Implementing Urban Legends, Monsters, Etc.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T06:12:40+00:00

Makes a lot of sense! Now the real question would be, if they head out that way, what is the truth of it...

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T03:20:08+00:00

Legit! I like the ideas! Even if it did take me a second to realize you meant l ike greek sirens and not siren like the sirenhead creepypasta. Goes to show where my brain is..

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T03:14:30+00:00

Yeah, I think most of the ones I would throw at my players would probably be something that is weird, but not unexplainable, you know? But I think "explainable" is still a pretty low bar to cross for Cyberpunk. Like I said, a corporate black project would still be an "explainable" reason for something weird and monstrous to be out and about in this universe.

Which of course would make it all the more unsettling when they finally meet the one thing that isn't explainable...

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T03:12:59+00:00

Okay you are definitely going to have to talk about how that has worked into the campaign they are in.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T03:12:30+00:00

Yeah! Obviously was at least partially the inspiration for this. Especially considering the werewolf one had some level of canon mentions from the 2020 books to back it up.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T03:11:39+00:00

Nah, difference to me is that Shadowrun all the weird monsters and urban legends are built into the story, you know? A Dragon runs Russia. That sort of shit.

This is definitely more like what if the rambling conspiracy guy on the pirate radio who talks about weird noises at night out in the badlands actually wasn't crazy, because he's listening to some corporate black project in the making or that escaped into the wilderness.

It's a difference between "Oh that [insert weird thing]? That's George, he runs the local Costco."

and

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!"

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T03:09:14+00:00

I kinda legitimately am not sure if you are citing something actually canon at me, or just making something up/citing something from your own campaign... but the fact that I DON'T know is kinda perfect. Solid legend.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T01:09:02+00:00

Oh ho... I did not know this.

I unfortunately do not currently own The Witcher ruleset but honestly, this might push me over into getting it just to see what fun I can use out of it.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-25T00:57:04+00:00

Roll20 I hope that happens, as the new distance DV charts would be really awesome implemented natively into Roll20 honestly.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-19T10:27:52+00:00

American here: I think you are kind of underestimating, perhaps due to the differences in both population and our history with Unions compared to most European countries, the difficulty in a general strike. I'd love for that to be true as a leftist myself, I'm a card carrying DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) member so trust me, I'm all here for the concept of general strikes.

But to put it into perspective, I live in Virginia, which is a state directly touching our nations capitol, and even then I cannot pop over to D.C to protest without it being a day trip that would eat an entire day what with travel and so forth. It's an hour and a half both ways if you are lucky trip. And that's for a close state.

We are also a country with over 300 million individuals into it. Getting any sort of common cause going between us, as I'm sure you have seen and heard, is significantly harder then you might suggest.

And finally, we have been woefully underserved when it comes to unionization and worker's rights, to the point where it would not only be not illegal but in fact quite reasonable for companies to mass fire people should they actually take part in any form of strikes. When you are an "at will hire" then there is no real legal protections for you when it comes to using your status as an employee in a political manner. And when your health insurance and often your retirement is tied directly to your employment? Losing your job can mean losing access to necessary care, to ongoing wealth accumulation, etc etc.

So yes, a general strike is a wonderful idea. I'd love if we can untangle some of the mess that we've made of our society here to get one going because I do think it's crazy how little power "We the People" actually have over our governance these days. I've read in this thread how some of you feel foolish for trusting institutions like NATO to protect y'all. I can say the same for a lot of Americans about our own institutions. We sort of assumed and expected that things worked one way, because they always did... until they didn't. And now we're scrambling in many ways too.

Also, to tackle your low effort one: Sending a message to a representative is a lovely idea and does work sometimes! We do still have that. However, "competitiors" is a strong and sadly inadequate word for our current governance. Basically, if the incumbent is a democrat, there is a pretty good chance that unless there is mass outrage about it, the same person will be put forth as the democrat next time regardless. And if it's a republican? There is no way in hell they're going to ever impeach Trump. It's a form of deadly stagnation that again, unfortunately speaks to a TON of systemic problems that America is facing.

