Rust City Blues

East of the mountains, west of a vast jungle, north of a vast wasteland, lies a city.In the heat of the day a mist rises from the jungle obscuring the sun with mist and clouds, sometimes at night a breeze blows away the cover and the moon shines through, but every morning brings new humidity, new mist.

The sky is eternally grey, while the humidity brings rust and corrosion to the metal. The people haven't seen the sun in years. It's a world like our own, maybe a parallel universe, but its a world where the shadows are a bit longer, the streets a bit grittier and the nothing is quite what it seems.

Rust City is a world where you ain't nobody 'til you've cut a deal with "Old Scratch", where everyone's got a cover...maybe as a muttering short order cook, an ivory tinkling bluesman, a sultry singer, a gutter tramp, or maybe a carney on the run from a past that's rapidly chasing them down.

Waitsville lies down south as a cluster of wooden buildings bleached by age... a hopped boxcar ride across windswept plains... or maybe along the white line highway, if you hitch a ride past a half dozen greasy-spoon diners, and a too quiet crossroads... it's a place you go to get away from the city, on the way to somewhere else, even more than the city it's a surreal place haunted by dreams and nightmares.

Since I saw this, I haven't been able to get my mind off it.

It may not be cyberpunk. but it fits FUBAR perfectly as an alternate setting. Darkness, corruption, secrets to reveal, maybe it's a hidden purgatory locked in a mid 20th century echo of our world. But unlike regular FUBAR, these will not be tales of redemption, they'll be tales of lingering and holding on against the creeping insanity and downward spiral, tales of street magic, voodoo and devil dealings.

I've been working through decades of the lyrics of Tom Waits, it's a dark seductive world oozing with style, gritty with texture, dangerous like a champagne flute filled with ice and broken glass.

I really want to play a game there, and after a few hours of typing, I might be able to do so soon.

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