A recap for newcomers:

Nutopia

It's 25 ACE, after the common era, after the Corps fell.

Well, they didn't fall, we toppled them. After a hundred years of toiling and striving we finally got back what we wanted. We got back our freedom, we became relevant again.

The Corps were ironclad. We were well and truly theirs. Those of us that weren't taken in the night and modded beyond recognition for some impossibly niche task were worked to death compiling data. We created and slaved and toiled for a system that existed to perpetuate itself. New skin colors and hair styles that none of us would ever see. Minds worn down for the pleasure of one tenth of a percent of the population.

They were well protected from all forms of attack. Their 'bots and mercs protected them from the few unincorporated nations and from each other, but they neglected their foundations. The Global Network was truly ubiquitous. Its transmitters float in the stratosphere and permeate the crust, our earth is a literal infosphere. The formulations of a rebellion flowed along the back channels. It allowed us to execute perfectly coordinated insurrection. One day the cogs, the gears that moved their massive industries and bureaucracies, Us, rose up. We moved outside their machinery and brought it down.

There were losses. In some places atomics were detonated in their silos as the last spiteful acts of newly irrelevant CEOs. 'Bots were given liquidation orders, Mercs set loose. 5 years of strife followed, and with it went 5% of the earth's livable surface. 1,201,372,459 people died.

>>4419188

We know because everyone was tracked. It was one of the first things we did away with. We've actually got kids being born now without transponder chips, and they'll never have them.

The Unincorporated States still exist, and many ran to them after The Corps Fell. Some people simply couldn't handle a life without someone else determining its structure. A surprising number of us, however, stayed in the wastes.

We are creating something new amongst the wreckage of the past century. There are of course dangers, simple scarcity being the biggest threat. For this we have The Delvers, individuals of unique capability and motivation who dive into forgotten supply depots and ammo dumps, plumbing the treasures of the last age. Some protect our communities from still roving 'Bots and Mercs, and from those of us who find it easier to prey on isolated communities than contribute.

It is a new age, we are for the first time in the history of the species a globally connected collective of ture individuals. We are clawing our way out the ashes of the worst atrocity this planet has ever seen like a new born phoenix, and we are creating something wonderful.

We are, for perhaps the first time, Human.

>>4419202

The crimes of the Corps still remain. Demi humans, those taken in the night and twisted by sick minds to suit some fleeting need still exist in the dark places. I've grown tired of seeing people reunited with lost loved ones only to find their Husband or Daughter a hunched, lobotomized mockery of a human being.

The 'Bots are a mixed lot. many of them are quite useful and keep our holdouts and 'steads running. Some of the larger communities have crackers good enough to reprog a 'bot security force if Delvers bring them the parts. On the other hand you've got Kill Droids and Tanks of every make and model patrolling broken streets and lost armories that pour microgun fire at anything that moves.

The Mercs are a real problem. They were the heaviest, best enforcers the Corps had and most of them were hardly human by the time they were done "enhancing" themselves. Once you've seen a 7 foot tall four armed demon with reverse jointed legs, a cloud of flesh eating nanites and a 40mm Bofors cannon vaporize the guy standing next to you before leaping 30 feet up onto the side of a building and sprinting away you lose any appetite to run into those fuckers again. We were lucky, they usually move in packs...

>>4419209
Raiders and brigands exist as well, but they present a negligible threat in comparison to the other nasties out there.

The Delvers are a mixed and eclectic lot. Soldiers who participated in the Fall, Savvy Crackers who worked in the highest labs, Performance artist "Hivers" who turned their implants to more utility based functions and even the odd Genmodded Numan who retain their original minds and want to help rebuild from the wreckage of the companies that twisted them. Most interesting are the new births, children and young adults who don't remember what once was but still long for adventure outside their 'claves and fortified homes.

The treasures they bring back from their expeditions are incredible. Everything from autosensing railguns to hydroponics modules to functioning Makers and mod parlor arrays. One huge 20 man venture came out of the wilderness hauling an entire intact Feed Stack behind them on a grav sled.

