Beltway 2070
Free the Code, free the Bay, free the City.
A transhumanist heist crew in Beltway 2070 liberates the captured commons — hardware, software, energy — and gives them back to the people. Hopepunk-cyberpunk: resistance with a building arc, not nihilism. The system is Hack the Planet, a Forged in the Dark game by Fraser Simons; the setting swaps HtP's default Shelter 1 for a captured Capital Metro megacity and the drowned bay below it.
The hook
A resistance network contacts the crew. They have a stolen corp schematic, codebase, or design — something the corps will kill to recover. The job isn't to sell it back. The job is to free it. Get it to people who can fab it, run it, spread it. The first score earns the crew their place in the network. Origin emerges from flashbacks and downtime, not exposition.
The seven truths
These are the campaign's locked design constraints. The rules the GM doesn't break and the players can rely on.
The bay is dying, and the corps that killed it now sell the remediation. Decades of warming, runoff, and engineering failure have turned the Chesapeake into a stratified, half-dead estuary. Corp-owned "restoration" subsidiaries dredge, desalinate, and re-engineer it for profit while gating access. The watermen who remain are stubborn, broke, and dangerous.
The Beltway is one captured megacity. The old line between DC and Baltimore is gone. Officially the Capital Metro Authority — a corporate-administrative jurisdiction flattening DC, Maryland, and Virginia into one taxable zone. Locally everyone calls it the Beltway: the road, the surveillance ring closing around you, the eye that never sleeps. Federal agencies operate as services for whoever pays. The sprawl from Annapolis to Bethesda to Baltimore is administered by overlapping security contractors. Real government — the kind that helps — happens elsewhere.
Open hardware, unsigned firmware, and unmetered energy are crimes. Self-replicating fabs, jailbroken sleeves, off-grid solar, ham radio, mesh networks — all illegal. The penalties are severe, the enforcement is uneven, and the people most punished are the poor. This is the captured commons the crew is trying to free.
Resleeving exists, but the body is a class marker. The wealthy swap morphs like clothes — luxury, fashion, novelty. Working-class people generally inhabit one sleeve their whole life. If they hold a current Hopkins subscription sleeve contract when they die, they might be resleeved once — Hopkins's subscription model functions as the working class's grim life insurance. Most can't afford even that. Consciousness transfer is direct: it either works or kills you. No copies, no backups, no stacks.
The resistance is real, plural, and building. Watermen's mutual aid, HBCU-rooted academic undergrounds at Howard and Morgan State, Beltway hackerspaces, queer arts mutual aid, climate refugee co-ops. They don't trust each other. They have no central leadership. They keep going anyway. They are not waiting to be saved — they are doing the work.
The drowned Chesapeake is the third pole — frontier, refuge, and proving ground. Beyond the seawalls, in the flooded neighborhoods of old Norfolk, Annapolis, and Baltimore's harbor edge, and out on the bay itself, corporate control thins. Watermen flotillas, salvage towns built on rooftops and stilts, mariculture cooperatives, off-grid camps. The bay is where the liberation work lands — where a freed solar design or open fab can take root and stay rooted. It's also dangerous: storms, salt rot, corp patrol boats, and the desperate.
Your mind is yours. Everything else is a subscription. Consciousness itself is sacred and singular; each consciousness is a person. The corps can't capture your mind. But living as a person requires infrastructure they own: Hopkins makes the sleeves. Argus seeds the nanites in your bloodstream. CHEG meters the Joules that power your cyberware. ARM enforces the contracts. The cheaper the gear, the more you've signed away. The corps can't take your consciousness, but they can make personhood impossible to live freely for everyone who can't afford to be a customer. The resistance is building alternatives — never quite legal, never quite reliable, always free.
Read deeper
Where the campaign stands
Session two, ended mid-escape. The job is done — nothing in Carrion's staging depot is rolling at four. The crew is still inside the fence, in fog of their own making, with no clear way out.
The crew
Free Signal — a Sappers cell working out of Morrigan, a boat with no fixed mooring. Tier 0, hunting ground Agitation, reputation Savvy.
| Character | Playbook | Root | Background |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coyote | Lens | Unknown | Military |
| Aven | Quirk | Foundation | Trade |
| Mercy | Haunt | Forged | Underworld |
| Shine | Faint | Tipper | Exec |
| ATP | Torque | Foundation | Trade |
| Dread | Faint | Tipper | Trade |
They hold turf, claimed from the Free Stack and paid for in Joules rather than taken — which cost them everything they had. The crew is broke: zero Joules, no heat, and nobody looking for them yet.
The job
The Patapsco fabs have been on strike for three weeks. PMG hired Carrion to break it, and Carrion's people were to move on the picket at dawn.
Miss Yvonne — Yvonne Dorsey, third-generation Sparrows Point, who runs the Local — sent a handwritten note to Morrigan, signed only the Lady, and met the crew in the back room of a bar. She did not ask for soldiers. She asked them to buy the line one more day.
Session one
Before they moved, Dread went looking for how PMG breaks strikes and came back without proof but certain of the shape of it: the damage is the point. Enough of it, publicly enough, that nobody in the Beltway strikes again. They chose their approach knowing that.
They went after the staging depot rather than the picket — an unmarked fenced warehouse a block off the fab corridor, where everything for the morning was parked and waiting. Shine walked the whole crew through the vehicle gate on a falsified work order and the cover held. Coyote went looking for the depot's control room and turned up a PMG patrol instead; Aven talked them around, and one of the guards pointed out an old diagnostic junction box on the back wall, left over from the fabs and never separated out.
Session two
They took the depot apart from the inside — the ground fleet, the plows, the security node, and the drones, which they did not break so much as re-point at a frequency of their own. Nothing in that yard moves at four.
The building noticed. The yard locked, the lights came on, the gate shut, and the contractor story stopped working. The night ended in fog, mid-escape, with a charge set and unfired and no safe route left between the crew and the way out.
They are carrying nothing. Nobody knows it was them.
Updated after each session.