The Megacities - The urban sprawl, home to 80% of
all humanoids of the New World. Megacities are gigantic, self-contained skyscrapers so tall that oxygen is
piped into the upper levels from algae farms nestled in their cores. Inside, levels are broken up by their
use. High up are the executive suites, boardrooms and office blocks, as well as director lounges and
swimming pools, hydroponic farms and orchards for fresh fruit and vegetables, massage parlours and spas,
niche storefronts catering to every whim, high-end sense-tank warehouses, bespoke tailors and cobblers, and
executive landing pads for aerial vehicles. Nestled in the centre levels are corporate artists,
pornotainment studios filming psychologically perfected media, as well as accounting firms, consultancy
firms and analysts, public baths, hospitals and dentist offices, small, comfortable bars and pubs, local
franchise eateries and casual clothing stores, and walk-in, walk-out genetic manipulation clinics. On the
lower levels, where crime and poverty is abundant, are the factories, creating technology, weaponry and
ultra-processed foods, distilleries and dive bars, low-end franchise food stores serving synthetic
fried foods and corn syrup sodas, video game parlours and shoddy storefronts, as well as gang hideouts and
smuggling dens. On the ground floor, Wukong conclaves, merchant caravan launches, motels, small nightclubs,
forgotten storefronts, auto-fill vending machines, and the occasional mango tree or banana plant
litter the streets, filled largely with sunbathing drunken Gobbos, mischievous Wukong and the occasional
adventuring party heading out with a caravan. Throughout all this are the habi-cube residential areas, laid
out carefully so that no employee comes to work late or conspires with their neighbours.
Megacities
are miles wide at the base, with many levels overhanging their foundation in a bid to create as much product
- and therefore market share - as possible. Many megacities have interconnected spires, each tower focusing
on a product of its own, be it machinery, technology, food or clothing. Underneath every megacity spire is a
dreaded Datacenter, home to foul and frightening creatures that patrol the endless dark corridors
maintaining, if not outright worshipping, the zettabytes of data that pass through every hour.
Adventurers are often born here, desperate to get away from the tedium of dead end jobs and lack of natural sunlight, and get their start performing freelance work for corpo field agents or gang lieutenants, before setting off to find greener pastures.
Fixer Hangouts - Bars, stripclubs, nightclubs, gambling dens, smoking lounges, et cetera. If it's a place one can discuss business with the comfort of a cheap drink from an attractive server, job-creating middle men will congregate there, knowing that fresh-faced adventurers will show up to handle the dirty work. Most of these hangouts revolve around their own central theme. Perhaps a nightclub revolves around a gothic black and red theme, complete with aristocratic wine taps, chromed silver and glass chalices and a seductive - if somewhat frightening - Netsucker landlady. Or perhaps the seedy, cigar-fogged gambling den is a front for a tabletop wargaming club, its scarred and stone-faced members in fact a hardcore competitive tournament for miniature battlefields. Perhaps a bar is built around a boxing ring, with new adventurers having to prove their mettle before any jobs are thrown their way, or perhaps a strip club caters exclusively to Artificiates, portraying bizarre robot circuit diagrams in lieu of dancers.
In any case, a newly unemployed party of would-be adventurers often start their journey with a little help from a Fixer, by looking for work in their local Hangout.
Wukong Conclaves - The mobile shanty towns found on the outskirts of every megacity are known as Conclaves, congregations of Wukong clans dedicated exclusively to the art of monkey business. Banana plants and mango trees dot the area, genetically perfected to produce weekly harvests in exchange for viciously expunging the nutrients from their soils and gulping water by the gallon. Tents and yurts house the Wukong, while small hastily constructed shacks protect their fruit, drinks, and any stolen tech they've pilfered from outgoing merchant caravans. While the majority of the inhabitants are Wukong, many Gobbos, humans, and the occasional Nayaling have made these Conclaves their home, usually as a guest or pet by an adventurous Wukong.
