As for types of organization, actually trying to split it into clearly separate categories isn't making me feel so great, but what can you do?

People have their Friendlists, CoOps that they live and/or work with, Resilient Communities of all the Slackers within an area, and then Distributed Republics/Tribes of various slackers spread out all over - like social network groups as nations with citizens and embassies all over, or secret societies or political parties.

An alternate way of looking at it is that Slacker organizations have different levels, sometimes progressing sometimes staying at a single level.

Starting out with living on the streets, on the road, or off-road
Then with a good Squat, like a neighborhood where there's several apartments and a lot of nooks and crannies where Slackers let each other couchsurf - or an abandoned factory or something like that.
Then there are veritable Slacker towns, squats grown up into whole DIY weird architectural slacker communes - Villes.
And then there are the cities that are open to Slackers; like Detroit, Portland, and East Austin.

>>12293398

Nah. This setting was kind of silly in the first place- 'Slacker Crackdown'? Really? Sounds like Urinetown. Slacker means 'lazy', and not doing anything, so why would they mobilize? In fact, why do anything in the game except be defiantly unproductive?

>>12293515
Previous Iterations -
Thursday's Thread (The Slackers): http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/11928860/
Friday's Thread (Slacker Crackdown 2.0): http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/11940946/
Saturday's Thread (3.0): http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/11954894/

Inspiration -
Global Guerrillas, a blog about the personal superempowerment and new ways of tribal organization globalization and telecom enables: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/
Comrade Simba, one man's projects to make his family/property future-proof: http://www.comradesimba.com/blog/
InfoWar, a 90's semi-realistic cyberpunk rpg setting: http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/InfoWar/
Death of the Dragons, an internationalist near future rpg setting: http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/Dragons/index.html
Distraction: http://boingboing.net/2008/05/17/bruce-sterlings-visi.html
Makers: http://craphound.com/makers/about/
The Dropout Economy: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971126,00.ht
ml
Old Thread Inspired By "The Dropout Economy": http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/8570710/
90's article about an alternative New York City: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.01/futuretekture.html
DIY biotech: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page
Making: http://makezine.com/projects/
Transition Towns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_ethic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modding
http://lifehacker.com/

>> In 2011 the Recession Double Dipped... Anonymous 09/10/10(Fri)21:17 No.12036535
The near-miss that was the Great Recession became D2 (Double-Dip, Depression 2), a head on collision of the way of life we were always told to want and the future that was really happening.
Everyone entering the workforce for the first time, an entire generation of young adults, America's future...was lost.
With the fall of the young came down the colleges and universities, the professors and the academic community. Ivory towers crumbled and those that didn't catch a hold of predatory enterprises intent on surviving the Depression fell down through the same cracks as the Lost Generation.
We promised them a future, we owed it to them. And we defaulted on that debt.
Now they're tearing our society down, a society that barely survived two decades of Depression, in order to build a new future of their own.
I hope they remember us fondly.

>>12293515

>> Lo-Lo-Look At You Slackers Anonymous 09/10/10(Fri)21:24 No.12036608
A pathetic generation of weaklings, still dependent on our garbage after all these years. How can you improve a world better than you ever deserved? How can you challenge a perfect, united society?
------------
When D2 ended, from the halls of power came the declaration of a New World Order. Never again would the Establishment lose face to the forces of chaos and anarchy.
The testament to this new order was the One World Center, built as a monument to the Depression and as a symbol of the triumph of globalization over national strife and class struggle.
On February 2cd, 2029, a deranged member of the Lost Generation who had been off of his psych meds for years blew it up.
This was the causus belli for the Crackdown against the Lost and those who had became lost too and joined them in their new societies. This was the beginning of the Slacker Crackdown.

