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
Discover Worlds. Tell Stories. Create Legends
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.
Start your next campaign. Build your world. Shape your legend.
Old Downtown: The Dying Heart of Night City
Once the beating heart of Night City, Old Downtown now lies in a state of surreal ruin and flickering half-life. Before the Fourth Corporate War, it was a shining symbol of progress — packed with neon-lit towers, luxury shopping arcades, corporate embassies, and nightlife for the elite. But the nuke changed everything.
Today, Old Downtown is a hybrid zone: partly gentrified, partly irradiated, and entirely haunted by its past. Skyscrapers stand cracked but defiant, their windows boarded or glowing with outlaw energy grids. Law enforcement is minimal. Scavengers, squatters, corporate ghosts, and unaffiliated Edgerunners all make their homes here, taking what they can from the bones of the old world.
The deeper you go, the weirder it gets. Layers of graffiti mark shifting gang territories. Vendors run power off stolen city lines. Hacked city infrastructure sometimes runs loops from a decade ago. Automated systems still operate in basements no one dares enter.
To locals, Old Downtown is “the Dead Heart” — a place where the city remembers what it was and refuses to forget. For some, it’s a living archive. For others, a hunting ground. And for Edgerunners? It’s where secrets sink into the concrete — waiting to be found, sold, or bled over.
Old Downtown is a paradox: a shattered monument to a future that never came, now wrapped in new myths and layered in centuries-old concrete. Once, it was the pride of Night City — designed as a central corporate and civic core during the Arasaka-Foss boom of the 2000s. Government offices, corporate towers, data nodes, and vertical arcologies stacked high above sleek walkways, greenery, and synthetic parks.
Then came the nuke.
The blast radius didn’t fully level Old Downtown, but it fractured everything — physically and economically. Many buildings were rendered unstable. Power grids fried. Radiation warnings blanketed the zone for years, keeping out most of the public. The corps pulled out. So did the money. What was left was a vacuum — and the perfect breeding ground for the desperate, daring, and dangerous.
Today, Old Downtown is a city within a city. On the surface, it’s a lawless, anarchic zone of squatter enclaves, converted ruins, and gang-run power nodes. But underneath lies a network of still-active data cores, forgotten bunkers, and black-budget vaults sealed since before the War. If it’s valuable and lost, it’s probably buried somewhere in Old Downtown.
Some portions of the zone have been reclaimed — Corpo front companies are rebuilding select towers for ultra-high-end condos. But they only illuminate the hypocrisy: steel and glass high-rises guarded by drones, standing beside crumbling ruins used as cookhouses or cult hideouts. It's a place of dramatic contrast: tech wealth and broken elevators, drone gardens and diseased water lines.
Old Downtown is also culturally rich — street performers, AR poets, punk bars, and post-collapse philosophers gather here. Its wild energy draws the curious. Its darkness hides the past. Sometimes, ghosts — metaphorical and literal — are said to roam here. Glitches in the AR feed. AI fragments reciting classified logs. Survivors who don’t know they survived.
For GMs, Old Downtown is a multi-layered environment. It can be a combat zone, a data heist site, a haunted ruin, or a launching point for ideological warfare. Fixers run gigs here. Netrunners dive ancient hardlines. Nomads deliver contraband through shattered subway routes. And somewhere, behind boarded-up walls, someone is building something new from the bones of the old world — something big.
Adventure Hook:
A new building has appeared in Old Downtown — a pristine, shining arcology, fully powered, staffed, and visible in broad daylight. Only problem? It wasn’t there yesterday. No one saw it arrive. Satellite scans from 24 hours ago show an empty lot.
Fixers want answers. Corps are in denial. Locals are spooked — they say drones are watching from windows and strange AR messages have begun overriding personal displays near the site.
The Edgerunners are hired by an off-the-grid archivist who claims the building is tied to a pre-War Arasaka project, rumored to involve early quantum AI and reality-layered architecture. Their job: break in, find the central server, and retrieve a backup of something called “ChronoVault.”
The structure is booby-trapped with time-locked doors, hostile security constructs, and temporal anomalies — floors repeat, memories glitch, clocks run backward. Inside, the crew may uncover logs from people who never existed… or hints of their own futures.
The deeper they go, the more the building begins to shift. Eventually, they’ll have to choose: escape with what they found, or go deeper — and possibly be trapped in a place that defies all known rules of time and space.