New Barcelona
Contents
New Barcelona
Districts
District 1: Neon Abyss Impending Doom/Urban Maze District 2: Corp Stronghold/Restive Locals District 3: Sweatshop Labor/Secessionists District 4: Organleggers/Depths Below District 5: Sweatshop Labor/Organleggers
A number of very influential organlegging rings operate out of the district, buying cyber and flesh from gangs throughout the city. Those who desperately need certain implants or surplus organs that can’t be obtained legitimately can be found dealing with ring representatives here, as well as medical organizations who aren’t picky about their sourcing.
Factory work is rarely safe and offers slave wages. Here, it’s nominally worse than slave labor, because slaves expect to be fed. Some massive factory or other economic enterprise is eating up poor laborers, wringing what work they can from them before leaving them broken and discarded. Most hold out hopes of decent pay and advancement, making good on it only often enough to keep the dream alive.
ConsumerCorp employs children from the children farms in conditions no better than slave labor, destroying their minds and bodies before discarding them to the streets when they can no longer meet strict and abusive work standards. Organleggers prey on the homeless and destitute, harvesting flesh and cyber to sell in other markets.
District 6: Restricted Access/Lasting Scar Create/Chaos A bioweapon weapon was released that infects people and forces them to grow extraneous limbs until they become gibbering creatures formed entirely of limbs that swarm after warm bodies. The entire district is permanently sealed off and has heavy guarding outside of it.
District 7: Grand Structure/Border Dispute
Badlands
Here is what I've got so far for districts - most of them are still just the flavor provided by the systems roll tables. District 5 is the most fleshed out by far, but I am currently running another group here and would prefer to run a different district.
District 1 is where I am runningNa little solo game to test some of the systems.
District 6 would be closer to the wastelands as far as access to the fruits of the city. It's completely cut off due to a horrible bioweapon leak, and would be a pretty bleak area to live. Extremely dangerous and access to resources is poor.
Thoughts from Psyche
Brainstorming a bit, hope that's OK. It seems strange that there is such a heavy presence of both sweatshops and organlegging, so I feel like that cries out for an explanation. I'm thinking the organlegging must not be entirely local: what if NuevoBarca is a hub for medical and implant tourism, a target of inbound human trafficking and body "disposal" for the rest of the world. The sweatshops are producing cheap knock-off cybernetics and bioware in volume, with the workers struggling to stay ahead of the threat of being worth more as parts than as labor.
District 2 could be the regional headquarters of a Kamagawa / Maxim joint venture medical center focused in life extension cybernetics, with the nursing staff on the verge of revolt and strikes over the extreme hours and the imperious top-down cultures of those two companies.
District 4 might be literally spread across the city, occupying an expansion of the Barca Metro system, which was built to provide both expanded public transport, but also cooling systems for body storage (and maybe even cryogenic preservation of wounded or severely ill patients until further medical options become available). People from all over the world pay to be shipped to Barca on their deathbeds, in hopes of eventual revival. If some of the local body banks have turned to organlegging, well, all these frozen guys look pretty similar to one another, and they are pretty quiet about any objections.
The District 6 virus is pretty bizarre, but it sounds to me like what might happen if a technology intended for clonal replacement organs got out of hand.
As for the grand structure in District 7, megacities like this always strain a little credulity when it comes to feeding themselves, and Barcelona is coastal. How about a gigantic fishery along the coast, run by SLAG, where the border dispute is between internal management. SLAG is used to managing land-based agriculture, so it has given the managers geographic regions of authority within the mega-fishery. Problem is, the fish can move (or be chased) from one managers territory to another, leading to all sorts of dirty dealing to keep the numbers up at the expense of the neighboring divisions.
