This is the second of five preview posts about Reboot the Future which is coming to Kickstarter on Monday 1st November.
This time out I’m looking at the game’s setting, Cyberpunk in the 23rd century.
Most Cyberpunk games start at some year in the near future, which amusingly for some of the older games has been and gone. So pushing the setting’s date to further out protects against that and also opens up literally whole worlds of opportunity.
The Consortium is the name of Corporate controlled known space that the game takes place in. Its made up of three types of corporate-controlled worlds, and its capitalism gone mad. Where you either earn and pay for various corporate services, or get pushed out to the slums in the Demilitarized Zones. Within this tightly controlled system of Corporate-Feudalism, they have held back technology for hundreds of years. For example faster than light travel is still science fiction, and any commercial space flight, outside vast expensive colony ships loaded with cryo-stasis tubes, is far outside the means of the general population. Who despite it being a space-age live and die on the worlds they were born on.
The Galactic War was the latest in a series of corporate wars that have taken place in human history. In the mainstream media, it’s presented as a “consumer revolt” where ungrateful anti-capitalist guerillas attacked the corporations, causing a Consortium wide recession. After withdrawing to their corporate headquarter worlds and regrouping, the Corporations heroically fought back and saved the galaxy! The unpleasant truth is that the Galactic War was an inter-corporate war, where the corporations consolidated their assets after the initial colonisation of space, bigger corporations ate up smaller rivals, and one of the four major megacorps was actually ejected from human space.
Project Darklight. Is a collection of corporate black projects run by the ruling trio of megacorporations (known as Tri-Corp). The full extent of which is hidden from the public who are led to believe that it’s some super-science that will rebuild the prosperity of the Consortium after the war.
The Reboot Movement. It started off as a rather cynical marketing campaign, in which the CEO of megacorperation Imperial Sterling INC publically said it was time to “Reboot the Future”. The cyberpunks who had grown on worlds abandoned during the Galatic War, free from crushing corporate control, made this slogan their own. They use it as a battle cry, a focus that they can take control of the way that their communities are being run. That in this period of rebooting society after the Galactic War, they can create a more positive world, economically, environmentally and ethically, for themselves and their families.