Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

Dumpshock Forums _ Shadowrun _ Converting real city to Shadowrun.

Posted by: bigdrewp Jun 7 2006, 07:56 PM

Basically I am looking for any information that would make it easier for me to convert a real city to a Shadowrun one. I know that it is just a matter of updating the city-scape and stuff like that, but there is a lot of stuff like that I would need to do. The city I am wanting to convert is Kansas City, so if it was already done somewhere point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance,
Drewp

Posted by: Teulisch Jun 7 2006, 08:06 PM

step one- get a roadmap of the area. both state and city maps will be usefull. i recommend AAA maps.

step two- look at the area. are there smaller cities on the edge of a laregr one? in SR timeline that ity will be large, and those areas will probably be absorbed.

Step 3- decide how much business is in the area. how many corperations have extraterritorial land there, and for what purpose?

for the example of Kansas, i would expect a food processing plant, which deals with wheat crop. real food can be expensive, so it would have a fair amount of security, as well as a large storage area, able to hold out against a food riot.

I have been to oklahoma myself. its very flat out there, and theres a lot of wheat. a lot of places have very grid-like roads, with a lot of planning before it was developed. I would expect this planning to continue, so you will have a lot of very strait roads with few curves. line of sight will be very long most places.

Posted by: Shrike30 Jun 7 2006, 08:08 PM

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=10584&hl=kansas+city

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=12391&hl=kansas+city

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=12494&hl=kansas+city

The http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?act=Search&CODE=show&searchid=e7aeafc35318bcc6a31b6286a43dfabf&search_in=posts&result_type=topics&highlite=kansas+city function is your friend Hope these are useful.

Posted by: TBRMInsanity Jun 7 2006, 08:11 PM

Keep the history in mind. Correct me if I'm wrong but it is still part of the UCAS and as such has all the services that most UCAS cities will have (lonestar, docwagon, AR, etc). Historic sites would remain but there may be some new buildings (maybe even an arcology if the city is big enough). I'm guessing that being so close to the CAS border the main SR activity would be government based rather than corp based (ie gathering infor for both the UCAS and CAS governments). Hope this helps.

Posted by: bigdrewp Jun 7 2006, 08:24 PM

I always forget about the search function, I'm not lazy I swear, just really forgetful. Maybe a little bit slow too.

Anyway thanks for the help, I'm sure that it will speed things up. If anyone else has something to add, feel free, I'll keep checking back here for a while.

Drewp

Posted by: coolgrafix Jun 7 2006, 08:53 PM

I had the same inclination to write up KC in 2070, but I was beaten to the punch (see above). I offered some suggestions and some made their way into the work. But basically the PDF that exists is really very nicely done and well thought out. I intend to use it more or less as canon for the games I run where KC is concerned (the existence of the Crown Arcology and that Hallmark is owned by the Horizon Group for examples).

Posted by: coolgrafix Jun 7 2006, 08:54 PM

Speaking of which, what is the deal with all the Shadowrunners in KC who want to write the city up? =)

Posted by: bigdrewp Jun 7 2006, 09:04 PM

Why wouldn't you want to base a game out of the city you live in? It gives it a sense of realism you don't get with a city you don't know as well, or at all. I guess that there is more city pride here for whatever reason. It is something that I noticed before but hadn't really thought about. I am not saying that KC is the best city ever or anything like that, but for me it is just right.

Posted by: stevebugge Jun 7 2006, 09:12 PM

You KC guys are lucky in a way, you get to do your own city from scratch and are able to get the local flavor more or less right. I live in Seattle, and while it's nice that a lot of the work has already been done, there are a lot of things that really show it was done by people not from Seattle.

Posted by: Kyoto Kid Jun 7 2006, 09:13 PM

...I've done this with my old hometown of Milwaukee for an upcoming campaign.

I have written all the sections you would normally have in an SR city guide - Demographics (high percentage of Dwarves) , Getting there, Government (still Socialistic), Corporations & Megacorp presence (SK is big, very big here), Points of Interest (both tourist & SINless) as well as random matrix comments.

(and Yes, the Brewers finally have won a World Series - actually four of them by 2061)

Posted by: coolgrafix Jun 7 2006, 09:18 PM

QUOTE (Kyoto Kid)

(and Yes, the Brewers finally have won a World Series - actually four of them by 2061)

COUGH! =) 2061 is not THAT far away. lol

Speaking of baseball teams in need of repair, you have GOT to check out this Onion story on the Royals...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/49108

Posted by: Shrike30 Jun 7 2006, 09:32 PM

Funny thing about having your city be canon is when a building that's in the sourcebooks doesn't exist any more in real life. Because they'd demolished the Kingdome, my whole SR crew recently wanted to know if we were still playing by with the old Seattle sourcebook (which still has the Kingdome) or the new Seattle sourcebook (which, IIRC, does not).

