Everyone has a gun, because this is AMERICA god damn it. It goes over what is presumably the old history of Night City.
A guy named Night build the city when America was falling apart. He bought some land where Bikers killed/drove everyone away, presumably haunting the city with their ghosts. Its actual name is "Coranado", but everyone thought Night City was cooler so they never use the other one. He designed it "like Disneyland" with different styles of architecture for each neighborhood. Gangsters shoot Night, then someone else renames the city after him and said gangsters finish building it (the giraffe construction company wasn't around yet sadly enough).
Nobody really bothered stopping all the gangsters so they just kinda did their own thing. So the city sucked. The Corporations finally decided having the mobs running the city was a bad idea and shot them all and took over. So now it is slightly less terrible. Presumably if the PCs shoot all the corpos they'll be allowed to rule the city under this tradition. We're then into the times of 2020! There is a list of a bunch of zones, with some suburbs following after. Its mostly a list of places. Flavorful but nothing particularly stands out, "This is a crime ridden area. This is a rich secure area. This is a factory area".
Then the two corporations fought and nuked the city, so things sucked again. A tiny suitcase bomb basically destroyed the entire city because reasons.
New stuff! I think! The President knew that Militech launched the bomb and nationalized them. She blamed Arasaka officially and their unused nuke is left as a plothook. Arasaka gets kicked out of America.
Nomads and some corporations begin rebuilding night city, starting with bringing in shipping containers for people to live in as mentioned in character creation. Cozy! You would think they would find a more stable location that isn't one relatively small explosion away from falling apart completely, but they're Californians.
Now they have seven brand new zones!
HotZone: Fallout style destroyed city.
Rebuilding Urban Center: Where everything is...rebuilding.
Executive Zone: Uber rich gated community
Combat Zone: Basically just the original combat zone.
Overpacked Suberbs: Actually mostly refugee and homeless camps.
Reclaimed Perimeter: Outside the city. But only slightly.
The Open Road: Outside the city less slightly.
Each area gets a threat rating:
Executive: Very secure
Corporate: Paroled by corporate police, secure
Moderate: Moderately safe.
Combat: Dangerous ghetto
Outskirts: Nobody is here lol
Most of the security is pretty obvious from the map, just note the Hot Zone counts as a Combat Zone. The amusement part from the last trailer is mentioned. Since the Nomads have been making money in shipping they actually have the power to kill all the roaming badguys and do so making it so people can actually use the roads. Still have to wonder why the old shipping companies never bothered to do that.
Government now has several factions including Nomads, Corpos, Edgerunners, and the old government. Each faction takes control over part of the city instead of having a single mayor. They sometimes shoot each other. Cops and hospitals are a thing city wide. The local internet thing is brought up again. There are a couple of non cop security groups. Including FreeLance Police if your solo wants to pretend to be a Lawman.
This just kinda bleeds into a Transport section that tells you Transport:X before everything. I think they wanted to make it a separate section but ran out of time or something. Most of it got screwed up, but you still have things like roads and trains. Nomads are the only real option presented to get to air and space for some reason. With blimps.
Next there is a looooooooooooooooooong list of people. I'll just pick out some of the weirder or more interesting ones.
Hornet: A fixer who made chemical weapons, which should totally make him a different class. Makes it onto this list because of his katana wielding bodyguard.
The Other Doctor Bob: A surgeon who hates poser gangs because John F Kennedy took his arm.
Rex Royale: A fixer who takes protection money and sends Solos to protect areas that pay. Also runs pancake breakfasts.
Father Kevin: An ex-Solo priest who does charity and mediates conflicts.
Fox: Hornet's katana wielding bodyguard. Edgelord who dresses in all black and wears a weeby net mask.
Next there is a less long list of Gangs. Most seem left over from 2020, Some are good, some are bad, some are silly, some are just homeless people. A sidebar notes that some gangs died out, but you can just use them anyway if you want. I don't think any are new ones, but could be wrong.
Next is a list of 43 places. Standouts:
Danger Girl Offices:
This group was mentioned earlier, but slightly less silly there.
Metalstorm: A "Nearly indestructible bar" where everything is made of metal.
Two separate fire stations: Just in case you where wondering about what happens if you set things on fire I guess?
Poor kid is going to get soaked by that plate over their head.
Next section is everyday life. It starts with cops. Cops patrol everywhere in the city, corpo cops patrol corpo areas. Then we get another history lesson about defense lawyers being lynched (based). Apparently laws got rewritten follow military law after this, including outside of the non-succeeded American states for reasons. Stealing is mostly punished by the guy you stole from beating you up. Fraud is mostly the same, except corpos will disappear you. Drugs are totally legal. You can bring rape or assault to the cops, but it says most people usually hire someone to kill whoever attacked them. Nomads tie a rope to their gentiles and drag them behind their cars (also based). If two people are shooting at each other everyone just considers it self defense and nobody cares.
