setting detail (Setting)

Night City, 2045. The Time of the Red.

Night City sits on the coast of what used to be California, a free city that
answers to nobody for long. In 2023 the Fourth Corporate War ended here with a
tactical nuke in the old downtown: Arasaka Tower and half a million people,
gone in a flash. Debris from the war still hangs in the upper air, so the sky
runs orange and rust and red at every hour. People call these years the Time
of the Red.

What changed

- The NET is dead. A rogue netrunner's viruses wrecked the old global
  network, and NetWatch walled it off. Data now lives on local, air-gapped
  networks: the city's CitiNet, the public Data Pool, a building's private
  system. To hack something, a netrunner has to be standing near it.
- The megacorps fell; the neocorps rose. Arasaka was thrown out of the
  country. Militech was nationalized. Smaller, hungrier corporations fill
  the space, each one with a named Face who answers for its crimes.
- The city is rebuilding. Cranes and construction mechs work all night
  in the center while the Combat Zones rot. Who gets rebuilt is a question
  of money, and money is a question of who you know.
- Nomads move everything. Road and sea clans run most of the freight
  in and out of the city.

Where you fit

You are an edgerunner: someone who lives on the edge of the law and sells
their skills to whoever pays. Fixers broker the jobs. Gangs run the streets
the cops won't. Corps hire people like you when they need something done that
can't be traced back to them.

Money is the eurobuck (eb, or "eddies"). Your pocket computer is your
Agent. News comes on screamsheets and in the Data Pool, and the rich live
other people's lives through braindance recordings.

See also: the glen, corporations, slang, roles

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