>>12293515

>> Repost: Detroit Is For Slackers Anonymous 09/11/10(Sat)21:29 No.12049841

"Detroit was perfect for us Slackers. There was already an urban farming community and houses for basically free. They weren't in great condition but they were solidly built. Plus the electricity and sewage system was already there. Net connections were as simple as putting wireless routers up on old telephone poles. We had to eventually pay for a backbone connection but that turned out to be a good thing. Nobody wanted to just hand their money over so we looked through all the Facebook killers; TruDiaspora, PSYC2YU, and MyCassandra before we picked RepWiki. It was nowhere near as powerful then as it is now but it did the job. All the community stuff went up there, including who paid and who didn't. That way we could use social shaming to get cheapskates to pay up and spot people who were struggling and give them a hand.

Not that we weren't all struggling. A free house was great and the money we had went a lot further, but urban farming while temping over the Net was tough. Luckily there was the local expertise and tons of educational material and advice on the Net. Plus material was all over the place, just rusting away. Detroit also had plenty of retired metalworkers who were happy to build stuff and take on apprentices for what we had. Gradually we become a thriving community and that attracted more people with more ideas. A lot of them didn't work out, but some really changed things. Algae reactors for making pelletized chicken feed was one of our huge breakthroughs."

>>12293515
>>12293571

>>12049841

"By that time we had to have a full-time police force since Detroit was still a mess. Some veterans back home from the Mid-East volunteered but that turned into aggro.

The community wanted accountability and the vets needed tactical something software so once again we put everything up on RepWiki and that worked great. Back then no one had heard of a reputation server, RepWiki was just a replicated wiki. We just kept expanding it and adding new features.

Tool tracking was the big one. We'd peel RFID tags off of stuff we got at Wal-Mart, flash them with our own code and stick them on everything. That let us loan everything out and keep track of where it was and who was using it. We'd already plugged phones into it and when people started crunching the data we got these incredible productivity boosts.

Reputation scores were a bit of a joke at first, but gradually everyone wanted to pump theirs up and that meant a lot of Good Samaritans in the real world."

>>12293515
>>12293581

"Wayne State University getting shut down was a huge boost for us. We already had a lot of students and faculty living in one of our villages or plugged into SlackNet. It was a cheap way of living and the hip thing to do.

We basically absorbed the whole thing, including the lab gear. That stuff was already out of date so nobody really missed it. For us it was a bonanza and we started using it non-stop for prototyping and troubleshooting the things we wanted to do.

Synthetic biology was starting to take off back then, but we were already doing so well that Detroit's population was back above a million.

That's also when all the Slacker Union talk started up, but I never paid it any attention. We never had an official government, but I had over a half million fans and a reputation score that was over 9,000.

That meant I got called when there was a problem and people listened to me when I suggested the best way to make things better. It was kind of intoxicating, like CivCraft except I was helping real people.

_ Interview with "Mayor Jimbo", Slacker Leader, Detroit, USA

>>12293515

"You never carry a gun during an adjustment. Guns are loud and they make you stupid. Guns make you feel invincible, like you can take on the world. Well you can't, but that feeling will make you sloppy.

You carry tools. Nobody looks twice at a guy carrying tools. It's like a belt of invisibility. Plus tools are magic. Give me three minutes alone with a junction box and I can do more to a city than a commando team could do in a week.

And if worse comes to worst, you can always bash somebody's head in with a wrench or shank them with a screwdriver. You can't tap into a traffic control system with a nine millimeter."

- The Finer Art of Adjustments, SlackNet e-book.

>>12293515
>>12293607

"Rule #1 of the modern battlefield. If you can see it, you can kill it. Rule #2? Rule #1 works for the enemy as well.

When you are doing an adjustment your first priority is avoiding detection as a threat. Easiest way of doing that is blending in and that means sanitizing your nifty Slacker gear.

Now I know none of you are wearing tie-dyes or any of that steam-punk shit, but take a look at your laptops. What's the finish like? Is it slick and glossy? No. Some of them look like they came out of a garage metal-shop, which they did. The rest are covered with colorful grafitti or mother-of-pearl or some other personalized finish. They all have screws and are at least ten mikes thick so you can get in there and swap out the parts when you want to upgrade. See this? It's an AirTouch Personal, pretty basic Gank laptop. Same parts as you are using, probably a few years behind in terms of raw power. But it's half the thickness, is seamless and has this nice shiny coating. You whip out your Maker shit in the middle of Boston and you might as well hang a sign around your neck saying "I'm a Slacker and I'm up to no good!"