No more plea deals or probation. Murder gets you executed in three months. They can adjust your personality to prevent you from committing more crimes. They can whip you with an electronic whip. They have a form of chip-enforced exile where entering the city you're banned from causes intense pain. Low security prison is basically the same as the modern prison system, with maybe more labor. Some people are shoved into cryopods with a braindance playing on a loop. Execution is by bullet to the back of the head.
Cellphones get replaced by Agents, like in the preview. They're basically cellphones with a not-AI making them more handy. They come with a deepfake function you can use to autogenerate responses if you're lazy. They take a lot of your information which is supposed to sound handy but sounds like something that would be horrifying to a career criminal like an Edgerunner. They can be programed with personalities, and its specifically mentioned that degenerates turn their phone not AIs into waifus and add sex toys to them. They come free with your lifstyle, along with their data plan things.
Now GUNS! There are gun laws, but nobody in universe really cares. I'm not even sure why a federal law applies to Free States anyway, so you can ignore it too. Must guns on the street are cheap 3d printed caseless weapons that can be purchased at convenience stores and vending machines. Old guns are still around if you want to use them, the simplified weapon system kind of makes them equivalent to modern guns anyway. Guns from all the wars are available just kinda everywhere.
Cars are still cars. They run on plant-based alcohol mostly. Cybercars are like cars but with fancier attachments, like the ability to drive with your mind if you're cybernetic. Cyberbikes are like cyber cars but bikes. Speedboats are like cars, except they go over the water. Mini-subs are like speedboats, except they go under the water. I mentioned this earlier, but all the vehicles are really fragile compared to humans. A cyber bike for example has 35 HP and no base armor, so the weakest starting character will be able to survive longer than his bike would. You can take down a helicopter with two or three near average assault rifle shots. Right, there are actually more air transport than ground transport. Gyrocopters, like helicopters but small, helicopters, like gyrocopters but big, AV-4s are basically flying cars (and usually, but not by default, armored), AV-9 are basically flying sportscars. They top out at basically the same speed as a normal sportscar. Their space combat plane is only slightly tougher than a cyberbike. Maglevs have stats just in case you end up fighting a train. There is also a full sized submarine that will actually be really really tough if you add armor to it. Then Zepplins for all the air pirates.
Data terminals are a ripoff at $10 a minute and do basically what your Agent can.
News is digital now, but in the dumbest way possible. The news emails you the news which it than prints out the newspaper using "high speed replication" instead of a website or something. There is a random headline generator if you want to actually make the news:
"International...Killer...Praises....Hope. What an inspiring story!"
"Gossip....Pick a corp uh, Arasaka.....dies....woman. Yep you heard it here first."
"Financial...President...Murders.....City. Well that escalated quickly."
Maybe choose the headline instead of rolling.
Entertainment is basically on the local internet thing now. Its basically youtube. It sounds like they still have air times and have to literally fight over bandwith (lol).
Some clothing has fancy heating properties with chipped zippers that report if they need to be cleaned or reparied to your phone. They can also change color or logos. There is another chart for types of fashion, which we saw waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in character creation.
Kibble is made of things like algae and soy. Its gross. And cheap. Poor people it a lot of it. Prepack is microwaved dinners. It is also mostly soy. With maybe some real food. Higher tier prepack is said to be restaurant-quality real food. And it sounds like restaurants mostly serve prepacks. This game has something of a Guerilla gardening kick, where people try to build gardens in the irradiated ruins of a city and it somehow works despite all actual farmland being mostly unfarmable. There was street wars over these gardens. They now somehow have animals that are raised for meat, and they made a deal to sell excess food they somehow had to the corpos.
Nobody really watches TV anymore. The whole Krash thing meant that smaller organizations could now send out news and entertainment (still youtube) instead of all information being controlled by megacorps. Presumably to give the Media some actual power. Rockerboys are still a thing. So are Idols. Braindances are another form, but are expensive and addicting.
They have a dead pool where people bet how many bodies will be found every day. Guess right and you win the pool!
Most stores have been replaced by vending machines. Vending machines armed with internal turrets and flamethrowers. There is a random chart that you can roll:
Yep, classic panty vending machines are canon! Prices range from $10 to $100.
Aside from vending machines, there are Bodegas. Tiny corner stores that exist despite the last section telling us stores have been less common. They also get a random table, but with who is there rather than what is there. One for the owner, one for "Colorful Character #1", and one for "Colorful Character #2". They're mostly for flavor, but some can be a random encounter with a guy trying to break or rob the place.
Ha, fat.
Now those last two stores are mostly for flavor. The real way you're buying things is the Night Market.
Before that we get a history lesson on how shipping was a thing. Again during the last big corpo war both sides went full retard and blew up ALL THE SHIPPING! All of it. Worldwide. Boom. Nobody bothered to start it back up again yet. You can find the last known location of some stuff by having a Netrunner take a dive into the Old Net, while Fixers do their main job in buying and selling things.
I kind of lied when I said nobody bothered to start it back up again. The Nomads had as we've talked about before, they just don't use the big cargo ships from before.
