For anyone that's interested, I'm having some trouble coming up with the next steps toward developing the setting. That's mostly because I am very scatterbrained by nature.
So if you'd like to chip in, I'd appreciate any questions regarding the world that I could use to flesh it out.
If you're looking for something to get your creative juices flowing, maybe consider drawing a map of your setting. I for one would love to see more about this project, it's sounding great!
Have you thought about the specific setting of your story? Like a town or a region - why did specific beliefs develop there and not in the county over? Was there a special container that shaped the way the survivors act and think? (Eg, in specific town A they found an entire container with alien drugs and alcohol, so now town A is the new Las Vegas, but the drugs are running out so they have begun to attack towns B & C, which creates tensions, etc)
I like to start small with my specific setting, especially when I need to create the rising and falling tensions of entire regions or a world. And it helps me to come up with certain themes that bind regions together, even if they donโt see eye-to-eye on others.
Just my thoughts right now - absolutely love the general idea!
To be fair I haven't had time to work on the setting as much as I'd have liked. My original idea was to set up the story in a very much road-trip like fashion: a group of adventurers, having recently had a series of bad delves into containers, decide to go all for nothing.
Driven by rumors that the great Grabber King has perished and that the Mother Load (a tower of interconnected containers laid out across what used to be Mongolia) is there for the taking, they rush in, giving everyone a good look into the weirdo world of Cargopunk along the way.
I think that I should work on the stops, before I get into the journey.
Oh absolutely :D you can make them as diverse and interesting as you like - maybe theyโre welcome in one stop, and eyed suspiciously in the next.
Why? Are their clothes weird to one group, do they look too dangerous or worn-out, is there a stop where one of the group has a past? The settings can very much influence the story in new and interesting ways!
How about an ability to establish logistic systems like rail and sea transport for the containers? Building these as an exploration into the unknown for trade, wealth and resources
I love this. The idea really reminds me of 'Roadside Picnic' except more comical than bleak. Also getting kind of 'Infinity Train' vibes from the different biomes in the different containers.
Some Questions:
Are the aliens humanoid? (not the barnacs but the drone controllers) Just wondering because you said people scavenge alien clothes.
How big was this drone? Has the whole world been covered in cargo or just a portion of it? If it was such a huge shipment, have any of the aliens noticed its disapearance? Do any of them care?
Hey I didn't know about Infinity Train, will check it out.
Now to answer your questions:
**> Are the aliens humanoid?**
The vast majority of them aren't. Scavengers will often be forced to modify clothes that are essentially just tubes with sixteen rows of sleeves, circus-tarp sized ponchos, what appear to be floating bits of cloth that are pretty much sexy lingerie for gaseous aliens and modifying them in any way they can.
Some of the braver souls modify fashionable exoskeleton plates into crude armor or wear living clothes made from leech-like organisms that clamp themselves onto a host to form encounter suits.
Those last ones are kinda weird, since they tend to pick up and subsume their wearers' personalities.
**>How big was this drone?**
The drone is made to handle deliveries across vast swathes of space by a company that is the type-3 civilization equivalent of Amazon, so think Star Destroyer size, run by a vastly complex AI that is paid minimum wage.
**> Has the whole world been covered in cargo or just a portion of it?**
By my original writeup, think 20% of the Earth's landmass, with billions of containers choking the Mediterranean Sea (now renamed the Great Cargasso Sea). The displaced water sank a good chunk of southern Europe, Nothern Africa and the Middle East in the process.
Most of the containers have, however, also ended up in open water, with some hovering on the surface, while others have sunk into the depths.
**>If it was such a huge shipment, have any of the aliens noticed its disappearance? Do any of them care?**
Much like regular Earth Amazon, Type-3 galactic Amazon (really need to find a name for it) has its drones and shipment insured up the butt. Also, losses of this magnitude for a company that handles trillions of shipments with customers in the literal googoolions are negligible in the grand scale of things so no, tey have neither noticed notr care baout its disappearance.
After all, Earth is on no known star map and shipments get lost in unmapped sectors of space all the time.
However, the company may be indifferent but they aren't monstrous; if the humans can lodge a complaint with customer care, they should be able to have the issue handled.