Our communities vary in size from one man bolt holes to city fortresses of thousands. We are scattered about, but hardly stranded. The Global Net connects all the free people and High Speed Transports can be dispatched at a moments notice. The biggest problem is, as ever, resources. Most communities will have at least one Maker, but only the largest have Feed Stacks, and that's the reason for their size. Schematics are being created daily, but the best stuff resides in well protected data piles in the old cities, just waiting for the Delvers to move in and fish it out.

anyway, that's the setting so far, go for it!

>>4417311

Check out the post mentioned, OP. You and one of the other writefags both started threads at the same-ish time.

Also, archivefag from previous nights, not going to be able to tonight, so if you come up with win, don't expect me.

Yeah you might want to move any OC here to the other thread, since it's getting shit done over there.

Take a trip through the Old Midwest, past the Cloning Farms still running, endlessly producing steadily more devolved subhumans as their genetic patterns degrade, beyond the Archives, the vast multi-kilometre data warehouses once full of the sum of human knowledge and now just meaningless ones and zeros, and beyond the Red Zone where the radiation from the Goldmarck Neumann Wars is still strong enough to kill an unshielded man in hours. Keep going, into the vast fields of GM wheat, effectively unkillable and unstoppable, that turns even the flesh-melting nanite clouds into another energy source. Keep going, through the vast craters of the Megabombs, GM wheat only broken by the scarce few ruins still stable enough to stand, and pools full of every kind of pseudolegal chems mixed by decades of leakage and sunlight into brews so utterly toxic not even the wheat can grow in it. Tread lightly past the Sentinels, unimaginably lethal 'bots designed to be able to hold off entire armies alone, still defending the ruins of their homes. There, go into the Deep Crater, and you can see it; the Neumann Vault.

It is an unassuming structure, a block of some fancy darkened supermetal, five hundred metres long and wide, and a hundred tall. Look for the door, fifty metres by fifty, every centimetre of space taken up by warnings etched into the metal. Behind that door lies the reason for the Neumann Corps' existence, the reason for their destruction, and the reason hundreds of Delvers die each year trying to open it.

A relative latecomer to the Corporations, Neumann was a small company built by a bored megarich executive around this facility, an empty space occupied only by at-the-time advanced nanonic assemblers with one task; to copy itself, and to improve itself every time. One day, the Vault would be opened, and whatever was inside would be The novelty of the offering amused many of the idle megarich, and money flowed in, soon powering it to the status of a moderate Corp. They built other divisions and started work, and soon forgot the assemblers in the vault over newer, more advanced models. They ran into money trouble, and were prepared to open the Vault to see what they had cooked up in desperation, and this so worried the Goldmarck Corp, another high-level corp mostly specialising in nanonic assemblers, that they declared a Private War, at first subtle, then more and more overt. By the end of it, just four weeks after it had begun, both corps were utterly destroyed, and the Vault soon forgotten as the Fall of the Corporations came a bare month later, befor the radiation had cooled enough to send in even hardened 'bots.
Decades later, the Vault still lies unopened, its work going on far longer than even the Neumann Corp had planned. Anything could be in there now, a mist of dead nanites self-coded into deactivation, assemblers capable of rearranging the universe on the subatomic level, a vast array of pretty and meaningless junk, built to please the eye of a nanite swarm gone Smart, or nothing, the assemblers improving themselves beyond the constraints of the universe.

All I know is what the Vault told me. Seven hundred metre crater walls mean that this vault had the Corporations so worried that, even as their world collapsed around them, they spared the time to launch no less than twenty-eight Megabombs at this place, and that the Neumann guys were so worried it could get out they built a facility that could survive that sort of punishment unharmed.

I came to unlock riches, me and the twenty others of our Delve. Only three of us survived to reach the Vault, and the other two had died by the time I found the Key. I could have opened it, but never brought myself to. I gave away my chance for new-Megarichdom at the doors of this vault, and ran back to my Enclave with everything I had destroyed, because I couldn't help but fear what could come out of those doors.

