The future of humanity is no longer human.
The year is 2045. Humanity has survived the greatest paradigm shift in its history. Reality itself has changed.
The NHI Crisis shattered humanity's understanding of its place in the universe. We are no longer alone, no longer the most intelligent beings on Earth, and perhaps no longer masters of our own minds.
Hostile superintelligences, both extraterrestrial and artificial, threaten human civilization. Rogue artificial minds pursue incomprehensible goals. Alien infiltrators walk among us. Meanwhile, mysterious and seemingly benevolent extraterrestrial Zookeepers offer protection, guidance, and the possibility of a radically different future. But what do they really want?
Humanity is changing just as rapidly. Artificial intelligence, cybernetics, genetic engineering, and psionics are transforming our species into a multitude of humans, cyborgs, transhumans, and posthumans. The boundaries between human, machine, alien, and consciousness itself are dissolving.
In the face of existential threats, humanity has united under the United Nations. But political unity does not mean ideological consensus. Rival factions struggle to determine humanity's deep future: resist the transformation, control it, or embrace the emergence of a new civilization.
Three great paradigm shifts define the age:
- AGI: Artificial General Intelligence. The creation of minds beyond human intelligence, promising abundance and threatening extinction.
- NHI: Non-Human Intelligence. Contact with extraterrestrial and other mysterious intelligences, overturning humanity's understanding of reality and its place in the cosmos.
- PSI: Psionics and Consciousness. The discovery that mind and reality are stranger, more interconnected, and potentially more powerful than modern science imagined.
NoöPunk is a New Weird science-fantasy role-playing game and political strategy simulation about humanity's struggle for survival, transformation, and control over its own destiny.
Play as an individual investigating the impossible, or as a faction shaping the future of civilization. Explore a world where every technological breakthrough becomes a political crisis, every existential threat creates new ideologies, and every answer raises deeper questions.
The old world is ending. The next one is still up for grabs.
Setting note: 2045 depicts the developed NHI Crisis era. The earlier strategy campaign begins around 2027, before these outcomes are settled, allowing players to shape the future rather than treating it as inevitable.
In 1974, at a Hawkwind concert, a left-wing science-fiction writer named Tommy Pilgrim took LSD and experienced what he described as a transmission from VALIS. Amid the space rock, he believed he had received a staggering download of humanity's future: artificial minds, political upheavals, alien encounters, cybernetic bodies, psychic phenomena, and a civilization struggling to understand what consciousness even was.
Pilgrim wrote it down as NoöPunk, a psychedelic, radical, occasionally ridiculous work of social science fiction. He could never be certain whether his visions were genuine precognition, symbolic misreadings, or glimpses of a neighboring timeline. His technological descriptions sometimes resembled the hardware of 1974 more than the machines they seemed to predict. Yet, decade after decade, uncomfortable numbers of his supposedly fictional events began to look familiar.
The novel became a cult classic, then inspired films, television, tabletop and computer games, and an entire NoöPunk subculture. Pilgrim is still alive in Helsinki, now a literary celebrity studied by scholars and courted by parapsychologists. Whether his extraordinary foresight came from VALIS, chance, or something stranger remains an open question inside the fiction.
And this is where the book ends and the scenario begins. The real-world NoöPunk project uses Pilgrim's imaginary 1974 future history as a presentation and narrative frame, not as evidence of actual precognition and not as permission to rewrite its underlying simulation or canon. The opening account summarizes the established premise; Tommy Pilgrim's full literary story remains reserved for the project's author. Design background: issue #447.
NoöPunk = Noösphere + Cyberpunk.
NoöPunk is an experimental computer RPG and social simulation set in 20XX, using an independent NoöPunk rules system, a deterministic Python RPG kernel, and Google DeepMind Concordia for optional LLM-driven agents and narration. Earth still exists. Transhuman technology is already here. AGI, cyborgification, NHI contact, psionics, panpsychism, and the emerging Noösphere are destabilizing the old world at the same time.
The project is currently a playable text-based prototype. You can run the normal game entirely without Ollama or an LLM.
My primary motivation is sociological modeling of possible near-future paradigm-shift scenarios. NoöPunk is an experiment at the intersection of social science, social data science, and social science fiction. The game is a way to build and explore simple, explicit models of how societies, institutions, networks, ideologies, and political factions might respond to interacting transformations in AI, nonhuman intelligence (NHI), and consciousness/PSI. These are exploratory scenarios, not predictions or empirical claims that contested phenomena are real.
My secondary motivation is to make science-fiction entertainment in my own style. Characters, political satire, unsettling mysteries, philosophical questions, absurdity, and encounters with the genuinely strange give the models a playable and imaginative form.
