Help Needed for home brew campaign setting

[Itous]

hi all, I'm just gonna cut right to the chase as its late here.


basically I'm writing my own home brew setting, however i have never done it before, not in this level of detail so basically i am here to ask from one gamer to another for aid or an aid other check.


i am designing two city's, one being modern day and the other one being part of a virtual world


first i need to established specific things and with xmas coming and recently going through the loss of one of my parents i find myself in very short time to run around and doing everything myself.

i will post a list of things i need if people want to contribute that's fine if not i guess i'll have to do it painfully slowly.


1) i need to know the dimensions as in the average height, length and width of a city and average population count.

2) inspiration: can someone suggest movies to watch to help inspire these things, for my virtual world i have been watching things like "the matrix" and "Tron" not to mention the all time fav "War Games"

3) names if i was to build this entire city on my own could someone please tell me a very basic way of setting up a dice based Pen and Paper generator to randomly create names for places such as.... Bars, Hotels, Restaurants, Motels, Gas Stations, street names, anything you can think of, chop shops, liquor stores, gun stores, strip clubs. if you can think of it, it will probably need a name.

4) custom buildings and Custom NPC's
now instead of using the standard NPC's if people want to be creative and generous feel free to write up your own buildings, business ideas and NPC's who would run it to that effect for example......

i have plenty of space for a "Private Military Contractor" organization to be placed within the city i am building

5) Currency

i am writing my own currency system as a result it is very taxing to be blunt i don't actually know what in god's name I'm doing here's how i have it in my head, its just making a comparison to specific things.... so here we go with the currency system

this is to replace the purchase DC system in D20 Modern.....
what i have done is taken a D&D approach with money, and slightly modern-ised it

Coins:
Copper Coins are called "Bits"
Silver coins (which speaks for itself) are as they have always been called "Silver/s"
and finally gold coins are called Sovereigns

heres how it works in terms of exchanging

10 bits = 1 silver
100 silver = 1 Sovereign

1,000,000 Sovereign's is ALOT of money, think how money was back in the 1990's where effectively a million is alot of money

now i under stand the game is modern and people won't be carrying around backpacks full of loose change so..... here is the note system

the note system is effectively the same as modern day you have:
1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 10,000

the notes are called "Shells" and each Shell is assigned its own value equal to Sovereign.... for example

DM:"Ok Alex you have beaten down the cop, what do you do"
Alex: "i search his body, i got a 23"
DM: "Alright you find his standard cop gear and his wallet, do you look inside"
Alex: "Damn right i do!"
Dm: "Inside you find 5 bits, 3 silvers, some credit cards, family pictures and some paper currency, you count it out to be 5 Shell notes, each note worth 100 Sovereigns"

(aka he got 5, 100 sovereign notes for a total value of 500 sovereign's. this extra explanation is to help verify what i mean)

what i need is a way of basically integrating it into the game and examples of how i can do stuff with it like buying selling, etc.


6) Bad Guys: i need bad guys for my virtual world, so i dunno if people want to write up or just point me in the direction of some virtual based enemy's i will be quite grateful.

7) general help

if anyone has any other way they can help me which i have probably missed feel free to message me or reply i will respond ASAP. even pointing out horrible flaws of mine which i probably cannot see, anything at all to get me on the right track.


thanks very much everyone i look forward to you responses.

Itous

[Kuma Kode]

1) i need to know the dimensions as in the average height, length and width of a city and average population count.

Wikipedia is your friend. Just find a real city which is roughly how big you want and find its dimensions.

2) inspiration: can someone suggest movies to watch to help inspire these things, for my virtual world i have been watching things like "the matrix" and "Tron" not to mention the all time fav "War Games"

Neuromancer is a book by William Gibson which is quite iconic of the cyberpunk genre. If you have the time or resources, I seriously suggest putting an audiobook of it on your portable music player or something. Generally, we'd need to know more about what you're aiming for to help. My friend is a fan of the anime Ergo Proxy, but I don't know how well that fits.

In fact, you could watch some non-sci-fi and see if you can fit in some of their motifs or change them into sci-fi.

