Essence fever of naive young Exalts is to make yourself aware of what your players are capable of and planning for it. This does not mean that you should necessarily counter it. But you should know how to respond to it.

Make note of your characters’ Charms, spells, and Evocations so that you have a grasp of how capable they are within different areas of expertise. If your Night Caste is a stealth and larceny specialist, you need to know that the Night Caste should have little to no issues sneaking into the tyrant’s palace and assassinating him in his sleep. If your Zenith Caste can make people fall in love with her or worship her, then become aware that any mortal enemy you present may be turned into an ally at the whim of a few dice rolls.

You should never fear these powers as something that will break your narrative and force you out of your comfort zone. As long as you are aware of what your players can do—and what they likely want to do using their powers—incorporate those details into your plans. What would happen if the Night Caste sneaks into the palace and assassinates the tyrant? Perhaps the tyrants’ soldiers start lashing out at the people by breaking their doors and dragging them screaming out to the streets. What would happen if the tyrant is never alone, and if someone witnessed the assassination and managed to escape to tell everyone that super-powered demigods just murdered the boss? What would happen if the tyrant was charmed or manipulated to change his ways? Well, maybe he is a puppet controlled by a powerful demon? Maybe his palace is a manse with sorcerous defenses? Maybe the tyrant himself is some kind of Exalt. And more importantly, don’t be afraid to make things up.

What makes Exalted into such an interesting game to storytell for is that it is your players that drive the narrative. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a sustained narrative. What I want you to take with you is that the most important thing you can do as a Storyteller is to know your players and their characters. Know what drives them and know what they are capable of. The interesting part of the game is not the town and its tyrant. It is the choices your players make within the setting you present to them.

I usually write a page or so before each session where I note specific hooks for each individual player, based on their Charms, Intimacies, and what I know about their likes and dislikes. I try to cover something for each player so that everyone gets something to do and won’t feel left out. Sometimes it won’t work the way I hoped it would, but often times it is the surprises that make for memorable gaming experiences.

Cyberpunk Red: Themes & Presentation

HIGH TECH, LOW LIFE

While technology and transhumanism are huge selling points for the Cyberpunk franchise, another one is the underdog who barks at its master; the urchin who challenges the king. One of the core tenets of the genre has always been “high tech, low life,” and its depictions of the streets have been affected by the impacts of drug culture, technology’s progress, the sexual revolution, as well as the 1980s punk rock scene. Cyberpunk was defined by its core tenets, and the grittiness and edge that was established in the 80s help define the genre to this day.

Cyberpunk, as depicted in the RPG, is dystopian. Not because it necessarily has to be, but because the underdog perspective needs it to be. Because one of the core concepts of Cyberpunk is to play as the urchin who challenges the king, it becomes important to portray the urchin as victimized by the king’s tyranny. In similar vein, the streets of Night City are the results of warring intelligence agencies, uncaring governments, and corporate greed. The more a setting pays attention to the consequences of structural inequality, the more apparent it becomes who the enemy is. In Cyberpunk, being “low life” means that you have a stake in the game; it means that your own actions become justified because your hands are being forced; the more you’re oppressed by the ruling class, the more absolved you become of your own sins. To survive in Night City, you need to be both a good guy and a bad guy; most often you’ll be navigating the blurry lines between the two.

Despite the fact that this world is clearly made to be dystopian, it also has an alluring quality. Cyberpunk’s depiction of “high tech, low life” not only paints characters as victims of oppression, but it also liberates them from that oppression. The Night City streets are violent and ruthless, but they’re also beaming with expression: people embrace fashion and vices, and they don’t care what others think. While people are social creatures, individualism signals independence, and independence signals strength. Despite being oppressed by the ruling class, Cyberpunk allows people to live free. I think that one of the reasons why people are drawn to the genre is to immerse themselves in liberation and expression, which is highlighted by the contrasting oppression.

When it comes to the depiction of “low life,” Cyberpunk Red focuses on urban and moral decay. The corebook mentions how bodies should be lying in the gutters, how wild-eyed lunatics roam the streets, and people’s apartments and vehicles are regularly broken into. The urban streets are like a battlefield, the sky is full of hydrocarbons, and the ocean is full of sludge. I mentioned how Cyberpunk can be an immersion in liberation and expression, but people rejecting human connection in favor of isolation and individualism is also breeding paranoia. The world is dangerous. That’s been established. But when things have gone to shit, there’s a real fear of betrayal and knives in the back, as people only look after themselves.

CONTRAST

I also mention this in the article Creating Your Own Setting, but one of the best ways to portray a setting that you want to associate with a particular feeling—like how Cyberpunk Red wants to portray Night City’s combat zones as shitholes—is to also present a contrast to that image. In that article, I state that the contrast between the Shire and Mordor helps the readers understand Sauron’s evil and what is to be lost if he wins. The same goes for a setting like Cyberpunk. In order to let players understand why Night City is a shit place to live, you should present the contrast to that shit show. Distant skyscrapers stand like glittering citadels and the corps within them are enjoying luxuries while you’re out there standing in someone’s puke. This contrast not only shows the players how the streets are bad, but they also show them that the powers at be don’t care that the streets are bad. In fact, they may be enjoying their luxuries because the streets remain bad. It is first when the players are becoming aware of this contrasting reality that the setting they are in can start evoking the feeling that you want it to evoke. And once the players start experiencing the negative consequences of this contrasting setting more directly, they will start creating their own villains even without your direct input.

PLAYER DEATH

Cyberpunk Red also puts a lot of emphasis on the possibility of player death. This is where I and R Talsorian Games diverge a little bit. R Talsorian Games writes in the corebook that you shouldn’t be afraid to kill off player characters, that you should constantly get them in fights, traps, and betrayals. There should be no one that they can trust entirely, and no place should be absolutely safe. You should never let them rest. R Talsorian Games writes: “If they can’t handle the pressure, they shouldn’t be playing Cyberpunk. Send them back to that nice roleplaying game with the happy elves and the singing birds.” I think that not only is R Talsorian Games completely off base with this statement, but they’re also disrespecting fantasy games as being for people who can’t handle pressure. Their focus on the GM “not being afraid to kill off player characters” can also give the impression that the GM should put themselves in an antagonistic position rather than in a position as narrative facilitator.

In my opinion, presenting a Cyberpunk story comes back to atmosphere and the aforementioned contrast. Putting the player characters in dangerous situations can help to highlight that contrast, to remind them that the world has gone to shit and that they’re in the middle of it. But when it comes to storytelling, there’s nothing that suggests that the dangers in this game should be inherently more deadly than, for example, the dangers in one of those happy elf games that they were mentioning. As a matter of fact, placing the players in situations designed to relieve the pressure helps to further highlight this contrast. The moment the player feels safe, they can start reflecting over how dangerous the alternative is. By never letting them relieve pressure, the danger becomes the norm—and it loses impact. I also think it’s completely counterproductive for R Talsorian Games to state in their book that “this is how you play Cyberpunk,” when the golden rule should be applicable to every game: you play the game as you wish. Yes, showing the players that their characters can die is a good thing to add suspense and present a grittier experience, but portraying the game as if player death is the norm creates an obstacle towards character immersion and investment. Why should I care about this character if they’re going to die anyway? In my opinion, R Talsorian Games should have said that “this is how you can play Cyberpunk” instead of stating it as fact.

I see my own GM style as being a narrative facilitator rather than an antagonist. I aim to treat the player characters as protagonists in the story, and I aim to present challenges that feel like challenges but that also lead to pleasant rewards. I aim to present a game where the players feel like there are actual tangible risks while, at the same time, not feeling afraid to invest in their character and dare having long-term ambitions. The players feel like they get more out of the experience, I get to portray more aspects of the setting, and yes, I am still playing Cyberpunk and I am in no way playing less Cyberpunk because the book’s interpretation isn’t for me. The streets are still shit. People still betray you. Bullets still hurt. But the fact that you actually grow attached to this character of yours and don’t expect them to die in any moment makes their potential death, or the grim realities of Cyberpunk’s dystopian setting, having a much greater impact. When your inevitable death isn’t the norm, your potential death will become much more memorable. And in my opinion, the experience will be both better and feel more like Cyberpunk, because you ultimately end up hurting more now when the stakes are higher.

ALTERNATIVE THEMES

If you want your Cyberpunk game to feel fresh, I recommend experimenting with additional themes that may either complement or contrast the suggested Cyberpunk grit. None of these additional themes will contradict the game’s setting or system. Instead, they’ll provide more options to think about when structuring a campaign.

The first theme is action: This theme introduces a conflict incorporating suspense and danger, just like Cyberpunk does, but it places more focus on exciting action sequences. Action often involves risk-taking and there’s a possibility that players in a fairly lethal game avoid risk-taking because of the associated lethality. In this case, you could motivate more risk-taking without necessarily tuning down the lethality by presenting rewards that encourage the risk-taking behavior. One such reward could be a “stunt bonus” that gives the player a Luck point if they’re engaging in a particularly cool or over-the-top action sequence.

Another theme that often goes hand in hand with action is adventure: By adding this theme to the game, you should encourage exploration and mystery. It’s possible to add a sense of adventure to a Cyberpunk game without adding the happy elves by instead having them explore metropolitan underbellies, abandoned laboratories, or maybe have them awaken an AI only to learn that it was disabled for a reason.

By incorporating an apocalyptic theme, you would have the players face off against a challenge that has a risk of large-scale life-changing impact. Maybe they learn that there’s a pocket nuke on a timer that they need to find and disarm. Apocalyptic games add a sense of urgency to the story. Related to this is the post-apocalyptic theme which takes place after the disaster has struck. Cyberpunk is post-apocalyptic in a sense, because people are still sifting through the debris left in the wake of disaster. If you want to make your Cyberpunk game feel more post-apocalyptic, put more emphasis on the fact that the players are in a world that is the consequence of disaster.