Parties of adventurers are often formed from these guests, eager to make themselves useful to their new homes. While most Wukong are happy to occasionally steal something off the back of a merchant's loader, these parties will wander out into the world in search of creds and tech to bring back.
Charging Outposts - Life in corporate territory is largely congregated to megacities and its surrounding urban area, but with the prevalence of solar powered vehicles, intermittent charging stations have been set up to allow for merchant caravans to swap out and recharge their batteries, instead of losing time during night hours waiting for daylight for drained batteries to slowly refill. These charging outposts have quickly become small, Wild West like settlements unto themselves, merchants and mechanics setting up shop to provide travellers with food, booze and repairs on their journeys. Saloons provide world-wide gossip and card games, barberdocs can tune up augmented limbs while providing a fresh shave and a haircut, and general stores allow wanderers to stock up on rum, tobacco and sundries for the road. Occasionally a herd of photosynthetic cattle might graze nearby while their handlers stop at a virtual brothel, or weary nomads might seek fresh sheets and a night in a warmed bed. Life outside the megacities is mostly barren desert or endless fields of agriculture, so these charging outposts make for a welcome stop on an adventurer's journey.
Production Towns - Consisting of densely packed
habi-cubes and bizarrely structured factory floors, production towns are entire communities dedicated to the
refinement of raw material into a single product. It begins with a single a company scouting remote
locations for resources. From there, a sea of cargo transports and construction equipment are sent out into
the middle of nowhere to build the town directly on top of the desired natural deposit. While these towns
may initially appear as scrambled masses of buildings tied loosely together with catwalks and conveyors,
they are in fact AI-generated marvels of compacted efficiency. Once the build is complete, employees are
assigned to work there.
The towns are not simply made of workplaces. They are all set up with an
entire miniaturised economy, controlled entirely by the company that owns it. Each employee is paid what
seems to be enough, only then to have it taken back by their employer through the carefully manipulated
prices of housing, supplies, power and facilities. While forcing employees into what is essentially
indentured servitude would normally break several laws, at least according to the tattered remains of any
legal system in The New World, they don't actually have any rules against employees going elsewhere to
spend their wages. Instead, they use the sheer remoteness of their locations that make outward trips
completely unfeasible from a logical stand point.
Onsen and Oasis Towns - Dotted throughout the
desert are hot springs and oases, places of welcome respite from long days on the road. Of course, almost
every hot spring has an accompanying bath house and inn built alongside it, and every oasis has a
merchant's rest, inevitably turning its fresh water into hypercarbonated soda. Which means smaller
accompanying stores to sell to purveyors of the initial buildings, and thus, small villages spring up
alongside the soothing watering holes.
Still, these are excellent places for adventuring parties to
rest, recharge, and network with other wanderers.
Plantations - The vast,
semi-automated fields that exist along the fertile coastlines, terraced mountain sides, even around desert
oasis of many a territory. The most famous are in Czarina Tropical Agriculture, miles upon miles of
carefully ordered croplands and orchards protected by harvester titans and automated security. While most
territories focus these on food agriculture, some territories, such as the Duty Free Ports of House
'Bacco, instead focus their efforts upon cash crops such as tobacco, sugar, and other organic
pharmaceuticals and additives that are cheaper or more profitable for sale when grown naturally rather than
produced through synthetics.
Such regions are often dotted with charging stations that act as hubs
both for the local labor and security forces, and with the fortress-like mansion-homes of executives and
corporate feudal lords who like to get more personally involved with their land management. In addition they
can be home to mutated variants of flora and wild fauna, agricultural zones turning wild on occasion when a
system breaks down and no one notices, or when the original owner of the plot disappears through hostile
take over or bankruptcy liquidation. These places become home to mutant nests, wukong enclaves, and rebel
outposts until someone up the chain notices the alerts and sends out teams to cut back the overgrowth and
replant the cash crops. Ancient lost product lines, mutant bandits, and smuggler's paradises can be
found in such places in the short periods before the corpos notice once more and seek to turn reclaimed
wilderness back into tightly organized profitable agribusiness.
