The Architect of Anarchy: A Cyberpunk Crafting Quest

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Given how big baseball is in japan, it would be kind of hilarious for there to be some gang based on some player who want us to make supped up tech bats for them.
 
That moment where you have decided...

That oh god, I have looked at how Cyberpunk Red creating thing... and I don't want to go that deep. Because I want to focus on guns and armor... rather then doing something... crazy.

So I decided to stand back... and just keep to what I planned, rather then try to expand.
 
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    • Oh and just want to let you all know...

    All charecters that you are voting for, or rather the options that you are voting for, are pre made.

    I'm sorry, but it makes things easier. for me... and you will see why when i show you that the workshop and everything else, is premade sheets.

    It will be easier for me, easier for the quest to get going ,and not get bogged down by multiple turns of creation.

    I'm trying to get the charecter set up.

    The time line chosen.

    And then we motor.
    Scheduled vote count started by Magoose on Jan 24, 2025 at 12:14 AM, finished with 61 posts and 36 votes.
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    • The Craftsman Beginning (Where in the Timeline Are You) New
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    • The Craftsman Beginning (Where in the Timeline Are You):

    You, Senji Masamune, were alone. Or at least, that's how it felt most of the time. In reality, you were surrounded by millions and millions of souls packed into the glittering sprawl of Night City, one of the world's supposed capitals of innovation, technology, and the ever-elusive future. But despite the noise, the neon, and the sheer press of humanity, it might as well have been a vacuum.

    Richard Night's vision, a city of progress and opportunity rising above a crumbling world, was real enough, but it had soured long before you were even born. His utopia had become a dystopia, a dream deferred, corrupted by the very forces he thought he could wield: innovation turned into exploitation, freedom twisted into control. First, the Mob took its piece. Then came the corporations, with their perfectly polished boots stomping down on everything and everyone beneath them. The promise of a better tomorrow had been rewritten as a cautionary tale, but nobody ever read the fine print. Everyone still thinks that this place was the place to change their fortunes.

    And here you were, trapped in the middle of it. Night City wasn't just your home; it was your cage, an endless game of survival where you played on the edge of a knife.

    For your parents, the high-flying corporate elites with more ambition than sense even before they realized they had to keep up appearances of a loving and happy relationship and fuck, having you… you were an afterthought. Once you turned eight, they unceremoniously moved you from Tokyo, dumped you into a luxury apartment in one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods, and left you with the directive to "figure it out." They paid the rent, kept the accounts loaded with enough eddies to sustain you, allowed you to splurge as appropriate for your income bracket, and promptly disappeared into their boardrooms and executive retreats.

    The fact they only showed up when they wanted something from you, was just the irony on top of a shitty situation. Apparently, you were the future, and they were gambling it all on you being somewhat better than all the other corpo heirs.

    Figuring it out, of course, turned into a daily cycle of routine isolation. Wake up. Put on the school's custom-tailored uniform, a sterile and uncomfortably pristine facade meant to convey wealth and order. Head to class. Don't embarrass yourself in front of your classmates at the academy, a fortress of glass and steel perched high above the chaos of Night City. It was a school for the ultra-wealthy and ultra-ambitious, a pressure cooker where the children of corporate elites honed their skills in backstabbing and manipulation under the guise of education.

    The academy wasn't just a school; it was a battlefield. The curriculum wasn't limited to financial domination or corporate strategy, it was a crash course in survival among predators. The lessons weren't about collaboration or ingenuity; they were about dominance and submission, about who could claw their way to the top and who would be trampled beneath them. The kids there weren't your friends; hell, they weren't even competitors in the traditional sense. They were enemies in waiting, sharks circling, always ready to exploit the faintest sign of weakness.

    And it wasn't just the students. The faculty were part of the game, too, corporate loyalists who saw the academy as a proving ground for their next protégés or pawns. They didn't care if their students learned ethical practices or even useful skills. They cared about results. Grades were secondary to power plays, and assignments were less about learning and more about testing your ability to deceive, manipulate, and destroy.

    Rumors floated around the halls, dark whispers about what students did to stay ahead. The line between ambition and outright malice didn't just blur, it vanished. Some kids hacked into rival students' personal systems, leaking private data to humiliate or blackmail them. Others bribed or threatened faculty for better grades, securing their ascent up the ladder. It wasn't unheard of for students to sabotage their peers' projects, or, in some cases, their lives. There were stories of accidents that didn't seem accidental. A kid with a promising future might suddenly vanish, their name scrubbed from the academy's system. A drone malfunction here, a cyberware short-circuit there, it didn't take much for someone to disappear.