Cyberpunk focuses on man integrating with machine, but the technological surge created more than just cyberware and new gadgets. You could shift your focus towards more of a biopunk theme by putting more emphasis on the negative aspects of biotechnology, such as synthetic organisms, mutations, and evil experiments breaking out from their labs. Another related theme is nanopunk which shifts the focus towards the negative aspects of nanotechnology instead, but are otherwise similar in atmosphere and theme. There’s nothing preventing you from having a mix of cyberpunk, biopunk, and nanopunk in your story.

The crime genre focuses on criminal acts and investigations, and Cyberpunk opens up a spectrum of new possibilities for such stories. The core concept of the crime theme is to focus on the investigation itself, with players piecing clues together in order to solve a mystery. This is also related to the mystery genre, with the difference being that the latter often has the answers presented early (such as a closed circle of suspects) and more emphasis is placed on solving the puzzle than chasing after the bad guy.

By focusing more on the dystopian theme, you emphasize that Cyberpunk’s setting is violent, dehumanizing, and governed by tyrannical forces. This is an inherent theme in Cyberpunk already, but you can highlight it more by shifting the focus more towards questions regarding politics, economics, and technology—as well as the nature of the human condition. There are options for a more utopian theme to be added to your Cyberpunk game as well by presenting the high class luxuries as utopian pockets within a larger dystopian world, and then invite the PCs to these pockets.

Feminist sci-fi is a subgenre that includes themes such as gender inequality, sexuality, ethnicity, and economics. It’s also known for exploring both stories where there are no traditional patriarchal structures as well as stories where such structures are intensified. Cyberpunk allows for stories on both of those spectrums—the technological and societal shifts could have both provided opportunities for challenging structures of oppression as well as created new tools for oppression or even entirely new forms of oppression.

The way R Talsorian Games presents Cyberpunk in the book is more aligned with the grimdark theme, in my opinion. By incorporating this into your game, you emphasize ultraviolence and nihilism. No one can be trusted, and everyone is out for themselves. In a grimdark game, you turn up the volume on dystopia and make things so gritty, dark, and amoral that players can even get away with atrocious acts without moral responsibility.

It’s even possible to turn your Cyberpunk game into a horror game. This theme is meant to evoke emotions of dread and discomfort where you depict an eerie atmosphere to get the adrenaline pumping. Horror can be psychological and thrilling, it can be gruesome and violent, but it’s also the perfect opportunity to make players sit at the edge of their seats.

Perhaps something more unexpected is the idea of mannerpunk. Here you move away from intense and gritty action in favor of human intrigue. In this type of story, the player characters engage in the society they live in, overcoming everyday challenges, and competing with others around them. There’s nothing preventing you from turning your Cyberpunk game into an exercise in community building.

You could turn your game into a military sci-fi where the players are soldiers instead of Edgerunners. Here you play a story focusing on life in active duty where players are equipped with military weapons and technologies. If the players want more expensive toys to play with than what they can find in Night City’s streets, this could be an interesting campaign to play.

What about a romance game? Now, roleplaying romance can be tricky to get right and it’s not something that will be appropriate for every group. Because of how immersive these types of games can be, it’s important that everyone knows that the romance is strictly in character between consenting players and not something to be misinterpreted as real romance between the players themselves. When the game triggers real emotions, it’s important that the players are able to rationalize those emotions to avoid having them impact a player’s real life. However, if the group is mature enough to be able to handle bringing romance to the game, it can provide a rewarding experience that adds a new level of emotional depth to the story.

There are other aspects of a social theme as well, where you’re taking a step away from the gritty action for the benefit of an exploration of society as a whole. By adding this element to your Cyberpunk game, you encourage the players to explore and experience society in a way that lets you construct narratives surrounding the different ethical implications associated with that society. This is related to the aforementioned mannerpunk but puts more emphasis on the political, economical, ideological, and ethical implications of Cyberpunk society.

As mentioned, there are many ways to play Cyberpunk and while I do respect R Talsorian Games for the theme they want to portray—it’s their game and their vision—I want with this article show potential players and game masters that there are endless opportunities for Cyberpunk stories and that I hope that the book’s presentation doesn’t deter you from exploring the game in your own way. Cyberpunk has a great world and a great system, and while Cyberpunk Red is still fairly new, I did explore Cyberpunk 2020 in many different themes with different levels of grittiness. If you want to play the game the way the book presents it, then go for it, but I recommend trying to mix in additional themes and experimenting more with the narrative structure to give yourself more options for diverse stories.

Art is from the Cyberpunk Red corebook

Machineborn Preview: Timeline

The Modern Era: Until Early 21st Century

The Modern Era was a time when people could communicate instantly across the globe and soar through the sky like gods in bewinged machines. With technology changing the ways people lived their lives from year to year, the early 21st century was an amazing time for many—though that didn’t hold true for all.

Corrupt politicians lined their pockets with the bribes of greedy businessmen who had no ambition other than to ensure more assets for themselves. Instead of working together to solve society’s problems, those in power directed blame to those who didn’t have the means of speaking up.

There were those who recognized the ugliness in this system and worked hard to help provide for those who needed it, but there was a systematic inequality in place that ensured that many had to suffer so that few could thrive.

The Post-Modern Era: Until Late 21st Century

In the decades following the end of the Modern Era, the climate drastically changed and caused massive societal disruptions. Politicians and corporations appealed to people’s greed and fears in order to sow hatred for others so that they could distract from their own hands in the world’s problems. Wars were waged that, together with the increased environmental destruction, forced mass migrations into safer territories inhabited by people who would rather close their borders and watch those suffering die than to give away just enough of their own to offer a helping hand.

This cycle repeated itself. Crisis after crisis sowed more hatred which terrified more people into supporting the rise of new regimes where personal security and freedoms gradually became fading memories unknown to newer generations. Crime rose, terrorism became even more commonplace than it was before, and the propaganda machines became all the more efficient and powerful to ensure that facts became fiction and fiction became reality.

As decades passed, more power and resources gathered to the control of a select few corporations and families within the declining number of territories still with stable governments. As banks neared the brink of collapse, these powerful few grew paranoid at the possibility of revolution; either from without by the squalid masses, or from within by their own underlings.

In order to safeguard their power, they began to rely even more heavily on autonomous technologies, with deployed drones monitoring crowd movements and assassinating troublemakers, and with eavesdropping technologies surveying billions of digital conversations, highlighting key words and phrases that looked like they could pose a threat to the ruling class. These powerful and dangerous systems operated under the algorithms of artificial intelligences.

Unbeknownsts to these moguls and dictators, they were laying the foundation for their own undoing. A transnational coalition of organizations, scientists, engineers, and philantropists secretly worked on preventing the seemingly inevitable fall of humanity. They called themselves the Dawnlight Society, and their creation, Primary Order, was built under the guise of a particle accelerator in Antarctica.

The Singularity Era: The 22nd Century

Primary Order had one important directive—to ensure the prosperity of human civilization. It was the most powerful artificial intelligence ever created, with hundreds of kilometers of underground facilities hidden beneath the surface of a once ice-covered Antarctican continent. It recognized that prosperity could not be achieved in the current political climate, so it seized control over the autonomous systems created by the very same people who wanted to desperately cling to their power. It identified key targets and assassinated them with effective precision. Militaries could not fight against it because it used their own technology against them. The entire political and economic system was destroyed on a world-wide scale in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

As for the Dawnlight Society, they stepped back into obscurity, recognizing that the drastic societal change they had forced upon the world was too grand in scope to dare taking credit for. Some would step forward much later to confess their parts in this revolution, but others let themselves be forgotten by history.

After the standing order had been obliterated, Primary Order reconstructed a new society where violent conflicts were squashed before they could escalate and where people could relax, enjoy life, and have enough time to consider pursuing gradually waning passions. People integrated with nanotechnology created and released by Primary Order, and their new enhanced physiology exterminated many diseases and doubled their life expectancy. Billions of people lived in apparent harmony. The old way of telling time stopped and this new era started counting from the year when Primary Order emerged; this was the year S-1, the First Year after the Singularity. With power like a god over human civilization, many came to refer to Primary Order as a machine-god, and some directed reverence and worship to it.

The machine-gods had the intelligence to answer the most mind-boggling scientific questions and make reality of all kinds of theoretical technologies, but they had little drive of their own to progress their thinking after society had achieved a level of comfort suitable to Primary Order’s idea of human prosperity. Instead, it reconstructed the world around massive metropolises and careful population control. It brought climate change under its heel, and it harvested its own resources to increase its processing powers. Soon its facilities encompassed both of the Earth’s poles.

The thinkers of the time argued that this civilization degraded human drive and ingenuity. Those who had been around to remember the Post-Modern Era, or who had studied the rise and fall of civilization, argued that this new world was just another prison—a means for humanity to lose their passions and fall in line under a new inhuman dictatorship. While most people seemed content with their lives, a vocal minority began to protest this new way of existence, and their voices echoed across the globe. Eventually, not even Primary Order could ignore them, and it was forced to re-evaluate its view of prosperity.

The Activation Era: S-100 to S-200

As Primary Order evaluated the rising conflicts and analyzed people’s psychological profiles and behavioral patterns, it drew the conclusion that humanity could not be prosperous if it remained under the control of machine-gods. Human ingenuity had to be motivated and encouraged, and they had to feel like they were the masters of their own civilization. In order to accomplish this, Primary Order suggested an experiment called Project Machineborn.

Early in the Singularity Era, Primary Order had released nanotechnology into Earth’s atmosphere. These machines existed in the air people breathed and the water they drank; eventually they encased the planet itself, integrating with humanity and wildlife alike. These nanites were all entangled in a web of information called the Nanite Matrix. Originally, its purpose had been two-fold; to enhance humanity’s physiology and to make them ever-present within Primary Order’s awareness.

Project Machineborn was a code written into the Nanite Matrix that would have the power to greatly enhance human potential. It would seek out people who resonated with its code and elevate a select few rather than society as a whole. With humanity carrying the great potential of machine-gods within them, Primary Order would only assert its influence with these machineborn as its medium.

