The Midnight City Free State. A sprawling metropolis that lies in the shadows of the coastal mountains, on the western shores of the Salish Sea. Its lights shine like a beacon in the night sky, a sickly glow reflected off the thick industrial haze visible for miles around. Spires of steel and glass scrape the sky, and neon lights burn bright on every building.

On the surface, it is a jewel of international business, home to towering corporate arcologies under the protection of mile-high geodesics. It's a place where the ultrawealthy rub shoulders with the Unseelie Court while fortune hunters seek their chance at fame and glory in the Squad Combat League or in front of the cameras on any one of the entertainment networks. It's a chance for exiles and runaways to start over with a clean slate and a new identity, a place to disappear. The Free State is a land of opportunity. But opportunity for what - and for who?

Midnight City lures millions with its promises and ensnares them with its vices. Underneath the neon glow and mirrored sheen of progress and opportunity lies the truth. The true face of the city is on its streets, in its back-alley clinics, in its dimly lit bars talking biz over rails of the latest designer drug. The true face of the city is in the jackbooted Security Forces and overflowing prisons, in its morgues, in its underfunded hospitals. The true face of the city is in its infamous Zone, in the concrete and barbed wire and checkpoints separating the real citizens from those too poor or too troublesome to make the cut.

It is a face of debt, addiction, corruption and greed; a face of murder and theft, espionage and sabotage, gang warfare and blood on the streets. There is opportunity here, that much is certain, but it is not equal and it is not for all.

From the crumbling tenements of the Zone you can look up at the glow of the domes in the distance and realize the truth of the world, that the movers and shakers, the wealthy, the corporate elites -- they live in an entirely different universe than the average citizen. They shape reality to their liking, and everyone else is a pawn in their chess game or collateral damage in their corporate wars. Most ordinary citizens have accepted the status quo, at best hoping to waste away the rest of their dreary lives as a corporate wage-slave, waiting for the day the smog or the streets finally do them in.

We’re not here to talk about the ordinary citizens.

There is still success to be had on the streets of Midnight City for those willing to break from the norm. If you check your morality at the door, you will find no shortage of employment as a legbreaker, a kidnapper, or an assassin. You can throw your lot in with the smugglers and dealers, flooding the streets with drugs from New Angeles and black market cyberware from Shenzhou and stolen mystical artifacts from New Tairngire across the Atlantic. Maybe you have a mind for the electronic, and you can navigate your way through the spires of data in the Cortex, hack your way through layers of black ICE and siphon off a little digital currency for yourself. Or maybe you've found a cause greater than yourself, a rare and endangered idealism among the punks and revolutionaries on Midnight City's streets. There are a million ways to survive here. The only question is how far you’re willing to go.

Opportunity calls to those with the guts to roll the dice. Are you one of them?