PREFACE

Carbon Pink is a light-hearted cyberpunk themed

cosmetic overhaul for Dungeons & Dragons 5th
edition, aiming to create the same roleplaying and
combat opportunities as the traditional fantasy
setting. Carbon Pink features a multitude of races,
genetically altered from Humans, from the elegant
E.L.Fs and untrusted Nayalings, to the mischievous
and comical Wukong, to photosynthetic Gobbos
and nomadic, stocky Jerboans, as well as the recently awakened androids known as
Artificiates and
the hosts of personality engrams called Remakes,
and the cosmetically altered genetic mish-mashes
known as Splicers.
All of 5e’s classes and subclasses have been flavoured to fit the urban science
fiction setting, as
well as cantrips and spells, known as Tricks and
Techs. Most enemies have been recategorized and
flavoured with the cyberpunk themes in mind, and
as a result Carbon Pink will feel very familiar yet
fresh to fans of D&D 5e, allowing players to jump
straight in.
Points of INterest
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, lowend 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 loca-
tions 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 over-

thrown 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 UrUm-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.