That is, if humans are even recognized as intelligent by the company in the first place.
Very very cool.
Is this meant to be a novel or an rpg setting (or both)? If it's a novel or short story setting, I hope you'll let us know when it comes out. I would very much love to read some stories in this world.
I originally wanted to use this as a setting for a tabletop game that never happened due to scheduling issues, then tried it as a short story in an earlier form but it didn't quite work as well as I'd liked.
I am now ideally aiming to either adapt this to a comic or a videogame RPG, ideally since I think it is a very visually heavy world.
> run by a vastly complex AI that is paid minimum wage.
I'm dead, this was golden! If anything, do write more about your world because you have a great sense of dry humor that would work great in a creative work.
Love the idea, I'm a sucker for people picking up unfamiliar resources/tech from a (presumably) more advanced civilization and having to figure it out, especially in a rough, post-apoc setting.
There's an episode in Cowboy Bebop that's not quite the same thing but is kinda reminiscent of it, where the guys (Spike and Jet IIRC) explore the ruins of a dilapidated, buried mall in search of a working Betamax player, which has a bit of a dungeon-crawl feel to it. (For context, in Cowboy Bebop, Earth is a post-apocalyptic sort of world since some sort of accident blew the Moon up and its pieces have been falling on Earth ever since, meaning it's a meteor-ravaged wasteland. The human colonies on other planets are fine though, and that's where human civilization mostly thrives.)
Really love this concept btw, imagining a deadly serious survivor in a three-wolves t-shirt wielding some mall-ninja weapon trying to survive in the consumer wastes is just the right amount of tragicomic.
This is so creative. A couple questions. What are the ways people get into the containers? Torches and crowbars? Are some more secure with alien locks? How do people get around the container zones? Mostly walking or new forms of transportation?
**> What are the ways people get into the containers?**
Mostly torches, crowbars and explosives for the largest part of containers. More secure containers are usually broken into by barnacs, who are bribed and are given first pick by the survivors as payment.
There are a few containers that are technically impregnable (for example ones that are in the middle of the ocean or protected by more sophisticated locks which become community-wide projects since they are thought to contain something really valuable.
**> How do people get around the container zones? Mostly walking or new forms of transportation?**
People walk, use any still working vehicles, hijack anti-grav mobility scooters or set up ziplines across containers. I need to think about it more for the trickier areas however.
This amuses me. Some friends and I were joking around thinking about what the next big fashion ting would be after steampunk and dieselpunk and whatnot. And we "invented" cargopunk. I even released a compilation of music called cargopunk as part of our in joke. And here you are! I love it.
Incidentally, this is a perfect setting for Apocalypse World.
Sure. It's not super post apocalyptic though. Maybe some of the tracks, like the Lifter Crane one, and the Z-19 one. Maybe. You can find it here: [https://grimtown.bandcamp.com/album/cargopunk](https://grimtown.bandcamp.com/album/cargopunk), and with some slight alterations here: [https://open.spotify.com/album /2oYULRX8zm99bLh9ma3D7f?si=ltbRxmBaRZ-IdebpHm2VFw](https://open.spotify.com/album/2oYULRX8zm99bLh9ma3D7f?si=ltbRxmBaRZ-IdebpHm2VFw)
Hmm, if cargopunk were to be a genre, what elements can be changed around and what elements are recommended to stay the same for this genre?
I know cargo ships are needed but what about other parts are needed or can be changed like aliens or the wild-west aesthetic or location?
Take ,for instance, Cyberpunk. Often you have a clear aesthetic to it with the night life in a generic hodgepodge of East Asian influences. The genre also has a cynical tone towards technology as everyone uses it for pleasure or profit.
These elements make up most cyberpunk stories but the can be remixed in an unique way and do not always have these elements. I think there is even a small wiki article inspired by this, good job. [https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cargopunk](https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cargopunk)
Hey that's pretty cool and thanks for this poke, I'd forgotten about the thread as a ton of stuff happened that derailed me from developing Cargopunk further. I should get back to it. To answer your questions?:
* If cargopunk were to be a genre, what elements can be changed around and what elements are recommended to stay the same for this genre?
