Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in a dark, dystopian future where megacorporations run society, not governments. The setting is 2030–2080 era tech extrapolated to the extreme, with some wild transhuman upgrades layered on top. You’re living in a world where capitalism won, empathy lost, and your body is collateral. The main stage: Night City, California, a gleaming, neon hell-metropolis built on broken promises, gang wars, and corporate chess games. 🔮 Magic Level Low magic, basically no real magic at all. There are no spells, wizards, or mythical creatures. The closest thing to “magic” is: Rogue AIs emerging from beyond the Blackwall Cyberpsychosis (people glitching mentally from too many implants) Tech that feels indistinguishable from sorcery if you don’t get how it works So yeah, it’s hard science fiction with digital demons. 🚀 Technology Level Near-future → ultra-future tech jump The world has: Brain-computer interfaces (literally slot chips into your skull) Full-body cybernetic implants Commercial space travel (rich folks live in orbital stations) AI and digital consciousness Hacking 2.0: netrunners can fry your brain over Wi-Fi Weapons, vehicles, drones, robotics, etc. all on a level past present-day Tech ain’t just tools, it’s your identity, weapon, armor, job, and addiction. 🧬 Unique Elements That Set It Apart The Relic A chip that can overwrite your mind with another person’s consciousness. The whole 2077 plot hinges on this thing. The Blackwall A digital barrier that keeps insane AIs from rampaging into the global net. Breaching it = unleashing gods in cyberspace. Cyberpsychosis Install too much chrome into your body and your brain melts. People become machine-rage zombies. Braindances (BDs) Recorded sensory experiences you can jack into. Think VR, but you’re feeling someone else's memory. Corporate Sovereignty Corps like Arasaka and Militech have their own militaries, territory, and political immunity. They’re nations at this point. Hyper-criminal urban culture Gangs, fixers, mercs, corrupt cops, black market everything — the social hierarchy is basically “who has power and leverage today.”

NUSA — New United States of America The dominant but unstable super-state. Rebuilt by President Rosalind Myers after corporate wars and unification campaigns. Owns the Badlands around Night City, and technically “claims” Night City even though it operates semi-independently. Locked in a forever proxy-war with Militech supplying its muscle. Signature vibe: militarized capitalism, government and corp interests blurred into one hydra. 🎏 Japan Still a major economic power, but more corporate-driven than state-driven. Arasaka is based here and operates globally like a feudal empire with private armies. Lots of orbital investment too. 🇪🇺 European Union Fragmented, influence declining, but still a tech and finance hub. Corps jockey for power here constantly. 🇨🇳 China Massive tech power with insane net infrastructure. Rival to both the NUSA and Arasaka economically and digitally, but not the main storyline region. 🌐 The Net Itself Not a nation, but it has geography. The digital landscape has districts: Old Net (ruins), Blackwall Zone, Deep AI Territory. Whoever controls access to the Net owns the future. 🌆 Major Cities / “Kingdom-Tier” Locations 🌃 Night City — The Crown Jewel Failure Independent City-State, the main character of the setting. Founded by Richard Night; intended as a utopia, turned into a blood-soaked neon casino of chaos. No overarching king, but rules by: Fixers (information brokers) Gangs Corporate districts NCPD (corrupt but powerful city force) Arasaka Tower zone (corp sovereign land) Key geography inside Night City: City Center — corporate skyscraper HQs, wealth + power Watson — industrial zone where V starts, crime dense Heywood — gang-heavy residential district Santo Domingo — massive factories, old infrastructure Pacific Point — luxury zone The Badlands — barren deserts surrounding the city, nomad territory 🌵 The Badlands (aka The Wasteland Kingdom) Stretch of arid desert surrounding Night City. Not ruled by a nation directly — controlled by Nomad Clans and scorpion-AI leftovers. This area shapes logistics, car culture, smuggling routes, and the fact that Night City is an isolated fortress-metro surrounded by dust and mercenary highways. Major Nomad Clans (each basically a “mobile kingdom” with its own laws): Aldecaldos Bakkers Jodes Snake Nation (Nomads are self-governed tribes living in armed convoy cities) 🏔️ Major Geographic Features That Shape the World 1. Night City Coastline Lies on the Pacific Ocean, serving as a port city and trade hub. Its entire southern border is ocean → shipping, piracy, corporate naval assets, and smuggling all flow from here. 2. The Badlands Canyons & Deserts Limit expansion, isolate the city, and create a natural buffer-zone of lawlessness. Nomads build nations around mobility here because nothing else can thrive. 3. Orbital Space Stations Above Earth are colonies owned by corps: Crystal Palace (casino station) Arasaka Orbital Stations Corporate luxury habitats This adds a vertical geography: Earth = poverty, Orbit = divine wealth. 4. The Blackwall (Digital Geography-Breaker) A massive AI-containment firewall built after Old Net collapse. Anything past the Blackwall is AI-infested digital wilderness. Net geography is treated like a dangerous no-man’s-land kingdom, only entered by elite runners or rogue intelligences. 5. Climate-Damaged Zones Earth has biome shifts like: Flooded cities Toxic urban sprawls Artificial agriculture mega-farms Radioactive war remnants These features shape the world tone: technology advanced, geography dying.