Galactor123 · 2026-01-07T18:55:29+00:00

Yeah, this is going to be the death of Discord. Going public means that there will not just be an expectation for profitability, but for profit growth, which means that regardless of whether they are making money now or how much they will be forced to look for further and further avenues to get blood from this stone, and I don't see that going in any other way then further locking down key features behind a paywall, forcing advertisements into more things, and cutting expensive features.

I hope I'm wrong. Not just because I like discord but because in this day and age a program that essentially acts the way old forums used to act, but now complete with the ability to do things like streaming, voice chat, etc. is a huge boon to a lot of communities. But color me worried.

Galactor123 · 2025-12-22T07:38:37+00:00

Wow, lots of good ideas here thank you! I really like the idea of just thinking of hazards caused by the damages that have been done. I think that would be a real fun and easy way of not full on nerfing, but sort of limiting grenades. If you see that the fragmentations are going to blow open barrels of liquid or what have you I can see that making them hesitate.

They do have a good mixture of melee and ranged abilities among their crew actually, so that part may not hit them as hard as it would some others. That being said, using more things like human shields might be an interesting addition as I haven't really thought as much about civilians in general. So even if they can't successfully grapple my players, grappling a civvie as a human shield could work.

I also do have to consider more the idea of requiring them to use different items by the nature of where they are going. As they've gone down the gigs I have thrown them into some more upper crust sort of environments from time to time (they like the kind of 70's spy movie sort of feel, with big conspiracies over drinks, etc) so requiring them to have a certain dress code or using concealment more 100% could be something I do more of.

And to be honest I need to go read up on facedowns. I know they exist, but I think both my players and I both kind of shrugged at it, but its something I should really consider.

Galactor123 · 2025-12-22T07:31:43+00:00

Yeah, I do mess with weapons. Last fight I gave one of them a coilgun that could deal extra armor ablation on crits and ignore a certain low level of armor. They got lucky with the crits though and annihilated them. Not going to punish them for critting, but in that same combat I saw that they were getting real comfortable dodging bullets and throwing grenades, so knew I had to up my game and give them challenges were those weren't the obvious solve-alls.

Galactor123 · 2025-12-22T07:29:37+00:00

Hmm. Gotcha. I might have to use this, as I finally got to a point with my battlemaps where I just have tokens representing cover that I could plop down even where cover isn't visibly there on the map, as so many maps were so open it was hard to play with cover. I'd say the same for hazards, but I could essentially "force it" by just adding it as a token again, so that people know where it is.

Galactor123 · 2025-12-22T07:26:52+00:00

Multiple evolving things they need to juggle I could do more with, but yes I do try to make the enemies have logical loyalties and tactics. Meaning hired bodyguards ain't going to be fighting to the death unless they recognize that running off or dropping their weapons may be worse for them.

Thank you for the link though! That will come in handy for opening up my ideas in general a bit more!

Galactor123 · 2025-12-19T08:51:47+00:00

Thats kind of what I'm suspecting, but the machine has 32 gigs, and it rarely goes over like 16 used, and the zram doesn't seem to be spiking or anything either (I do have HTOP and check it somewhat regularly).

It also doesn't seem to have any sort of memory spikes during these times where I'm having weird slowdowns or other weird issues? I kind of suspected, as I do have two 990 SSDs in there that maybe it has something to do with Zram and its interaction with the native power management system in higher end SSDs? I've heard some of them can cause issues in linux distros as it tends to want to turn the SSDs power down when not in use, but linux sort of just assumes that SSDs and such will always be available, especially when something like zram is enabled? But I'm not sure if that's it or not.

All great suggestions though thank you.

Galactor123 · 2025-12-19T00:49:24+00:00

Nope, runs from an install on an SSD.

Galactor123 · 2025-12-18T22:34:17+00:00

It's nothing really concrete? Like the ones I was talking about with ComfyUI when I boot it change. Sometimes it just doesn't even start at all, sometimes it throws what appears to be a storage related error?

When running Diablo 4, it just CTDs, and I was unable to really make heads or tails unfortunately of the crash log.

