#DataFortress

[creative-core]

Khushi Doshi

Title: The Game of Shadows Year: 2104 (Exercise:2 Draft 2)

The war didn’t start with bombs. It started with data—tiny bits of information that no one thought would matter. Now, data is everything. It’s the new weapon, and the battlefield is in the minds of children.

My name is Kara. I’m 12 years old, and I’ve been playing The Game of Shadows for as long as I can remember. This isn’t a game on screens; it’s real.

The city around me is a fortress of towering skyscrapers, doubling as massive data centers. These buildings hum with power—quantum processors, fiber-optic networks—all defended against cyberattacks. Holographic ads cover the walls, shifting and flickering as they scan your mood. But when hackers breach the system, those bright images glitch, displaying threats instead of offers.

I was taken when I was seven, chosen for my mind. They plugged us into the Grid, the network that controls everything. They call us Shadows because no one sees us working, but every move we make in the digital world affects the real one. One wrong step, and people die.

The adults run things from the outside, but they need us to fight their war. They say the enemy is another faction, another country. But all I see are other kids like me, trapped in a game we never chose.

They promised the war would end when we won, but I don’t believe them. The city may still stand tall, its lights may flicker, but the real battle is in the shadows. And every day, a little more of me slips away.

[technocevious]

Unmatched Data Backup and Security Services

Empowering Your Data's Guardianship: Unmatched Data Backup and Security Services.

[byberbunk2069]

In the AU So Mi was worried about Veil during the Unification War so much so that she tried to find details on her but her records were all gone. So Mi assumed that around the time she joined the FIA, NetWatch (or her own agency) had finally caught up with Veil and fried her.

The truth is that Veil had taken NetWatch's offer and had her records scrubbed and was doing agent work in the UK & Europe to try and win back her family's approval after she thought So Mi got fried after breaching that Militech datafortress and found herself very much alone.

Veil would only return to NC shortly after the war when Arasaka got NetWatch to help them clean up the Net after NUS left some stuff laying about. Veil became suspicious about some NUS junk left in Arasaka's corner of the Net, just some code that looked familiar but it couldn't have been.

[abolishfandombs]

For those who are interested, here's a link to the sourcebooks on the datafortress 2020 site:

It has sourcebooks on Africa and Central and South America during Cyberpunk 2020.

[mechanicalinertia]

Return of the BGC 2069 RPG

Well, it’s back. The BGC 2069 RPG has returned, including:

- Completed lore

-Retooled Hacking System

-Retooled non-hardsuit Gear system

-Some very, very basic character sheets

-Slightly refined Mekton Infinity

-Rebalanced Knight Saber Weapons

...That’s not a lot, but it took a lot of time to work on. How about that.

What now? Well, I need to retool some more fundamental parts of the game, I think. That’s my goal for V0.95, and then after that I’ll get to the crunchy part of the sourcebook, building Boomer after Boomer.

-The most basic skills are kind of a mess, so I need to re-sort them - maybe that’ll make the social ‘boss battle’ system more cohesive.

-I don’t want to do a dice pool system like I discussed in the last post - but I think tweaking the set difficulties, or at least providing more cohesive systems for task failure (maybe degrees of success / failure?) is important. The little catchphrase I’ve got is Make Failure Fun.

-I think live-combat / Hardsuit hacking is good right now, I like the EYE ripoff mechanics. Not sure if a hacking system which is more about breaching the ‘net’ and going into a ‘datafortress’ or whatever, or something more realistic with social engineering, etc. If there’s some demand for it maybe I’ll put it in.

-I don’t want to do a full-scale OSR which is setting agonistic - I like the lore I wrote. The idea is that players pick their local megacity and assemble their own Saber team, fight the local GENOM / CWPC / UBIQ branch, blow up some Boomers. The players aren’t strapped for cash, they’re fighting the good fight for reasons other than money - and all the ‘loot’ is just hardsuit upgrades anyway. They’re fighting The Man on behalf of those who cannot. They can even win the fight. That being the case, I think it might be interesting to add a ‘build-a-branch’ system, or something like CPChimera’s proposal for a neutral organization construction system - build mutual aid co-ops, trade unions, underground revolutionaries who can help the Saber team out - plus a system to outline corporate Sinister Plots a la Headspace? Not exactly like Headspace, I don’t really like the unique systems of that game. Hm.

-And then - for V 1.0 - build those mecha.