From publisher blurb:
Oh, beautiful for spacious skies
Skies that are colored gray, not like that of a dead channel, but from rain trying in vain to wash away the grime and evil of the streets below.
For amber waves of grain
Grain used to make “food” to feed America’s 430+ million people; and of course, the fatcats still get the first — and sometimes the only — mouthfuls.
For purple mountains’ majesties
That the average person will never get to see, because they’re too busy with their noses to the grindstone, pleasing their corporate masters. If the skies were even clear enough, that is.
Above the fruited plain
At least those plains that haven’t been devastated by the worsening weather events brought on by climate change.
America, America
No longer exists in a recognizable form, ever since becoming a mere fascist shell of itself under the boot heel of an ascendant China.
God shed his grace on thee
The gods now live above the masses in their mighty towers of polycarbon and glass, imposing their will through tyrannical (and compliant) politicians and legions of armored federal agents.
And crown thy good with brotherhood
There’s very little good in the world anymore and “brotherhood” is a joke. There is only destroy or be destroyed, succeed or fail...and the system is rigged to make you fail.
From sea to shining sea
Which (also thanks to climate change) comes a little closer every year, flooding once-habitable land.
New World is a cyberpunk campaign framework based on the Traveller SRD (which is itself based on The Original Science Fiction Roleplaying Game published in the 1970s) and the Cepheus Engine SRD. Set in the middle of the 21st century in an America rendered almost unrecognizable by past events, the campaign features many of the tropes commonly expected in a cyberpunk world, along with some developed expecially for New World:
A timeline based on and extrapolated from real-life events
A familiar lifepath character generation system
A generous selection of cybernetic modifications, mundane equipment, and vehicles
Simplified rules for computer use and cyber-combat
A discussion of mid-21st century American life and culture, including a glossary of slang terms
A look at the changes wrought on America and the rest of the world
A system for mapping sections of the “Net (aka cyberspace)
A system for determining spontaneous radicalization, one of the worst scourges of the future age
And much, much more
It’s a new world, just around the corner. Welcome to the future, daoren…hope you survive it!