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Cybermancy — GM Guide

Initial Concept Summary

The world of Cybermancy sits at a fragile equilibrium between the Council (Law) and the Cabal (Chaos). Neither side is wholly evil — one seeks order through domination and control; the other seeks freedom through dissolution and entropy. The player characters inhabit the narrow trench between these two forces — street-level operatives, runners, and would-be heroes trying to carve out meaning and justice in a world where both cosmic order and chaos would consume them.

Your current arc has nine key narrative strata:

  1. Catalyst rumors — the strange new drugs, chipware, and metahumans that mark the emergence of something world-shifting.
  2. The Threefold Cabal — dragon, AI, and demon—each a facet of Chaos with their own logic and appetites.
  3. The Council’s technocratic regime — five megacorps representing material domains: weapons, cybernetics, energy, data, and food.
  4. The Law–Chaos axis as the world’s central moral tension.
  5. Corporate manipulations (propaganda, pandemics, surveillance).
  6. Cabalic counter-operations (AI plagues, cult drugs, ritual bombs).
  7. Street-level threads — protests, raves, gang wars, metahuman rumors.
  8. Personal anchors — the idealistic corporate insider and her rebel sister.
  9. Player motivation — the party’s search for agency and moral clarity amid systemic corruption and magical corruption.

Next Steps for Ideation

Here’s how we can structure this thread going forward:

~~1. World Foundations – Pin down the “Event” that birthed this era of magic-tech convergence. Was it accidental, cosmic, engineered?~~ 2. The Council – Flesh out the five megacorps, their internal politics, and how their monopolies map onto global infrastructure. 3. The Cabal – Define the dragon, the AI, and the demon more fully: their names, motives, and how their philosophies of chaos differ. 4. The City – Anchor the player’s experience in a primary urban setting: geography, neighborhoods, cultural texture, and media. 5. The Street Hooks – Expand each of your existing “projects” into playable arcs with moral choices, infiltration points, and NPCs. 6. The Twin Agents – Deepen the siblings’ story — their relationship, where players meet them, how their allegiances evolve. 7. Mystic-Technological Themes – Explore how magic, biotech, and data weave together; what “cybermancy” means in-world.

Would you like me to begin by fleshing out the Threefold Cabal (dragon, AI, demon) — giving each a personality, human alias, and operational style — or would you prefer I first define the post-Event world and how magic returned to it? Either one forms the foundation of the tone and mythic logic of the setting.