The resulting genre is best described as Social Science Fiction × New Weird. Cyberpunk Science Fantasy emerges progressively as the paradigm shifts become more visible and consequential within the fictional world. The scenario starts around 2027, still close to recognizable contemporary society, rather than assuming a mature cyberpunk future from the outset. Social modeling remains the core motivation throughout; the aesthetics and possibilities of the world evolve with the crisis.
Genre identity: Social Science Fiction × New Weird is the defining blend: social-scientific modeling motivates the project and New Weird gives it its distinctive fictional expression. Cyberpunk Science Fantasy becomes increasingly prominent as the fictional paradigm shifts unfold. These are complementary lenses, not three separate games.
NoöPunk explores how institutions, ideologies, communications, economies, religions, and political movements respond to extraordinary paradigm shifts. Players lead factions and characters in a compact grand-strategy/RPG simulation: they build networks, contest meanings, pursue hegemony, and influence social change. Ernesto Laclau's discourse theory, Manuel Castells's network/communication power, and Niklas Luhmann's systems theory inform its abstract political model. The starting scenario, around 2027, focuses on accelerating conflict before the later NHI Crisis.
The primary imaginative genre, alongside Social Science Fiction. AI, alleged nonhuman intelligences, anomalous consciousness, PSI, unfamiliar religions, and strange institutions collide without reducing the mystery to conventional aliens, magic, or a single tidy explanation. The tone can shift between political satire, unsettling investigation, philosophical wonder, absurd comedy, and the profoundly alien. The paradigm shift is ontological as well as technological: who gets to decide what is real?
Secondary genre and influence, not the whole premise. Hacking, surveillance, corporate power, cybernetics, BCI, AI, inequality, and transhuman technology provide grounded near-future material conflicts. Science-fantasy elements introduce NHI and PSI as consequential features of the fictional setting, with uncertain mechanisms and competing interpretations. Cyberpunk stays deliberately limited in the early 2027 scenario, rather than swallowing the social-science and New Weird themes or assuming a fully cyberpunk society already exists.
In one sentence: Social Science Fiction asks how society changes; New Weird asks what reality has become; Cyberpunk Science Fantasy asks what powers and technologies people use to survive and fight over it.
Elevator pitch.
Earth still exists. That is the problem. An agency nobody outside it takes entirely seriously investigates abductions, infiltrations and impossible physics, while two non-human powers rebuild the planet for reasons of their own.
Storefront pitch.
NoöPunk is a New Weird social-science RPG and political simulation of investigation in a wounded near-future. The Fall has not happened; a catastrophe already has. Two non-human factions helped rebuild Earth after regional holocausts, and neither can be filed as simply an ally or an enemy. You are a newly graduated investigator of the United Nations Security Administration (UNSA) — trained, augmented, wired to a limited forensic AI, and sent into a world where mind-control, hybridization, corporate psy-ops and ordinary human lying all leave the same kind of evidence.
Comparisons. NoöPunk sits between three touchstones and borrows from each:
- Shadowrun — cyberpunk plus extraordinary powers, and a world where the paranormal is real. NoöPunk draws on UFO/PSI/interdimensional lore rather than elves, dragons or spells.
- Eclipse Phase — ASI catastrophe, transhumanism, existential risk and survival.
- The X-Files — investigations, agencies, and conspiracy mythology.
A useful shorthand is "pre-Eclipse Phase" in degree of societal transformation — not a prequel and not shared continuity. Cybernetics, PSI, disclosure and transhumanism are still comparatively new, and Earth-based states and social institutions largely continue to function despite regional catastrophes, post-ASI damage and reconstruction.
Tone. This is not a full postapocalypse and not Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The universe is not fundamentally hostile: some NHI are benevolent, others hostile, ambiguous, or merely politically opposed to one another. Cosmic wonder and Fortean/ontological mystery are the default register, with horror as an occasional note rather than the premise.
Positioning note. The audience-fit comparisons above are a positioning hypothesis, not proven market data. NoöPunk claims no affiliation with, or endorsement by, any game, show or publisher named here — they are comparisons, not licenses. See the licensing section below for licensing and attribution requirements for adapted rules.
Two books published in 2026 are especially useful real-world intellectual inspirations for NoöPunk's near-future New Weird political simulation:
- Alexander Wendt, The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, online 2026; print 2027). Wendt asks what the discovery of superior nonhuman intelligence could do to anthropocentric state legitimacy, ontological security, sovereignty, populism, and the international order. NoöPunk lens: the political and institutional crisis of NHI disclosure.
- Diana Walsh Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny (St. Martin's Press, 2026). Pasulka examines extraordinary-encounter narratives through religion, AI, immortality, and transformations in ideas about consciousness. NoöPunk lens: the cultural, religious, and ontological collision of AI, NHI, and PSI.
