The Gauntlet G+ Archives

Hello everyone! We are entering the final week of Hack The Planet, my cyberpunk meets climate fiction Forged in the Dark game (using the Blades in the Dark SRD). I had this setting coalescing for ages; ever since I read The Windup Girl and Heavy Weather. Let me give you a short pitch below and if you dig it or know someone who might, hey, consider sharing this post with them and checking out the Kickstarter. There’s tons of art, interviews, and more located on the Kickstarter page.

My goal was to make a retro-future like say, Blade Runner, make sense in this fiction. That movie exists in a space where they wanted an alternate future extrapolated on really specific things happening at that time. Nowadays, climate fiction, or cli-fi, is gaining a lot of steam. What could happen if some of the effects of climate change happened, and what if they happened far sooner than anticipated? When I thought about that, it dawned on me that a retro-future still could be possible. Where we have to pour all our resources into developing tech to combat climate change and radicalized weather and natural disasters/events that occur–rather than the current trajectory of technology now. The result would be some futuristic tech that deals with specific setting, but a sort of archaic construction of previous technologies no longer pertinent.

A massive shelter, called Shelter 1, was constructed in this fiction. One funded by corporations and the superrich. Slowly, as it was completed and their power in this new place is solidified as the world around them is ravaged by the various outcomes of climate change, they’re twisting this place into the megacity we typically know and experience in cyberpunk. I decided to roll with that notion.

In this setting, a lot of cyberpunk tropes are recontextualized. Take actual blade runners for instance. Instead of hunting down replicants, they’re empowered by the corporate congress to hunt down Tippers, people who contributed to the occurrence of these radical natural phenomena, called Acts of God. The technology is powered by physical labor. If you’re caught, it’s time to power the city… And you better believe the major contributors of this future, the corporations, aren’t the ones paying this toll.

The city has a massive population of climate refugees and you’re a few of them, shirking the existence of normal folk, deciding to take back some agency and power. Whether to subvert the corporations or simply get what you think you deserve, you’re people on the fringes of society, operating in an underworld. Glitches in the system.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samjokopublishing/hack-the-planet/description