This article is going to be a bit of rambling account. I hope to be able to significantly edit and order this post as time goes on.
What I am doing?
I am interested in starting a campaign with a new group that starts in prefall Luna. I am hoping to have ~ 6 adventures before they play Straffer Grafan 39 (using the Pre Gens as a one off)
I am looking to make an immersive world that I can then rip apart as the fall happens.
What I am asking for?
I would love to hear the ideas of the community in making Luna a living breathing place. Big Brand foods, entertainments, drugs, gangs, corner stores, even big stores and franchises. Anything you can do to make Luna real.
I hope to edit this doc often and place peoples suggestions into the articles sections.
PLOTS:
1: Taxi cam medallion scam. Counterfeiter team?
How do the investagators get involved with it?
2: Unauthorized human product testing. (Missing persons showing up dead/or brainwashed)
Are the citizens fat enough to have a weight loss product?
Some kind of performance enhancer that is making them crazy/ mutated and
then dead?
3: Drug running of course
Faust (Dark Symmetry Campaign)
SLO (Dark Symmetry Campaign)
Mooncaps Slightly hallucinogenic
Bad trips see monsters?
Actually unlocks the Art in some people but only when high?
4: Corporate theft (how do you make it LPD and not corporate security?)
Great chance for juristic fighting
5: Corporate defection (do they hide the citizen or not?)
Star crossed lovers?
DL plot lines:
Assassin with all cogwheel gear is caught but it is in fact counterfeit Bauhaus gear, and takes the investigators into the Bauhaus world of quality control.
WORLD INFO
Integrated Waldo kits are surgically installed for clerks and servants using the extra arms to hold drink trays and the likes.
facial mods for celebs and amped voice boxes for singers.
Hi tech sports???
Every gun has an expert system. High level executives (and maybe SWAT PD) could have DNA linked triggers or palm reading grips.
all searches have an extra 2d20 if they have access to a smart phone or computer.
High level documents can have over 5 difficulty due to high tech countermeasures
basically standard info is going to be super easy to find, but black bag ops are
almost impossible to uncover even with the use of smart computer AIs
FOOD
Everything is mass produced and chain based. Home/handmade food is crazy expensive
The Shake Shack: full line of protein shake meals. A three course meal in a cup. Each layer is a different food, so simply move your straw to each level to enjoy your meal.
Saturn’s rings doughnut shop (Imperial)
Orion’s burgers: (Capital)
Pisces fish and chips: (Imperial)
Super Nova Sandwiches: a blast of flavor in every bite (Bauhaus)
More constellation themed restaurants?
People on Luna don’t rob the 7-11 they rob the???
RESOURCES
Capital has the largest grain and ranch lands on Mars because they are earth sized and no oceans to get in the way. Thousands of small streams from the frequent short rains.
Imperial has Zero G fish farms and aquariums tied above asteroids
Mishma has gourmet fungus grown in their caves (think truffles) as well as a huge seafood trade from the lakes in their caves
Luna’s lake is very well stocked with seafood as well.
this leads to a thriving docks scene which every cop show needs
Bauhaus has Venus. Everything on earth and then some in the way of foods. Jungle fruits huge oceans, rice, beans, livestock they have it all.
INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY
Imperial: Massive minerals and shipping fleet
Capitol: grain and livestock
Mishma: minerals, tech goods, specialty foods
Bauhaus: smattering of everything
ESTABLISHED LORE FOR REFERENCE
PRE-FALL NOIR:
LUNA AT THE HEIGHT OF TECHNOLOGY
Humanity has lost its home on Earth, but in many ways the race begins this era with more innocence. While humanity has seen a self-made apocalypse, it has yet to fully understand the evil and madness of the Dark Symmetry.
There is an arrogance to the Luna citizenry at this point in history which we often find missing during the Second Dark Legion War. Technology has always been that which set humanity apart from the other animals on the Earth. Even after the desolation of their homeworld, people still believe technology is our salvation.
Cell phones and computers, the Internet, and body modification are all found in Luna of the period. Mankind, having received a reprieve, is pushing ahead toward a brighter future and a golden age of prosperity unmatched by any other era. Luna is therefore suffused with technology. It is inextricable from the people and the society around which it revolves.
Adventures are necessarily more technically oriented than in the current timeline.
Intelligence networks are all advanced. Spying takes place as often through electronic means, as it does by human assets on the ground. Every corporation is a Cybertronic when it comes to technology, and much of the corporate wars take place in cyberspace – a term all but forgotten now. Still, someone has to go in and do the dirty business, much as they do today. The operative skulking the streets of Luna Noir is not as far removed from those who operate now as one might think.
PRE-FALL LUNA NOIR CULTURE
Luna Noir resembles contemporary, 21st century culture much more than the Luna of the Second Dark Legion War. Pop culture is everywhere. Even with the divided mindsets of different corporations, media and cyberspace form a common language of which everyone on Luna is familiar. This is the difference between Hollywood of the 30s and 40s and Hollywood today. One is not simply aware of celebrities: they are ubiquitous in advertising, TV programs, websites, and the like.
In Luna Noir, you cannot escape pop culture, and there is no Church to fight for that percentage of attention. Vice and corruption appear not only from Dark Symmetry but also as the by-product of the largest and greatest city that humanity has ever known. Things are big and shiny in Luna Noir. Neon and holo-ads draw the lonely and lost into the night with promises no advertisement can hope to keep. It is a world of two-bit detectives using special algorithms to track their targets as opposed to just good “old fashioned” sleuthing.