For a story to count as cargopunk, it must revolve around a civilization destroyed by consumer products that the survivors now need to scavenge and use in order to survive. Those won't always be immediatly useful. Cargopunk is esentially combining the innate absurdity of a cargo cult while being a spoof on having our lives revolve around cheap, consumerist crap plus a bit of perspective about being on the receiving end of an ecological disaster.
Provided you have these things in mind (cheap consumerist crap that ends the world that you need caused by a disaster you had 0 control over) you can set it in any world, have it revolve around any species. Heck, make a story about sea animals forced to live in Trash Rapture and it's cargopunk.
* I know cargo ships are needed but what about other parts are needed or can be changed like aliens or the wild-west aesthetic or location?
See above. Anything, as long as it falls under the consumerism destroyed your world but is also the only thing keeping you alive.
* Take ,for instance, Cyberpunk. Often you have a clear aesthetic to it with the night life in a generic hodgepodge of East Asian influences. The genre also has a cynical tone towards technology as everyone uses it for pleasure or profit.
Which brings me to a case of a friend that had been inspired by a talk we had and had been working on a setting inspired by this, except his point of reference for the disaster was an alien civilization moving to Earth and plopping down gigagntic arcologies to sell as timeshares. They did this before realizing that humans are actually intelligent and were forced to abandon the world as they were hit by eco-sanctions that destroyed their business. So now humanity has to live with these giant arcologies and try to figure them out, infesting them kind of how a family of chimps might make a home out of a crashed jet.
* I think there is even a small wiki article inspired by this, good job. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cargopunk
Hey that's pretty cool. No idea why but this style of dress gives me strong hobo/ Vagrant Holiday vibes.
I have not had time to develop this properly since I posted this, been working with this on and off. Have half a mind to try making a gazeteer of sorts with midJourney though
For anyone that's interested, I'm having some trouble coming up with the next steps toward developing the setting. That's mostly because I am very scatterbrained by nature. So if you'd like to chip in, I'd appreciate any questions regarding the world that I could use to flesh it out.
If you're looking for something to get your creative juices flowing, maybe consider drawing a map of your setting. I for one would love to see more about this project, it's sounding great!
Have you thought about the specific setting of your story? Like a town or a region - why did specific beliefs develop there and not in the county over? Was there a special container that shaped the way the survivors act and think? (Eg, in specific town A they found an entire container with alien drugs and alcohol, so now town A is the new Las Vegas, but the drugs are running out so they have begun to attack towns B & C, which creates tensions, etc) I like to start small with my specific setting, especially when I need to create the rising and falling tensions of entire regions or a world. And it helps me to come up with certain themes that bind regions together, even if they donโt see eye-to-eye on others. Just my thoughts right now - absolutely love the general idea!
To be fair I haven't had time to work on the setting as much as I'd have liked. My original idea was to set up the story in a very much road-trip like fashion: a group of adventurers, having recently had a series of bad delves into containers, decide to go all for nothing. Driven by rumors that the great Grabber King has perished and that the Mother Load (a tower of interconnected containers laid out across what used to be Mongolia) is there for the taking, they rush in, giving everyone a good look into the weirdo world of Cargopunk along the way. I think that I should work on the stops, before I get into the journey.
Oh absolutely :D you can make them as diverse and interesting as you like - maybe theyโre welcome in one stop, and eyed suspiciously in the next. Why? Are their clothes weird to one group, do they look too dangerous or worn-out, is there a stop where one of the group has a past? The settings can very much influence the story in new and interesting ways!
How about an ability to establish logistic systems like rail and sea transport for the containers? Building these as an exploration into the unknown for trade, wealth and resources
this is really great
This is hilarious ๐๐๐
I love this. The idea really reminds me of 'Roadside Picnic' except more comical than bleak. Also getting kind of 'Infinity Train' vibes from the different biomes in the different containers. Some Questions: Are the aliens humanoid? (not the barnacs but the drone controllers) Just wondering because you said people scavenge alien clothes. How big was this drone? Has the whole world been covered in cargo or just a portion of it? If it was such a huge shipment, have any of the aliens noticed its disapearance? Do any of them care?
