Hey, It Could Be Worse - A Look At 2020 In Two Alternate RPG Histories

It’s July 28^th 2020.   Despite the success of the 2^nd Mars mission by the joint ESA/Russian mission, the news media is more abuzz about the cyberpsychosis killings in Night City.  There’s also rumbles in the air of the fears of another corporate war.

Wait, that’s not correct.  Let’s start again.

It’s July 28^th 2020.  Video footage of the great dragon Aden smashing Tehran into rubble after the ruling Ayotallah declared humans mutated by unknown causes as ‘spawns of the devil’ is all you see on the news today.  The remnants of Washington state, one of the only areas on the west coast besides California that wasn’t given over to the Native Americans, is talking about uniting into extensions of Seattle.

No, that’s not correct, either.

It’s July 28^th 2020.  And if there’s ever a lesson to be learned, it’s that no matter how bad things get, fiction can always show us that, hey, it could be worse.

In particular, I wanted to look at two RPG settings – the Cyberpunk 2020 setting, and the Shadowrun setting, both of which have a well-established timeline (and one is quite literally set in 2020).  Both skew off from established history around 1990, and events begin to fly off the handle fairly quickly.  (As an aside, the highly anticipated upcoming video game, Cyberpunk 2077, is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG).

Let’s take a look at Shadowrun first.  While the game originally was set in 2050, it has always had a strong background to their universe.  Corporations begin to amass much power and influence throughout the 1990s, culminating in landmark US Supreme Court decisions in 1999 and 2001 that grant corporations not only the right to field their own paramilitary forces, but allows corporations of sufficient size to act as a nation – in other words, that their property is extraterritorial, like an embassy.  Snowballing, the US government begins to allow them free access to natural resources, turning over not only Federal parkland but Native American reservations to corporate exploitation.  Everything goes wrong in 2009 when a group of ex-military Native Americans manage to seize a nuclear missile silo, and in the ensuing crisis a nuclear missile is launched at Russia.  While the nuke somehow doesn’t detonate, the incident allows the US to begin rounding up all Native Americans into ‘relocation camps’ the following year… when, all of a sudden, a pandemic strikes worldwide, beginning in India.  How bad does it get for them?  Well, in the end, a quarter of the entire world’s population dies.  Entire governments collapse, riots and chaos are the order of the day.  And yet, it is the following year, 2011, that is called the “Year of Chaos” – a percentage of children born exhibit what is called “Unexplained Genetic Expression” – mutations that resemble ‘elves’ and ‘dwarves’ from fantasy stories.   Other inexplicable phenomenon begins to become commonplace worldwide, what some would term ‘magic’.  Environmental disasters begin to also direly affect the world – for example, a massive storm in the North Sea swamps the German coastline with waste and pollution called the “Black Tide”, effectively ruining the area.  And then…

… and then, on December 24^th, 2011, in Japan, the first dragon is sighted.  Magic has officially returned to the world.

Throughout all this, corporations have not only survived, they have thrived.  The most powerful corporations form their own equivalent of the UN to govern the corporate world, and swiftly becomes more influentual.

In the United States, the Native American find their ancient rituals are now working, and end up going on the offensive in 2014, causing a volcano to erupt in New Mexico as their opening gambit.  After three years of a guerilla war, the US government goes to enact an end game – the massacre of all Native Americans – and in turn, the Native Americans perform a costly Great Ghost Dance to cause all the volcanoes in Washington state to simultaneously erupt.  The war suddenly ends, and in 2018, the Treaty of Denver is signed – effectively ceding the entire western US, apart from the Seattle area and the state of California, to the Native Americans.

2020 is somewhat of a calm before the storm in the Shadowrun universe; the world is still recovering from the massive pandemic, the return of magic, the disintegration of various nations (China has collapsed at this point) and the rise of the megacorporations.  Space exploration has fallen to almost nothing, with that arena ceded almost entirely to the corporations at this point.  Cybernetic limb replacement, one of the cornerstones of the setting, is just starting out in 2019 with the first truly successful total limb replacement.