4) custom buildings and Custom NPC's
now instead of using the standard NPC's if people want to be creative and generous feel free to write up your own buildings, business ideas and NPC's who would run it to that effect for example......

Again, without a system or theme of the setting, there's no real way we can help in this regard. Do you want dark and brooding d20 Modern characters, or are you going for a science-is-magic GURPS? The system changes what powers are available to characters, and sometimes that can matter in how the character will turn out.

5) Currency

i am writing my own currency system as a result it is very taxing to be blunt i don't actually know what in god's name I'm doing here's how i have it in my head, its just making a comparison to specific things.... so here we go with the currency system

How do credit cards work in this world? What about loans? That's the reason d20 Modern had such an abstract system. Real-world economics are way too complicated to be able to model with anything specific like that. Admittedly, D&D's system is over-simplified as well, as medieval economics were also a lot more complicated than some give it credit.

In your system, what would happen if the party took the cop's credit cards? What about their own credit cards, how would that work?

6) Bad Guys: i need bad guys for my virtual world, so i dunno if people want to write up or just point me in the direction of some virtual based enemy's i will be quite grateful.

Omnipresent, unquestionably evil, and as magnificent as she is untouchable, S.H.O.D.A.N. is by far one of my favorite sci-fi villains. I use her voice clips for my Aurora campaign setting's similarly villainous AI, "Unity."

[centuriancode]

1) Modern world with higher tech (VR is still slightly beyond us if you do it on a large scale) will have, in a decent sized city, between 10 and 20 million people. Massize cities will go to 35 million. How spread out that is depends on how high it is, and how far out the high rise goes. As a rough guide, Tokyo, with massive high rise everywhere and designed in the most compact manner possible, is roughly 2000 square kilometres, with population of roughly 12 million in the central areas, though if you include the rest of the metropolitan landscape it's more like 35 million.

2) The original version of this set up comes from William Gibson's Neuromancer. That's what inspires all of the Matrix/Inseption style films, whether the directors are aware of it or not. Ignore where it talks about single megabites of RAM as revolutionary amounts (just scale it up, the numbers are basically unimportant), and look at the ideas presented.

Good luck.

[Itous]

thanks guys, got some good feed back there. seems neuromancr is a dead sure way of getting some inspiration followed by some wiki searches i think credit cards would have to be categorized each category having a different limit.

although it is entirely possible to say "the banking system in this area doesn't use credit cards.....yet"


the setting i am trying to make is essentially a large island, the island has a large active volcano and a mountain..... at the base of those it has a large forest between the base of the mountains and the suburbs then you move into the city, the city is also a port city.

this island is in international waters in the Atlantic Ocean how ever is quite close to America. there for it might possibly have its own currency which would be the one i have suggested, assuming its not broken to hell.

so it would kinda go like this

"the city has been built and has stood for many years, technology is the same as the rest of the western world however this one island, this city uses its own form of currency, its banks have no yet decided to put out.... over drafts, bank loans, credit cards... this way if you don't have the cash, you can't get it"

this way when we have scaled the currency and figured out basically how to use it, we can then go "oh look the banks having a special promotional offer take a out a credit card and get and extra 50% of what you asked for free with no pay back charge on it"

besides in D20 Modern games i prefer it if characters apply for credit cards or loans in game but with this you would grant them an extra Sovereign limit and they have to pay it back in X amount of time i would imagine


Setting:

OK as i said the city is set on an island with a large volcano and mountain range at their base is a huge forest. then you have suburbs and the city then the docks / port

basically in terms of magic and stuff here we go
Science Exists
Magic exists but is separate to science
Monsters Exist but are not accepted in the city, they can have black market contacts and come in and out of the city but if their caught people will freak out..... sort of call of cthulu style knowing monsters exist is like accepting something from a fantasy or science fiction exists Monsters can have their own tribes and areas and stuff outside of the city in the forest.
Aliens Exist, a good chunk of bad guys from the Menace Manuel are actually alien life forms, so what the hell, can't say no.

i know people say you should never mix magic with aliens, but i say it just makes the game more spicy it allows door ways for all sorts of stuff to happen.

i hope this has helped if you need more let me know