Video games and virtual reality are the default entertainment of the masses not hooked on their TVs. Like our real world, media is amorphous – a unified, ubiquitous thing through which the picture of man himself is distilled. The rich are still rich and the poor still poor, but everyone thinks they will be a Net Star someday. This represents a tonal shift from most Mutant Chronicle campaigns. Up the cyberpunk and dial down the theology. The Dark Symmetry is out there, as it always has been, but it is largely dormant, and there are only a handful who know about it. Fewer still know what it may herald. In the early days, the great corporations of the world thought they were unstoppable – too big, too powerful, and too prosperous to fail. As stated before, these are innocent times.
PRE-FALL LUNA CITY LAYOUT
Much of the topography of Pre-Fall Luna Noir now lies hundreds of feet below the surface of the city as it is known today.
The GM can play on this for effect. For the players, it is as if they have gone back in time. The city is different. Chrome gleams from trains powered by advanced magnetic technology. The skies buzz with aircraft of all shapes and sizes. The tallest spires are not those of The Cathedral, but those of corporate enclaves housing the business suited warriors of hostile takeovers and product rollouts.
BROTHERHOOD SQUARE
The Brotherhood is centuries away, but the territory which becomes the square is currently downtown Luna. This is the equivalent of downtown Manhattan being used for a religious centre sometime in our own future. For anyone living in Luna Noir, it is very hard to comprehend.
Buildings rise up into the night, while the lower tiers are clogged with people out to enjoy the city. Massive aerial highways crisscross downtown like a web tying everything together. Lights are everywhere, not unlike today, but many of them are holographic or based on other forgotten technologies. There is an underlying seedy quality which comes out at night. When the corporate business is done for the day, ■■■■shops and peep shows, drug dealers and addicts hustle around the confluence of Luna’s great streets. It is, in many ways, the opposite of what Brotherhood Square symbolizes. Here, in the Luna Noir night, humanity lets the grosser demons of its nature play, and that is before you include Dark Symmetry.
STUDIO CITY
While CEN is the premiere entertainment producer in Luna Noir, all the major corporations have their fingers in the pop culture stew.
There is simply too much connection between celebrity, media, and advertising for any corporation not to participate. The result is an area of the city that is not quite its own district: Studio City, governed by dozens of corporate representatives and liaisons.
Films and television series are shot here. Virtual reality productions are built in computers here, and a great many of the celebrities live in the ritzy resident area located in the faux-district’s perimeters.
Fame-Seeking drones fly all over the area, trying to capture a celeb in a compromising position for the never-ending feeds.
In the Dark Legion Era, the technologies that made Studio City possible have been lost for over a thousand years, and only they are starting to resurface – carefully, and to a reluctant public – through corporations like Cybertronic.
LESSER MARS –
CAPITOL DISTRICT
Capitol is, perhaps, the single greatest icon of the Pre-Fall Noir era. While the relentless pursuit of profit has not diminished in the intervening years, this is a boomtown built on Capitol finds and speculation. The Pinnacle, as it stands today, is shorter than The Cathedral, but it was not always so overshadowed. The building itself hasn’t much changed over the centuries, although street level before the Fall was several dozen storeys lower than it is today.
Some 30,000 people work in the Pinnacle. Skyways leads from various floors and parking garages punctuate every ten levels, though these are replaced by hangars and landing pads in the upper levels. Residences, too, fill the upper portions of the Pinnacle, making it an arcology of sorts. It is truly said that a man need never leave The Pinnacle and may still see all that life has to offer. Before the Fall, much of that experience is virtual, but that does little to diminish the claim.
LONGSHORE STOCK EXCHANGE (LONGSEC)
Little has changed here except for the technology. Prior to the Fall, tiny, hand-held devices linked into remote servers replace the great computational machines that dominate today’s exchange. The physical presence of traders on the floor is less necessary; the furore and bustle of the exchange is something that came after the Fall.
MAD SQUARE GARDEN
In this era, the Garden has a different name – one tied directly to Old Earth. As in later times, it is a sporting venue. Sports, however, are different. Boxing features both robots and augmented athletes.
Wrestling involves a pantheon of colourful characters whose skeletons are reinforced by carbon steel. Death sports, always popular, have a bit less lethality in the Noir Era, as many wounds considered fatal in later times are treatable by technology that was widely available before the Fall.
THE GIANT EYE
Both a comedy show, and the nickname of the Capitol Entertainment
Broadcasting Network [CEN], The Giant Eye is something of a subculture phenomenon. The show, allegedly made by pirates, deconstructs the notions Luna citizens have of themselves and their achievements. Where CEN broadcasts shows that underscore the validity of modern living, The Giant Eye takes it down a peg.
The show features surreal skits interpreted with actual footage captured from cams around the city, personal and public. The Eye claims to be a panopticon watching itself while the viewers watch it. While the goals of the program and whatever group lies behind them are opaque, the show is enormously popular even if not tracked by normal metrics. In fact, CEN has been looking for a way to monetize these broadcasts.
A central conceit of the show is the repeated, near tautological conspiracy idea that the CEN Tower, and media at large, is preparing humanity for the outbreak of “A great and terrible force”, by shattering preconceptions and casting doubt upon the conventional.
While those behind the Giant Eye program ostensibly seek to warn Luna, some deeper conspiracy theorists suggest the Giant Eye is a tool of that very “terrible force” it purports to fight.
…but I note hat the trooper did get there first.