The All Terrain Loader Universal Service XL "Atlus". The primary method of hauling goods by land, the Atlus XL is a quadrupedal flatbed with a fully loaded speed of 5 miles an hour. While designed for merchant caravans, the Atlus XL's constantly recharging solar batteries and incredible reliability has made it the primary method of transportation for many mercenary groups and adventurers, building homes out of scrap materials on top of its flatbed loader. While travelling in the Atlus XL is slower going than bikes and mounts, the Atlus XL's ability to carry gigantic loads allows for travellers to bring all the comforts of home with them, making them especially popular for those in no hurry to get where they're going.
Bunkers - During the collapse of the Old World climate, northern nations took it upon themselves to build an interconnected underground network of haphazardly constructed bunkers, nuclear powered and supposedly able to feed and house up to fifty million people. The reactors of these bunkers failed after only a few generations, while the rudimentary artificial intelligences governing them malfunctioned, creating horrific mutants and terrifying robotic creatures that now prowl the endless halls and rooms deep underground. Oftentimes these bunker networks feed into megacity datacenters, allowing for undercity elfs and cyberdriders to skulk around beyond their usual haunts. Inside, Old World relics and ancient treasures are abundant, but booby traps and haywire defence systems even more so, making bunkers an excellent prospect for adventurers looking for quick creds, if they can handle the dangers within.
Relic Sites - Abandoned ruins of the Old World dot the landscape, drawing treasure hunters and archaeological expeditions funded by collectors of ancient trinkets and knowledge. These areas are often quite depressing; old roads littered with burned out cars and charcoal skeletons, dusty bunkers filled with empty tins and bleached photographs, crumbling warehouses picked clean by Old World looters and New World collectors, the occasional forgotten ghost town reduced to rubble, and underground facilities and abandoned datacentres still booby-trapped and manned with rusting tech husks. Still, even the most humble gif or social media meme sells for hundreds of thousands of creds to the avid Old World enthusiast, and many adventurers are contracted to head out into the desert with vague coordinates and empty satchels, ready to plunder.
TechnoCult Gatherings - The loss and suppression of
knowledge during the Great Relocation has made many people turn to technocults for impossible answers. The
prevalence of digital beings formed from coalescences of code, combined with the lifelike simulations of the
Corpo-Net and Dark Web, has made some cults believe that the material world is itself a simulation or video
game. Some cults, like the Sect of The High Score, preach this gospel through deeds of charity, believing
that philanthropic acts will attain them a place on the scoreboard of life, granting them privileges and
bragging rights in the supposed True Reality. Other cults, like the Sect of The Open World, believe that
they are player characters in a free-roaming, no rules environment, and behave recklessly and violently
around non-believers under the assumption that they are NPCs.
Not all cults believe in the simulated
reality. Some believe in the purity of unaugmented human flesh, forgoing cybernetics and terrorising those
with them, while others worship the sun and solar power for their vehicles. And while many cults have grand
designs on the New World, concocting schemes and attacks on the populace, many are also welcoming and
charitable.
The Undercity Datacenters - Beneath the mountain high spires of every megacity, zettabytes of data are processed, redistributed and archived in cavernous, ramshackle and pitch dark datacenters. Everything from corporate-created pornotainment, mercenary social media profiles and bounty boards, sponsored streams, influencer VODs, sense-tank digital worlds and the innumerable engrams of digitized personalities and reconstituted people pass through megacity datacenters. But maintaining these hubs is a lifelong fulltime job, and lurking deep in the dark, frightening and strange creatures have forms, born from hundreds of years without light. Undercity Elfs, Cyberdriders, Abominations and other monstrosities prowl the forgotten alleys and aisles, repairing and replacing broken servers, while ambushing any topsider that dares to attempt to plunder their treasured data. Auto-filled vending machines provide sustenance in the darkness, with tented villages built around them to guard and hoard precious candy bars, cheese puffs and sodas from the other warring micro-societies that inhabit the datacenters. Scrap drones and tech husks shamble through the cavernous halls, created by Undercity Elfs to attack anyone not whitelisted by themselves. Cults of personality form and vanish from forgotten profile pictures found deep in server archives, micro-societies are rocked and warped from titbits of topside news, wars are fought and lost over waifu ranking lists. The Undercities are the very heart of the 'Net, and are kept by those obsessed with it.
