Hacking Globalsec from New Angeles: A Quick Android Setting Primer

Mood Music

The Android setting by Fantasy Flight Games is huge. It began in the late 2000s with an eponymous board game which was more like a cyberpunk noir film generator than a murder mystery game. It was brilliant, and remains a personal favorite for just how existential it is. Later, FFG got the rights for Richard Garfield's old Netrunner CCG and released Android: Netrunner, where the lore exploded across all of the card sets. I've indulged a lot of cyberpunk over the years, be it through the classic novels and stories, Bladerunner and its adjacents, or board and roleplaying games alike. My favorite take on the genre remains Android, and as I mull over running a diceless cyberpunk game, I decided I'd dust off the beautiful (and huge) Worlds of Android artbook/lorebook that FFG released several years ago. 

So, for any of you who are already familiar with Android, whether through the board game, the brilliant asymmetric card game, or the "official" adaptation through FFG's Genesys system, none of this is new. For the rest, I want to introduce you briefly to the setting, and put out another few posts about quick-hits for lore touchpoints for megacorps, factions, groups of runners and hackers, and the like. Nothing crunchy. Few, if any numbers. Just tasty bits to break off and insert into your various cyberpunk-adjacent games. If you have Worlds of Android, great, it's fantastic, but it's also a tome, and no one wants to quickly gloss a tome when you only need a few hand-holds into the setting.

Why do I prefer Android over other, more recognized cyberpunk settings? Perhaps because it came about more recently and affords a more accurate projection of our actual society into the near future. Perhaps because not every story within is about nihilist anarchism raging against the machine (featuring soccer moms-turned-hackers like Sunny Lebeau, everyday transhumans like teenaged Kit Peddler, or a remnant AI from before the big war, slowly evolving in the darkest corners of the internet, like APEX). Perhaps because there is limited stellar sci-fi, with a giant space elevator in Ecuador, fusion reactors on the moon, and colonies on Mars. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't have anything to do with the net wünderkind, Chaos Theory, and her computer console, Dinosaurus.

"When I said I could hack in my sleep, did you think I was joking?"

So, bird's-eye view time.

- The moon and Mars are colonized. The moon features Heinlein, a very large surface city, and a ton of helium-3 refineries pumping out absurd amounts of profit. Mars is filled with dissidents who think earth is full of jerks. They're not wrong. As a result, terraforming has proven... difficult.

- The largest city on earth is New Angeles, rising out of Ecuador around the Beanstalk, a supermassive space elevator constructed by Jack Weyland of the Weyland Consortium. The Beanstalk represents truly unchained profit, power, and leverage. What was once a restricted area along the equator has become the largest megalopolis in human history. Everything is here.

- Brain-mapping tech has advanced to the point where human minds can be stored electronically, and by ways and means, reverse-engineered artificially to afford a booming business. Elegant clones are manufactured by biotech giant Jinteki, and robust full-synth facsimiles are produced by the austere Haas Bioroid corporation.

- As you might imagine, a pardigm shift like artificial humans, whether produced from flesh or polymer, results in not only an existential crisis for the planet but a focused undercurrent of unrest. If you think "they're taking our jobs" is a prickly statement on a good day today, add overpopulation, augmented reality ennui, and science-as-deity to the mix.

- Cybernetics, smart weapons, G-modding, low-grav life, and virtual reality doesn't begin to describe the ways in which actual humans have managed to change their makeup. Effectively everyone everwhere is connected by The Net, which is managed by SYNC, which is managed by NBN. NBN wants to keep you informed. Keep you happy. Keep you flushed with options. You can be whoever you want to be. It's not a lie. It is also not a promise.

The sun rises over the infinite skyline of New Angeles, starscrapers, the haze of moisture and pollution, and the Root, a matrix of light against a massive shadow. Hoppers clack and hum overhead. Discarded wrappers and plastiform containers drift in the air, slowly descending to the slums to gather in drifts at the base of affordable housing complexes. A bioroid, its unfeeling silver eyes staring straight ahead, pilots the street hoover, gathering the detritus of Life Above on its way to some recycling center beyond the edge of the inhabitable.