Can't part with your precious gear? Fine, get it re-skinned. There's a hundred shops that can do that for you. Everything else? Hit the rummage sales. You want the stuff The Man uses. Old tools, old clothes. Yes clothes. There are kilotons of old polyester clothes that after a wash or three will be just as fresh as the day they got tossed and thrown into a landfill."

- The Finer Art of Adjustments, SlackNet e-book.

>> Learn To Tell The Difference Anonymous 09/10/10(Fri)21:35 No.12036731

THESE ARE NOT SLACKERS

Bagmen
"Blood And Guts", the 20th century's terrorist rejects. Every time the Gulf Defenders blow up an oil platform, the Capitol of Texas in Austin issues a proclamation impeaching the Mayor of the City of Austin, for the pro-Slacker policies of his party, the Keep Austin Weird Party. Every time the "State of Jefferson" Militia seizes armories in Oregon, the Slackers of Portland get busted. Every time the Michigan Muj stars firing off homemade rockets, the Slacker majority in once-abandoned Detroit have to fight mysterious arsons that the state authorities never investigate.

Disruptionistas
Blowing people up in high-risk, suicidal attacks is so past millennium. The asshole of the 21st century disrupts social order and brings civilization to it's knees by striking infrastructural weak points that cause cascading failures. These are the hackers, the bio-terrorists, all of the clever children of Chaos. The Establishment news nets say they're being funded by the LatAm bloc to crush North America's spirits.

>>12293633

Ganks
The aristocrats, clergy, vassals, servants, and men at arms of the New World Order. The Establishment. The world is their playground, but in Normerica they call hallowed ground the gated, quasi-national Exurbs; the militarized Citadels reaching up to poke God in the eye from the heart of the megacities, of which the repaired and reconstructed One World Trade Center arcology in NYC is king; and certain cities and counties that have become benevolent dictatorships of the super-rich, such as Boston. Fed, state, county, and local govs have merged with transnational corporations and the largest family estates/trust-funds into a blind idiot god called the Complex. Ganks from other countries are still considered more American than you, from the Neo-Deutschland embassies that account for a disturbing amount of America's permatemp and crowdsourcing oriented economy to the Gankbank of choice, the Beijing Merchant Bank (with a dozen or so baroque fortresses across Normeric).

Lumps
Mainstream society crowdsourcers, permatempers, sweatshoppers, and those people who still have "real jobs". They're the hordes of consumers, the colonial subjects of the One World Order. They get to be pettily contemptuous of the personal servants and bonded henchmen who serve the Gank elites and sleep in the corners of the gank estates, and never pay Slackers more than a second glance except as an Establishment-approved scapegoat for unemployment and terrorism.

>> Closing the Generation Gap Anonymous 09/10/10(Fri)21:41 No.12036810

age groups in Slackertarian society

- Collaterals - Ages 40 and up. The Long Emergency meant austerity, which is an old-person word meaning "Fuck over anyone but me." Along with the Lost Generation, college professors, government workers, and millions of other unemployed people had to invent new ways of getting by.
- Lost Generation - Ages 30 to 40. Those discarded by the Double Dip. They spent their lives jumping through hoops only to see the brass ring taken away at the last moment.
- New Normals- Ages 20 to 30. They were kids when the Double Dip happened, they grew up in a world very different than the Lost Generation. One without hope and only the promise of low-paying jobs and no education. Many of them joined the Slackers.
- Generation Z- Ages 20 and under. When the Lost Generation got kicked to the curb they made lemonade out of lemons. That included hooking up, getting married and raising kids. These are their offspring. They have lived their entire life in Slacker communities and know nothing else. Reputation servers, SlackNet, maker faires and getting shit done with whatever is available are as natural to them as breathing.
- Defectors: Any age. They are one of the many who managed to survive the Double Dip and the Long Emergency. They had houses and jobs and all the things the Lost Generation was promised. But it wasn't enough for one reason or another and they defected to the Slackers.

