Someone asked: "What do the ads in Nuevo Bay look like?"

Good question. I had no idea.

So I wrote some. Twenty of them. And then I immediately cut one.

The Titan Problem

One ad was pure comedy: MagnaTech Titan™, a giant hydraulic dick augment.

18-36+ inches. Fully articulated. "Retractable for everyday convenience."

I thought it was so fucking funny. Hilarious. Sign me up for a deal with Comedy Central pronto.

And it was. But it was also wrong for Crosstalk.

Here's the thing, right? Altered Carbon can do that joke. Altered Carbon is maximalist cyberpunk, chrome fetishism, excess as aesthetic, bodies as playgrounds.

Crosstalk isn't that.

Crosstalk is a story about Mack's mom dying while waiting for Claims approval. It's a place where Wong Industries billed a renter for fire damage caused by their own faulty microwave. And then there's "deprecation" as a legal penalty buried in Tidewall Authority fine print. We don't even want to go there.

Not "haha penis big." That's not what work's in this game or this world.

So I cut Titan.

Not because it was bad. Because it was the wrong register.

What I Replaced It With

I needed an ad that reinforced the Paper Saints, the analog delivery network that's core to blue lane culture.

And it was better anyway.

The paper saints are mentioned everywhere else, and are the reason you can go into blue lanes in game. They curated the relief valves for the stealth.

Why shouldn't they show up on the net in some way?

And yet, I didn't have an ad from them. Just ads about them (like Keller & Associates trying to sue them).

So I wrote: Paper Saints - Community Drop Schedule

Simple. Direct. No corpo branding. Just a few points:

• Drop locations and times
• Services offered (mail, package holding, message relay)
• Etiquette rules ("Yield to runners. No cameras. No questions.")

And Agent M's note does the heavy lifting:

"Sometimes I wonder if the whole city used to run like this, before we optimized the trust out of it."

That's the beat I wanted. Nostalgia for a system that worked because people agreed it should work. Not because an algorithm enforced it.

The NSFW Question

Three of the twenty ads are explicitly sexual:

• Delta Cerberus™: Three-mouth augment (economic trap, corpo financing, removal surgery sold separately)
• SyncMatch™: Dating app with neural pattern analysis (surveillance as intimacy)
• SensoryScape VR Lounge: Anonymous VR sex work (commodified labor, alienation)

I know what you might be thinking. Is that too much/too little?

I say both cause some of us hardcore cyberpunk fans know that cyberpunk as a genre is a fetishized hellscape of body augments and porn straight to your cranium that-

Okay let me stop.

No. This wasn't either.

Because they're not jokes. They're horror wearing the skin of advertising.

Cerberus traps you in debt. SyncMatch monitors your emotions. SensoryScape ensures nobody has to look each other in the eye.

That's not "haha sex stuff and titties everywhere". Capitalism comodified intimacy, even in the real world, and here is how we show it.

Titan was different. Titan was just a dick joke. Funny, but not thematically coherent.

So it got cut.

What Makes a Good Cyberpunk Ad

After writing twenty, here's what I noticed:

The best ones sound normal at first.

"Your Mental Health Matters! Integrated Wellness Monitoring Program."

Cool, right? Employee wellness is good!

"Daily mood tracking via commlink. Productivity correlation analysis."

Oh. Oh no.

Fine print is where the horror lives.

NetSure's Neural Port Maintenance ad has 47 disqualifying clauses in microscopic text. If you view it from your phone (at least for me) the disclaimer section is twice the phone's screen size!

Community ads hit harder because they're rare.

If every ad was "Union Meeting! Fight the Power!" it would feel preachy.

But when you get Dock 14 Co-op or Tenants Union after eight corpo ads? It feels like oxygen.

Scarcity creates impact.

Agent M's notes make the ads real.

Without Agent M's commentary, these are just fictional ads.

With it, they're evidence. Documentation. Artifacts collected by someone trying to understand the city.

That framing turns marketing material into narrative.

What's Next

The Advertisements of Nuevo Bay series is live now. Nineteen ads. Three NSFW (marked clearly).

And there are still eight more series coming to the Explore Nuevo Bay page:

• Daisy's Runs: Paper Saint delivery logs
• The Ledger: Rook's fixer economy
• Lost Letters: Undeliverable packages
• NetSure Incident Reports: Corporate surveillance logs
• Bay Gazette Archives: Sanitized news
• Federal Grant Requests: Corp applications
• Deprecated: Rogue Tidewall agent logs
• Lost and Found: Unclaimed items

Each one is a different format. A different voice. A different angle on the city.

Because Nuevo Bay isn't one document. It's a filing cabinet full of them.

If you want to read the ads, start here: Advertisements of Nuevo Bay

And if you want updates when Act I launches, sign up on the homepage.

Thanks for reading.

- afro

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