William Gibsons take on giving a city description shames my GM skills

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Here in my Akasaka hotel, I can’t sleep. I get dressed and walk to Roppongi, through a not-unpleasantly humid night in the shadows of an exhaust-stained multilevel expressway that feels like the oldest thing in town. Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer – equally sheer, skintight, and microshort – and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami.

William Gibson is god. The bits of text are from a piece he wrote for Wired, the cyberpunk geek monthly.

Night City Map

Night City is the hometown of Cyberpunk. Most use it as a campaign-setting. Since the Night City Sourcebook is no longer available, most don’t have a map. But you need one – I can tell by the amount of people asking google for a “night city map” and then being send here.

RTG hasn’t allowed to republish the original map, so I can’t help you there. BUT on the web there is one map that shows greater Night City, which might help you. It can be found here. Another Map reminds me very closely of the city center, but might be just the one from the main sourcebook, which you probably already have.

But there are a lot of sites out there with other, less fictional cities, making them useable for a cyberpunk campaign. I’m going to list some and would ask you to add any other you know in the comments.

Or you play on Mars.