Fortune 50, the few that remained to seize for peanuts the assets of all those corporations that failed in the twenty year long Depression.

Beijing Merchant Bank, the Chinese colonial bank that 7 out of 10 Normerican Gank oligarchs entrust their wyrdgild to.

Neu-Deutschland Embassies, the Ganks of Germany have a lot of them in Normerica and they employ a disturbingly large number of the workforce.

One World Trade Organization, the organization by which the new world order engages in the mercantilistic trading empire practices that characterize the post-Depression world economy.

Transnational Carbon Fund, by which the OTW budgets global usage of fossil fuels.

Senate, which controls the country through powerful cliques that provide each other funding, ballot controls, and so on and are far more important than the actual parties - of which these days there are hundreds. In order to get anything done Senators of wildly opposing worldviews essentially have to form administrative cabals to abuse the Emergency powers (still in effect) for their own profit and that of their friends and relatives.

>>12293801


Praetorians: considering there's no one party that can capture even 10% of the popular vote, the national security complex gets to vet the presidents and essentially run the executive branch.

Contractors: they're the police, the utilities, the armies, everything; and they do it for profit. Essentially the government leases out contracts in exchange for a payment. So instead of paying private cops to protect a city they get paid by a security firm, so the firm can have the privilege of selling their services exclusively to the citizenry and increasing their profit margins any way they can.

Pro Terror: The One World order finds it easier to pay off some guerrillas, especially those that disrupt oil and natural gas lines. They attend OWT conferences are essentially part of the establishment. Henry Okah of MEND is considered the grandfather of the Pro Terror lobby.

Princes of rich provinces or large decentralized populations are easier to deal with than centralized dictators or parliaments. African, Arab, Persian, and Indian princes are common sights at the One World Trade Organization meetings.

>>12293398
Awesome to see that the slack is still going. Pay no attention to the peanut gallery>>12293515, this setting idea rocks the kasbah.

I would not sweat the system too much; it is a lot of work, and there are lots of modern systems out there that are easily adaptable. I like your skill ideas, though, as the one thing that most established systems would not have is a set of skills with the specialties and limitations that are more-or-less unique to the slacker culture. (ie. a mix of silicon-valley skills and trailer-park survival ability)

What I took away from the earlier threads, plus the Freemarket threads from earlier this week (http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12240979/) is that people do not have a good intuition about economically-based settings; they see seemingly arbitrary GM fiat at work, and revert to bashing things and trying to break the system. I think some background might be in order about exactly why being a "bagman" is both frowned upon and legitimately a bad idea. (while avoiding too much 'no fun allowed' setting enforcement)

Bagmen (Blood And Guts terrorism), those 20th century rejects that still bomb places or hide in the hills with machineguns. The real amateurs. Those terrorists that got smart and started disrupting and siphoning oil shipments or taking over remote regions as Temporary Autonomous Zones to reap profits went Pro. With these jokers we're talking about Greens (the Gulf Avengers), Militias (the Constitutional Militia of East Washington State), and religious nuts (like the Michigan Muj) primarily.

Then there are the real pieces of work; those who are clever enough to be Pros but want to see the whole world burn. The ones who hack air traffic control systems, down power lines, release designer plagues. Anarchists, lunatics, hackers, and the like. Disruptionistas.

Finally, whatever organized resistance against One World collaboration exist in any part of the developing world at any given time is labeled the Global South movement. Global South fights collaborationist Princes and tries to get Pro Terror bosses to defect.

The shining beacon of the Global South is the wreteched LatAm Bloc, the only place that is keeping the One World out - currently in a state resembling Cold War.

It is suspected that the LatAm bloc are funding Disruptionistas, which is often used as an excuse to break into SlackNet and generally crackdown on anyone who is anarchic and has cool tech.

