Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Faelvur, the dark elven god of fire
Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Role Play Games for Beginners
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Welcome to the Arcverse
Your gateway to tabletop roleplaying games — whether you’re starting with Dungeons & Dragons or exploring new systems and genres.
We offer expert RPG advice for beginners, Game Master tools, and worldbuilding guides to help you create and run unforgettable adventures. Whether you play fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, horror, superheroes, or post-apocalyptic settings, the Arcverse is your home for creativity, storytelling, and game-ready inspiration.
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Neo Soviet Bloc - The brutal rising power on the streets
The Neo-Soviet Bloc refers to a loose coalition of Eastern European and former Soviet states that re-emerged as a geopolitical force in the aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War and global collapse. With the West fractured and major megacorporations weakened, these nations — long overlooked or destabilized during the early 21st century — banded together under a new form of regional mutualism: part political alliance, part corporate syndicate, and part military deterrent.
The Neo-Soviet Bloc is not the USSR reborn. It’s something leaner, colder, and far more pragmatic. United less by ideology than by survival, its member states function like interlinked state-corporations — each with its own specialties in arms, agriculture, bioware, or surveillance. While not as globally dominant as Arasaka or Militech, the Bloc exerts major influence in trade, espionage, and mercenary markets.
Their agents appear in Night City as smugglers, cyberware dealers, and political agitators. They often operate through shell companies and expat criminal networks, offering cheaper but often more brutal alternatives to Western corporate services.
To many Edgerunners, Bloc tech is reliable, rugged, and affordable — built to last, but also built to monitor. Dealing with the Neo-Soviets means access to power... and exposure to shadows that stretch all the way back to Siberia.
In the wake of the global economic collapse and the chaos unleashed by the Fourth Corporate War, the vacuum of power didn’t just leave room for megacorporations — it also created space for new geopolitical players to emerge. Among them, the Neo-Soviet Bloc is one of the most enigmatic and underestimated.
The Bloc is not a single nation, nor is it a revival of communist dogma. It is a mutualist syndicate of post-Soviet and Eastern European states — including parts of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and others — each retaining national identity but linked economically, militarily, and digitally. The driving ideology? Autarky through interdependence, surveillance over freedom, and dominance through silence.
This alliance developed its own internal megacorporate structures: BlocKor, a military-industrial contractor known for black ops; NovaStahl, a manufacturing giant that dominates Eastern weapon exports; and Vityaz-Bio, a biotech firm infamous for ethically murky experimentation on prisoners and conscripts. Each member nation contributes its resources and specialties, creating a self-sufficient, tightly monitored, and increasingly export-focused power bloc.
In Night City, the Bloc’s presence is subtle but growing. Their front companies sell cheap cyberware, particularly military-grade implants with limited recall tracking. Bloc-origin drugs flood the underground market — performance enhancers used by street gangs and corpo bodyguards alike. Their operatives often wear no insignia, working through local Fixers and deepcover spies. Some even infiltrate corporate security firms or masquerade as freelancers.
Their Net presence is equally enigmatic. BlocNet, a sovereign slice of the fragmented global Net, operates under heavy encryption and is home to both government propaganda and rumors of rogue AI surveillance tools developed in Siberian bunkers.
For GMs, the Neo-Soviet Bloc provides a cold, methodical villain archetype — the kind that watches, waits, and strikes only once. Unlike flashy corporations or anarchic gangs, the Bloc plays the long game. Their agents don’t bluff. Their tech doesn’t glitch. And when they make you an offer, it’s never negotiable.
Campaign-wise, they can serve as arms dealers, blackmailers, shadow employers, or silent antagonists. Perhaps they want to reclaim a defector. Or retrieve a piece of Bloc tech gone rogue in Night City. Or maybe they’re trying to annex part of the city's underworld, and your crew is in the way.
One thing’s certain: if the Neo-Soviets are in town, someone's secrets are about to become leverage.
Adventure Hook: “Operation Motherland”
The team is hired by a desperate fixer whose netrunner contact has gone missing after intercepting strange traffic coming from an abandoned Net relay in the Watson Combat Zone. The pings trace back to BlocNet — the secure network of the Neo-Soviet Bloc.
Soon after, the fixer is assassinated with surgical precision.
Now the crew is being hunted — not by mercs, but by "handlers": cyberware-augmented Neo-Soviet agents with eerie calm, burner identities, and brutal efficiency. They want what the netrunner stole — and they’ll burn down city blocks to get it.
The job? Trace the source of the BlocNet signal, retrieve the netrunner (if still alive), and decide what to do with the stolen data, which may include backdoors into Night City's most sensitive networks. But the clock is ticking — every contact the crew approaches ends up dead, bought, or both.
It’s a Cold War in the shadows — and your Edgerunners are in the crosshairs.