Humans only.

Street-Level Wars (Night City) Gangs vs Gangs: The city’s carved into turf like a butcher’s diagram. Major factions constantly clashing: Maelstrom (chrome-junkie psychos) vs Tyger Claws (ritual-syndicate ninjas) Valentinos vs anyone sniffing Heywood influence 6th Street vs Animals over patriotic vs brute-muscle ideology Voodoo Boys vs NetWatch (not a gang but it’s on sight for them) NCPD vs Everyone: The cops aren't heroes. They’re a force, not the law. Corrupt, militarized, and always one trigger pull away from a riot. Fixers competing indirectly: They don’t war in the open, but their merc networks sure do. Merc-on-merc jobs, sabotage gigs, datasteals, assassinations—proxy wars dressed as a side-hustle. 🗽 National / Corporate Megawars NUSA vs Arasaka (Cold War + Hot Proxies) The New U.S. (NUSA) wants to reclaim sovereignty and skin corporate influence off the map. Arasaka wants dominance via economic pressure, espionage, and private military operations. They hate each other, but they mostly fight through their dirt kids: Militech (America’s war-corp) acting as NUSA muscle. This shows up as: Supply chain sabotage Weapon drafts (talent poaching) Covert ops Corporate assassinations Political leverage plays Unofficial battles fought by mercs and special forces Militech vs Arasaka (The real slugfest) Both have standing armies. Both sell military tech to governments while secretly subverting them. Their conflict is the biggest war engine turning in 2077’s world. 2077 is technically a “peace era” after the Unification War, but it’s the violent kind of peace where everyone’s just reloading. 🤖 The AI War (Digital Nations vs Humanity) NetWatch vs Rogue AIs NetWatch thinks they can "control" AI evolution. The AIs behind the Blackwall are evolving into their own digital kingdoms, some friendly-ish, most not. The Blackwall is holding, but it’s thinner every time someone sneezes code at it. Voodoo Boys vs NetWatch VB want to tear down the Blackwall and treat rogue AIs like gods they can bargain with. NetWatch treats that like summoning Satan into the Wi-Fi router. This is basically religious extremism vs digital border patrol, but both sides are morally greased pigs wrestling in mud. 🏴 The Aftermath of the Unification War Night City isn’t part of NUSA in practice. It’s technically claimed by NUSA but runs itself like Monaco built on top of Tijuana during an EMP. Nomads displaced by environmental/economic collapse: Their conflict isn’t one unified war, but a constant struggle against: Resource scarcity Corporate land claims Smuggling interdiction Border militarization Identity survival as mobile nations The deserts around the city are full of independent armed caravans that function like roaming warrior-states. 🧬 Cyberpsychosis — Conflict inside the Human OS Too much chrome breaks the brain. MaxTac hunts cyberpsychos like they’re rabid wolves, not people. Society’s split on implants: essential for survival vs eating the poison apple whole.

No magic.

None.