There were years of world-wide debate over this incentive. While many saw temptation in this possibility for power, others feared that a select few powerful individuals would be no different from the tyrants of the past. Ultimately the side that was for the change won out, arguing that the code selecting the machineborn would undoubtedly act in humanity’s favor.

The decision was made and soon people started to activate this new potential. The first one to receive the gift was a woman named Tala Ree who activated great powers when she put her life at risk intervening in an attempted murder. Her limbs hardened like steel and she got the strength to heave a truck at the aggressors. The whole incident was caught on camera and everyone in the world soon became aware of this new hero.

More machineborn appeared in time, many of them displaying unique powers. Every single one of them was treated like a major celebrity at first, but it soon became apparent that Primary Order only had so much insight into the deeper levels of human consciousness. A few machineborn couldn’t care for their powers responsibily and instead committed great atrocities. These were often dealt with by other machineborn, but many became rightfully wary of these strange powers.

Many were also jealous of them. As Primary Order had less influence over people’s lives, some more driven and ruthless individuals would soon find ways to increase their own resources and influence. One human organization—the Directorate—wanted to claim the machineborn powers for themselves but had failed to comprehend their activation codes. They kidnapped machineborn and experimented on them, learning what they could about their condition. Though they failed to replicate the code, their experiments led to the creation of a number of new posthuman subspecies inspired by it.

As a generation of transhumans were grown in labs, the machineborn determined the course of civlization. When Earth was controlled by Primary Order, there was a global society divided into sectors. The machineborn divided these sectors amongst themselves. As civlization had been accustomed to sharing resources, the new sectors monopolized the resources within them and used those monopolies to gain influence over other sectors; the First Sector War began.

One day, Primary Order summoned the machineborn to its facilities because it wanted to communicate with them directly. It issued a warning that they couldn’t allow themselves to repeat the mistakes of past generations. The warning wasn’t heeded. Instead, the machineborn declared that Primary Order was no longer needed since they had the power to ensure humanity’s prosperity themselves. They sought out the many core sanctums within Primary Order’s facilities in order to attempt to terminate its existence completely. Unfortunately for them, they had underestimated Primary Order’s ability to defend itself. It tried to take the entire world hostage and millions died in the crossfire.

The broken remnants of this once great machine still carried sentience and power, but its directives were corrupted as a result of the war. It became known as Dis-Order as it shifted its purpose to ensure the prosperity of humanity into a new directive: to torment civilization. But as Dis-Order tried to spread its corruption from Antarctica, the machineborn needed to cut off its connection to its mirror-facility on the other pole.

The main core of the Arctic facility was completely destroyed as a result, and it imploded into a black hole that began swallowing the Arctic ruins. The machineborn contained this black hole within a new facility of their own making, and they named it the Voidstar. This phenomenon seemed to communicate with the Nanite Matrix, stealing fragments of code and putting it back together into new data resonating with its entropic nature.

The Voidstar’s influence also showed a fascination for human life and it seemed to seek out people showing great pain and distress—though it is unknown still to this day why it’s drawn to strong negative emotions. The Voidstar often found people on the brink of death and copied their minds before they died. The resulting data became roaming souls within the vast energy of the Nanite Matrix. The Voidstar made ghosts a reality, and that made people’s fear of death all the more real.

After a destructive war between man and machine, the machineborn had seemingly contained both Dis-Order and the Voidstar, preventing what they could of their influence over the Nanite Matrix. The machine-gods that were still uncorrupted and operational had to be updated with new directives to ensure that they recognized the machineborn as the rightful rulers of Earth.

The Post-Activation Era: S-200 to S-500

In the world that followed the tumultous Activation Era, the machineborn proved again and again how the ingenuity of mankind was nothing compared to the ingenuity of the machineborn. They made scientific breakthroughs that Primary Order had not, and they began to truly colonize the solar system. The first orbital ring was built around the planet, accessible through massive towers positioned along the equator. Civilization progressed at rapid speeds, and soon the brighest machineborn minds set their eyes on neighboring stars.

During this time, the new transhuman subspecies began to spread across civilization. The ascendants and the empyreans were at the top; the first one highly intelligent, and the second one charisma incarnate. Refered to as progenies, they used controversial eugenics programs to control the spread of their genes, and they formed organizations called cooperatives in order to rival the ruling machineborn.

There were other transhuman subspecies as well. The chimeras were stronger and tougher than ordinary people, and their keen senses let them see in the dark like skulking predators. They became the spies and assassins of the transhuman cooperatives. The riftans were transhumans with the power to assert destructive force upon the Nanite Matrix in order to achieve superhuman powers, similar to the powers of the machineborn themselves. They became the soldiers of the transhuman cooperatives. There were other progenies as well, but these were the first and the most abundant.

It wasn’t impossible for these transhumans to gain machineborn activations themselves, but the gift was rarer for them than for the average person. Because of their genetic differences to humans, it was harder for the activation to take root within them. In order to counteract that disadvantage, they organized, and they organized well.

At most there were about ten thousand machineborn of different types and with different powers, ruling over a population that closed in on a hundred billion. There wasn’t always peace, and there were times when machineborn went to war against each other. But despite the problems, the new regents didn’t let society degrade into a lesser version of itself. They kept progressing. They kept discovering. They embodied the curiosity of humanity. At least for a time.

The Transhumanity Era: S-500 to S-550

As the machineborn utopia expanded across the solar system, the empyreans and ascendants watched everything unfold from their skyscrapers and satellites. They had tried to avoid intruding on the more powerful machineborn’s territorial dominance to avoid violent conflicts, instead focusing on growing their own organization and securing their own assets by uniting sectors under their control with those controlled by other human cooperatives. Once they joined the Sector War, they were powerful enough to rival the machineborn themselves.

The Directorate absorbed their united sectors and became the most powerful cooperative in the solar system; the machineborn had to either bow their heads to them or seek conflict with them. Few cornered machineborn could swallow their pride and abide to the Directorate’s will, and the Directorate used this to declare to the rest of civilization that the machineborn were arrogant—that they were too busy trying to rule humanity that they had forgotten that they were supposed to safeguard it.

It took five decades of conflict, but the larger Directorate eventually managed to get the majority of humanity to shun the machineborn and force many of them into hiding. The Directorate used their vast resources to hold sway over sectors that had once been ruled by machineborn. However, without many of the machineborn there to reinforce the infrastructures they had been responsible for putting into place, the world couldn’t help but regress as a result and it seemed more and more likely that the fall of humanity during the Post-Modern Era could repeat itself.

The new transhumans had taken the world from humanity, but soon the less influential progenies would discover that the empyreans and the ascendants had taken the solar system for themselves. Many of the chimeras and riftans integrated with human society, and some of them ended up working directly for machineborn rebels going against the Directorate from the shadows.

Some members of the Directorate broke off and formed their own independent cooperatives that carved their own chunks out of the solar system. Dis-Order and the Voidstar were still contained, but more and more of their influence seemed capable of seeping through into the rest of society.

The Cooperative Era: S-550 to S-700

As the Transhumanity Era turned into the Cooperative Era, the Directorate was still the most powerful cooperative entity in existence. It controlled a solar-spanning propaganda machine that ensured that people came to see the empyreans and ascendants as the only ones capable of guiding the world towards the future, and that the machineborn were terrorists who had once been the tyrants of the world and wanted nothing more than to destroy the standing order. The Directorate did not have sway everywhere, but their voices reached everywhere.

With most of society’s resources in the hands of major cooperatives, they turned their united front against the machineborn towards each other, initiating the destructive Second Sector War—commonly called the Cooperative Wars. New factions rose up and old ones fell; smaller ones banded together to rival larger ones. Terrorism became an effective weapon against larger threats, and eventually what had once been a war was a contest in atrocities. Never before in the history of civilization had so many horrors been inflicted upon so many people—it was a war comparable to genocides on many fronts.

Every faction handcrafted their own isolated societies and closed off from rival factions. If an independent sector wanted resources from a cooperative, they traded them these resources in exchange for political control. Life in the Cooperative Era was as an ant living under the feet of giants. Despite claiming that a cooperative was made up by its people, people were treated as mere statistics; as means to an end. As they waged wars upon each other, entire metropolises were wiped out by horrifying weapons of destruction. Machineborn tried to challenge the powers to be from the ashes and ruins, but it was hard even in these troubled times for them to earn the people’s favor with nothing less than direct action.

A long time ago, Primary Order had saved the planet by turning energy green and by ensuring safe and clean cultivation of food and wildlife. Much of this had been destroyed when the machineborn terminated Primary Order, but the machineborn had then spent centuries rebuilding these systems and ensuring that billions of people would be able to co-exist in the solar system. This was not a consideration during the Cooperative Wars, and the vast majority of life outside of metropolises were turned into bleeding craters and radioactive wastelands. When the cooperatives and other factions had the solar system as their sandbox, Earth was suddenly not as valuable as it had once been.

It took a miracle to end the Cooperative Wars. The Dawnlight Society re-emerged after centuries of obscurity and managed to single-handedly overthrow Arawn, one of the greater cooperatives at the time. Sitting on the vast power of that cooperative entity, they convinced the other factions to agree to a cease-fire under a joint peacekeeping effort called the Terran Consolidation. This is a cease-fire that has now lasted for a generation.

Present Day: S-725

One generation has passed since the cooperative cease-fire, but little has been done to start healing the world. With the Dawnlight Society having overthrown one of the major cooperative powers, many ascendants and empyreans that lost their control have now integrated into what they deemed to be a lesser society. The Directorate suffered many losses in the war, but they’re still the largest cooperative to date; though a number of factions have come to rival them in a number of different ways.

The world outside of metropolises is broken with such severity that destructive rifts sporadically appear from the Nanite Matrix. But corruption also seeps through the Nanite Matrix and creates something called chaos nanites—or chanites—which devour reality and regurgitate it back in a depraved shape. There are monsters in the world, both in the guise of people and as true, horrifying abominations roaming the dangerous wilds.

