Describe your ideal cyberpunk bar / club in one comment

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nightclubbarCP77.jpg

Hello, as we were discussing lately in the Discord about our personal ideal features in a cyberpunk club or a bar, I've decided to open this thread. I've checked the forum to avoid double post but couldn't find one similar thread so let's go !

Can you describe your ideal place, in the perspective of the Player Character : entering into the place, describe the surroundings, style, music, ending with being served your drink. Roleplaying welcomed.


(Warning : my English may have flaws)

8052
MADONNA's
The name is engraved on a discreet door plate. So here is the Corpo secret place Kenneth told me about... I would never believe that it was a lounge bar from the go. By the outside, this just looks like another apartment building.

Following the known tip I got from the Fixer, I plug my credit chip in the digicode and hit whatever amount of eddies I want to spend tonight. A few seconds later the door unlocks quietly and I step into the room, welcomed by a bouncer in velvet costume. "Good evening, madam" says the hostess. Noticing I'm new, she explains me that rifles, wallets and portable devices are locked in a private Faraday locker for everyone's safety.

"The basic rules here are simple, adds the guard : Mind your own business when you're here, and we're fine. We wish you enjoy your stay and have a good time." (If only he knew I wasn't even a Corpo, but anyway...) The hostess hands me my drawn amount of eddies in cash, stamps my wrist with a temporary recognition ink, and I'm ready to enter to the bar.

The first thing shocking me is that it's remarkably broad and clean for a bar, they barely got any bullet hole or some kind of degradation, or they try fixing 'em real quick. They've got many exotic plants here and there that matches the color of the walls, the air smells a mix of perfumed cigs and opium and the dim ambient light is a blessing for the eye. No violent brawls or gunshots, I can barely understand the conversations from where I stand. And it feels good.

The serving room is dispatched in 3 levels : the one underneath my feet shows a few traditional pool tables in the middle of the room, surrounded by private couches separated by red vine walls ; the couches come each with a personal holo-tv, table and cyberdeck. On the main level is the bar, hold by a human bartender to one side and a robot arm hanging on the other end. The bar itself is the most visible piece in the room, literally covered in colorful brand signs moving in wave patterns, contrasting with the natural wood the bar seems to be made of. The upper zone consists of multiple restrained golden balconies with an unusual, old looking architecture, and there's a few couples of virtual dancers performing in the air, in the space between 'em. Surprisingly, the roof is nothing less than a big screen dome displaying night scenes from a clear sky perspective.

Not knowing where to go first, I just wander at the main floor, cracking a cig, looking at the local clientele : no Boosters high on synth, filthy drunk Nomads nor even a single Cop, they're all Biotechnica swaggers in costume hanging out with some white-teethed, fat ass booshis. Kenneth was right, they look for an upper-class dress code. I guess the entrance gorilla would've thrown me out of the place like a hobo if I kept my usual combat gear.

Everything seems to belong to another place in another time : the Industrial Era elevators with their cables and huge buttons. The many lamps on the walls and over the pathways that remind me of those in that oriental market near Chinatown, traditional stuff. The dancers upstairs who are flying under the star dome, projected by a flickering, blueish early model holo-vector. They even have a jukebox and arcade cabinets near the bar, I've been told these relics are a hundred years old !

I decide to sit at the bar and find out with a glimpse of panic that the menu doesn't appear on my eyesight... The waiter ends serving another client, then comes to me and puts a plastic sheet on the table. "Good evening mademoiselle, here. Most of the implant-based functions won't work here, they're purposely not installed at all." So I read at the menu, looking at all these unknown cocktail names, trying to decide myself... "Need a drink that suits your mood ?"

"Give me an Old-Fashioned, please." He puts an amusing grin on his face "Seems like this place inspires you already."

