Popping in to say that I think another large scale event with high stakes like this would be great!
Building off both Tifa's mention of the EMP event and yours of looting and survival in a forgotten city, I've always been interested to see what would happen if the world's dependence on technology turned on them even further. If you wanted to run something like this without doing another round of heavy damage to the city to achieve it, totally wiping out (or at least vastly limiting) the functionality of the neural implants for a temporary period could be a cool alternative. Effectively closing down people's access to money, to communication, to their security systems and forms of personal identification, and the way they're used to interacting with and being recognised by the world.
The people who opt in are completely isolated from the outside and each other except for in-person interaction or any other means of communication they manage to rustle up while everybody not in NA can still access their implants as normal. And maybe the isolation of NA isn't an initial consequence of the implant malfunction itself but a human decision - maybe trains continue to run for a short while afterwards but then there's a crush or violence or something at the station (along with the risk of a sudden surge of refugees without functional implants flooding into other megacities) and it's all shut down by the powers that be until they can figure out a plan of action. The added detail of perceived active abandonment and isolation sanctioned by those in authority in the face of an emergency might shake up some of the societal structures in the game going forward. Maybe there's some other danger element like a chemical leak or the rage drug or something to give it a zombie apoc vibe? But with or without an added danger it still leaves a lot of space for playing with class systems, gang uprisings, protecting the vulnerable, navigating shifts in morality, figuring out how to exist without the credit currency however briefly, seeing how much damage befalls a city full of people that are that are no longer (or at least not as efficiently) policed etc etc etc
Purge vibes?? But also like... room for the Displaced to provide help and try to limit suffering... I guess just more human drama and violence and resilience than monster/catastrophic event-induced drama and violence and resilience. I'M RAMBLING I have no idea how you'd trigger something like this and didn't really intend for that to get so long whoops wow, drops these thoughts in the pot and hoofs away
no subject
Building off both Tifa's mention of the EMP event and yours of looting and survival in a forgotten city, I've always been interested to see what would happen if the world's dependence on technology turned on them even further. If you wanted to run something like this without doing another round of heavy damage to the city to achieve it, totally wiping out (or at least vastly limiting) the functionality of the neural implants for a temporary period could be a cool alternative. Effectively closing down people's access to money, to communication, to their security systems and forms of personal identification, and the way they're used to interacting with and being recognised by the world.
The people who opt in are completely isolated from the outside and each other except for in-person interaction or any other means of communication they manage to rustle up while everybody not in NA can still access their implants as normal. And maybe the isolation of NA isn't an initial consequence of the implant malfunction itself but a human decision - maybe trains continue to run for a short while afterwards but then there's a crush or violence or something at the station (along with the risk of a sudden surge of refugees without functional implants flooding into other megacities) and it's all shut down by the powers that be until they can figure out a plan of action. The added detail of perceived active abandonment and isolation sanctioned by those in authority in the face of an emergency might shake up some of the societal structures in the game going forward. Maybe there's some other danger element like a chemical leak or the rage drug or something to give it a zombie apoc vibe? But with or without an added danger it still leaves a lot of space for playing with class systems, gang uprisings, protecting the vulnerable, navigating shifts in morality, figuring out how to exist without the credit currency however briefly, seeing how much damage befalls a city full of people that are that are no longer (or at least not as efficiently) policed etc etc etc
Purge vibes?? But also like... room for the Displaced to provide help and try to limit suffering... I guess just more human drama and violence and resilience than monster/catastrophic event-induced drama and violence and resilience. I'M RAMBLING I have no idea how you'd trigger something like this and didn't really intend for that to get so long whoops wow, drops these thoughts in the pot and hoofs away