I'm giving you the key, because I'm a dead man. Even shielded, that place was so hot it cooked my DNA like like a frozen dinner, and I won't last the month. The key's gene-locked, and can't be lost, sold, or destroyed, only given away. You seem better than the sort of bastard might take the key off my body, and I'd rather whatever was in that Vault went to you instead of some fuckhead Raider.

Just remember. There are some doors in the world that, once opened, can never be shut again.

Assuming this setting is put into true form, is there a chance people could watch it- or at the very least- post logs? It's adequately awesome, at least to me, to be able to enjoy it without actually taking part.

>>4419266
woops, thanks for the heads up, I was trying to avoid that, but oh well,
>>4419294
>>4419291
I'll copy this over to the other thread if'n you don't mind.

Anyway, there's a campaign idea, to build on.

The GM wheat should be a constant plague everywhere, because the stuff's nearly unkillable and grows damned fast. Fast to the extent that if you go to sleep unprotected in a Wheatfield it starts growing over and on you. If you don't want them to sleep to recover, just have this stuff around and they're forced to keep going. Communities surrounded by it need specifically tasked nanite swarms to kill the stuff, and even then it's still a race between the Wheat developing resistances and the nanoarchitects designing attack systems, which makes for quests.

I also like the idea of Sentinels, massive and ludicrously deadly guard bots, that just sit there. You can do whatever you want to them or near them, and they won't activate unless you meet a certain criteria. If you set off a preprogrammed response they will kill you in seconds. I like the idea of a huge robot just standing there in a field where a building used to be, programmed to kill anyone not coming in through the front door and then going through the security scanner, so you have to figure out that criteria, then where the frotn door was, then where the scanner was. It makes for a good non-combat challenge.

>>4419342
>>4419302
>>4419294
>>4419291
fucking delicious.

Those guys? The ones with the plastic-bag parkas and antique-pattern Kalashnikovs with real wood in the stock? The dark-skinned gentlemen who keep to themselves, don't look like they seem to fit anywhere? Those are the Savages, man. The Have-nots. The real global proletariat. The folks who the Megacorps thought were so poor and so backwards that they never considered them a market. Even the most bloated consumer drone can live like a civilized person under the tender and loving care of his corporate masters - these guys have been left out of the loop for so long than the cybernetic and the nanotech revolution passed them by. No chips, no implants, haven't seen as much as a Maker in their lives. Too poor to afford anything the Corps produce. Mostly the minded their own business. The best they can do is pick at the garbage dumps their lands have been turned into and peddle their memes and DNA to the ever-hungry Corps. Just because they couldn't afford the goods doesn't mean the Corps didn't find ways to profit off them.

A thought, I dropped a hook about Unincorporated States in the above wall of text and realise now that I haven't developed it any further. Anyone have any theories on what the world's few remaining real nations have been doing while society was redistributed?

>>4419580
Of course, it's all different now. What we wrested from the Corps' cold, dead fingers is theirs to share too. I just spent the last month with a convoy of Crackers, wiring up their villages to the Global Network and introducing their farmers to the wonders of GM corn and solar power. Oh, of course they're suspicious of modern technology. They've been stuck so far behind the wave that it might as well be all magic to them. Look at them stumble around town, stepping into a whole new world which had been denied to them, their fathers and their father's fathers. I catch them leaving offering to the Feedstack sometimes, and by offerings I don't mean raw feedstock. But you know, they've got to start somewhere.

>>4419616

If they're not in the corporations, they're off the grid. No nanite saturation, no Makers, no global network (just primitive Internet). Dirt poor, angry and violent. Still full of the old ideologies and religions. Used by corporate sociologists to publish theses on "consumption patterns in primitive post-scarcity societies". I imagine the new global governments look at the Unincorporated with mixed feelings: part terror, part surprise, part pity.