Lost Megacities - Any number of things can go wrong in a megacity that causes its denizens to be scattered to the surrounding territory. An awakened Hive A.I can seize control of spire defence, hardlight, and environmental systems, wreaking havoc on its population. Undercity incursions can spread from underground upwards, in a bid to overthrow their corporate overlords and datawasters. Director infighting or subterfuge can cause a loss of leadership, causing anarchy and fighting in the streets between corpo-cop subfactions. Some megacities become overrun with feral Splicers, known as Beastmen, due to haphazard genetic altering from higher-ups, creating skyscrapers filled with lycanthropes and mutants that prowl the streets, on a constant hunt. Netsuckers often congregate to these spires once chaos has erupted, creating terrifying gothic horror facsimiles for those that couldn't escape. Occasionally, stagnant growth can cause Walled Street shareholders to simply pull their shares en masse, bankrupting a spire.
In any case, lost megacities are a treasure trove for adventuring parties. While the spires can be filled with anything from anarchic raider clans, having overthrown their corporate masters, to digital infestations of rampant A.I, to werewolves and minotaurs, lost megacities are always still rich with forgotten merchandise, weaponry and armour, ready for plundering for those brave enough to enter.
The Edge of the Map - The vast majority of people on the world believe the world is flat, and that the sun orbits the earth. The weirdness that can only be explained by a curved surface blocking portions of the sun that is most readily obvious on the pole is easily avoided, as so few people bother to travel extensively, why bother when easy access to Sense-Tanks makes safe and fast travel anywhere you can possibly imagine so much easier? Adventurers of a more inquiring mind, and researchers and even a few executives tend to be more aware of the truth of the world, but for most? The world is a tiny oasis in the middle of an infinite burning desert. Only the Ronin Expedition regularly travels far beyond the edges of the known world. Few even think about traversing beyond the edges of the known world, and those who do are rarely seen again, fewer still of those who return are little more than sun-maddened wrecks. The lucky few however, return with relics from a lost age, worth riches untold. Once you travel deep enough, the land becomes unbearable, not simply because of the heat, but from the lack of carbon and nutrients in the soil, ancient polution, and other dangers.
The eastern side of the world, All-Gobi, is bordered by a combination of
deserts and tall mountains, whose stormy peaks are nearly impassible. The storms breaking on the mountain
sides spilling water down into the former Russian and Siberian permafrost plains, feeding jungles and
grasslands. Beyond them, the mountains become little more than furnaces, reflecting the sun's heat. In
the west, New Mojave, the great plains and deserts of Ur-Um-Wines and Spirits Company give way to infinite,
blasted, cracked, rock and sand, and the fossilized remains of vast forests. In their depths can be found
valuable lost bunker entrances and ancient settlements from the early migrations.
For the oceans, the former Atlantic is considered near worthless, both by
corporate and adventurer interests. Those who have access to old world maps can see clearly that there are
almost no north Atlantic islands of value, and no ship can shield it's crew from the heats south of the
tropic of cancer, let alone the terrible storms thrown up by the equator. The former Pacific is considered
much more potentially profitable. This vast ocean has several island chains tantalizingly close to the point
where the seas remain just barely survivable, and the great plastic gyre, now a series of chemically and
heat melted plastic, mobile islands, regularly push free of southern climes; treasure troves of wrecked
vessels, ancient products, and god only knows what.