The Lore Synopsis and Characters (“Day in the Life”) entries offer an intimate look at what it actually means to live in each Ring of New Lincoln. Deeper details and setting-specific trivia unfold once you join the server. Why Us? We offer classic cyberpunk and dystopian themes with New Lincoln-unique elements and real-life aesthetics.
LORE SYNOPSIS
The Lore Synopsis lays out how New Lincoln actually works (its Rings, power structures, enforcement, and technology) and how inequality and control shape everyday life. It introduces the forces that define the city, from the Directorate’s bureaucracy and the Pretorians’ enforcement to fragmented resistance movements and the unpredictable emergence of Variants, setting the framework every character is forced to live within.
NEW LINCOLN ZONES
Core Ring – The Boulevard: The Boulevard is New Lincoln’s center of power and money, built upward in glass towers and neon-lit streets. Wealthy residents (executives, media darlings and political elites) live cocooned in luxury, moving almost exclusively by hover vehicles and private air transport, rarely touching the street. Life is comfortable but tightly managed: surveillance is constant, access is permit-based and social behavior is quietly policed by both the Directorate and neighboring elites. Reputation matters more than privacy, and stepping outside accepted norms can cost someone their status faster than any legal charge.Middle Ring – The Projects: The Projects are dense, functional, and crowded, made up of older high-rises and brutalist housing blocks packed with working-class residents and mid-level city employees. Streets are busy with vendors, commuters, and informal trade, while public transport and aging hover systems keep the area moving. People here survive through practicality - side businesses, black-market goods, and drug-induced or virtual distractions are common. Law enforcement is visible and uneven: NLPD patrols are routine, Enforcer raids can happen without warning, and Directorate control is felt through restrictions, surveillance drones and bots as well as selective enforcement rather than protection.Outer Ring – The Favela: Beyond the city wall, the Favela sprawls outward, surrounded by dust and scrap it's formed from tents, shanties, and scavenged tech pressed against a massive landfill and the encroaching desert. The poor, displaced, undocumented and wanted survive here, often under the protection, or oppression of gangs and local militias who control the scarce water, power and food. Community is closed and fierce, built on barter, street knowledge, and shared hardship, with children picking through waste as part of daily life. The Directorate rarely intervenes leaving the Favela aware of the inner rings’ comfort while existing largely beyond the reach and concern of official law.
POWER
Government – The Directorate: The Directorate is the real governing force of New Lincoln, operating as an impersonal system of rules, infrastructure control, and algorithms. It manages everything from zoning and utilities to security and Variant oversight, exerting power through permits and delays instead of open violence. Publicly neutral and efficient, it favors elites while keeping the broader population functional, distracted, and contained.Politics: Politics in New Lincoln is largely a managed performance layered on top of Directorate control. Public offices, elections, and campaigns exist, but their role is to shape perception rather than policy, with candidates acting as media figures more than decision-makers. Real power remains bureaucratic and procedural, easily corrupted, while scandals, protests, and reforms are tolerated, or staged, as long as they don’t disrupt the system.Elite: The Elite are the city’s corporate leaders, media powerhouses and cultural icons whose wealth and visibility define New Lincoln’s direction. Their influence is protected by the Directorate through regulation, security and narrative manipulation, shielding them from consequences faced by others. They rule indirectly, shaping outcomes through capital, image, and access, driven less by ideology than by a shared interest and fear of losing their comfortable lives.