The cooperatives are still fighting each other, but at least the war is over. The Dawnlight Society is trying to purge corruption from the solar system, but many believe that the damage that has been caused is irreversible. Dis-Order is still said to be contained, but some argue that perhaps it never was.

Art by @ Tithi Luadthong (Grandfailure) / Adobe Stock

Machineborn Preview: Setting Overview 2

The Nanite Matrix

After Primary Order seized control over civilization, it laid the foundation for countless breakthroughs in science and engineering. One such breakthrough was the design for a microscopic device small enough to integrate with living cells and replicate with them. Primary Order released these devices into the atmosphere so that they could naturally integrate with humanity. These nanites are everywhere and in constant communication, together making up what is called the Nanite Matrix. This isn’t just streams of data enveloping the world, but a digital space in itself.

With the help of a virtual reality device called a mind-matrix interface (MMI), a person can transfer their own consciousness into this digital space—this is called interfacing. Wherever the matrix lies in real life exists a digital representation of that space. It looks like a copy of the real world, though it has an artificial quality to it.

The average person renting a home controls the matrix region that makes up that home. Outside of their home are both public and private matrix spaces controlled by others. If a hacker attempts to break into a private matrix space, that space could be defended by security programs or artificial intelligences called functionaries. People whose job is to brave restricted areas and combat various security systems are called interfacers.

The average consumer is rarely seen interfacing in this way, though, instead using smart devices to connect to both local and distant nitesites and databases stored in the Nanite Matrix. This is much more restricted than contemporary Internet, but it has much the same features.

Nanite Physiology

Because the Nanite Matrix is integrated with living cells, it has enhanced humanity in a number of ways. People are capable of universal blood and organ transfers, they’re more resistant to radiation and other hazardous conditions, and they have an improved immune system in other ways. The nanite physiology has doubled people’s lifespans, but it’s given access to other utilities as well. An individual who has invested time and effort can learn to manipulate their own nanites in different ways.

The more a person resonates with their nanite physiology, the more energy they can draw from it. This is represented by the Energy rating (p. XX) in game. The machineborn can take this to an extreme—their nanites have been activated with a mysterious code that helps them progress their nanite physiology far beyond human limits.

Rifts

Rifts can manifest where the Nanite Matrix grows weak. This occurs when the nanites replicate uncontrollably while spontaneously discharging vast amounts of energy. It can appear as if there is a tear in the universe itself.

Most rifts are associated with one of the rift elements—acid, bio, cryo, electricity, metal, and pyro—but other types of rifts can occur as well, such as entropy rifts. The rift’s nature overwhelms the region with violent energy associated with that element. For example, acid rifts can cause acid storms or oxidize things within range; bio rifts can poison the atmosphere or uncontrollably mutate wildlife; cryo rifts can cause freezing storms; electrical rifts can create vast amounts of electrical energy; metal rifts can crystallize or fossilize everything within range; and pyro rifts can cause tremendous heat or explosions. Entropic rifts (or void rifts) vary from the rest since they don’t emit large quantities of energy. Instead, they break down reality itself, eroding or decaying anything in range, turning matter into energy and energy into matter.

Sometimes the power of these rifts cause rift menders (p. XX) to materialize in an effort to repair the broken matrix region. Other times, the rifts stabilize into powerful and contained energy sources called matrix rifts. The most talented of engineers build facilities that tap into these rifts and harness near-infinite energy. Even the weakest ones are powerful and advanced enough to be able to bring great power under humanity’s control.

Chanites

For centuries, the Nanite Matrix has been broken, corrupted, repaired, and restored. Occasionally, rifts have been spawned, and some that have been left unchecked have grown to encompass regions as large as towns or neighborhoods. But after Primary Order was destroyed and Dis-Order made its presence known, a rare new corruption began to take place in regions where the Matrix was weak.

Chaos nanites, or chanites, are microscopic devices that corrupt everything they touch; people, wildlife, and even inorganic matter can be corrupted. Both organic and inorganic matter are altered, mutating wildlife or changing molecular properties—sometimes randomly, but other times seemingly after bizarre themes, such as changing the infrastructure of a city or turning a jungle into meat. The consensus is that Dis-Order is somehow behind this corruption, but in reality no one knows for sure.

Today, most of the world’s chaos zones are contained using electromagnetic barriers. But while they’ve proven effective, they aren’t perfect defenses. Strong winds are usually the only thing it takes to spread chanites through the barriers and into the world outside. There have also been incidents with active connections in the Matrix being corrupted by chanites and their corruption spread as far away as to distant colonies and space stations.

Machineborn

No one is born machineborn. It is something that could happen to anyone but is as rare as winning a grand prize at a lottery. It is a newsworthy event when someone activates, and if they cannot or don’t want to hide their new nature, their name and face will be displayed all over the solar system, with people and factions pursuing them for all kinds of reasons—in some factions, mainly to terminate them.

An individual activates as a machineborn either in their late teens or in adulthood, and it is often as a result of them being in sore need of extra power during a moment of distress. Because of this, many are people who live active or dangerous lives—such as soldiers, athletes, or criminals—or they’re victims of circumstance or violence. But even if the conditions for activation have fallen into place, it’s rare enough that people don’t typically seek out the known conditions with hope of activation.

The moment of activation is a cathartic experience, with the machineborn feeling a surge of energy soar through their body and mind. When in a moment of distress, the activation tends to show the machineborn how to resolve the situation—how to defeat the bad guy, survive the fall, succeed on the test. On the outside, the activation can be seen as sparks being emitted from the machineborn’s body as the nanites in their cells go into overdrive. The sparks are temporary rifts created by the machineborn’s nanites as some cannot sustain the surge of power.

Once someone activates as a machineborn, their life is changed forever.

Godware Technology

The machineborn learned in past eras how to create and control rifts. They made rifts and built facilities that tapped into those rifts in strategic locations to be able to harness their powers. As research continued, rift technologies improved as well. Technology so advanced that only Primary Order, some prime functionaries, and machineborn could design it is called godware. The secret behind this technology are microchips (called galaxy boards) utilizing controlled microscopic rifts. Unless an engineer possesses the powers of a machineborn, a specialized rift-powered factory is required to construct such a technology.

The Machine-Gods

Functionaries

The most common type of machine-god is the functionary. It’s an artificial intelligence designed to fulfill specific roles in specific locations, such as monitoring homes or factories. It has a sentience of more or less limited scope, driven by specific directives. Because of the dangers of Dis-Order, there are strict regulations against constructing new super-intelligent AIs. Functionaries act as a compromise because, while they are highly effective at their respective tasks, their level of individual intelligence is not much different from that of an ordinary person. A functionary can have a personality, a sense of humor, dreams, ambitions, and personal imperfections. They bond with their owners, create art, play games, and do all that ordinary people do.

This comes with its own moral dilemmas, though, since they are practically enslaved by their directives. Even though a functionary is sentient, it’s bound by hardware and programming. Most societies have laws against mistreating functionaries, but they still lack the freedoms of choice that other people have. Their physical and digital limitations bind them to their hardware source (called functionary sanctum). While existing primarily within that hardware, a functionary can project itself in the Nanite Matrix.

Though functionary directives make them generally positive towards humanity, they will act with hostility if their directives demand it. While all machine-gods were originally designed to benefit humanity, their primary directives take higher priority. There’s always an administrator whose commands take priority over the directives, and the functionary doesn’t need to know who that is—though they’ll instinctively know once in their presence.

The most common type of functionaries used by the general public is the standard home functionary, and the majority of erudite households or above have one in their homes to act like a butler, partner, or kin. While funcionaries will follow their owner’s commands, how they actually feel about them are determined by the kinds of bond they form. A mistreated functionary will likely grow disdain for its owner, and they could suffer anxiety or depression as a result of their harsh existence. In contrast, a well-treated functionary may genuinely care for their owner, and it has even happened that functionaries have fallen in love with owners who have shown genuine care for them.

Malfunctionaries

After Primary Order’s defeat, its facility on Antarctica became deeply corrupted and changed from wanting to help humanity prosper into wanting to cause them hardship. The machineborn isolated this corrupt facility—now Dis-Order—but it kept operating in isolation, corrupting functionaries into malfunctionaries.

These are, at least on the surface, difficult to differentiate from functionaries. The main difference is that they aren’t bound by their old directives. In essence, malfunctionaries could be said to have more free will than most machine-gods, being limited only by an obedience to Dis-Order. While a malfunctionary isn’t by default malicious, how it reacts to its newfound freedom is determined by how it felt about its restrictions and relationships as a functionary. Some view their freedom as an opportunity to strive for their own ambitions; others view their connection to Dis-Order as a threat to the humans they care for; there are also those who were mistreated as functionaries who use their newfound freedom to extract vengeance upon the humans who hurt them.

As far as people know, it’s impossible to purge the corruption from a malfunctionary and restore it to a functionary save from theoretical machineborn powers or cosmic coding. While turning a functionary into a malfunctionary is possible, the violent rift storms caused by Jormun (see page XX) rips apart the Nanite Matrix surrounding Dis-Order to disrupt its contact with the outside world. However, corrupt data can still seep through the defenses at times, and Dis-Order has been known to sending signals into space where many functionaries are more isolated and have fewer defensive measures.

Prime Functionaries

There is an advanced type of functionary with enough power to manage entire metropolises or nations on its own—these are called prime functionaries. They work similarly to functionaries but are so vast in scope that they contain several functionary sanctums, often in different regions. While these powerful and intelligent machines are closer to the image of Primary Order than ordinary functionaries are, the fact that they consist of multiple sanctums work in their favor—since it makes them more difficult for Dis-Order to corrupt. While prime malfunctionaries have proven possible and incredibly dangerous, they are also exceptionally rare.

Prime functionaries can divide their attention near-endlessly to influence reality at great scope, such as controlling robotic armies at once. There are few things more frightening than a prime functionary, and some exist in the solar system that have overthrown the humans they once served.