    And then there were the parties. Officially, they were networking events, social gatherings meant to encourage camaraderie. In reality, they were exercises in corruption, cesspools of excess where students and faculty alike indulged in their darkest impulses. Deals were made in the shadows, favors were exchanged for unspeakable acts. If someone had leverage over you, they'd use it, and the cost of failure was steep.

    By the time graduation loomed, the academy wasn't just a school anymore, it was a crucible, a place that forged monsters out of children. You weren't sure what scared you more: that you might fail and become one of the countless casualties, or that you might succeed and lose what little humanity you had left.

    So you kept your head down, walking the razor's edge. You pretended to care about the lessons, took notes like your life depended on it, which, in a way, it did, and avoided making eye contact with anyone who might decide you were a stepping stone. You played their game, quietly observing, quietly learning. After all, in a place where everyone lied, cheated, stole, or worse, being underestimated was your greatest advantage.

    ----------------------------------------------------------

    Your parents likely envisioned you climbing the ladder one day, aspiring to sit at the table of Emperor Saburo Arasaka himself, or at least taking a lucrative position as some soulless middle manager. What they hadn't accounted for was your curiosity, your insatiable need to understand.

    It started with the trash bins outside your apartment building. They overflowed with discarded tech—scraps of failed projects, broken devices, and components too expensive for normal people to even dream of. To you, it wasn't garbage; it was treasure. Every piece had a story, a lesson in how it worked, or how it didn't. You'd haul your finds back to your workshop (formerly the dining room), strip them down, and figure out how to make them tick. And when the scraps weren't enough, you turned to less conventional sources: banned books like The Anarchist's Cookbook, Gunsmithing for Dummies, and anything else that promised to teach you how to make the world's deadliest creations with nothing more than a soldering iron and some ingenuity.

    And even then, with the local net's connection being… unreliable at best and a patchwork of bootleg nodes and outdated servers at worst, you managed to secure blueprints, designs, braindances, and even a few obscure simulation games. These weren't just toys or distractions; they were tools, ways for you to learn. You tore apart digital schematics for firearms, reverse-engineered them, and reassembled them in your head before trying it with your hands. You experimented with designs for heavy armor, layering kevlar, and polyceramic composites to create custom suits that could stop a high-caliber round or even shrug off a borg's crushing strength. Every challenge, every new build, every circuit soldered and every screw tightened was another piece of your boundless desire to learn and create.

    Of course, all of this had to be done in absolute secrecy. The tools and materials you salvaged or siphoned off from corporate supply lines were hidden in plain sight among piles of junk in your apartment, every bit of clutter a calculated camouflage. If your parents ever found out, you knew the fallout would be catastrophic. They wouldn't just be angry, they'd obliterate the life you'd built in the only way that truly mattered. Not literally, of course; you were too much of an investment for them to physically harm, and you knew that killing you after your mother sterilized herself was just… well bad for the bloodline.

    But figuratively? They'd tear apart everything you valued.

    You could almost see it: them shipping you off to some cold, soulless corporate "correctional" academy, a factory disguised as a school where individuality was an error and curiosity was a crime. They'd call it discipline, shaping you into the ideal corporate drone, obedient, efficient, and devoid of creativity. Your passion for building and learning would be scrubbed away, replaced by a strict curriculum of blind loyalty and predetermined corporate objectives. You'd emerge as another interchangeable cog in Arasaka's vast, unfeeling machine, perfectly polished and utterly hollow.

    They wouldn't see your tinkering as resourceful or innovative. To them, it wasn't a sign of intelligence or ingenuity, it was a liability. An embarrassment. A crack in the perfect image they had painstakingly cultivated. And the thought of being reduced to that, of losing yourself, your spark, terrified you more than anything else.

    But you didn't care. Because in those moments, crouched over a workbench with a soldering iron in your hand and the faint hum of a half-repaired circuit board filling your ears, you weren't just alone, you were free. Free to dream. Free to create. Free to imagine a life beyond the gilded cage they had built for you. You weren't just a corporate kid anymore; in those moments, you were an architect of your own rebellion, one line of code and one handmade masterpiece at a time.

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    Senji Masamune

    Age 16

    Stats:

    Craftsmanship: 12 (You have begun making things since you first moved to Night City, and really, you have become quite skilled and capable at just making things.)

    Reputation: N/A (Who is this kid who calls himself a techie? Why should we believe in his work?)

    Innovation:12 (You have a spark of inspiration and hope. Most people don't have that anymore in this line of work… You might be The Next John Moses Browning. If you can stay alive)

    Negotiation: 8 (Keep your head down. Eyes forward. Do not make eye contact. You might stay alive that way.)

    Stealth: 6 (You call yourself a Corpo, you can't lie for shit.)

