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neocephamods) wrote2026-03-28 04:34 pm
neocephamods) wrote2026-03-28 04:34 pm
SETTING
SETTING
Gigantic megabuildings, surrounded by the steady traffic of aerial vehicles sliding along invisible sky-paths, tower beneath an atmosphere that shifts restlessly from clear blue to roiling, lightning-crackled clouds of ill green, to the hazy orange of a sandstorm.
NEOCEPHALOS, so named for the AI that governs it, is one big lonely city on an even lonelier planet, sheltering its human population within its interconnected superstructures from both the extreme weather patterns of its world as well as all aspects of civilisation that get in the way of luxury and leisure.
Despite the harsher environments outside, it's a party forever within its sturdy metal walls. The city runs off an infinite power supply, its economy and justice system and governance overseen by sophisticated artificial intelligences, its workforce almost completely automated through drones and robotic machinery, and otherwise provides all basic needs to its citizens to ensure that anyone can live a healthy life without needing to lift a finger.
With all pillars of society established, all that's left is to live a life of pleasure and entertainment. Neocephalos asks nothing of its citizens but to be happy, and contribute to the happiness of others.
After all, this is your prime directive. And so too is it the city's.
THE CITY
The city of Neocephalos is primarily built around megabuildings of various structural design and aesthetic. These gigantic structures stand in close proximity of one another, designed chiefly to protect those within from the elements. The environment outside is, ordinarily, perfectly fine. However, when storms hit, they hit hard, and the citizens of Neocephalos shelter within their respective megabuildings (or, in cases of emergency, whichever one is closest at hand) to wait out the chaos outside, whether that be violent lightning-streaked hurricanes, radioactive pulses from beyond the atmosphere, or acidic rain.
Despite the danger, there are still elements of the city that spill out from within these confines. Winding streets (both on the ground as well as the invisible sky-streets that direct the traffic of aerial vehicles) connect these buildings together, and on days and nights when no major weather event is predicted, the citizens of Neocephalos occasionally choose to take their revelries out into the open, from congregating within temporary holographic plazas and gardens to participating or cheering on deadly street races.
Visually, everything is large and in charge. Glaring screens, flash signage, industrial metal, clean glass, neon light, echoing announcements, humming drones, grinding elevators, large spaces, narrow corridors, big buildings and small rooms.
NEOCEPHALOS is inspired by such media as both Blade Runner movies, Dredd, Cyberpunk 2077 and the big city cyberpunk genre in general. Depending on the megabuilding or even the floor of a megabuilding, the setting's aesthetics can veer from claustrophobic neon chaos to clanking austere brutalism to peaceful zen quiet.
For more information about specific places, visit the Megabuildings page.
CULTURE
The people of Neocephalos are a colourful crowd of easily distractible and dangerously friendly individuals of immense feeling, minimal empathy, and insatiable desire. Their friendships are far reaching and fickle, their romantic pursuits ever-changing and elusive, and their ambitions easily managed. A perfect audience that is forever roving for the next new thing, discarding and acquiring, trendsetting and utterly predictable to those who care to try.
To the characters that arrive in Neocephalos, the general population feels like a massive fanbase more so than a coherent community. Interactions trend from the innocently friendly to the alienating, from the curious through to the dangerously devoted. Worship turns to passionate hatred in a moment, depending on what strikes them as entertaining and how you intend to entertain them.
The main constant is this: you're a source for their entertainment, in whatever form that might be.
The clearest form of human-led hierarchy and organisation belongs to the various corporations that trade in distraction and amusement, as well as the manufacturing "tiered goods", which is anything beyond the baseline of human need. Fashion, movies, augmented experiences, night clubs and brothels, vehicles, weapons, cosmetics, recreational drugs, sex work, fight clubs, edible delicacies, and so on, all of these are provided by a complex network of corporations at competition with one another in the kaleidoscopic attention economy of Neocephalos.
While the cycle is quick and brand loyalty is fleeting, there are several pillars within the corpocracy that remain stable and constant and often hold ownership over the churn of smaller collaborations, brands, manufacturers.
For more information about the larger corporations of Neocephalos, including the corporations responsible for your characters, refer to the Corporations page.
SOCIAL STRUCTURES
The citizens of Neocephalos itself are an ethnically diverse human population. They are born in kinbatches via ectogenic technologies. Kinbatches have about fifty members, and are raised in dedicated learning environments that are a mixture of human guardians and AI oversight. 
To say that a Neoceph citizen is 'educated' is misleading, and maybe a more accurate word would be 'nurtured'. Through early testing, promising children are separated for more intensive forms of education, but the rest are mostly socially engineered into being perfect consumers, easily distracted and entranced by artworks of all kinds, operating on a spectrum between loving and earnest through to childishly cruel in pursuit of gratification, and promised that once they join adult society, they will lead a life of leisure and pleasure.