[Edit: minor corrections]
 
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So there I was, right, on the outskirts of Night City. It's been pretty difficult to find a place that does a good ale these days - I'm not one of those fancy craft beer drinkers, but Bud Light tastes like it may have been stored next to a brewery at one point of its miserable existence. But then my mate Jackie suggested this new British-style pub (The Count's Escape) that had only just opened, so I thought "yeah, why not, it's day three of the three-day bender, I need to wind things down a bit".

We pulled into the gravel car park in Jackie's car. He's the designated driver tonight, as I can still shoot straight after nine pints, and because he said "I will throw up again if I have another ron y Nicola." Whatever. From the outside, the pub looks like some sort of square concrete bunker, the sort that would need a whole kilogram of heptanitrocubane to make so much as a dent in the walls. The door is a big steel wedge that could easily have once been used as a shield by a goon on too many anabolic steroids.

As we're walking in through the front door, it abruptly shuts, trapping us in a checkpoint of sorts. "PLEASE DEPOSIT ALL FIREARMS, IMPLANTED WEAPONS, KNIVES, GRENADES, TOOLS, AND OTHER ESTABLISHMENTS' FOOD AND/OR DRINKS INTO THE RECEPTACLES PROVIDED," chimes a computerised voice. True to its word, two steel buckets slide out of the sides and we empty all our remotely dangerous stuff into them. I've only got my pistol, but Jackie takes a whole ten minutes to fully disarm. "COMMENCING SCAN. PLEASE STAND BY... SCAN CLEAR."

Two minutes later, the door to the bar opens. And it doesn't look like a bunker at all.

It looks like a proper British pub.

Yes, it's all fake. The windows to the outside are just holographic projections, one showing rolling green fields that ceased to exist before I was born, another showing two drunks having a punch-up in the car park. The wood panelling squeaks when you rub your fingers on it, and sawdust hasn't been allowed on the floors since fifty years ago. (I had a closer look at it later and it's actually ground-up expired rice.)

Jackie stomps off to find a table in the corner. A bald bloke (weird note - almost all of the men here have their heads shaved, as do half of the women) drops and breaks his pint glass, and six people scattered across the pub go "wheyyyyy", confusing the hell out of everyone else. On the ceiling, various small plastic domes lightly travel around the surface, their purpose unknown until a dude in a Mohawk hits someone with a bottle, at which point they split open to allow the drones inside to deliver tranquiliser darts.

The radio is playing all the British classics. The Beatles, The Clash, The Specials, Britney Spears, One Direction, Skadown, Elephant and Gunn, McMac, The Deceased Pigeon Collective of New Hampshire... At 8pm on the dot the music gives way to a tinny synth version of the English clock chimes.

The bar has something like twelve varieties of ale and six types of cider on the pumps, each one causing a tooltip to appear in my vision when I look at it. Behind the bar there's a series of chest-high fridges that stock fancier drinks as well as some inhaleable stuff. On the bar there's a line of extremely soggy beer mats as well as a credit reader labelled "stick the tip in, see how it feels". Well, that's what it probably used to say. Somebody must have spilt their drink on it as it now reads "stick the llp ln, soo nouu ll foos".

"You bein' served, mate?" asks the bartender in the sort of hybrid English accent you get from watching a silly amount of British soap operas and old box-sets of Downton Abbey. Her colleague sips from his pint, waiting for somebody else to come over.

"I'll have a pint of stout, and..." I glance at Jackie. "... and a treble vodka and lemonade." The bartender nods, glances at her colleague, and then faces me again.

"Sorry mate... you got any ID?"
 
Take your stereotypical Wild West saloon. Replace all of the wood with metal and cheap plastics. Dress everyone as punks and quadruple how heavily armed they are. Stick a malfunctioning gridscreen on one wall. Make the alcohol more rotgut, less cheap whiskey. And you're not certain if the piano player is a humanoid robot with an Eliza program or a human with far too much cyber for their own good.
 
A shisha / alcohol bar with antiques of the "old world" all over the place...just like my favorite bar in Lisbon -- Pavilhao Chines (except with shisha pipes everywhere, too! :cool:). So, take this, and go Cyberpunk on it:

 
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