____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________So... the future is finally here, but how long is this peace going to last for?
That's up to you to decide, Executives.
After all, you're kings: You've got all of the clout and guns and money that you could've ever dreamed of, so who's to say that you can't take any risks?
You make the money, you roll the nickels, and you deal the cards. The world is yours.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the not-so-distant future. Specifically, the 23rd Century. Space travel, a commonplace now, has become so easy and so fast that getting a flight from Earth to Mars, Venus, or any other terraformed colony at the nearest aerospaceport is as easy as buying a ticket to the nearest city on earth, all thanks to the efforts of the now non-existant Oxis Corporation. As the Earth becomes increasingly bureaucratic, overcrowded, dessicated, and downright boring, combined with the massive increase in travel to its fancy terraformed neighbors, vast megacorporations - such as your own - have begun to rise up and take initiative, whilst also attempting to combat increasingly dangerous and heavily-armed criminals and pirates both planetside and among the stars. These companies have all risen up and surpassed the tests of time, becoming incredibly powerful politically, militarily, and economically, whilst also attempting to either one-up rival corporations, criminals, or syndicalist rebellions, all looking to take the mantle of dominating the Solar System.
But as much as this is an exciting age of peace and advancement, it is also an age of conflict and chaos. With the utterly embarassing amount of effort that the UN is putting into stopping these dangers, it's time for the megacorporations to push past the bureaucracy and take matters into their own hands.
Which, obviously, is where you come in, Executive.__________________________________
THE QUICK RUNDOWN
This is "CHIEF EXECUTIVE", a cyberpunk roleplay taking place in the not-so-distant future of January, 2251. This roleplay is mainly free-form, allowing for people and their corporations to do as they wish in a sort of sandbox environment (and to bask in the glory of an 80s/late 90s anime cyberpunk aesthetic), though there will be a grounded underlying plot on several occasions of the roleplay whilst also allowing for ample time to interact or fight with one another. In it, you shall make your own evil (or not-so-evil) megacorporation, where you will be able to define the lines between good and evil in a frantic scramble for dominance in the Solar System. The brunt of this roleplay shall deal with these various megacorporations which all arose after the fall of the massive Oxis Corporation in 2165 where, in the ashes of its fall, these megacorporations would begin to further assert their authority where Oxis once ruled, to such a huge extent that they would ultimately dominate nearly every facet of 22nd century life as we know it. Additionally, these megacorporations all will have to deal with a common enemy: Each other, first and foremost, but also the massive amounts of pirates, criminals, and syndicalist partisans all ruining amok on the streets of vast cities and asteroid belts alike.
You will be taking control of your very own megacorporation and respective CEO during this time, presented with an arsenal of mechs, mercs, and more guns than you could ever imagine to duke it out with your rival corporations as you wish, or to take up arms against the encroaching and increasingly dangerous criminal world - it's your choice.__________________________________
THE LORE
Prepare for a big read, if you even bother reading it all.
World War Three was more or less just a big, fat, nuke-free joke for us. A joke for the world, and specifically for what direction that Wars later would be going into. Countries effectively did not exist at the turn of the century - it was just the UN now. 2100 marked the end of the three-year long Third World War in which, shockingly, nobody was bathed in nuclear fire. People died, of course, but no nukes flew, while the introduction of powerful new weapons and huge Private Military Corporations to use them ended the war relatively quickly and quietly in North Korea, Iran, and in South America. The world's population had grown exponentially as temperatures only began to rise higher and higher, whilst pollution levels increased as well in an increasingly desiccated and fossil fuel-reliant world. Massive, densely-populated megacities soon formed, with many of these metropoli rivaling the size of many small countries themselves with skyscrapers that pierced the clouds. More and more armies worldwide began to become privatized with the eventual centralization of the world government in the UN, seeing as how the UN's peacekeeping force was relatively lacking techology wise. The Oxis Corporation, the conglomerate of many gigantic fast food, information technology, defense, and pharmaceutical companies, was the first big sign that something big was coming: the rise of megacorporations. Free SIM cards and phones worldwide, corporate-sponsored space travel, and robots galore; if it was new and techy on the market, then Oxis was probably responsible for producing it and putting it on the market.
Oxis had a monopoly on nearly everything commercially, and was a menace globally, dwarfing any other company or world government that had come before it in just twenty years. Oxis phones, Oxis cars, Oxis condoms, Oxis cancer-eliminating drugs, you name it. The company was the benchmark of what any megacorporation should be today, but, one day, they made one major mistake:
They went to space.
In 2140, Oxis took advantage of the UN - now the world's primary world governing body - and its utter lack of awareness of the current technological situation in the world, and took to the stars. As a private venture, Oxis guided the population of an overpopulated and desiccated Earth to space without any major restrictions from the UN, establishing colonies far and wide on planets and moons in the far reaches of the Solar System such as Titan, Europa, and Mars. In just under twenty years, Oxis's space program had easily dwarfed any other space expedition in history with its unprecedented speed and cheapness. With the introduction of huge Atmosphere Processing Plants for terraforming and incredibly powerful nuclear engines, Oxis pretty much had colonies on nearly every planet in the solar system, including Venus, with much effort. As more and more people flocked to the Oxis colonies for work or for better lifestyles, huge cities began to form on each of the colony planets, whilst more and more resentment was built up against the bureaucratic UN's inefficiency to monitor Oxis. Hatred against Oxis rose as well, with many people criticizing the megacorporation for its alleged poor treatment of workers and total monopoly on the market.