As such, there are no tight family connections amongst the native population, although some kinbatches form little communities or social networks. The result of their social engineering means that much of the population is happy to be looked after by their city in pursuit of happiness and pleasure.
Some may seek to be entertainers rather than just be entertained, others may wish to produce and sell and create rather than only consume, and there is plenty of apparatus available for them to do so, forming a collaborative ecosystem in which humans can fulfill their potential: experiencing and evoking happiness.
To say that a Neoceph citizen is 'educated' is misleading, and maybe a more accurate word would be 'nurtured'. Through early testing, promising children are separated for more intensive forms of education, but the rest are mostly socially engineered into being perfect consumers, easily distracted and entranced by artworks of all kinds, operating on a spectrum between loving and earnest through to childishly cruel in pursuit of gratification, and promised that once they join adult society, they will lead a life of leisure and pleasure.
As such, there are no tight family connections amongst the native population, although some kinbatches form little communities or social networks. The result of their social engineering means that much of the population is happy to be looked after by their city in pursuit of happiness and pleasure.
Some may seek to be entertainers rather than just be entertained, others may wish to produce and sell and create rather than only consume, and there is plenty of apparatus available for them to do so, forming a collaborative ecosystem in which humans can fulfill their potential: experiencing and evoking happiness.
LANGUAGE AND AESTHETIC
Neocephalos a kaleidoscope of semi-recognisable contemporary Earth cultures, wherein 'Earth cultures' refers to mostly economically and technologically dominant countries. Naming conventions are varied, taking from various cultural roots, mixing them together, or foregoing them entirely with people naming themselves after nouns or digits or concepts.
There does not appear to be a single stable cultural pillar to refer to so much as cyclical trends, and culture and heritage has been decoupled from birthright and lineage, turned into aesthetic or sometimes spiritual choices. Neocephalos is a city without a cultural memory, and it is not clear if its cultural signifiers are left overs from a previous time, or generated through external influences.
There is a single dominant language that has a vaguely ancient Greco sound to it, but is not the same. There is a writing system that will be unrecognisable to all characters, and most of the native population is not as adept at writing as they are reading.
The native language, both verbal and written, is automatically translated thanks to the CORD all characters have been implanted with.
There does not appear to be a single stable cultural pillar to refer to so much as cyclical trends, and culture and heritage has been decoupled from birthright and lineage, turned into aesthetic or sometimes spiritual choices. Neocephalos is a city without a cultural memory, and it is not clear if its cultural signifiers are left overs from a previous time, or generated through external influences.
There is a single dominant language that has a vaguely ancient Greco sound to it, but is not the same. There is a writing system that will be unrecognisable to all characters, and most of the native population is not as adept at writing as they are reading.
The native language, both verbal and written, is automatically translated thanks to the CORD all characters have been implanted with.
ECONOMY
The economy of Neocephalos runs off a non-mathematical tiered system. All basic needs are free and available, also known as Tier N products and services. Tier N stores receive basic supplies from Neocephalos' manufacturing, and civilians have a decently generous quota of credit they can use to receive them. The quotas (which all tiers have) are mostly in place to prevent hoarding, and are sometimes lifted during gifting seasons.
After that, luxury goods rise through the Tiers, from 1 through to 3. Access to these tiers are granted through various programmes, like employment, where a business could be qualified to offer something like flat access to Tier 3 goods, or have a scaling programme within to reward longevity, or temporary Tier boosts to reward difficult tasks.
However, there are other non-labour actions and programmes that civilians can sign up for to access higher Tiers. One example is gamified systems like virtually augmented ARGs, of which there are thousands and are easily accessible. Others are situational, such as being in attendance of a city-wide festival, or a lottery, or using/showcasing an experimental product. Others are behavioural incentives, in which participants are monitored and rewarded for things like social adeptness, good deeds, or sexual frequency and promiscuity.
In other words, if you're stuck in Tier N looking at that Tier 2 leather jacket, you could probably complete some VA games or see what behavioural incentives are going that week and boost yourself upwards.
TIER N: Basic clothing; basic nutritional food (synthetic meats, processed carbs, vitamin tabs, shelf-safe canned goods); hygienic/sanitary items, simple medical supplies; basic household appliances; medically necessary cyberware and surgeries.While Prestige levels advise flat access to different Tiers, temporary boosts such as the kinds NPC civilians can access, through games and behavioural incentives, are free and available to PCs. You can make up your own or take inspiration from State of the Game posts, which will describe some of the Tier boosters going that month. There will be no mod oversight over what your character can access when it comes to the above items.