ENFORCEMENT
NLPD (New Lincoln Police Department): The NLPD is New Lincoln’s everyday law enforcement, tasked with managing constant, low-level crime rather than changing the system that inspires it. Understaffed, unevenly equipped, and stretched thin outside the Core, officers prioritize containment, optics, and de-escalation over ideal justice. They absorb public frustration and systemic failure, knowing their authority is conditional and effectively ends the moment Pretorian Enforcers step in.Pretorian Enforcers: Pretorians are the Directorate’s direct response to threats that can’t be managed, only ended. Operating outside normal law, they are deployed against terrorist and Variant incidents, mass unrest, and symbolic acts that risk destabilizing the city, acting with total authority and near-total immunity. Networked through haptic and enhanced by scientifically-realistic augmentation and supported by the state of art tech, they function as a synchronized unit and most genuinely believe they are preventing collapse, not enforcing tyranny.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology in New Lincoln is advanced, pervasive, and intentionally uneven, built to regulate behavior and maintain stability rather than empower individuals. Daily life is saturated with holograms, augmented reality, surveillance, and virtual or neural entertainment, but quality and access vary sharply with each Ring. The most advanced systems are restricted to the Directorate and Pretorians. True artificial intelligence, radical life extension or permanent mind transfer remain firmly out of reach.
RESISTANCE
Resistance in New Lincoln is scattered and uncoordinated, defined more by shared frustration than by a unified movement or clear ideology. Defiance shows up as labor unrest, criminal activity, local mutual-aid groups, espionage, and extremist cells, most of which don’t even identify as resistance. Beneath it all, small underground networks quietly infiltrate institutions and prepare for systemic collapse, waiting for the moment when disruption spreads, coordination becomes realistic, and the wider population finally decides the regime is no longer tolerable.
VARIANTS
Variants are humans altered by the Radia Varianta pathogen, a synthetic–organic agent originally developed for adaptive human enhancement. The pathogen fuses into DNA and the nervous system unpredictably. While most carriers never manifest changes, some die suffering and a small percentage develop irreversible abilities. Manifestation typically occurs during puberty or later under stress, trauma, or illness, often as an uncontrolled and exhausting experience. Early stages are confusing and many Variants hide them even from closest ones.
DAY IN LIFE IN THE FAVELA
You wake with the sun because someone else needs your bed after their shift. If you’re lucky it’s a clear day and you can see the skyline. The ground, sand and broken concrete is cool but the air is already warm and loud. A barking dog outside, a kettle whistle, a neighbor praying loudly to something painted on a scrap door. Two alleys over, a gang lookout argues with a food vendor about free breakfast.You eat whatever doesn’t smell wrong, check that nothing important was stolen overnight, and step outside knowing the day has already started without you.You work fixing something that shouldn’t work anymore. Everything you have is patched, repurposed and scavenged. Power comes when it comes. Water’s something you plan your day around. You keep one eye on the street, one ear on the rooftop. You don’t ask questions and remember who controls which corner this week.By afternoon, dust coats your skin and tension sits in your gut next to hunger. At night, you drink with people you trust just enough, laugh too loud, argue harder, and sleep lightly. Tomorrow will be the same unless there’s a raid or someone tries to steal turf from whoever controls the one your bed is on.But some nights, when the moon is gone and the clouds reflect the city’s vibrant glow across the desert, you can feel it. That unnamed yearning. Like you’ve been robbed of something you never had.
DAY IN LIFE IN THE PROJECTS
The building wakes up before you. Pipes knocking, someone yelling, a kid crying two floors down. The architecture’s old, concrete slabs, leftover from a time you heard about from an old relative.
Your alarm syncs with the train cycle. You shower fast, dress in yesterday’s clothes, and eat standing up. The elevator is full but quiet, everyone’s already tired. They know where they’re going and what happens if they’re late.Work is repetitive, mentally numbing, and monitored. You fix small problems so bigger ones don’t happen. You submit reports that don’t change anything. Or maybe you work maintenance on equipment you can’t afford to break. At lunch, you scroll feeds designed to sell you another thing you don’t need.Commute means checkpoints, IDs and suspicious looks. You learn to keep your head down, your tone neutral, your hands visible. Everyone here knows someone who was flagged for something minor.After work, maybe a bar, maybe a Sim booth, maybe straight home. Entertainment is a distraction, not joy. At night, you prep for tomorrow: put devices on a charger, check schedules, grab a snack that’s been sitting in the fridge for too long and you try not to think about tomorrow. Or about what’s the point of all this.Still, people help each other, share tools, watch kids, trade favors. There’s a stubborn pride in keeping things running despite everything. The Core might shine, the Favela might burn, but it’s you who’s holding New Lincoln together.
