This setting grew out of a scenario I participated in developing a number of years ago. It was neither intended as an utopia or dystopia, rather the same kind of mix of good and bad we find today in reality. It was an exploration of what could happen if the societies of today did not adapt to new technology, and completely lost control over the developments.
One question that might be asked is whether I believe this is a likely future. The answer is to a large extent a no. While I wouldn't be surprised to see many of the components (with the exception of course of the Dragons!) such as the rise of East Africa, biotech buildings, unexpected climate swings or the economic changes brought by cryptography, the setting is not intended as a prediction of the future. It is rather a scenario, playing with some trends and seeing where they might take us. I do not think it is likely that the split between nationalists and internationalists would turn into a permanent cultural rift (unlike some debaters like Castells and Bard, who appear to take this for granted). Neither do I consider a fast ice age very likely. Humans are smarter and more adaptable than we often give them credit for, and the climate may be chaotic but not that chaotic.
My experience from the Dragons campaign was that unlike in the traditional superhero cartoons, if you give random people superpowers they won't become superheros or supervillains. Just as poor people who win at the lottery often have a hard time transforming the money into something lasting, the characters of my players had a hard time coming up with something better to do with their powers than gain money and power - and the methods they used for that were more adequate for the streets of Chonquing than the international world.
In the end they had to face the choice of remaining as they were before and thus very limited, or transform/adapt to the new circumstances, giving up their old lives and goals in order to fully exploit their abilities. We are faced the same choices when we adopt new technology - it is not just the binary question of whether we bend it to our will or if it changes us, but how we change each other.
Thanks to
Stirling Westrup for many good ideas for technology and politics.
My players, who provided much of the inspiration:
Tommy (The Rat) for many, many entertaining and plot-advancing (if irritating) mistakes and disasters.
Jenny (Miss Liao) for her wonderfully common-sense dragon lady.
Martin (Miss Chu) for putting the fun into global terrorism and using wagueness as a weapon.
Anna (Feng) for demonstrating the manifold uses of a heavy marble table in indoor decoration, plumbing and cranial surgery.
Henrik Ö. (Silken rope) for his "ancient Chinese leadership abilities".
Henrik A. (the Colonel) for demonstrating that you can both gamble and be clever - and that dynamite under a road works just as well in Djakarta as in the Chinese mountains.
Mats (Yuan) for being smart enough to know when to sell out your friends.
Mikael (Chi Li) for keeping the adults in their proper place.
Reidar and Håkan (Siripool) for their efforts in Indonesian-Javanese legal obfuscation, litigation and assistant torture.
Alexander (the Yuppie) for heroic efforts of getting away from potatoes and chickens into global stockmarkets, using heavy weapons if necessary.