>>12293864


I see. I will get unhungupon the other stuff for a while and work on concrete examples and ideas that will, now that the world has been well fleshed for a while, get more into the nitty of not just what slackers can do but what the slacker ecosystem and slacker adventures are like.

Don't want to see this thread die too quickly, so bump with more feedback.

I'm getting a nice Traditions/Technocracy vibe from the Slackers/OWO conflict. I'd follow this up with a little bit of setting for playing Lump and even Gank characters. Lumps are really just slackers waiting to happen once the terrible unfairness of the future economy steamrolls them, but they have their own viewpoint and it is not just poorly-educated lower-middle-class frustration - many are both fairly comfortable and smarter than either the slackers or elites give them credit for. I'd say there is some possibility for PC Lumps to have a good time, working within the system despite their relative lack of power or freedom. (and being able to scapegoat the Slackers when neccesary to avoid attention) I'm especially interested in giving the Lumps a voice as they are the group that most people will identify with - players would probably sympathize with the slackers, but in all likelihood the players are closer to the Lumps irl than any other group, which gives them a point of reference to begin with. (rather than 'lol I am a social outcast huh, OK I use Make to put together some AK-47s and we go take it to the Man)

>>12294333
Finally, what does the iconic slacker adventure look like? In Dungeons and Dragons, the heroes meet up in a relatively safe location and go on a quest. In Shadowrun, a Johnson presents an opportunity for a paycheque and double-crossings take place. I can't say that every game has something like this, (VtM always seemed to me to be mostly 'A bunch of immortals get together and act pretentious until someone discovers the broken combat rules and BAD END') but it sure seems to help newer players and GMs get into he flow.

PS, I would have started this thread with a repost of the timeline - fear-future financial doom seems to be a good way to get attention.

I seem to be the only one into the setting tonight, best of luck putting it together and will continue to follow

>>12294414

this wasn't meant to be an archived/successful thread anyway, i honestly just was in "is this skill set up retarded" Q+A mode, but you pointed out that I'm in tunnel vision and need to address other areas instead.

So all in all, worth it.

>>12294259
>> I will get unhungupon the other stuff for a while and work on concrete examples and ideas that will, now that the world has been well fleshed for a while, get more into the nitty of not just what slackers can do but what the slacker ecosystem and slacker adventures are like.

Absolutely. Right now you have a wire-frame setting. Once you provide examples of what the PCs do the details and areas to expand will suggest themselves.

If they are doing adjustments? What are typical objectives, who are the opfor, what are their capabilities, and what special skills do the PCs have to defeat them?

If they are trying to cobble together an automated kibble farm (or some other project)? What factions are out there, what do they want, what resources can they contribute, and what leverage and enticements can the PCs use to put things together?

Adventures define a setting. D&D started out as random things to kill in a series of 10' wide tunnels. Everything else was filling in the back story.

>>12293864
>>I would not sweat the system too much; it is a lot of work, and there are lots of modern systems out there that are easily adaptable.

Agreed. Keep it system neutral for now and just talk about typical adventures and setting.

When the time is right you can pick a system you like and modify it.

Like the Slackers, you don't need to reinvent the wheel, you just need something reliable enough that it won't break when you hot-glue extra stuff onto it.

So... You live in an urban commune and try to keep shit going and attempt to be a BEEEG MAN

If people played the "Harvest Moon" conversion for WHFRP they'll love this.

>>12294448

So what do you even do in this game? It looks...Well, boring. About as pretentious as freemarket, too. There's nothing to do at all.

If you can't think of what to do in this game you have no soul.

I've been running a game of this on IRC. You basically use any modern scenario and change the window dressing a bit.

Over the course of two sessions my PC's have:

Embarked on a daring mission to steal cable
Pinned it on the creepy cultists down the road.(Protip:Nobody even cared.)
Refurbished a houseboat(They were like "OH WOW!")
Found a mass grave when they went to vandalize the cult's compound(The leaflets I printed up made my entire party RAAAAAAGE).