This spree of vast and rapid space travel came to an abrupt crash in 2147, when an organization known as the National Secessionist Front, a syndicalist rebellion centered in Mars, declared unilateral independence from the Oxis colonies and from Earth. The carnage that ensued from the riots and skirmishes quickly transformed formerly peaceful city streets and aerospaceports into bloody war zones almost instantly, as terrorist attacks and piracy absolutely exploded in the Solar System. Oxis, already set back by several economic busts and crashes in previous years and faced with competition from rising megacorporations, was already on a path to capitulation as its own private forces could not keep up with an increasingly tech-savvy and highly-organized enemy. Beset on all sides by the NSF and pirate groups, and on the verge of total bankruptcy, Oxis ultimately collapsed in 2165, but not before taking the NSF and its rebellion with it. Secret operations into the NSF by Oxis's armed sector led to the capitulation of the revolt, after it was unable to keep up with itself after being stricken with internal coups almost instantly after Oxis fell, all thanks to a coincidental lack in leadership.
The void in authority was contested for nearly 35 years, but, in the wake of Oxis's collapse, new giants emerged. This is where you come in, by the way. Megacorporations, all modeled off of the success of Oxis, re emerged to dominate life in the solar system, stomping out any authority that the UN, a mere shell of its former self, had left, if any. These megacorporations grew exponentially in power, clout, and strength, rivaling anything ever seen before, and even surpassing the strength and influence of Oxis itself.
But, there still remained a big problem. Big problems, actually. Oxis's collapse allowed piracy and crime alike to run rampant in the colonies and on earth, with an estimated four million crimes taking place every day on Earth alone, be it big or small. The UN's failure to provide any sort of reaction to the crime seemed to mean that the megacorporations would step in now, but one more problem remained, which would surpass any other problem seen as of late:
The NSF's remnants were back, bigger and badder than ever before. With vast megafactories out in deep space and on remote moons producing their arsenal for war, the NSF now gladly arms criminals, terrorists, and pirates alike, with goals to provoke a large proxy war against the UN, and, by extent, the megacorporations. As a result, petty criminals and pirates now began to become much less of a nuisance nowadays and more of a significant threat, thanks to their new high tech goodies of destruction provided by the NSF. Recently, one of the biggest and deadliest terrorist attacks in history took place after an entire space station was destroyed by a NSF strike fighter, showing how the war against crime has since gone interstellar. In the advent of this chaos, megacorporations, mercenaries, and bounty hunters alike all have begun to attempt to drive back the encroaching threat that the NSF and other like-minded criminal syndicates pose, whilst also attempting to keep one another and criminal groups in check.
The rest, as you would later find out, is history. Now is the time for you to rise to the challenge just like Oxis did, Executives. Will you grow to dominate the Solar System and destroy the NSF once and for all alongside your fellow conglomerates? Or will you choose to loom in the shadows, waiting to strike at your rivals to take all the glory for yourself?__________________________________
ON TECHNOLOGY
Anything in bold is pretty important. In short, technology as it pertains to this RP is weird. It's a bit difficult to follow, but it's not too different from other franchises and universes people have seen before. It follows a typical hard sci-fi setup minus powerful space travel, forcefields, or any of those goodies, but it's still got that gritty 80s/90s cyberpunk anime touch to it. For a basic description, think Blade Runner or humanity in the Aliens franchise. Technology here is meant to be realistic, or something that we would likey be seeing in our real life future, but that does not mean that it is restricted. In fact, anything would typically go here, save for FTL travel, forcefields (which are in prototype), or psionics. Artificial gravity is only limited to space stations and large spaceships (the latter of which is still a rarity), whilst things such as cybernetic enhancements, nanomachines, and AI are fair game, provided that they're within reason. Any and all sort of tech included in apps is subject to be reviewed and/or possibly rejected, depending on how I feel.
Much like in the real world, no aliens exist (or any that we know of), and Faster than Light travel is something that we'd probably be seeing by the 2600s rather than now. What does exist in this universe that differs from our own, however, is the difference in speed of space travel. For the sake of this universe, space travel is insanely quick, with a regular flight from New York City to the moon taking a little under 7 hours, more or less, depending on the spacecraft used. Obviously, travel to distant planets and moons such as Titan takes significantly longer - we'll be going into the double digit hours on that range. Military spacecraft are significantly faster than regular spacecraft, of course, but generally space travel has become such a common thing that it's foolish to think that it'll take long to get from point A to point B in the Solar System in weeks, or even months. This is all thanks to powerful nuclear impulse engines, which Oxis patented, by the way. These engines are incredibly fuel efficient and allow for extremely fast travel in atmosphere and space, while the need for solid or liquid fuel in space has since been eliminated. Humanity has since terraformed nearly every terrestrial planet and moon in the Solar System save for Mercury, all thanks to powerful Atmospheric Processing Plants. Settlements on areas without atmospheres exist instead in specialized biodomes.Regular bullets and guns have since been replaced by pulse rifles, plasma guns, laser guns, railguns, and gauss guns, while thermonuclear weapons, cruise missiles, and orbital railguns have still steadily been reserved for last resort use. Megacorporations nowadays are always finding ways to make guns bigger and badder, especially with the threat of a resurgent NSF. Many megacorporations actively produce mechs that, albeit their size and strength, are still vulnerable to conventional means, as the image to the right suggests...