    Hack Resistance: 8 (You have basic ice, nothing more, nothing less)

    Combat Skills: 8 (If you got into a fight, you might be a wet tissue paper bag that could win. If they were also a wet paper bag.

    Traits:

    Resource Rich: Your parents' corporate accounts and logistical networks are a treasure trove that are yours for the pilfering. While you can't outright plunder their wealth, subtle pilfering has become an art form you have created. With so much equipment moving through their systems, one or two missing boxes won't raise suspicion. You have the ability to acquire rare resources, components, or even prototype-grade weapons that are normally inaccessible to most. (Gain one rare resource, or component per turn.)

    Maintenance Monkey: Your tinkering hasn't gone unnoticed at school. The faculty and student body see you as the go-to person for fixing what the school board deems beneath them. From repairing ancient plumbing to rebooting the school's decrepit holo-projectors, you're constantly being roped into thankless maintenance tasks. (Must dedicate one action per turn to maintenance requests for the school.)

    Parental Disapproval: Your parents have no idea what you're up to. They expect you to follow their carefully laid-out plan: graduate, enter middle management, and climb the corporate ladder like they have. If they ever found out about your extracurricular activities, especially the unsanctioned kind that have you do something crazy like leave the apartment for more than a burger and fries, they'd ship you off to a soulless engineering school that churns out corporate drones. And not the kind that would have you tinker and make them better (You are limited to 3 safe actions per turn. Taking additional actions triggers a Security Roll. Failing three Security Rolls results in severe consequences, such as losing all but one action or being forced into a major narrative event.)

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    Now where in the Timeline of Cyberpunk are You?:

    [ ] 2013: The Time of Legends
    Night City is alive in the chaos of the early Time of the Red. This is a world where tech is new, raw, and experimental, a dangerous frontier where being a solo, netrunner, or techie means you're constantly inventing what it means to survive.

    The streets are ruled by gangs like the Bozos, Iron Sights, and Maelstrom, while megacorps like Militech and Arasaka wage their shadow wars, leaving scorched earth in their wake. Heroes and villains alike are rising from this chaos, from Morgan Blackhand, the ultimate solo, to the wild antics of Johnny Silverhand, a rebellious Rockerboy trying to unite a fractured city.

    And then there is Adam Smasher... We don't like talking about Adam Smasher.

    This is the time of true legends, and you're building your craft in a world that's just starting to define what the future looks like.

    Pros:
    Be a Trailblazer:
    The unregulated tech environment lets you innovate and experiment like never before. (Make a name for yourself)
    Legendary Clients: Supplying rising legends like Morgan Blackhand or Johnny Silverhand could secure your reputation. (Lets just say you will run into main characters.)
    Experimental Tech: Access cutting-edge, untested tech to push boundaries—perfect for building one-of-a-kind creations. (One-of-a-kind custom jobs will be the standard you might have to work on)

    Cons:

    Raw Tech Risks:     Experimental cyberware is volatile, with the potential to enhance or destroy its users.
    Megacorp Crossfire: Militech and Arasaka's escalating conflicts could put your operation in danger.
    Lawless Streets: Gangs dominate, and survival means constantly watching your back.




    [ ] 2020: The Year Before the End
    The world is on the brink of chaos, but no one realizes just how bad it's about to get. The Fourth Corporate War rages in the shadows, pitting Militech against Arasaka in a conflict that will soon leave scars across the globe. Johnny Silverhand and his crew are still planning something that will rock the world to its very core.

    This is the golden age of cyberware, with sleek and deadly tech available for those who can afford it. But it's also the age of paranoia—netwatch agents, corporate assassins, and rising cyberpsychos lurk around every corner. Life has never been more lucrative—or more dangerous.

    Pros:
    Booming Demand:
    The war economy creates an endless market for arms and gear, making your business thrive. (Expect lots of large orders)
    Legendary Connections: Working with figures like Johnny Silverhand or Alt Cunningham could cement your place in history. (Again, you will run into main characters)
    Cutting-Edge Tech: The sleekest cyberware of the era means you're working with peak innovation. (Come on, do I need to say it)

    Cons:

    Corporate War Escalation:     Being caught between Militech and Arasaka could spell disaster for your workshop. (Expect the corpos to be after your ass.)
    Cyberpsychosis Epidemic: Outfitting mercenaries with advanced cyberware carries the risk of creating unstable, dangerous clients.
    Corporate Domination: Arasaka's growing power looms over everything, threatening to crush all opposition.




    [ ] 2073: Another Year of Apathy
    It's been decades since Johnny Silverhand lit up Arasaka Tower with his anarchist finale, but for the people of Night City, nothing has really changed. The corporations still own everything that matters, and the gangs still run the streets like their personal slaughterhouse. Johnny's nuke might've shaken the world for a moment, but life just kept grinding on.