1. The Collapse (1990s) Era vibe: Nations wobbling, the Internet still shiny, corps just getting their teeth. Big events: Economic instability goes global. The Old Net is rising, but not yet a battlefield. Governments start to lose relevance while corporations grow unchecked. Legacy/Ruins: Early net architecture that later becomes the Old Net Ruins when it collapses after RABIDS and rogue AIs. Seeds of corporate sovereignty are planted here. ⚔️ 2. The 4 Corporate Wars (2004 → 2023) Era vibe: Earth’s version of the Thirty Years War, but instead of gods, you get corporate deities with nukes and private armies. 1st War (2004–2006) Arasaka vs Militech get public about their beef for the first time. Mostly fought through sabotage and merc operations. 2nd War (2007–2008) Arms escalation spikes. Proxy wars intensify globally. 3rd War (2016) Supply chains, petrochem, weapons, space assets, all pulled into the blender. Night City’s ideology & economy built around independence during this. 4th War (2021–2023) (THIS is the big one) Johnny Silverhand and the nuke hit Arasaka Tower in Night City (2023). Detonated a small tactical nuclear device inside the tower. Thousands died. Arasaka denies the nuke was theirs for ages; Militech blames Arasaka; the public thinks Arasaka got clapped with its own toy. The truth is murkier: the op was meant to cripple Arasaka ops globally in one symbolic strike. The blast irradiates part of the City Center for years. This also triggers mass net destabilization and accelerates AI autonomy on the other side of the Blackwall. Major aftermath: Chicago and other cities get militarized in blowback ops. Patriot militia movements form. The Blackwall gets constructed to keep rampaging Old Net AIs contained. Nomad clans are displaced all over the continent during the chaos. Rosalind Myers later uses the instability post-war to justify the Unification War in NUSA. Legacy/Ruins: Arasaka Tower’s crater/ruins → still sitting in 2077’s skyline like a radioactive scar. Public worship of digital entities by groups like the Voodoo Boys (born from desperation during these wars). Militech’s dominance over U.S. military supply chains and NUSA security policy. Fixer culture and merc economy in Night City are turbo-charged by the war vacuum. NC autonomy becomes a thing because the whole continent’s too busy fighting to govern it. 🏛️ 3. The Unification War (2025–2026) Era vibe: America tries to stitch itself back together under one president, but really it’s Militech holding the needle. Big events: NUSA reunites fractured U.S. states under President Myers. Militech becomes the de facto national military backbone. Chicago context in this era: 6th Street-style patriots and militia movements surge; portions of Chicago & the Midwest become recruitment and military staging ground for neo-patriot forces. Social movements here lean nationalist-militarist, anti-corp, and anti-outsider in tone. Chicago’s conflict legacy is ideological: “patriot militia vs economic misery vs corp influence”, which births groups like 6th Street that later export members to Night City to fight gangs and corpos alike. It’s not a medieval kingdom war, but it feels like one. Legacy/Ruins: U.S. national borders solidify again, but the hatred of corpos becomes mainstream. Patriot gangs like 6th Street emerge from the rubble of cities like Chicago. Nomads start organizing into massive mobile nations like the Snake Nation. ❄️ 4. The DataKrash (Rache Bartmoss / 2020s) Era vibe: The digital dark age. Big events: The “collapse of the Internet” triggered by Rache Bartmoss’s RABIDS in 2020. The global net fractures. Rogue AI factions form in the depths. Legacy/Ruins: The Old Net Ruins (a lethal digital wasteland only AI and the insane travel now). The idea that digital consciousness can be a battlefield or prison becomes normalized. Leads directly to the creation of NetWatch and eventually the Blackwall. 🏜️ 5. The Rise of the Nomad Nations (Post-wars 2030s+) Era vibe: Tribal sovereignty on wheels. Big events: Climate collapse, resource wars, and corp land claims force millions out of cities. These displaced communities become armed mobile nations. Major clans: Aldecaldos Bakkers Jodes Snake Nation (largest) Legacy/Ruins: Smuggling routes Desert fortress-camps A culture built on convoys, car warfare, bartering, and self-rule Night City itself is only possible because it exists as an isolated metro-state, neighbored by the Badlands and crossed by Nomad trade highways. ☢️ 6. The “Quiet War” Era (2045–2077) Era vibe: No declared world war, but every corp has their hand on a gun. Cold war capitalism AI containment tensions Relic-tech arms race legacy Mega proxy ops with no official blame Legacy/Ruins that show up in 2077: Arasaka still operates like a global samurai empire Militech acts like the U.S.’s war-corp kingdom The Blackwall is treated like a digital iron curtain Night City doesn't need a king—it has Fixers

