So conveniently I'm playing a game in a cyberpunk setting right now. It's in San Francisco 2185, using Carbon 2185 as a ruleset (reskinned 5e). I'm playing Syggy a "korporate kid" with mixed heritage, a genderfluid male-leaning polyglot (speaks Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish) who's a combat hacker and a total diva.
First, I acquired this data using an ArcGis dataset, so that I would have accurate streets.
I removed the labels and made it look more 'Matrix' but I wasn't feeling this direction. At this point I was planning for something like 'glitch art' but I decided against it.
So I made it look like this instead. Then I also altered the city expansion to suit the setting stated changes to San Francisco (artificially made land with the sea held back by a wall)
I added the seawall and boundaries between caste-style regions within the city, and bravely did Chinese calligraphy, something I've done a handful of times for previous maps.
I added the English text and a focusing vignette to take the attention away from the western side of the coast, so that we could use that for any game notes without covering anything vital, distracting, or otherwise bright. I still wanted it slightly there, to give the sense of the wider world.
Knowing that everyone else hates vibrance more than I do, I made it more moody.
I then ended up cropping it to this view for the 'screen' for the game to focus on the area where we're playing instead, and fiddled a bit more with the 'mood' tone.
### Latest WIP ###
I am not sure if I will be continuing past this point. We'll see if I get more time to work on our San Francisco. I'd really like to put some in world sponsorship or ads on it, some UI elements. The campaign setting is pretty fun, I recommend checking out Carbon 2185 if you're into bleak corporate dominated cyberpunk.