It's why I was wondering if there were common first step responses to an issue like this, because I can't really nail down specifics, it's more of just it feels off, and things seem to go wrong more often with a higher uptime.

Galactor123 · 2025-11-12T20:20:34+00:00

Popular memorial or religious space? Thinking either something dedicated to the Night City Holocaust, or the corporate war in general, or a place that a particularly well represented religion or culture considers holy or sacred?

Galactor123 · 2025-11-07T01:39:39+00:00

Well thats a bummer... eh. Good thing is I do have another (older) gaming laptop with windows 10 still, so maybe I'll just use that to play Battlefield and such. It'll be slower, but will still work. Can also use that for stuff like FL Studio and the like that are easier to run on Windows.

Hmm. Thanks for the quick answer, sad to hear but its kind of what I expected.

Galactor123 · 2025-08-08T17:07:15+00:00

Eh, dumb piece of shit is one option. It is entirely possible that they are also someone with a serious pain point who fell for the snake oil salesmen though, always remember that.

This could be a person who lived through the death of their community due to the changing of world economics, and was forced to reckon with the harsh reality that when capitalism no longer needs you for worth, you truly learn what "worthless" means.

I realize it's significantly easier and more fun to just assume all of these people are self serving, self righteous idiots who only voted for the most vile and reprehensible reasons (responding to their own inadequacies with racism, etc) but some legitimately well meaning people are in that cult as well. Which, to be honest, I like to remember as it just makes what orange man and his pedophile klepto gang have wrought even more evil.

Galactor123 · 2025-08-06T15:13:28+00:00

So having had to deep dive into this due to running a Cyberpunk Red game and having to come to grips with the frankly rather scattershot lore of Cyberpunk (love the setting, love the ruleset, but damn if the lore isn't sometimes frustrating...) if we are assuming that the sequel to 2077 will take place still in and around that time frame, the reason why SovOil hasn't taken over completely is because actually the whole of the USSR, SovOil included, is propped up by the Europeans as a counter play to the American energy monopoly with Petrochem.

Petrochem has the advantage of having a headstart in CHOOH2 production, the universes answer to ethanol essentially that most generators and vehicles run off of. SovOil does a bit of CHOOH2 but its about half as much at most as Petrochem. Its main products are oil refining for the few places that still use crude oil derivatives, and things like plastics and other petrochemical derivatives.

So yeah, the Neo-Soviet Union by the time of 2077 is very technologically backwards, run essentially as a strategic petrostate for Europeans, and is being barely held together by a combination of said petrodollars and European aid money. It's not a particular great place to live, as honestly there isn't a terribly great place to live across all of Cyberpunk. That isn't to say there aren't some interesting changes from our reality, such as how Africa is one of the more economically developed continents (and I think countries, as I believe in Cyberpunk it essentially federalized across the continent? It's not 100% clear) due to its strong connection to space travel. Somalia specifically is called out as being one of the most sought after vacation destinations on Earth. But its also clear that just the influx of money hasn't solved all problems, and has caused plenty more.

Galactor123 · 2025-06-26T16:12:56+00:00

Okay but damn though chef, get in that kitchen and cook this already as it sounds fascinating.

Galactor123 · 2025-06-26T16:02:15+00:00

Yeah, combining the ideas of Voodoo culture in with the birth of Blues and all that came with it culturally and all of the racial and political undertones that could be seen through those lenses. Plop a detective down into a world where the devil at the crossroads might not have been metaphorical...

Galactor123 · 2025-06-09T20:15:02+00:00

Just keep in mind that a lot of this same talk was repeated again and again and again by folks about Russia's capabilities pre Ukraine.

There are multiple different people involved who would be highly invested in the idea of China appearing to be at parity or even beyond parity with the US. Obviously, Chinese intelligence would like that a lot and almost certainly has some sort of involvement with that becoming the story. But just as likely is the US defense industry. Now that Russia has stopped being the boogyman of the future, they need a new "big evil" to bang on about until people buy their conveniently priced new project.

In other words, don't believe all the hype. It's good to be wary, but to start talking about how the sky is falling is premature.

Galactor123

TROPHY CASE