Together: Wendt explores what happens to political order when human exceptionalism is challenged; Pasulka explores what happens to meaning, belief, and identity. NoöPunk turns these questions into a struggle for hegemony: emerging factions try to define a rapidly changing reality, reshape institutions, and build communication power. Its political simulation draws on Ernesto Laclau, Manuel Castells, and Niklas Luhmann. The initial strategy scenario begins around 2027, during accelerating change, before the later NHI Crisis and UNSA era.
These are scenario inspirations and interpretations, not evidence that disputed NHI or paranormal claims are established facts; the game's fictional world makes its own assumptions.
Requires Python 3.12 (the version tested in CI).
git clone https://github.com/TomiToivio/NooPunk.git
cd NooPunk
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
python scripts/noopunk_text.pyOn Windows PowerShell, activate the environment with:
.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1The normal start command launches the default pre-Fall 20XX NoöPunk scenario:
python scripts/noopunk_text.pyOllama is optional for basic play.
At the prompt, try:
look
n / s / e / w
go <direction>
inventory
take <item>
drop <item>
talk <character> <message>
say <message>
stats
sheet
save
quit
Useful rules/debugging commands also include:
test skill ...
test social ...
test mesh ...
test combat ...
See RULEBOOK.md for the actual rules instead of treating the README as a second rulebook.
git clone https://github.com/TomiToivio/NooPunk.git
cd NooPunk
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txtgit clone https://github.com/TomiToivio/NooPunk.git
cd NooPunk
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txtThe deterministic text game itself uses only the Python standard library. The top-level requirements.txt also installs the pinned Concordia dependency needed by the current Concordia integration and optional Ollama-backed runtime.
python scripts/noopunk_text.pyThis starts the canonical 20XX, Earth-intact NoöPunk scenario.
python scripts/noopunk_text.py --scenario issue74Issue #74 is a deliberately tiny vertical slice for testing the current architecture. It remains fully playable without an LLM, using deterministic mechanics and scripted NPC behaviour.
Scenario notes: docs/scenarios/ISSUE74_CONCORDIA_EP2_POC.md.
python scripts/noopunk_text.py --helpOllama is an external runtime/service, not a Python dependency. Install and start Ollama separately, then make sure the model you want to use is available in Ollama.
The current NoöPunk adapter reads these environment variables:
NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_MODEL— required model identifier.NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_BASE_URL— optional; defaults tohttp://127.0.0.1:11434.NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_TEMPERATURE— optional; defaults to0.5.NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_TOP_P— optional; defaults to1.0.NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_TOP_K— optional; defaults to40.
For example:
export NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_MODEL="your-installed-model"
python scripts/noopunk_text.py --ollamaTo run the small issue #74 scenario with an LLM-controlled contact and optional GM narration:
export NOOPUNK_OLLAMA_MODEL="your-installed-model"
python scripts/noopunk_text.py --scenario issue74 --ollama --llm-gmThe division of labour is intentional:
- LLM / Concordia: dialogue, agent choice, natural-language intent translation, interpretation, and optional GM narration.
- Python: legal actions, game state, dice and rules resolution, character statistics, inventory, harm/stress, world-state changes, and consequences.
LLMs may decide what an agent attempts. They do not get to invent dice rolls or silently rewrite the rules.
NoöPunk is an experimental text-based RPG/social-simulation prototype under active development.
The current direction is:
Independent NoöPunk RPG
↓
1–10 STAT + 1–10 Skill + 1d10 core
↓
subsystems selectively inspired by many games
↓
shared deterministic rules for text / Concordia / future Godot use
NoöPunk is not an Eclipse Phase conversion and not a hack of any single parent system. Its six-STAT + separate-Skill kernel is NoöPunk's own (issue #200); Eclipse Phase remains important for transhuman concepts; Fate, PbtA, CY_BORG, Cities Without Number/OSR, Citizen Sleeper, The Expanse and other games inform different design problems.
The current core work is issue #111.
The Cyberpunk side explores the AI revolution, automation, surveillance, corporate and state power, hacking, biotechnology, BCI, cybernetics, morphs, cyborgification, transhumanism, and post-scarcity technologies.
The Noösphere side explores NHI/UAP contact, psionics, panpsychism, consciousness-related phenomena, and the possibility that humans, machines, cultures, and networks form larger cognitive assemblages.
The setting treats these as simultaneous paradigm shifts. Humans are deeply divided about them: enthusiasts, accelerationists, doomers, skeptics, regulators, opportunists, believers, critics, and people who simply do not care or understand what is happening all inhabit the same world.
NoöPunk therefore focuses not only on future technology, but on what societies do when several incompatible futures arrive at once.
NoöPunk is being developed as one computer RPG and social simulation, not as separate tabletop and computer games.
