NOTES FOR THE IDIOT IN CHARGE
For the Person Holding the City Together.
Tone
Pitch-black satire with genuine teeth. The violence is grotesque and specific and also, in the right register, funny — the way that things that are genuinely too much are funny, because the alternative is something you don't want to sit with at the table. The sexuality is uncomfortable not because it is explicit but because it is honest. It makes the reader aware of what they are looking at and what the looking says about them. This is not an accident. Run it that way.
The comedy is recognition comedy: this city is ours, three decades further down the same road, with the polite fictions stripped. The control apparatus is pharmaceutical and algorithmic and theological because ours already is, just with better branding and worse honesty. Run the satire like you mean it. The punchline is that the world is already like this. Everyone already knows. Everyone keeps acting like it's fine. That's the joke. That's always been the joke.
The drug economy is not background flavor. It is the engine. Hunger drives the city the way current drives the grid — invisibly, structurally, and the moment it stops, everything stops with it. When a character is hungry for something, that hunger is the story. Not a complication in the story. The story.
Love is the most dangerous force in the setting. Not sentimentally dangerous — mechanically dangerous. The most catastrophic acts in this city stem from something that functions like devotion, and the question the game keeps asking is: does that change what the act is? There is no answer in the rules. The rules are not where that answer lives.
There are no heroes. There are people making terrible choices in terrible circumstances, some of whom are more interesting than others, and at least one of whom is made of washing machine parts and something that might be love and is almost certainly going to get someone killed.
What to Prep
One faction wants something — what, who's in the way, why now.
One NPC has a face — name, look, one desire, one secret. Let them surprise you.
One location is alive — describe the smell first. Then the sound. Then what you can see.
One thing will go wrong — not the thing you planned. The other thing.
Money
Currency is lire. The economy is hostile to everyone below Verified bracket, which is most people, most of the time.
Reference Costs
Daily survival: Meal 50 · Safe bed 150 · Air subscription (lapsed) 100 to restore
Equipment: Basic weapon 200–400 · Good gun 500+ · Cybermod 500–2,500 · Drugs (street) 50–200
Services: Bribe a patrol officer 400 minimum · Unlicensed surgeon 300–600 · Machine Priest repair 100–500
Jobs: Starting work 200–600 · Serious job 600–1,000 · Anything over 1,000 lire: someone will try to kill you before it pays out.
Addiction in Play
Hunger is the fourth meter. Credit, heat, influence, and need — the city tracks all four, and the fourth is the one it can most reliably exploit. When a character is hungry, the hunger is always louder than the objective. When they're dosed, the dose is always shorter than they remember. This is the mechanism. This is Rome.
When a character is in withdrawal, all tests are at −2 and every scene that contains the substance requires a TOU DR 10 to not prioritize it. This is not a choice. Describe it like it isn't a choice. When they're on something good, choose one positive effect from the drug table and one thing that goes slightly, persistently wrong — something small, something they wouldn't notice if they weren't also trying to run a job, something the city noticed two doses ago. The city provides both endlessly. The city is very good at this part.
Sex and Violence
Both are real in this game. Violence has weight. Sex has context. Neither is free.
When someone is hurt, describe it. When someone is intimate, describe what it means, not just what it is. The city makes objects of people constantly. The game can choose whether to replicate that or examine it.
NPC Reaction Table (Quick)
| 1 | Hostile. They have a reason. It involves you whether or not you know it. |
| 2 | Suspicious. Will transact but watching everything. One wrong move. |
| 3 | Indifferent. The city has made them this way. Not rude; absent. |
| 4 | Indifferent. The city has made them this way. Not rude; absent. |
| 5 | Cautiously open. Unusual enough to be notable. |
| 6 | Genuinely warm. Very unusual. They want something. It might be worth giving. |
Getting Better (or Worse)
The GM decides when a character improves — after completing a significant job, surviving something that should have killed them, or bringing something meaningful into the world or out of it.
When this happens: roll 6d10. If ≥ current max HP, gain d6 HP. Roll a d6 against every ability: equal to or higher = +1 (max +6). Lower = −1 (min −3). Then roll on the "Left in the wreckage you find" table: 1–3 nothing, 4 three times your last job's pay in lire, 5 a contact you didn't have before, 6 something that will complicate the next session.