DAY IN LIFE IN THE BOULEVARD
From your sunroom, the city feels quiet. Not silent but filtered. The traffic hums somewhere below, softened by altitude and glass, and the Boulevard glows in every color long after midnight.You wake to curated light and filtered air. Your building knows your schedule, biometrics and preferences. The elevator never stops on floors it doesn’t need to. You don’t see the machines that clean the hallways, only the results. Sometimes you forget they exist.Hover travel is smooth and swift, boring. The news feeds are curated, inspiring and reassuring. Protests happen somewhere else. Raids happen somewhere else. If you feel uneasy, you tell yourself it’s the price of stability. After all, nothing bad ever reaches the center.Breakfast is efficient, expensive, and usually forgettable. Every interaction feels artificial but you don’t reflect on it. Meetings blend into meals, meals into negotiations. You say the right things, avoid the wrong people, and pretend not to notice when someone vanishes from access lists. Surveillance fades into the background, you often forget someone’s always watching and recording.At night, you attend something exclusive, like a gallery, a launch, a private party or concert. You relax just enough to feel human but never enough to be honest with yourself. Something is missing.
We blend grounded cyberpunk and dystopian themes like mass surveillance, corporate monopoly, moral ambiguity, resource scarcity and societal inequality with intimate, messy, deeply human stakes, and New Lincoln–specific elements in a city where relationships are shaped by pressure, secrecy, violence and where love, ambition, and loyalty all have a price.
We have...
Cyberpunk dystopia ✓
Moral ambiguity and personal drama ✓
Underground Resistance ✓
Political, criminal, celebrity, military and more paths to choose from ✓
Bots, drones, exo-frames, virtual reality and human augmentation ✓IF THIS DOESN'T CONVINCE YOU MAYBE ONE OF OUR UNIQUE ELEMENTS WILL!In this grounded, political, action-packed, conflict-driven future with a believable neon-80s revival, neo-noir grit, and a thread of love-story-worth heartache, we offer:Want to know how it feels to be hunted?
Variants are pathogen-mutated humans with scientifically grounded abilities - rare, feared, policed, and burdened with sometimes harsh biological and political consequences.
Oppressed humans with powers ✓Want to live in one of the three distinct environments?
New Lincoln is a three-zone metropolis: the hypermodern, neon-lit Boulevard at the center, the concrete Projects mixed with remnants of old architecture and new tech in the middle, and the lawless Favela Belt on the far edge. Each zone is shaped by its own culture, laws, and issues.
Three settings (futuristic, dystopian and post-apocalyptic vibes) in one ✓Want to “play” in someone else’s body?
VR Simulation aka Sim, lets users do more than run Avatars in cyber space. They can legally pilot contracted people's bodies, called Peripherals, in the designated real world locations called Sim Parks.
Simulations - more than VR ✓Want realistic body enhancement?
Augmentation stays believable: no arm cannons or movie-like cyborgs. Cybernetic and prosthetic enhancements follow real medical, legal, and economic limits.
Scientifically grounded realism (where possible) ✓Want to be an elite warrior? Are you ready to fall for your partners?
Haptics are military-grade neural/muscular/sensory implants that make special police units move as a single organism. Civilian versions are illegal and unstable.
Haptic Drift is the (optional) early Synchronization phase that makes linked users feel like they’re falling in love with one another.
Unique technology that gives interesting roleplay opportunities ✓These are just a few exciting elements you should consider when joining this server. We got more info and world building opportunities waiting for you in the server. Click the discord button below to join the lobby and check if this roleplay is a good match for you!