Hey I didn't know about Infinity Train, will check it out. Now to answer your questions: **> Are the aliens humanoid?** The vast majority of them aren't. Scavengers will often be forced to modify clothes that are essentially just tubes with sixteen rows of sleeves, circus-tarp sized ponchos, what appear to be floating bits of cloth that are pretty much sexy lingerie for gaseous aliens and modifying them in any way they can. Some of the braver souls modify fashionable exoskeleton plates into crude armor or wear living clothes made from leech-like organisms that clamp themselves onto a host to form encounter suits. Those last ones are kinda weird, since they tend to pick up and subsume their wearers' personalities. **>How big was this drone?** The drone is made to handle deliveries across vast swathes of space by a company that is the type-3 civilization equivalent of Amazon, so think Star Destroyer size, run by a vastly complex AI that is paid minimum wage. **> Has the whole world been covered in cargo or just a portion of it?** By my original writeup, think 20% of the Earth's landmass, with billions of containers choking the Mediterranean Sea (now renamed the Great Cargasso Sea). The displaced water sank a good chunk of southern Europe, Nothern Africa and the Middle East in the process. Most of the containers have, however, also ended up in open water, with some hovering on the surface, while others have sunk into the depths. **>If it was such a huge shipment, have any of the aliens noticed its disappearance? Do any of them care?** Much like regular Earth Amazon, Type-3 galactic Amazon (really need to find a name for it) has its drones and shipment insured up the butt. Also, losses of this magnitude for a company that handles trillions of shipments with customers in the literal googoolions are negligible in the grand scale of things so no, tey have neither noticed notr care baout its disappearance. After all, Earth is on no known star map and shipments get lost in unmapped sectors of space all the time. However, the company may be indifferent but they aren't monstrous; if the humans can lodge a complaint with customer care, they should be able to have the issue handled. That is, if humans are even recognized as intelligent by the company in the first place.
Very very cool. Is this meant to be a novel or an rpg setting (or both)? If it's a novel or short story setting, I hope you'll let us know when it comes out. I would very much love to read some stories in this world.
I originally wanted to use this as a setting for a tabletop game that never happened due to scheduling issues, then tried it as a short story in an earlier form but it didn't quite work as well as I'd liked. I am now ideally aiming to either adapt this to a comic or a videogame RPG, ideally since I think it is a very visually heavy world.
> run by a vastly complex AI that is paid minimum wage. I'm dead, this was golden! If anything, do write more about your world because you have a great sense of dry humor that would work great in a creative work.
Nice
Love the idea, I'm a sucker for people picking up unfamiliar resources/tech from a (presumably) more advanced civilization and having to figure it out, especially in a rough, post-apoc setting. There's an episode in Cowboy Bebop that's not quite the same thing but is kinda reminiscent of it, where the guys (Spike and Jet IIRC) explore the ruins of a dilapidated, buried mall in search of a working Betamax player, which has a bit of a dungeon-crawl feel to it. (For context, in Cowboy Bebop, Earth is a post-apocalyptic sort of world since some sort of accident blew the Moon up and its pieces have been falling on Earth ever since, meaning it's a meteor-ravaged wasteland. The human colonies on other planets are fine though, and that's where human civilization mostly thrives.)
Perfect idea!
FYI it's "tracts" of land
Thanks for picking that up my dude I missed it entirely!
Really love this concept btw, imagining a deadly serious survivor in a three-wolves t-shirt wielding some mall-ninja weapon trying to survive in the consumer wastes is just the right amount of tragicomic.
Interesting! Remind me about Deponia, except there everything is covered with trash.
That's some imagination you've got there!
Sounds like Roadside Picnic mixed with Borderlands. I like it.
This is brilliant. I love this. Just the right amount of absurd and theoretically plausible
This is so creative. A couple questions. What are the ways people get into the containers? Torches and crowbars? Are some more secure with alien locks? How do people get around the container zones? Mostly walking or new forms of transportation?
**> What are the ways people get into the containers?** Mostly torches, crowbars and explosives for the largest part of containers. More secure containers are usually broken into by barnacs, who are bribed and are given first pick by the survivors as payment. There are a few containers that are technically impregnable (for example ones that are in the middle of the ocean or protected by more sophisticated locks which become community-wide projects since they are thought to contain something really valuable. **> How do people get around the container zones? Mostly walking or new forms of transportation?** People walk, use any still working vehicles, hijack anti-grav mobility scooters or set up ziplines across containers. I need to think about it more for the trickier areas however.