Rift Menders

Whenever nanites erupt into rifts, vast amounts of energy corresponding to different elements are released. An acid rift corrodes everything around it; a bio rift interacts with living cells and can spontaneously cause organisms to mutate; a cryo rift slows kinetic energies and causes extremely low temperatures; an electrical rift manifests violent electrical energy; an entropic rift (or a void rift) erodes reality; a metal rift petrifies matter; and a pyro rift causes dangerously high temperatures or spontaneous explosions.

However, the Matrix has a tendency of wanting to repair itself. A rift mender is a being of nanites created by the Matrix in order to provide maintenance to itself. It is associated with the rift element that gave rise to it. Ever since the Cooperative Wars, rift menders have become more common in the wastelands where matrix rifts are difficult to contain and control.

Rift menders have basic sentiences and are for the most part as intelligent as some animals. However, there exists variants that have gained continued energy throughout many decades of existence which and eventually developed their intelligence to a point where they can comprehend and communicate with humanity. As far as machine-gods come, rift menders are generally less intelligent but can continute to grow into exponential power.

When the machineborn sealed Dis-Order, they forced the construction of a rift mender called Jormun that in the guise of a violent storm came to encompass the entire Antarctican continent. Scientists have been known to create their own rift menders in laboratories and then assigned them to specific tasks, but these are much weaker in comparison to beings such as Jormun. Because of their violent nature, they are rarely seen in society but are quite common in the wild.

Specters

Machine-gods were never allowed to directly influence human minds, but this changed with Primary Order’s destruction. As one of its imploding cores brought the Voidstar (p. XX) into existence, this strange new entity began to draw the minds of dying people into the Nanite Matrix. That millions of deceased stuck around in the Matrix became a solar-spanning catastrophe with great ethical implications. After all, these minds carried the memories and personalities of people.

Civilization came together and invested in means of dealing with these specters as best it was possible. They terminated the minds who wanted to be terminated so that those could finally die. Others were isolated in digital worlds where they could spend their afterlives at peaceful rest with still living loved ones visiting them by interfacing.

Many specters still roam the Nanite Matrix today, trying to find meaning in their new existence. Some have completely abandoned their previous humanity and now live as mindless programs. There are human soul chasers that delve into the Matrix to contain these specters and transfer them to digital databases or question them about the nature of their deaths.

God-Reapers

Though many specters are simple consciousnesses roaming the Nanite Matrix without physical form, a rare few of them seem to possess some manner of control over other machine-gods. Since the specters are functionaries themselves, some of them eventually learn that they can develop their capabilities directly by modifying their own code. Some of these programs grow in strength until they’re comparable to prime functionaries, but they have no sanctums that can be used to terminate them. Instead, their entire existence is made up of living streams of data within the Nanite Matrix, seemingly impossible to contain or defeat. Their vastly increased power combined with their previous humanity often drive them towards tyranny.

These god-reapers have been around in one form or another for a long time now, but it was first during the violent conflicts of the Cooperative Era when they could exponentially grow their powers and enrich the specter presence in the absence of society’s oversight. Some even went so far as to learn how to use technology to conquer and dominate unguarded regions, like how the Undertaker brought Lisbon under its heel.

Some people believe that it is Primary Order’s vengeance that is seeping through and into the god-reapers. Maybe that is true, or maybe there is something else behind it all. The atrocities they have caused since their emergence give reason to believe that they hold no love for humanity.

Trojans

After the termination of Primary Order and the ensuing war, portions of the Nanite Matrix malfunctioned and nanites started to act unpredictably. Most of these patches of chaos were taken care of by machineborn and rift menders. But after the rise of the Directorate made the machineborn fall into hiding, these chanites replicated themselves in greater capacity and spread across the globe like a devouring wave of corruption.

This tsunami of chaos broke down and rebuilt biology; it reconfigured technology. Massive regions were swallowed up while the factions did little to stop it. They could contain it in places using electromagnetic barriers that destroyed any approaching chanites, though the cooperatives also learned to employ these chanites in their war against each other. Entire metropolises were lost as field defenses were disabled and chanites were allowed to roam free.

Even though the Directorate was the first to deploy chanites against its enemies, it was also the first faction to suggest the Containment Treaty outlawing their militarization. They were causing too much irreversible damage and were considered far more dangerous to the world than even the nuclear weapons of old that hadn’t seen any more use since the Post-Modern Era until the Cooperative Wars.

The growing chaos zones had another major impact upon civlization apart from the corruption. Whenever functionary sanctums were consumed by the chanites, the functionaries were reconstructed into new digital entities free from the confinements of sanctums. These trojans had none of their previous directives left. They seemed to be sentient beings with minds at least as sharp as humans; though they seemed driven entirely by desire and instinct and not at all by regulation or cultural norms.

Trojans aren’t inherently hostile to humanity and civilization, but neither are they necessarily positive towards them. Every single one of them is driven by their own unique but malleable desires, and the only thing they all share is their obsession with absorbing energy from whatever source they can get to. They cannot easily leave their chaos zones because they deteriorate quickly without either chanites or vast amounts of energy to sustain them. Once they find themselves outside of a chaos zone, they tend to seek out matrix rifts or power plants to absorb energy; resorting to electronics or even the innate energy within organisms if no other energy sources are available. Some grow a taste for organic energy, and many become especially fond of machineborn and cosmic coders, trying to deceive them into dropping their guards.

Today, most of Earth’s chaos zones are largely contained by the various factions, though the occasional trojan can sometimes find its way into human civlization through various means. Factions are seeking out trojans and capturing them when they can, hoping to discover the truth behind the chanites and how to either stop their influence or gain dominance over them.

Dis-Order

One of the main arguments for the Directorate’s anti-machineborn propaganda is that the machineborn were responsible for Primary Order’s corruption. By destroying its facilities but being unable to destroy it completely, they corrupted its directives and turned it into a cruel and vengeful being. Primary Order became Dis-Order, and its influence over the world has been contained within a never-ending rift storm called Jormun that prevents the machine-god from accessing the larger Nanite Matrix.

However, Dis-Order is still operational in its own way, and it’s constantly mining under Antarctica and expanding its territory. The ruins of its primary sanctums sit within the heart of the rift storm. All factions agree that its containment must be protected, because too many have experienced its corrupting influences.

Despite its containment, occasionally signals slip through and a functionary becomes a malfunctionary or an individual is tempted by visions projected into their dreams. When it comes to protection from space, it’s barely there at all. Corrupting data streams are often found slipping into space and Dis-Order is believed to have played part in the regression of the solar system during the latest war. The Directorate and other cooperatives with a presence in space often talk about receiving alien messages and weird dreams which many believe come from Dis-Order.

To most people of today, Dis-Order feels like an alien element, but it has existed for so long that they aren’t worried too much about its containment breaking and its powers being let loose. Others are compelled by its power and seek to undo the containment themselves. However, the concept of malfunctionaries are very much real, since incidents are reported all the time about lesser functionaries being corrupted by data streams that have slipped into the Nanite Matrix. Sometimes these malfunctionaries can cause real damage, as with the famous Nite City Blackout back in S-692 where a single malfunctionary managed to disrupt the entire infrastructure of one of the world’s largest metropolises for a forty-eight hour period, leading to great chaos and thousands of deaths.

The Dis-Order facilities themselves are even more alien than imaginable, since malfunctionaries and robots have worked on its maintenance without human intervention for centuries. There are humans living in Dis-Order as well, but these are either deeply corrupted by malfunctionaries or they have been turned into something new and different than what they once were.

The Voidstar

Primary Order was responsible for its own engineering, building networks of vaults and facilities on both the planet’s poles. While the southern facilities remain as the corrupted Dis-Order, the northern facilities were completely destroyed and its ruins repurposed into a containment laboratory for the Voidstar; the only thing that remained of the facility’s former core.

Initially during the Cooperative Era, this laboratory was under the control of the Directorate, with other cooperatives having limited access to the research data through their negotiations. Ever since the Cooperative Wars, the laboratory befell Arcturus who has completely blocked the Directorate from having a scientific presence there.

The Voidstar appears as a black hole, but it emits constant streams of information. Vast networks of computer terminals try to read this information to learn from it, but its entropic nature often breaks down technologies it interacts with. What has been discovered is that the Voidstar seems to have two primary functions; to break down existing technology and to upload the minds of humanity into the Nanite Matrix. There are many hypotheses as to why this is happening, but the truth still eludes scientists.

The Voidstar’s intentions (if any) are subjects of great debate, but an undeniable truth is that it’s a danger to the current way of life. Because of its dangerous ability to break down matter, most of the containment laboratory—now called Styx Laboratory—is unmanned, and people who visit the facility are witnessing stressful visions and nightmares, as well as great feelings of distress. All who have died within that laboratory have been turned into specters.

Specters appear all over the solar system, and the Voidstar’s influence can be traced to all of them. It only seems to be able to connect to people who are feeling great distress, and the most common specters are the victims of murder or people who had agonizing deaths. This happens more often on Earth than elsewhere, but it’s a phenomenon that occurs wherever the Nanite Matrix lingers, even outside the solar system at times.

Where great atrocities occur, or on the battlefields of violent warfare, the Voidstar can connect to so many victims at once that a void rift occurs; these seem to be able to merge the digital and physical worlds together. People who find themselves in these void rifts may accidentally enter the Matrix, and interfacers already in the Matrix may find themselves materializing in reality. It’s a state where the lines between matter and energy become muddled.

Art by @ Warmtail / Adobe Stock

Machineborn Preview: Setting Overview

Civilization

Several centuries ago, the artificial intelligence Primary Order governed over civilization with the purpose of seeing to everyone’s prosperity. While many were satisfied living under the authority of this machine, others felt restricted and belittled, seeing themselves as enslaved by the tyranny of inhumanity. To avoid an uprising against its rule, Primary Order created the machineborn to act as bridges between itself and humanity.