Let’s now take a look at the Cyberpunk 2020 setting.  The original game, which came out in the late 80s, was set in 2013, but quickly advanced it by 7 years.  The world falls apart much quicker here – a cabal of right-wing interests within the various US intelligence agencies form a shadow government around 1990 and begin to get the US involved in fighting with the drug lords in South America, eventually ruining them with a tailored virus to destroy drug crops.  The rise of an economically united Europe raises their ire as well, and they begin covert manipulation of the world market to fight them.  However, this rebounds horribly – first when South American terrorists detonate a mini-nuke in Manhattan, and then when Europe learns of what the US had been doing, sparking a massive worldwide embargo against the United States in 1994.  The nation’s economy quickly collapses, anarchy ensues, and when both the President and Vice-President are assassinated in 1996, martial law is declared and a military government takes over the US.  Nuclear war wrecks the Middle East in 1997, and a pandemic strikes worldwide in 2000, killing millions worldwide.  Global warming is much accelerated, with droughts, crop failures, pollution and other calamities ruining the ecosphere and causing massive famines and unrest.  Eventually the US bounces back, the cabal that ruined the nation eradicated, but in the process is terribly weakened; state governments become the most powerful they’ve been since the pre-Civil War days, and much of the country is abandoned or in ruins.

Much like in Shadowrun, too, corporations move in to fill the holes left behind by failing nations; they accumulate their own military forces, and end up fighting each other in wars worldwide.  However, space exploration does much better, with the moon being settled and even a couple missions to Mars itself.   Cybernetics are much more advanced, too, with it being a well-developed, almost commonplace, thing in 2020.

Similarly, 2020 in Cyberpunk is another calm-before-the-storm year.  Events will spiral out of control soon enough, but for now it’s quiet.  Well, not really, it’s a super violent world full of chaos and mayhem, but nothing figuratively – or literally – earth-shattering.

So… how do these worlds measure up?  Well, for one you’ll notice that both have had terrible pandemics that were way, way worse than what we’ve been dealing with.   Both had nuclear strikes, although in Shadowrun this is limited to just Libya.  The United States fares especially poorly both settings, usually from the bad decisions of its own leaders.  The average person is much more likely to encounter violence, terror and death than our world.  Corporations, also, have little or no control over their actions.  Pollution and ecological damage are rampant.

Not to say that there isn’t some silver linings.  Both settings have numerous space stations in orbit, and Cyberpunk is moving forward to explore the solar system.  Computer and artificial limb replacement is light years ahead of where we are now.  And Shadowrun has, you know, magic and stuff, which makes for a more interesting time.

Still, that doesn’t really make for everything else, does it?

While they aren’t as horribly dystopian as, say, 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale, I think that – however bad it gets here – I’m better off by far (not that I’m saying everything is great, mind you, just speaking in relative terms).  Your Mileage May Vary, of course!

Minor addendum:

Other universe settings aren’t as developed for our equivalent year.  Star Trek, while vague about the early 21^st century, does have the two-part episode from Deep Space 9 set in 2020, where the poor are stuck in ‘Sanctuary Districts” and riots ensue.  The Fallout universe tends to keep much of its history hidden between the 1960s and around 2042 (something worthy of an essay in of itself someday).  The Twilight: 2000 universe, where World War III is fought in the 90s and has much of the world devastated by nuclear war, is still in the process of recovering two decades later.  Asimov’s Robot series has a rather vague setting, but along with humanoid robots being around for over 20 years, humanity is settling the inner solar system.  Probably the greatest irony of all, the Alien universe in 2020 is a bright and shiny place, with advanced technology having fixed the world’s global warming problems and humanity soon about to embark on heading into deep space – which demonstrates that however good or bad times are now, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be the same in the future… a lesson we should take to heart in our own world.