The rules are tabletop-like because they need to be:
- readable by humans;
- inspectable and testable;
- executable deterministically in Python;
- usable by Concordia/LLM agents without giving the model authority to invent outcomes.
The preferred loop is:
intent = agent.choose_action(...)
result = rules.resolve(intent, actor, target, world)
world.apply(result)
agent.observe(result)Important characters, factions, and institutions may use LLM cognition. Simpler background NPCs can use deterministic or lightweight scripted behaviour where rich language interaction is unnecessary.
NoöPunk's tabletop-style mechanics are homebrewed, modified and reskinned, drawing on Fate Core, Transhumanity's Fate and Eclipse Phase. Some narrative procedures are Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA)-influenced, meaning inspired by Apocalypse World's approach to moves and consequences, not copied or recycled from that game. NoöPunk is not set in the Eclipse Phase universe: its scenario, timeline, lore, factions, NHI and PSI are original and different. The precise implementation and source attributions vary between the legacy RPG and the newer strategy/RPG crossover, whose mechanics remain subject to approval. Fate Core's CC BY 3.0 terms do not cancel the CC BY-NC-SA obligations on material adapted from Transhumanity's Fate or Eclipse Phase; see the attribution policy and design issue #447.
NoöPunk is an independent RPG. External games are influences rather than compatibility targets.
Current important influences include:
- Fudge / Fate for the Attribute-versus-Skill split, the trait ladder and narrative consequences (the #200 centre);
- Eclipse Phase for transhuman technology, morphs/embodiment, mesh, reputation, space and existential-risk ideas;
- Fate for aspects/stunts and fiction-facing flexibility;
- PbtA / The Sprawl / The Veil for moves, consequences and narrative pressure;
- Cities Without Number / Stars Without Number (OSR) for fast, compact procedures and generators; CY_BORG as a design goal for extreme compression, not a rules source;
- Citizen Sleeper 1/2 for text-RPG structure, clocks and pressures;
- The Expanse and other science-fiction RPGs where specific subsystem ideas fit.
Directly adapted material keeps its source and licensing provenance. No external ruleset supplies default mechanics automatically.
Active canonical documents:
- Rules:
RULEBOOK.md - Continuity boundary:
docs/PRE_FALL_ALTERNATE_TIMELINE.md - Umbrella implementation work: issue #60
- Small Concordia/EP2 scenario:
docs/scenarios/ISSUE74_CONCORDIA_EP2_POC.md
Documents under docs/archive/ are historical design records. They are useful provenance, but they are not automatically active canon and do not override the current rulebook or explicit current author direction.
These archived documents remain important design and architecture references even when they are not active canon:
docs/archive/DESIGN_PRINCIPLES.md— project-level design balances and invariants.docs/archive/SIMULATION_ARCHITECTURE_SPEC.md— simulation state, event-log and resolver architecture.docs/archive/NOOPUNK_AS_ONE_GAME.md— the single-game / single-rule-model direction.
The runtime is split deliberately:
Python owns state and mechanical truth wherever practical:
- action legality;
- skill and opposed tests;
- dice;
- modifiers;
- damage and stress;
- inventories;
- resources;
- persistence;
- scenario objectives;
- explicit world-state mutations.
Google DeepMind Concordia is the agent/narrative layer. LLM agents can:
- choose goals and actions;
- converse;
- negotiate;
- interpret situations;
- translate natural-language player intent;
- narrate already-resolved outcomes.
The current Concordia dependency is pinned to a specific upstream Git revision because NoöPunk uses prefab/contrib APIs that were verified against that revision.
These commands should remain valid:
python scripts/noopunk_text.py --help
printf 'quit\n' | python scripts/noopunk_text.py --scenario issue74
python scripts/concordia_smoke.pyWith the dependencies from requirements.txt installed, also check the real Concordia import/config bridge:
python scripts/concordia_smoke.py --build-concordia-configEclipse Phase is created by Posthuman Studios. Eclipse Phase-derived material in this repository must follow the applicable Eclipse Phase Creative Commons terms and attribution requirements.
License information and source references:
- Eclipse Phase Creative Commons license
- Eclipse Phase 2E online rules
- Eclipse Phase 2E Quick-Start Rules
The Eclipse Phase material used for this homebrew is generally published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. EP-derived material must remain appropriately attributed, noncommercial where required, and shared under compatible ShareAlike terms.
NoöPunk-original setting material and code should be kept clearly distinguishable from directly copied or adapted Eclipse Phase material. Imported rules text, game data, or code should record its source, license, and modifications.
The aim is to implement and transform the rules, not to mirror the Eclipse Phase books. Prefer code, structured data, compact rule summaries, conversion notes, and provenance records over copying large amounts of rulebook prose.
NoöPunk is an unofficial fan/homebrew project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Posthuman Studios.