    The Rockerboy's message, his final hurrah, feels like an echo lost in the deafening noise of apathy. Survival has replaced rebellion. The spark of hope has dimmed into a dull flicker.

    This is the end of the world, and no one realizes it yet.

    Pros:
    Underestimated Potential:
    In an era where no one expects greatness, you have the freedom to innovate unnoticed. (Since the End of the Corporate Was, no one has really been creating such innovations in the arms and armor industry. Meaning you can create more than just the fad… you can make the next big thing that will change the world)
    Quiet Innovations: The stagnation of corporate tech leaves room for underground inventors to make breakthroughs. (Innovations will… come much easier)
    Low Stakes: Fewer restrictions give you more room to experiment without drawing immediate attention. (YOu will have fewer OC edge runners running around causing chaos for Night city.)
    Cons:

    Apathy Stifles Progress:     The lack of ambition in society makes it harder to find clients or collaborators with real drive. (Lets just say that changing the world will cause some… problems)
    Gang Power: Gangs dominate more than ever, making every street a battlefield. (The Gangs are at their most powerful since the 2020's. Don't underestimate them.)
    Stagnation: With corporations focused on control rather than innovation, breaking new ground is an uphill battle.




    [ ] 2074: The Rise of David Martinez
    Night City has always had its legends. Most of them burn out before they can shine for long, but this year, a story is just beginning.

    In Santo Domingo, a kid named David Martinez is about to hit the streets. Rumor has it he's running with Maine's crew, trying to make a name for himself as an Edgerunner. There's something about this kid, something electric. He's already caught the attention of the gangs and corpos alike.

    His story could end in flames, like so many others before him. Or maybe, just maybe, this time will be different.

    Pros:

    Legends in Progress:
    Aligning with David and his crew could elevate your workshop into the spotlight. (Can influence the Edgerunner storyline. For good or ill)
    Potential Allies: Supporting David might earn you powerful allies in the Edgerunner world. (A Vast array of OCs will also be in the world will be there for jobs)
    Thriving Arms Market: With rising tensions, your creations are in higher demand than ever. (You can sell weapons that would normally not be sold, like old weapons designs for a profit, if you want to do that)
    Cons:

    Unstable Alliances:     Associating with David or his crew could put you in direct conflict with dangerous forces. (Arasaka is watching.)
    Cyberware Risks: David's reliance on cyberware increases the likelihood of him succumbing to cyberpsychosis, with collateral damage possible. (Using David as the primary example… your edge runner OCs will be chromed out, and you will have to deal with those consequences.)
    High Stakes: Supporting a rising legend could bring fame—or paint a target on your back. (You either burn brightly, and suddenly… or not at all)




    [ ] 2076: V for Victory
    The streets are whispering about a new merc in town, someone who calls themselves V. They've teamed up with a kid from Heywood named Jackie Wells, and together they're starting to make waves.

    They're brash, hungry, and think they're on the brink of making it to the Major Leagues. But Night City doesn't care about dreams—it chews them up and spits them out. V and Jackie need gear, connections, and someone to believe in their vision.

    The question is, do they have what it takes to survive the climb? And will you be the one to arm them for it, or profit from their inevitable fall?

    Pros:
    Rising Stars:
    New Blood will always work on securing our workshop's reputation in Night City. (You will have access to lots of OC's trying to make it big in NC, not just V and Jackie)
    Access to Rare Tech: Their ambitious operations could lead to cutting-edge tech acquisitions. (Making future tech that can change the game is much much easier)
    Game-Changer: Supporting V might give you the chance to shape the future of Night City itself. (chances to change the 2077 storyline will come up naturally through the story, and will be much easier to chance the outcome and fates of multiple players in the game.)

    Cons:

    Combat Zone Chaos:     V's dealings might drag you into escalating conflicts with Kurt Hanson and his mercs. (You Will become a cog in the Phantom Liberty Storyline, whether you want to or not)
    Cyberpsychosis Threats: Arming ambitious but unstable mercs comes with inherent risks. (V and those cyberpunks who work now, are questionably… no they are all insane. And arming them might make things worse for the city.)
    Unpredictable Outcomes: Betting on V's success could pay off—or leave you scrambling in their wake. (Canon knowledge will not keep you safe.)
     
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    • [X] 2076: V for Victory

    Jackie has family enough for all three of us. If we want a true ride and die ally, can't go wrong with the wells. Plus, it seems like it's rich in potential allies, and it's past time Delamain got competition in the armored chauffeur business.

    [X] 2073: Another Year of Apathy
     
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