>>4419641
Some people say that the Savages are the last uncorrupted humans, the ones who stayed pure in spirit while we have to rediscover our humanity piece by piece. That we ought to be the ones who should be learning from them. It's funny that they were the poor saps who had the rawest deal in the old world order, abandoned by anyone who was the least profit-minded. They were running businesses not charities, you know? That old cliche. Now they're the ones exalted beyond all measure by our hardcore ideologues, leading the ideal, natural life. I really wonder whether the Savages enjoy their new pedestals, or whether they just prefer to have running water.

>>4419709
As I'm imaging it, the Savages are one step below even the Unincorporated States - at least the latter have functioning governments and industrial infrastructure. The Savages are the third-world subsistence farmers who were, and in some cases still are, battered by decades of anarchy and civil war, and have been stuck in that state for so long that everyone else have given up on them. Your average Savage owns a hut, some chickens, a stock of bootleg wheat seeds that might be the only thing that keeps him alive during hard times, and a gun that was made by a fucking blacksmith. A player who plays a savage will be approaching the new world as a true outsider, someone so awed by the technology that their old prejudices and beliefs have literally been washed away. What they make of the world is really up to them.

+Cracker L1nks-Zw0 personal log+

So I'm making these vlogs as much for your consumption as my own, because I'm sure the people at home are wondering what these "Savages" are like. Well, first off, don't call them Savages, these guys are Afghans. The culture up here is a mix of muslim mountain tribes and lowland sikh militias, and they are unbelievably hard men.

Things are definitely... interesting here. A good portion of the population still clings to their religions with the same stony determination as they have since the dawn of time. Whatever it was they were worshiping originally has warped and twisted much over time, and then sort of calcified within the past few decades into some sort of stable system.

>>4419923


They aren't intolerant, in fact they welcome new views and tech, although the Hivers and some of the soldiers freaked them out. Not that I can blame them, Hivers creep me out sometimes too... No, there's been no incidents of violence or animosity to speak of at all, just a kind of constant waryness that they've learned to treat all foreigners with. Looking up old historical data on the area it's no samll wonder. These guys have been buttfucked nine ways till teusday by every foreign power in the region, and then nearly squeezed out of existance as the corps took up all the profitable space around them.

One of the more dogmatic sikhs here seems very concerned by some of the interesting questions that the one Tank we brought with us poses towards his faith. Like everyone else here he held it in a kind of awe until he was informed that the vehicle was in fact a 60 year old man named Bill. We've all been wearing head coverings out of simple expediancy for dealing with the locals, and now it seemed that Bill, too, would require such accomidation.

Bill is now the proud owner of what I am almost sure is the largest sikh turban ever created, I mean this thing has a fucking superctructure. 12 square yards of multicolored cloth are perched atop the turret of Bill's main gun, and I don't know which is more amusing, the local's pride in it or Bill's

+Cracker L1nks-Zw0 personal log #2+

Hell of a day. Me and zoNNe get yanked out of bed this morning in with great urgency to deal with the feed stack. We're worried because the thing is going nuts, power levels spiking, the attached Maker is ejecting rondom gross spurts of what looked like half formed organic structures. Pretty soon Mut73r is on the scene and she's screaming about how some malcracker followed us out here and is trying to prog the stack from somewhere up in the mountains. zoNNe manages to calm her down enough to give me a chance to look at our shiny 2 story stack and figure out what's wrong.

There was a goat in it.

There was a FUCKING GOAT in the Feedstack. One of the Afghans had seemingly somewhat misinterpreted what we meant by "uses organic and inorganic stock" and thought he'd donate a freshly slaughtered goat to the cause, and proceeded to shove the thing under the tertiary uptake coil. The Feed stack of course tries to clear the jam and immediately has the maker whip up a maintinence swarm, but we don't have the two properly connected yet, so the maker just scans the animal instead and piles up build orders for 40,000 disembodied goat spleens. The thing was so stuck up under the works that we had a hiver dissolve it and we had to shut down and start formatting the whole system all over again.

As I speak Bill is pushing a large pile of a few hundered goat spleens off a nearby cliff and singing loudly the virtues of no longer having an olfactory system.

alright, classes in the morning, you gents have fun.