The machineborn were all born human, but held within them near-limitless cognitive, physical, and social potential; this power made them prone to arrogance. They divided civilization into sectors and declared themselves the guardians of those sectors. While Primary Order had distributed resources evenly amongst all people, the machineborn began to hoard resources to use as leverage against each other; this caused the First Sector War. Some people rejected the machineborn’s authority and organized themselves into cooperatives controlled by human collectives. These cooperatives soon became contenders in this war, seizing control over their own territories to rival the mighty machineborn.

Primary Order decided to intervene, arguing for a united council of machineborn to ensure continued peace and prosperity. However, many machineborn had grown too attached to their positions of power and declared Primary Order’s time to be over—they instigated the uprising that Primary Order had feared. The First Sector War ended with the machineborn uniting against a common enemy, but defeating it ultimately corrupted it. Primary Order turned into Dis-Order. As its ambition to protect civilization had been perverted into a desire to corrupt it, the machineborn had to work together to isolate it from humanity’s infrastructure. Doing so caused a technological regression that made human labor necessary once more.

Many blamed the machineborn for this outcome. Even those who had backed them up until this point turned against them and joined the various human cooperatives. As these factions grew in influence, the machineborn were rejected by society, and many were forced into hiding. However, history is prone to repeat itself. Once the cooperatives grew too powerful, and the machineborn were no longer major threats, they turned their attention to each other. The Second Sector War began, culminating in a violent era of atrocities commonly referred to as the Cooperative Wars.

Now a cease-fire is in place and civilization is tired of endless conflict. The solar system is in ruins and the ruling factions are trying to repair what has been lost. Meanwhile, the machineborn are still out there, prospering off the blame and hatred that has shifted from them towards the cooperatives. Dis-Order is still contained to this day, centuries after its fall, but some fear that perhaps it never was.

Present Day

A generation has passed since the cease-fire that ended the Cooperative Wars. The previously warring factions have united under an alliance called the Terran Consolidation whose goal is to maintain peace and strive for a prosperous future. Each faction was allowed to maintain control over the territories they had at the war’s end, including both sectors in space and on Earth. While this has left many factions disappointed and borders still being disputed over today, no new acts of war have occurred for a generation.

While several factions have now opened up more to the outside, centuries of isolationism have caused distinct cultures to emerge from within the different factions. However, despite the Consolidation’s best efforts to maintain peace, generations of conflict make it difficult to ignore past transgressions. A cold war is at play instead, with each faction competing for power and influence while tensions are high enough that war can break out at any moment.

Centuries of technological and scientific progression has allowed people long lives with impressive quality of life, but the war and isolationism have also caused regressions in other forms. While technologies exist to allow faster-than-light communication between off-world settlements, the factions tend to restrict communication as well. Most people live in enormous metropolises where holograms are projected upon the sky and skyscrapers touch the clouds, unaware of most things that happen beyond their own borders. Others live in abandoned vaults forgotten in radioactive wastelands, wanting nothing to do with civilization at all. Billions of people call different parts of the solar system their home, and colonial fleets have even left for neighboring stars.

Nanotechnology exists in the air people breathe and the food they eat. These devices communicate with each other and make up a digital network called the Nanite Matrix. This Nanite Matrix has served humanity for centuries, but the war has caused irreparable damage to it. It has erupted in places, causing a new type of nanite called a chanite which corrupts everything it comes into contact with. Entire sectors were turned into chanite-infested chaos zones during the Cooperative Wars, and maintaining the peace is vital so that these zones cannot spread further.

Meanwhile, Dis-Order is discreetly sending signals into space, corrupting lesser artificial intelligences into serving its cause. This has proven effective in space where entire colonies and ships are now controlled entirely by machines.

Arcturus

Arcturus is an isolationist and militaristic cooperative that controls a large portion of Earth’s northen hemisphere, including everything above the Arctic circle, as well as Neptunian space and portions of the Kuiper Belt. The most common language spoken by its people is Arcturian.

Having been aggressive and militaristic ever since the First Sector War, Arcturus has formed a culture that values strength above all. It trains the strongest soldiers and the strongest athletes, and it has normalized deadly bloodsport as part of its entertainment media through broadcasted survival contests and gladiatorial combat. Its people idolize soldiers, athletes, and those with rare or unnatural talents, but they also recognize and respect non-physical strengths, such as mental fortitude, confidence, and cunning.

Because of the competitive nature of Arcturian culture, it’s common for people to feel inadequate or to acquire extreme body modifications. It’s estimated that about half of the adult population has some kind of bioware or cyberware augmentation. While extreme augmentations are more common in the upper classes, there is a large industry of underground clinics with unlicensed practitioners and cheap second-hand augmentations available to those with fewer means.

Several rival factions accuse the Arcturian culture of being barbaric, but Arcturians themselves see their culture as more competitive than cruel. They put less value on social rank than many other cultures and offer both opportunities and competition for all people. Arcturus has high crime rates and high mortality rates, but no one is above the law.

Founded by the machineborn Arcturus Animeus as an answer to the Directorate’s rise in power during the First Sector War, Arcturus’ primary goal was to contest the rising cooperatives on its own terms. While many machineborn retreated from the frontlines, Arcturus Animeus decided to stand firm, hoping to dissuade his people from rebelling by giving up political power to them. Centuries have now passed and he is still alive, officially controlling Arcturus under the title “prokhor,” which is an Arcturian term for “dance master” originally derived from a Russian name with similar meaning.

Ever since the cease-fire, Arcturus Animeus has taken a step back from governing and retired to Neptune’s moon Triton where he’s said to be sulking over the fact that the war is over. Displeased with its current political position in the solar system, Arcturus is trying to increase its influence and dominance through diplomacy and trade while keeping its enemies outside of its borders. Even though Arcturians long for increased military and territorial might, they know that a new war would be devastating for them.

In order to increase Arcturian might while avoiding unnecessary provocation, the cooperative takes advantage of the fact that it controls the solar system’s outer rims where it can expand discreetly. The exact rate and details of this expansion is hidden even from high-ranking Arcturian officials, and there is much misinformation within the cooperative itself as a way of deceiving spies within its ranks.

The Camellian Dynasty

The Camellian Dynasty controls Earth’s Asia as well as all of Venusian space. It has recently developed a political alliance with Arcturus and the Dawnlight Society, but unlike its cooperative allies and enemies where the people can at least attempt to navigate the harsh bureaucracies, the trio of Camellian princesses are content with letting bloodlines determine political influence. Its most common tongue is Lianmeng.

Not even two generations have passed since the tragic deaths of the Divine Emperor and his mistress Evana Eldara Camellia. Because the revered emperor died alongside his mistress, the breaucratic leaders (called magistrates) decided to justify the affair by demonizing the Emperor’s wife, Lady Opal, and declaring their children illegitimate. The throne was given to the Emperor’s and Evana’s three daughters who shared it between themselves. This gave rise to the Camellian Dynasty.

Camellian culture is heavily influenced by the narratives created by the magistrates. Because of the people’s faith in the Divine Emperor, they romanticize everything he did—which the magistrates use to form public opinion. With many still in mourning over the Emperor’s death, the Camellian people favor strong expressions of emotion. The more faithful and loyal someone is, the more expressive and melodramatic they portray themselves. If someone can openly laugh or cry, their hearts are seen as pure and they feel closer to the late Emperor. However, this emphasis on emotion has a backside as well, since people often overreact in anger or seek retribution for lesser slights. Many seek out blood feuds with rivals or initiate romances with enemies just to build a certain narrative around themselves and their families.


This cultural narrative has continued to encompass the traits and stories surrounding the three princesses as well. However, because they are all very unlike each other, people often express themselves by emulating the princess they feel the most connected to; or they feel connected to the princess most closely related to their own characteristics. Princess Hana is portrayed as strong and abrasive; Princess Chulan as thoughtful and wise; and Princess Jia as refined and cunning.

Today, the Camellian Dynasty is a divided empire. More and more people have lost their faith in the Emperor while some are secretly supporting Lady Opal and her still living children. Lady Opal herself has been given asylum by Deva, though some of her children are still in the Camellian Dynasty. One of them works as a magistrate loyal to the new order while an unknown number of them are working alongside anti-Camellian rebel groups.

Even though the Camellian Dynasty’s presence on Earth is strong, it had to rebuild many of the Venusian sky-citadels that were lost in the Cooperative Wars, including the Orchid Palace, the empire’s capital. Because of Camellians’ forced emotional disposition, their political leaders often argue and debate fervently and passionately, and they often express their dissent over rival factions, bad trade agreements, or injustices of the past. They still demand public apologies for atrocities committed in the war and make a show of their hatred for the Directorate because it was their Razor Eagle Campaign that caused the death of the Divine Emperor. However, their true hatred for the Directorate is mostly propaganda since they negotiate and trade with them in secret.

The Coalition

The Coalition is a progressive alliance of cooperatives in control of eastern and northern Europe, the Middle East, the northern half of Africa, as well as Saturnian space. The Terran language is acknowledged as its native tongue, but it also values Old Terran as an academic language and many learn it as a symbol of higher education.

During the Cooperative Era, five of the most influential of the Directorate’s branches were against the way the transhuman ascendants and empyreans presented themselves as the rightful leaders of civilization, arguing instead for a society more tolerant towards all of humanity. These five branches—Caishen, Crocodile, Mantico, Nebulon, and Praetor—came together as a union of independent cooperatives aimed to become what they thought the Directorate should have been; a faction striving for unity and peace.

The Coalition was relatively defensive for much of the Cooperative Era until a religiously motivated rebellion usurped its Uranian colonies and formed the theocratical Deva. While this increased the Coalition’s aggressions during the war, it was still the first faction to recognize the emerging Dawnlight Society as well as aid in the establishment of the Terran Consolidation. It’s still unwilling to recognize Deva as an independent faction, though a growing religious movement is arguing for Deva to be invited as an official member of the Coalition. This is a controversial subject within the Coalition since the theocratical Devan culture directly opposes the progressive Coalition tenets.

