#ah the 90s

detail from the front cover of Night City: A City Sourcebook for Cyberpunk(1991)

“The urban environment is critical to your Cyberpunk world. Whether you use our Night City or create your own, remember that your setting has to have all the right elements. There should be garbage-stewn alleyways. There should be bodies lying in the gutters. There should be wild-eyed lunatics, staggering through pre-dawn streets, muttering darkly and clutching sharp knives. Taxis won’t stop in combat zones. There are firefights at the streetcorner as the local gangs slug it out. Players should find their apartments regularly broken into, their cars vandalized, their property stolen. Crossing town should be like crossing a battlefield, filled with looters, riots, crazies and muggers.

And it always rains. Every day should be grim, gloomy and overcast. The stars never come out. The sun never shines. There are no singing birds, no laughing children. (The last bird died in 2008 ad the kids are grown in vats.) The ozone layer decayed, the greenhouse effect took over, the sky is full of hydrocarbons and the ocean full of sludge. Nice place.*

* Okay, we’re exaggerating. But not much.”

–Cyberpunk 2020: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future (Second Edition, 1993)