These vehicles, known properly as Mechanized Fighting Vehicles,, steadily began to phase out traditional tracked or wheeled armored vehicles such as tanks, thanks to their incredible mobility and tank-grade durability. Despite this, these Mechs are still vulnerable due to an increasingly dangerous environment which they fight in, and higher-powered weaponry built specifically for destroying them being introduced to the battlefield. Although they face great danger, Mechs are still an effective and widely-used platform, on the civil, police, and military spectrums alike. A typical mech is around 12-15 feet tall, but their weight varies.
Of course, technology here is free form. It does not have to be specifically from what's available, but remember that I still reserve the right to judge any sort of technology or weapon as acceptable or not.____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________RULES
- I run the RP (with any folks I choose to be Co-ops), and our word is law. Follow it.
- I reserve the right to grade and evaluate any and all sort of technology or weaponry included in your apps that is not from the technology lecture. If I feel as if it's not good for the setting, I'll deny it. Make sure to stay within reason.
- Do not Godmod or Metagame: Godmodding is defined as your character or nation doing something inexcusably overpowered or otherwise deemed as "bullshittery." Stay within logic and reason, one soldier cannot take on a whole band of criminals and expect to live, and one Megacorporation can't destroy the entirety of the NSF in one run. Stay within reason. Metagaming is a bit different - this is defined as your character or nation knowing things that they couldn't possibly know, such as a mercenary knowing the location of every criminal in a city without even knowing the layout of the city itself. Same goes for technology. If you ever have a question about tech, feel free to DM me.
- Don't be a dick: This applies to both OOC thread and Discord. I presume everyone here is mature enough to handle themselves and know the difference between banter and blatant flaming. A character can be a total asshole in the IC, but that's no excuse to be one in the OOC.
- No One Liners: I cannot stress this enough. You posts must have at least three full lines of text per each IC post. Anything less than that is generally frowned upon and considered laziness, thus making it unacceptable. Anything greater is acceptable and is smiled upon, mostly.
- No 'Dick measuring' contests/Wanking: This is defined as when two people argue over which character or corporation is better. Sure, debating on whether or not X is more powerful than Y, or showing off any of your tech to others, that's okay and all, but don't turn it into a blatant and violent competition in the OOC or IC. This doesn't contribute to anything and just causes unnecessary conflict in the OOC/Discord. Everybody and everything in this roleplay has their strengths and their weaknesses. No one thing is blatantly better than the other. The moment two people are seen excessively power wanking, they will receive a warning.
- Keep it Clean: This is a general NS rule, and at this point is the law of the land. Keep the RP PG-13. I understand it's a bit of a blurred line between what's PG-13 and what's R nowadays and that this site has a big age range, but so long as it's nothing sexually explicit, or overly violent, it's passable. If it's a horribly grotesque and frighteningly realistic torture scene or a pretty damn well written sex scene, it's probably not gonna be allowed by me or the mod patrol. If it's the aftermath of the aforementioned scenes or is faded to black before things get heated, then it'll be okay to post. This is no place to act out deviant fetishes.
- No multicolor or odd dialogue: I understand that Nationstates's format is hard to read for some people - that's what the dark theme is for. Bottom line is, no colored text, and no italicized/bolded/underlines paragraphs. Reserve them for their proper use instead of using them for everything. Please try to make it at least readable, as well. In short, if you feel we can't read the post without having our eyes blinded by insane technicolor text or can't follow the post, then don't post it.
- If you have a problem with a player for any reason, politely take it to TG. If that does not work, contact an OP or a CoOP. Do not turn the OOC thread or discord into your own battleground between your opponent in question.
- I am granting you a 72 hour (3-day) grace period to post if you're holding someone back or keeping us waiting in an important moment. Inactivity is excusable with proper and prior notice, but after that period, you will be forced to move on by the OP or Co-Op, whether you post it or not. Same deal goes for long-term surprise inactivity.
- NPCs are permitted for RP, such as to roleplay small squads in a megacorporation team or other people of interest, but if you plan to commit them for long-term, app them as a proper character.
- Try to get others involved as well: Just generally be friendly. Don't turn this into a personal writing haven, try to get others involved, even if you don't want to. RPing with others, at least to most people, happens to be more entertaining than RPing with yourself. A major facet of this RPing is focused on interaction.
- Golden rule.
- Have fun!
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