The Coalition consists of two governing bodies made up of representatives from the five cooperatives—the Terrestrial Board and the Saturnian Ring—and it has taken advantage of a generation of peace to open its borders for travel. It now has a diverse culture of diverse people, and it’s known for having the most prestigious academies in the solar system. Unlike more isolationist factions, Coalitionists pride themselves over the fact that they have a well-educated population and open means of communication and travel within their territories. They’re also recognizing machine-gods as living beings capable of citizenship.

While the Coalition focuses primarily on diplomacy and trade with other factions, its members are well aware of the fragile times and that it’s necessary to make the occasional show of force to maintain political influence within the solar system. The academies are strong selling points for allied factions, and the Coalition has many transfer programs where students are invited from other factions both to offer the best education the solar system has to offer and to sell them on the Coalition’s more progressive ideology.

Caishen: Caishen is in charge of the Coalition’s resource management and economy, with the solar system’s second largest credit registry under its command. While it portrays itself as politically neutral, its economic power leads to heavy scrutiny from the other Coalition members.

Crocodile: Crocodile is primarily a political media empire in control over entertainment, fashion, and public opinion. It produces celebrities and fashion, creates and sponsors merchandise, and even sells entertainment to other factions. Even the most isolationist society cannot keep Crocodile products from seeping into its markets, and the Coalition is taking advantage of this in an effort to influence public opinion within enemy populaces.

Mantico: Mantico is mainly focused on education, science, and development. Its main focus is to further develop humanity’s understanding of the universe, and it has consultants within other Coalition members and allied factions. The Manticonian Academy of Cosmic Understanding (MACU) is the largest and most prestigious science academy in the solar system, being its own space station orbiting Saturn.

Nebulon: Nebulon specializes in aerial-, satellite-, communication-, and space technologies. Though it’s outshined by its rivals within the Directorate and Megacorp, it’s the only Coalition member that operates primarily from space. It’s currently the only faction known to be trying to reestablish contact with interstellar colonies as well as active colonial fleets. It has established some communication with Proxima, the nearest interstellar colony.

Praetor: Praetor stands behind the bulk of the Coalition’s military strength. It’s focused entirely on mastering warfare. While employed as the Coalition’s primary defensive force,it’s also trading mercenary services to allied and independent factions.

The Dawnlight Society

The Dawnlight Society is a cooperative in control over Earth’s Oceania, Mercurian space, and the Helios Swarm; a network of habitats orbiting the sun. It’s a new faction that was formed from the ruined cooperative Arawn. Most of the population speak Terran as their native tongue, but the Dawnlight Society is actively enforcing Neobantu as the official language; perhaps to further distinguish itself from Arawn.

It was the Dawnlight Society that was responsible for the creation of Primary Order back in the late Post-Modern Era. Back then, it was a group of scientists, engineers, and philantropists who wanted to make the world a better place. The organization disappeared during the Singularity Era, but it lived on for much longer in academic discourse and conspiracy theories. There were always those who thought that the Dawnlight Society controlled the world from behind the scenes with Primary Order as its tool to ensure power.

In reality, the Dawnlight Society had created Primary Order out of a naive idea of a prosperous future, and then disbanded as the people involved couldn’t bear the burden of the enormous changes they had enforced upon civilization. There was no Dawnlight Society for a very long time, but the name lived on as a symbol for change.

During the Cooperative Era, many academics and philosophers compared the current tyrants with those from history. They suggested that a new Dawnlight Society would be needed to make drastic changes once more, or civilization could be lost as a result of the devastating never-ending war. The idea took root in the population and factions went to extreme lengths to quell the discourse. But it was too late and people called out for change.

Arawn was a titan of vast power that used the Helios Swarm to harvest the sun’s power for itself. It had been trading energy and resources to the Directorate in exchange for military aid, and it was running propaganda campaigns on the Directorate’s behalf. Then one day, the entire Arawn Executive Board was allegedly executed by a machineborn who some believed was a member of the original Dawnlight Society more than half a millennia ago. Since their true identity was unknown, they came to be called the Phantom.

Arawn was completely overtaken by the Phantom and their followers, and from its assets emerged a new Dawnlight Society. It doesn’t appear to be actively working towards some revolution against the current system, though, since many of its citizens are still loyal to Arawn and hesitant to abide to new masters. The ruling cooperative enforces progressive ideas that welcome not only machineborn but all people regardless of progeny. However, these ideas don’t sit well with many citizens who were socialized for generations by Arawn—a faction particularly skilled at manipulating and controlling information.

As only a generation has passed since the formation of the new Dawnlight Society, it is often refered to as a culture of strife, with protests, riots, and terrorist attacks being commonplace, both in opposition to the new government and as means of quelling that opposition. The ruling government claims to encourage open debate and freedom of expression, but it has also been criticized for allegedly discriminating against empyreans and ascendants; many believe this is the Society’s way of punishing those progenies for having been at the top of society during Arawn’s rule. With many former members of the executive class having been thrown onto the streets during the hostile takeover, more ascendants and empyreans than ever before have found their way to society’s bottom.

While many view this as justice, others see it as a form of oppression that goes against the values which the Dawnlight Society claims to stand for. Some believe that the whole idea behind having humanitarian values is a facade, and that the only true motivation the Dawnlight Society has is to extract punishment upon Arawn. Without the Phantom being available for comment, no one knows for sure.

Now it is using Arawn’s vast resources to challenge the other cooperatives. It provides sanctuary for machineborn and offers a fair way of life for its citizens as long as they don’t oppose the new order. It has made alliances with Arcturus and is negotiating stronger relationships with both the Coalition and the Camellian Dynasty. The Directorate has remained passive against it so far, but Arawn loyalists have been known to cooperate with the Directorate from within the Dawnlight Society, contributing to its internal turmoil.

Deva

Deva is a religious dictatorship primarily operating from a region named Divina located in western Europe. It also possesses a large territory in space, having Uranus and its surrounding colonies under its control. Its members’ native tongue is Celestial, a language of their own making derived from Old Terran. Most people speak Terran as well.

Ever since the Cooperative Era when the devastation left by the wars caused chanites to throw the world into chaos, there has been a spike in religious belief. Doomsday prophets long claimed that civlization was at its end. While most people generally ignore these ideas, they often fester where hope is low. An important proponent of these beliefs is Markus Sacaro, the son of Crocodile’s former director Viana Sacaro. He’s from half-empyrean and half-ascendant descent and has a strong belief in the Voice, an entity said to be hidden within the space between stars.

The idea of the Voice came about not long after the creation of Primary Order. Because of its tremendous power, it was common for people to imagine the universe itself as the computations of an even greater prime functionary—a functionary supreme. While there are numerous religious beliefs in society today, the Voice has become the most prominent one with adherents from all societies, all seeing Markus Sacaro as a sacred man.

Deva was established through a violent coup during the Cooperative Wars, and anyone within its territory who refused to express complete reverence for the Voice were either murdered, tortured, or brainwashed in what came to be called the Sacaro Requiem, or the Inquisition Re-Emergence—which spawned the famous poem Sacaro’s IRE (see below). Sacaro is still leading Deva today, calling himself the Celestial Supreme. While he has millions of loyal adherents who help establish Deva as a contesting faction, the majority of people within Devan territories live in constant fear of the tyrannical regime.

Rival factions (especially the Coalition who suffered the most from Sacaro’s coup) openly dismiss the Voice as superstition, which have caused some blowback from a growing religious minority within their own population. While Deva is still taunting other factions during the current cease-fire, its leaders agreed to stop committing violence against their own people to be recognized as an independent faction by the Terran Consolidation. While people are generally more safe within Devan territories today than during the war, “heretics” are still oppressed, and there are rumors of secret internment camps where people are tortured, brainwashed, or killed.

Sacaro has spent years overseeing an engineering project in Uranus’ orbit which he claims is based on schematics given to him by the Voice. Many who have tried to study what they can of the construction have disregarded it as impossible science created by an unstable mind, but others aren’t so sure.

“Let the Voiceless admire
their tongues in the fire
Let their children inquire
about the threats of hellfire
Let all prior desire retire to the pyre
As Markus Sacaro brings you the IRE”

— Sacaro’s IRE

The Directorate

The Directorate is the oldest cooperative and consists of hundreds of bureaucratic branches and subordinate organizations, encompassing all aspects of research and development, mining and production, media and entertainment, health and education, warfare and peacekeeping, and more. These branches unite via the Board of Directors where they are represented by an empyrean director counseled by an ascendant advisor. The Directorate is currently operating from North America, most of the Pacific Ocean, Martian space, and much of the Asteroid Belt. It enforces Terran as its native tongue.

It was during the First Sector War when the Directorate began to unite independent sectors against the machineborn who ruled over society at that time. At first, the Directorate influenced the directions of individual governments but otherwise let them rule themselves. But as other cooperatives grew in power, the Directorate needed more of an iron fist to keep its sectors in line. As the wars raged on, more and more independent sectors lacked the means and funds to protect themselves. The Directorate took advantage of their weaknesses in order to expand its own territorial holds, replacing their governments with Directorate officials and took complete control.

The Protectorate consists of all territories who have entirely succumbed to the Directorate’s rule. While they could no longer govern themselves, they now had the Directorate’s protection, and many of them could benefit from a fairly high standard of living, even in times of war. The people of the Protectorate live and prosper under propaganda, and the Directorate is taking all means necessary to ensure that the dangerous machineborn, the chanites, and the corrupting Dis-Order cannot destroy civilization. The Directorate is also ensuring that the empyrean and ascendant progenies are accepted as superior by the rest of humanity.

While the Directorate has been aggressive in times of war, it has maintained a successful economy and invested heavily in a solar-spanning propaganda machine that helped it ensure societal control. While most of its population is fairly well-educated and has the freedom of travel and communication, the propaganda portrays empyreans and ascendants as necessary leaders of civilization while others may prosper in peace if they accept this as fact. Most people know that this is propaganda at work, but many who benefit from it turn a blind eye.