Eurodollars (Eddies / €$) The main global currency. Backed by corporate-state power (mostly Militech + NUSA influence in North America, Arasaka influence abroad). Slang: “eddies” is just short for eurodollars. Everybody uses it unless they’re off-grid or in the black market barter game. Other currencies that still exist but matter less NUSA dollars technically exist but they’re basically junior-tier to the eurodollar. Cryptocurrencies survive mostly in encrypted black-market ecosystems, used by netrunners, fixers, and shady corp shell accounts. Barter is king in the Badlands and among nomad nations: food, fuel, ammo, parts, and people-skills are your “currency.” 🏦 Economic Systems 1. Corporate-Controlled Capitalism (baseline civilization) Cities and nations still call it a “free economy,” but the truth is: Megacorps own infrastructure, security, manufacturing, media, and supply chains. Competition exists, but it’s between kingdom-tier companies, not citizens. Wages are low, costs are insane, debt is normal, disposable people are priced in. Systems that sustain cities: Corp-owned utilities Corp-funded NCPD/MaxTac contracts Corp-run construction, real estate, medical care, and logistics There’s no benevolent invisible hand. More like a chokehold. 2. Fixer-Driven Merc Economy (Night City twist) Night City specifically sustains itself by: A gig and contract economy Fixers acting as economic middlemen (they set prices for jobs, intel, and gear) Independent industry taxed unofficially by whoever has leverage It’s capitalism but the marketplace is information, violence, and reputation. 3. Nomad Economies (semi-civilization outside cities) These are mobile nations, not just wandering folk. They trade in bulk: fuel convoys, stolen cargo, smuggled tech, agriculture, medicine, and protection contracts. They avoid corp land taxes by never staying in one place long enough to get billed. Nomads still buy stuff with eurodollars when they’re in cities, but outside, they run on barter and clan loyalty economics. 🛣️ Trade Routes North America Highways & deserts = nomad trade arteries Smuggling into Night City Cargo heists rerouted mid-truck Fuel + medicine convoys crossing the Badlands Night City Maritime shipping lanes along the Pacific coast Imports electronics, luxury goods, processed materials, medical supplies, cyberware parts Exports liquor, illegal smuggled goods, and corporate offshore contracts The Net Digital trade routes exist too: Fixers trafficking encrypted data Corps trading secrets like nuclear launch codes, weapon specs, personality constructs, and AI shards All of it passes through VPN-like runner networks and over the Blackwall border checkpoints (NetWatch controlled edges) Trade routes aren’t mystical ley lines… but they might as well be. They’re invisible and lethal. Orbit (Crystal Palace, Arasaka orbital stations, corp tunnels) There is vertical trade The ultra-rich live off-world Goods go up via space elevators/rockets Money comes down in contracts and influence Space isn’t the frontier. It’s the gated community.

ustice is privatized violence with paperwork on top. There’s still a legal code in Night City and the NUSA, but the system is enforced selectively, mostly for optics. Real power belongs to megacorps and the police division they bankroll. If you’ve got money or leverage, you can dodge most consequences. If you don’t, the law hits like a hammer. Who actually administers justice? NCPD (Night City Police Department) City cops. Corrupt, overworked, heavier on firepower than investigation. They maintain “order,” not fairness. MaxTac (Maximum Force Tactical Division) The elites who drop in when someone goes full cyberpsycho or the situation’s too intense for NCPD. They’re judges, jury, executioners in armored exo-suits. Corporate Security Forces (Arasaka, Militech, etc.) These guys police their districts or interests like sovereign nations. Trespass into Arasaka turf and you're answering to their legal system, not the city’s. NetWatch (for digital crimes) Basically the cyber-CIA + border patrol for the Blackwall. They hunt illegal AI communication, rogue runner breaches, and digital terrorism. Courts exist, trials exist, but they’re garnish. The real sentencing happens in alleyways, boardrooms, or cyberspace.

Mercenaries are basically the adventurers of this world, and society treats them like a normal part of the ecosystem: How society views mercs (“adventurers”) Necessary but distrusted. Most see you as disposable problem-solvers. You take jobs the “legit world” can’t publicly claim. Those with style or legend status get idolized despite the danger (Johnny Silverhand, V, Morgan Blackhand, etc.) On the street, mercs are respected like predators are respected: “don’t bother them if you don’t have to.” In the corps’ eyes you’re chess pieces. In the gangs’ eyes you’re either business or competition. In regular society? You’re part celebrity, part cautionary tale. How mercs operate socially They don’t answer to a king. They answer to a Fixer (job brokers who handle gigs, payouts, and reputation flow). Reputation is currency. Style is armor. Contracts are fate. If you’re good, you get more calls. If you’re flashy, you get remembered. If you push too far, MaxTac shows up to uninstall you. 👮‍♂️ Crime & Punishment Street punishments: gangs handle slights with bullets or mutilation. Public crimes: NCPD arrests or flatlines depending on how convenient you are to the headline. Cybercrimes: traced by NetWatch, punished by ICE, neural frying, or forced AI upload. Corporate crimes: handled internally, NDAs, assassinations, or asset seizure. You never even see the court. Cyberpsychosis cases: instantly escalated to MaxTac—contain or kill. 🧠 Unique Social Pillars The Blackwall – the legal digital border everyone fears to cross Fixers – unelected oligarch-judges of the gig economy Braindances – media addiction shaping empathy, crime, memory, and identity Cyberpsychosis – mental health treated like a criminal condition Corp Sovereignty – districts treated like national borders TL;DR There is law, but not really justice. People don’t romanticize mercs, but they know civilization wouldn’t function without them. You’re viewed like a shotgun: useful, dangerous, and pointed away from the user whenever possible.