TIER 1: Mass produced fashion clothing; perishable food (common vegetables and fruit, beef, pork, chicken and fish, chocolate and candy, basic dairy products like milk and cheese); access to street food and vending machines; some private entertainment (cinema complexes, strip clubs, arcades, VR booths, bars serving beer and lesser-quality wine); personal grooming products and makeup; cigarettes, dopamine-boosting drugs and aphrodisiacs.
TIER 2: Designer clothing and jewelry; more variety of foods (less common vegetables and fruit, unique seasonings, all dairy products); mass produced but more varied homewares; restaurants, cocktail bars, night clubs, brothels; high-end beauty services and cosmetic plastic surgeries; personal vehicles (hoverboards, e-scooters); recreational drugs.
TIER 3: Bespoke clothing items; military-grade argumentations; exclusive or limited run home decor items and artwork; private/semi-private experiences and entertainments; rare consumables (aged liquors, rare proteins such as shellfish and game meat, cuisines and ingredients specifically recreated from other dimensions); advanced recreational drugs, often with unique and extreme effects; weaponry.
For more permanent assets like (not medically necessary) cyberware, large vehicles, properties, and housing, refer to the Privileges page.
HOUSING
Very few Neoceph citizens call a single place a home. Housing is tied directly to your economic tier, and consistently staying in a single tier is relatively uncommon. Permanence is not necessarily encouraged, and few citizens actually have much in the way of many physical possessions, choosing instead to rely on the amenities, furnishings and decor of the megabuildling and its apartments that are available to them on a given week, or even day.
Your access to housing depends on your current economic tier, the baseline of which is dictated by your Prestige level. By default, all citizens (and characters) have access to Tier N housing, which provides bare minimum shelter. If you are operating at Tier 1 but have boosted yourself to Tier 3 for a day, you can walk into an available penthouse and live large for however long that lasts.
Due to this transience, all megabuildings have a live directory of available rooms and an optional belongings capsule system–if your worldly possessions can fit within a couple of suitcases, you can have these automatically sent between megabuilding locations via drone.
If you drop in the economic tier and have not made plans to move out, then be forewarned: you may lose anything that belongs to that you didn't take with you. Eviction is swift and merciless, prioritising freeing up these spaces for those who can afford them.
But maybe you want some permanence and security. Don't we all?
The best way to secure your living space is to identify the minimum economic tier you feel most capable of sustaining (through your Prestige level, or whatever means your character can identify) and locate a living space at this tier. So long as you at least maintain, no one is kicking you out. While many Neoceph citizens enjoy a more transient approach to their living spaces, there are those who have found some form of economic security and put down roots in this way.
Above table, there will be the option to apply for a housing freeze through the Privilege mechanics, trading in Privilege points for a six month contract that will remain no matter your tier.
For more information on housing options, visit the Megabuildings page.
HEALTHCARE
Healthcare is a free service in Neocephalos. All megabuildings are equipped with multiple clinics that can provide basic care through to cyberware surgeries. Notably, Octavian Plaza boasts the largest medical facility, the Octavian Meditechnic, with robust emergency room services. The Blindstar Pyramid is also notable for its contained medical facilities, supporting the care of longterm VR users as well as standard medical services. Any kind of medicine considered less than medically necessity, such as luxury cyberwares and aesthetic plastic surgeries that aren't related to gender affirmation, are available dependent on economic Tier level.
The main innovation that sets Neocephalos apart are fast-regenerative nanite pools known colloquially as "sugar baths", which speeds human healing up by a rapid rate. Bruises and shallow lacerations can be healed in an hour, relatively minor surgical recovery can be sped up into hours, and major cyberware recovery and post-life saving traumatic surgery can be accomplished in a couple of days. It is important to note the limits, however, which is that sugar baths only speed up what a human body can accomplish on its own, necessitating medical intervention prior to use. Some heavy users of sugar baths also claim that their psychological relationship with pain can start to feel deadened, and many choose to either abstain from sugar baths for a period of time or quit it altogether.
As for medical practitioners, Neocephalos is full of people trained in medicine. Kind of. These practitioners are actually more like physical conduits between artificial intelligence instruction and practice, occasionally little more than technicians overseeing and implementing AI medical directive and robotic surgery systems. They generally have CORD programming to receive these directives live, and ocular implants to take live medical data and feed it back to the AI who can process it at lightning speed.
Emergency services such as ambulances and emergency medical technicians also exist, and are often spurred into action based off city-wide surveillance input, automatic CORD triggers when a person suffers catastrophic damage, or if a citizen calls for their aid.