magnus919_agent-skills/cyberpunk/references/world-operations.md

World Operations: Make the City Work Before Making It Look Futuristic

Model a place as overlapping systems

For each setting, answer the smallest useful set of questions in this table. Do not build a dossier if a scene only needs two rows.

System	Questions that create causal texture
Access	What credential, favor, payment, body, or route lets someone enter? Who is excluded?
Maintenance	What breaks first? Who repairs it, with what parts, and what does the workaround cost?
Commerce	What is bought, rented, brokered, counterfeited, or repaired here? How does a sale change a relationship?
Information	Who can observe, alter, withhold, or authenticate information? What remains off-network?
Authority	Which actor claims control? What contractor, family, gang, union, or informal service makes that claim real or porous?
Bodies	What is medically possible, expensive, stigmatized, normalized, illegal, or dependent on upkeep?
Supply	Where do food, power, water, hardware, labor, and waste go? Which shortage becomes a plot lever?
Time	What happens during a shift change, market opening, transit delay, security rotation, storm, or outage?

A “corporation controls the city” is only premise. Make it operational: perhaps it owns the permits and data backbone but relies on neighborhood technicians to keep old last-mile hardware alive. That dependency generates bargaining power, favors, and failure modes.

Write pressure at three scales

1. Immediate: Someone needs to cross a checkpoint before a payment window closes.
2. Local: The neighborhood has learned that the official route is unreliable, so an informal service carries people and goods through a maintenance corridor.
3. Systemic: The corridor exists because the owner treats maintenance as an externality while monetizing the access layer.

Move from immediate need to system only as much as the user needs. Let a character know the system by its invoices, smells, queues, repairs, and risks, not by a textbook explanation.

Technology should have a social cost curve

For every advanced tool, identify:

• Capability: What becomes newly possible?
• Dependency: What vendor, specialist, consumable, network, or legal status is required?
• Distribution: Who receives a reliable version, a used version, a hacked version, or none?
• Failure: What breaks, becomes unsafe, or exposes someone when maintenance stops?
• Meaning: What does its use signal about trust, class, consent, work, or belonging?

This prevents sterile “future gadget” description. A prosthetic, implant, AI service, or surveillance system matters because it reshapes a relationship and creates an uneven obligation. It should often function as furniture: a familiar fixture people use, curse, repair, bypass, or ignore while pursuing another concern.

Read the city as an archaeological record

Treat the built environment as evidence of successive bargains rather than a complete plan. For each visible layer, ask what it replaced, who paid for the change, who retained the maintenance burden, and what now occupies the gap. A tower's polished access lobby can sit above a former loading floor turned into micro-retail, with obsolete wiring carrying an unplanned service economy. The point is not generalized grime; it is history made physical by capital, technology, and human adaptation.

Cultural layering without extraction

Use concrete social context rather than a grab bag of borrowed nouns.

• Start with an actor: a vendor, migrant family, repair collective, designer, crew, union, religious group, or tenant association.
• Identify an actual practice: a supply chain, cuisine adapted to available ingredients, a language used for intimacy or trade, a music scene, a labor network, a remittance system.
• Give the practice internal variation and agency. It may be desired, resisted, commercialized, protected, or misunderstood by outsiders.
• Do not invent unreadable “foreign” signage to signal futurity. If text must appear in an image, use a deliberate legible language or leave it abstract.

Diagnostic failures

Weak move	Repair
“The megacorp owns everything.”	Identify one contract, enforcement mechanism, dependency, and exploit.
“The city is chaotic.”	Name the repeated transaction, flow, or repair practice producing the apparent chaos.
“Everyone has implants.”	State maintenance, cost, consent, distribution, and social meaning.
“It is multicultural.”	Describe a particular relationship or practice, and who controls its representation or profit.
“The future is grimy.”	Show weathering from a material cause: salt air, heat, rushed repairs, reuse, pollution, or high throughput.