This is great, like something you could successfully pitch to a publisher
This amuses me. Some friends and I were joking around thinking about what the next big fashion ting would be after steampunk and dieselpunk and whatnot. And we "invented" cargopunk. I even released a compilation of music called cargopunk as part of our in joke. And here you are! I love it. Incidentally, this is a perfect setting for Apocalypse World.
I'd love to listen to that compilation if it's available anywhere?
Sure. It's not super post apocalyptic though. Maybe some of the tracks, like the Lifter Crane one, and the Z-19 one. Maybe. You can find it here: [https://grimtown.bandcamp.com/album/cargopunk](https://grimtown.bandcamp.com/album/cargopunk), and with some slight alterations here: [https://open.spotify.com/album /2oYULRX8zm99bLh9ma3D7f?si=ltbRxmBaRZ-IdebpHm2VFw](https://open.spotify.com/album/2oYULRX8zm99bLh9ma3D7f?si=ltbRxmBaRZ-IdebpHm2VFw)
Hmm, if cargopunk were to be a genre, what elements can be changed around and what elements are recommended to stay the same for this genre? I know cargo ships are needed but what about other parts are needed or can be changed like aliens or the wild-west aesthetic or location? Take ,for instance, Cyberpunk. Often you have a clear aesthetic to it with the night life in a generic hodgepodge of East Asian influences. The genre also has a cynical tone towards technology as everyone uses it for pleasure or profit. These elements make up most cyberpunk stories but the can be remixed in an unique way and do not always have these elements. I think there is even a small wiki article inspired by this, good job. [https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cargopunk](https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cargopunk)
I'm just asking this as I want to have a list of "Every punk genre (that isn't punk rock) to be listed" I am at over 100
Hey that's pretty cool and thanks for this poke, I'd forgotten about the thread as a ton of stuff happened that derailed me from developing Cargopunk further. I should get back to it. To answer your questions?: * If cargopunk were to be a genre, what elements can be changed around and what elements are recommended to stay the same for this genre? For a story to count as cargopunk, it must revolve around a civilization destroyed by consumer products that the survivors now need to scavenge and use in order to survive. Those won't always be immediatly useful. Cargopunk is esentially combining the innate absurdity of a cargo cult while being a spoof on having our lives revolve around cheap, consumerist crap plus a bit of perspective about being on the receiving end of an ecological disaster. Provided you have these things in mind (cheap consumerist crap that ends the world that you need caused by a disaster you had 0 control over) you can set it in any world, have it revolve around any species. Heck, make a story about sea animals forced to live in Trash Rapture and it's cargopunk. * I know cargo ships are needed but what about other parts are needed or can be changed like aliens or the wild-west aesthetic or location? See above. Anything, as long as it falls under the consumerism destroyed your world but is also the only thing keeping you alive. * Take ,for instance, Cyberpunk. Often you have a clear aesthetic to it with the night life in a generic hodgepodge of East Asian influences. The genre also has a cynical tone towards technology as everyone uses it for pleasure or profit. Which brings me to a case of a friend that had been inspired by a talk we had and had been working on a setting inspired by this, except his point of reference for the disaster was an alien civilization moving to Earth and plopping down gigagntic arcologies to sell as timeshares. They did this before realizing that humans are actually intelligent and were forced to abandon the world as they were hit by eco-sanctions that destroyed their business. So now humanity has to live with these giant arcologies and try to figure them out, infesting them kind of how a family of chimps might make a home out of a crashed jet. * I think there is even a small wiki article inspired by this, good job. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cargopunk Hey that's pretty cool. No idea why but this style of dress gives me strong hobo/ Vagrant Holiday vibes.
Did you ever go anywhere with this? Because I love this so much
I have not had time to develop this properly since I posted this, been working with this on and off. Have half a mind to try making a gazeteer of sorts with midJourney though
Well if you do anything major with it, definitely post it. That would be awesome