The Net in Cyberpunk: Old Net, DataKrash, NetWatch, the Blackwall and the Net of 2077

Timeline#

1. 2014The Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithms are released to give the Net one uniform look. Rache Bartmoss plants the RABIDS virus in the new system.
2. 2022On 3 June the DataKrash destroys most of the Old Net.
3. 2025NetWatch declares the Net officially down.
4. 2030s to 2040sNetWatch oversees corporate CitiNets, local networks in reclaimed cities.
5. 2044NetWatch secretly starts the Blackwall project with surviving AIs.
6. 2077The Blackwall still holds, and netrunner groups plot to break it.

The Old Net#

The Net of the Cyberpunk 2020 era is a worldwide web of hard lines, radio links, cell networks and microwave transmitters, reaching anything that can talk to a computer. You can use it with a keyboard and screen, but pros jack in. A cybermodem, or deck, connects them in 3D and lets them react faster than any typist.

Everything is an icon. A program, a netrunner and a data fortress all show up as shapes, from flat monochrome blocks to photorealistic people. Data fortresses have data walls and code gates, and a sysop decides how the place looks, limited only by memory. A worm program might show up as a stylized worm burrowing through a wall and forming a door.

The Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithms make the Net feel like real space. If a server sits 30 floors up and another is three blocks away on the ground, you see them that way, with bad connections rendered as mountains you cannot cross. The default look is Tron-style.

Our read: it is closer to a giant walled-garden service with spectacular graphics than to the web. You do not browse, you go somewhere.

Regions and regional AIs#

The 2020 Net is split into regions, large areas with a shared virtual look: Pacifica, Olympia, Rustbelt, Tokyo/Chiba, Atlantis, Eurotheater, Sovspace, Afrikani, Orbitsville and Wilderspace. The borders shift with whoever has control.

Rache Bartmoss claimed the regions had their own giant AIs: Europa, Akira, Rusty, 0-1, Packer, the Duchess and Zero. Few believed him. His ally Spider Murphy thought he made them up as a joke. If you want a campaign hook, a regional AI that nobody believes in is a good one.

Rache Bartmoss and the DataKrash#

Rache Bartmoss is the setting's most famous netrunner and a rogue who spent his life harassing corporations, with bounties on his head. In September 2014, when the Ihara-Grubb algorithms rolled out, he stayed jacked in and planted the RABIDS viruses in the new system.

The result is the DataKrash on 3 June 2022. RABIDS spreads through nearly four-fifths of the Net within months. Traffic stops, corporations lose billions, data gets corrupted, and military-grade AIs are freed from their limits and mutate into dangerous entities. Corporations and governments fall back on punch cards. It lands in the middle of the Fourth Corporate War, which is not a coincidence you want to think about.

Bartmoss's body died in 2020, but his life support froze him and his consciousness stayed in the Net. That rumor runs for decades, and it takes until 2077 to settle.

NetWatch and the Blackwall#

NetWatch is the Net's police. It began as a London private security firm hunting hackers for corporate clients, and got a tenuous global charter in 2013 through a US and Eurotheater treaty. Its netrunners, nicknamed NetCops, Wolves, Weasels and Icemen, patrol beats, arrest, and use Black ICE to kill or maim. Slogan: Vos Videmus, "⁠we see you.⁠" There is more on the organization on the NetWatch page.

After the Krash, NetWatch tried to contain the rogue AIs and save what it could. It declared the Net down in 2025, oversaw corporate CitiNets in the 2030s and 2040s, and from 2044 secretly worked with surviving AIs on a barrier that became the Blackwall. Rumor says NetWatch could only build it with help from the AIs themselves, who wanted to be out of human sight.

The new Net is not a global network but fragments: private nets that corporations control, plus the public parts under NetWatch, which watches every user with no privacy and punishes anyone who tries to see what is on the other side of the wall.

The Net in 2077 and RED#

In 2077 much of the surviving Net is controlled by NetWatch. Alongside it are isolated pockets, Arasaka's Mikoshi, and the area beyond the Blackwall. The Voodoo Boys are the gang most obsessed with crossing it (see Voodoo Boys). To the rest of Night City, the Net is a tool for netrunners hacking cameras, cyberware and shop doors.

In Cyberpunk RED the Net is local: NET Architectures that run on floors and programs, accessed in person. If you want the rules, see the netrunning guide.

Fixer's notes#

Tabletop tip: do not run the Old Net as a pre-DataKrash setting unless your table has agreed on 2020 rules. For RED, treat the Net as local and the Blackwall as the thing nobody should poke. For 2077, treat the Net as rented space, owned by someone who will cut you off.

Mistake worth avoiding: calling the Blackwall a firewall. It is a boundary, and everybody who touches it has an angle.

The wall itself and the people who guard it: Blackwall and NetWatch.