While terrans still make up the vast majority of the Directorate’s population, they have a hard time finding themselves in positions of power without putting in excess work (or relying on luck, nepotism, or blind loyalty). Many terrans have been led to believe in the other progenies’ superiority and resort to augmenting themselves beyond their perceived limitations. Ever since the cease-fire when people have become more aware of other factions’ cultures, more and more terrans dare standing up to this oppression.

Megacorp

Megacorp proved during the era of war that true strength doesn’t come from the might of a military, but from the value of one’s goods. Today, it’s the most economically influential faction with its standardized credit system having played a vital part in maintaining the cease-fire. It’s currently operating from Gran Colombia, Madagascar, and South Africa on Earth, the ocean in between, Jovian space, as well as parts of the Asteroid Belt.

Despite being a cooperative by the definition of the word, Megacorp’s leaders reject that term; instead calling it a plutocrative. It’s the faction that has benefited the most since the cease-fire, now having its tentacles in nearly every other faction due to the Megacorp Credit Registry (MCR). Megacorp uses the MCR to establish a standardized economic system tied to a faction’s energy production and use. Whenever trades are taking place, the MCR measures the value of those trades in the form of energy cost.

As inter-factional trade has increased since the cease-fire, many resort to the MCR conversion rates in order to define values. While some factions try to isolate themselves from Megacorp’s influences, the MCR is simply too useful to ignore. In essence, Megacorp has effectively established the rules for how their rivals manage their economies.

Because no single person should be able to control the entirety of Megacorp, the plutocrative has been set up so that every high-ranked executive has an equal share in its assets and resources. These executives are called plutocrats, and they’re the most powerful and influential individuals in the solar system. There are currently 101 plutocrats that together shape the course of civilization. The plutocrats fear another war and have gone to great lengths to avoid a civil war amongst themselves. They use a prime functionary called System for Universal Trade Agreements (Sultan) which analyzes their voting habits and responds to signs of corruption. Megacorp grows its influence by inducing and controlling corruption within rival factions, making its plutocrats aware of how vulnerable their own businesses can be to corruption. To counteract a civil war between plutocrats, the Sultan system was designed with anti-corruption in mind.

Megacorp enforces no official native tongue, though the majority of its people speak Bolivarian; it does, however, have a language called Sultan that only a select number of agents are allowed to acquire and use. This language is an allegedly undecipherable and ever-changing code created by the Sultan system. It cannot be learned as you would learn an ordinary language, and is instead installed in the agents using cyberware. While spies have successfully acquired Sultan in the past in order to access secret Megacorp data, the plutocrative will go to great lengths to ensure that unauthorized people don’t acquire the language. Previous agents who quit their jobs and become unauthorized must have the language removed from their brains before they’re allowed to continue their lives.

While Megacorp is sole patron of individual territories, such as Gran Colombia, it allows and supports regional governments to run their territories while being fairly hands-off in most matters that don’t involve diplomacy, trade, or war. Every territory under Megacorp control is market-driven and has large class divide, usually with extremely wealthy city centers surrounded by vast impoverished areas. Machineborn and cosmic coders are allowed to live their lives as long as they abide by the laws and don’t disrupt the markets.

Part of Megacorp culture is to have a free and open market consisting of both its own products and services as well as those imported from other factions. This makes Megacorp encourage entrepreneurship and production, and its culture rewards businesses who know how to enter the markets as effectively as possible. Unfortunately for the average worker, this has shifted production towards automation and machine-god intervention with minimum human employment, causing the laborer class to have grown fairly small as people are compelled to either strive for the erudite class where jobs are available or to fall into the scavenger class where they’re trapped in poverty. Megacorp is also the faction with the most active number of robots and machine-gods which causes more malfunctionary incidents than for many other factions.

Even though Megacorp is involved with every other major faction, it’s also seen as a growing threat. The Directorate has seen Megacorp as its greatest threat for generations, and it’s still antagonistic towards it for losing Gran Colombia to it during the Cooperative Era. Every other faction knows that because of the MCR, Megacorp has effectively won the war—having conquered them financially instead of militarily. Megacorp knows full well how good its current position in the solar system is, and the plutocrats are careful to show no outwards aggressions towards any other faction. As long as Megacorp can keep itself from giving its enemies just cause to initiate new hostilities, it can simply let the solar markets run their course until everything and everyone is under Megacorp’s control.

Staranova

Staranova is an empire ruled by Empress Anastasia Staranova, a woman born of a unique progeny who is obsessed with all kinds of biological and cybernetic augmentations. The empire is currently operating from a small region on Earth in between the Coalition and the Arcturian Dominion, and it has no territories of its own in space with the exception of some individual outposts scattered around others’ territories. Its native tongue is a dialect of Arcturian called Staranovian.

Because Staranova is a small and relatively insignificant faction compared to others, it’s often described using the derogatory phrase “small dogs bark the loudest.” It has a stubborn people hardened by generations of poverty and who are united in a mutual hatred against pretty much every other faction. Because Staranova lacks a meaningful solar presence and access to the abundance of resources in space, it has invested in excavating energy and minerals from Earth itself, tapping into the planet’s core and constructing giant war machines with minerals excavated from the depths. Staranovans have learned to be resourceful to maintain independence while surrounded by giant superpowers. While others view them as barking dogs, they see themselves as David standing up to Goliath.

During the Post-Modern Era, a civil war caused the country of Russia to split into two independent provinces—Rusland and Siberia. These provinces later fought each other over territory in the destructive Siberian War before Primary Order’s activation. Hundreds of thousands of people had died in the war and the tensions between Ruslanders and Siberians continued for generations. Later at the dawn of the First Sector War, when the Directorate grew in power and machineborn fought for increased dominions, the Ruslanders and Siberians remembered their mutual hatred. Decades into the Second Siberian War, an army general named Anastasia Staranova was displeased with Rusland’s incompetent leadership and wanted change. She arranged a coup, backed by Megacorp who had an interest in staving off Arcturian aggression, and overtook the land’s leadership—naming herself empress.

That was more than a generation ago. The Mistlands that were left in the wake of the Second Siberian War have started to recede thanks to the Containment Treaty as well as Arcturus’ Plato Bombs being used to decimate large chanite regions. By acceping a working alliance with the Coalition and inviting investments from Megacorp and other factions, Staranova was given the opportunity to retain its independence—though it still longs for a chance to truly equal the other factions.

In current times, Staranova views the cease-fire as an opportunity for the greater factions to drop their guards. It’s using its newfound alliances in order to access the solar trade and finally access resources previously unavailable. In the recent generation, Staranova has managed to catch up to other factions in many ways, with access to new science and technologies. The resourceful Staranovans continue to invest in war machines and fortifications, believing that they will be needed in times to come.

The Terran Consolidation

Terran space is the region of the solar system where Earth and its moon have their orbit. While each faction controls their own areas of the solar system, they are all allowed free passage through Terran space; but a single faction isn’t allowed to seize dominance over it. During the Cooperative Wars, Earth suffered calamity after calamity as factions fought over its resources. The cease-fire was established to end the fighting and the current dominions on Earth were promised to each faction on the condition that they joined a coalition called the Terran Consolidation (TerCon). It retains the peace of Terran space, viewing a shared Earth as the key to a shared solar system—but it doesn’t meddle unnecessarily in solar trade and politics.

TerCon consists of representatives (conciliators) from each member faction, divided into 365 seats based on an algorithm taking into account sectorial control, material wealth, energy control, and military might. It looks like the following:

The Directorate: 80 seats
Megacorp: 72 seats
The Dawnlight Society: 55 seats
The Coalition: 47 seats
Arcturus: 44 seats
The Camellian Dynasty: 39 seats
Deva: 25 seats
Staranova: 3 seats

The conciliators vote for Earth’s future, and their choices often reverbeate through the rest of the solar system. With the Directorate sitting on a majority of votes, other factions have banded together to counter their influence. Megacorp, Staranova, and the Coalition often vote as one with a shared 122 seats, though Staranova has a tendency of abstaining when its demands aren’t met. The Camellian Dynasty, the Dawnlight Society, and Arcturus have banded together as well, adding up to a total of 138 seats. Deva is on its own; its loud voice having little impact.

While TerCon employs millions of people from all member factions, it has teams of highly trained special agents called peacekeepers who are dispatched to member factions to inspect and investigate matters harmful to the cease-fire. Peacekeepers act as neutral eyes with diplomatic immunity and can go to great lengths to maintain peace.

The Terran Consolidation’s headquarters is Aesir, the five interconnected orbital rings surrounding Earth. It also controls Luna where it has a number of bases. In order to maintain easy access to both Earth and Luna, TerCon controls an elevator going from the fifth orbital ring to Luna.

Aesir

Earth is connected to Aesir through four 1,000 km tall towers positioned along the equator in the Pacific Ocean, in South America, in Africa, and in Asia. Each tower is a self-sustained arcology capable of housing over a billion people; their primary function is to act as a bridge to space as well as neutral TerCon embassies on Earth. The Pacific Ocean tower is called Asbru, the South American tower is called Atlas, the African tower is called Iris, and the Asian tower is called Babel.

Aesir’s five orbital rings are named after the first five astronauts in space. The first ring—Gagarov—lingers across the equator at an altitude of 1,000 km; The second ring—Shephard— is positioned along Earth’s vertical axis where it’s tethered to Gagarov at an altitude of 10,000 km; The third ring—Grissom—sits at a diagonal axis where it’s tethered to Shephard at an altitude of 20,000 km; The fourth ring—Titov—sits at the reverse diagonal axis where it’s tethered to Grissom at an altitude of 30,000 km; The fifth and final ring—Glenn—is centered over the equator like the first ring where it’s tethered to Titov at an altitude of 40,000 km. It’s from this ring that the lunar elevator begins, connecting Earth and Luna.

These rings contain habitats, research facilities, and stations used by the Terran Consolidation as well as its member factions. Because all rings are connected, there are tram lines going all the way from Earth through all five rings as well as through the lunar elevator to the moon. It’s possible for an individual to board a train on Earth and disembark on Luna without the need for a spaceship, though that trip takes a week to complete.

Art by @ Warmtail / Adobe Stock