By the way: when they demolish stadiums, it makes a *mess*. There was concrete dust blowing around downtown for days afterwards.

Posted by: Witness Jun 8 2006, 01:19 AM

Google Earth, if you can run it, is a serious help. You just get a much better sense of the place as it is right now (if it's got decent resolution) than you can from static 2D maps.

Turn on the community layer and you may even get some POIs flagged up.

After that, try Google Image Search for some actual pictures of the place.

Then try and work out what would make it a great Shadowrun location, and what might make it different from other ones already described. Personally I think just a few key landmarks / concepts (and perhaps the history behind them) can really create a sense of place.

I would also suggest that you think in terms of a tourist brochure for the 2070s. There has to be something about a city that makes people want to (or have to) live in it. And if there is something in the city that appeals to peoples' dreams and ambitions- somewhere that gets you saying 'damn I really want to visit that'- then I think that works well.

You might focus at first on the two extremes: the rich and the poor. As I've said elsewhere, bright lights make the shadows darker.

Posted by: Omer Joel Jun 8 2006, 07:25 AM

Sooner or later I'll convert Haifa (Israel's biggest portcity) to SR data; hell, parts of Haifa (Wadi Saliv) already look like the Barrens even IRL. The town I've grown in (Kiryat Tivon, a middle-class sleeper community for Haifa) doesn't seen too interesting from an SR POV (other than a suburb of the 2070 Greater Haifa), and the town I study in (Kiryat Shmona) is a frontier hellhole with 20,000 people and almost no jobs; nearly nothing worth shadowrunning in it. The main problem with Haifa, though, is that the extreme pollution would probably give large parts of it a background count.

Anyway, my current campaign takes place in a town I've never been to: Orting in Seattle's Pullayup Barrens. Thanks to the help of a very kind local and to Yahoo! Maps, I've pinpointed a streetmap of Orting and found out where the RL landmarks (parks, city hall, courthouse, police station, library and school) are. Now, the thing is that all serious development in Orting got stopped by the 2018 Erruption, when the whole area got covered with tuff (sp?) and fine vulcanic ash, not burrying much (only parts of the town) but forcing the residents to flee; the squatters came soon after.

So between 2006 and 2018, I've given Orting two main developments: a medical center (not a full-blown hospital but a large clinic) on Washington St. and a well-developed sewer system that one could walk inside (is there one already in place?).

Posted by: Valentinew Jun 9 2006, 12:35 AM

QUOTE (Teulisch)

so you will have a lot of very strait roads with few curves. line of sight will be very long most places.

Not so much. Kansas City's a river town, so a lot of the streets & roads wind along the bluffs, or through what used to be countryside. Even the new communities are being built with curving roads & culdesacs. The only actual grid layout I know of for the KC sprawl as it stands now is the actual downtown area.

QUOTE (TBRMInsanity)

Yes, KC remains well within the borders of the UCAS. We're not even a border town. You should check out those other threads--and especially the pdf. I think it was well done.

QUOTE (coolgrafix)

Speaking of which, what is the deal with all the Shadowrunners in KC who want to write the city up? =)

I'm lovin' it!

Posted by: SL James Jun 9 2006, 01:06 AM

QUOTE (Shrike30)

It's the *NEW* Kingdome! Yeah...

QUOTE

By the way: when they demolish stadiums, it makes a *mess*. There was concrete dust blowing around downtown for days afterwards.

I've heard that can happen when large buildings collapse in on themselves.

Posted by: stevebugge Jun 9 2006, 04:17 AM

QUOTE (Omer Joel)

Anyway, my current campaign takes place in a town I've never been to: Orting in Seattle's Pullayup Barrens. Thanks to the help of a very kind local and to Yahoo! Maps, I've pinpointed a streetmap of Orting and found out where the RL landmarks (parks, city hall, courthouse, police station, library and school) are. Now, the thing is that all serious development in Orting got stopped by the 2018 Erruption, when the whole area got covered with tuff (sp?) and fine vulcanic ash, not burrying much (only parts of the town) but forcing the residents to flee; the squatters came soon after.

So between 2006 and 2018, I've given Orting two main developments: a medical center (not a full-blown hospital but a large clinic) on Washington St. and a well-developed sewer system that one could walk inside (is there one already in place?).

Orting today is just far enough out of Puyallup's South Hill Sprawl to still have a small town feel to it. The kind of place where you might actually know a fair number of your neighbors and chain stores and fast food restaurants haven't completely overrun the place. By 2018 Puyallup's South Hill sprawl is probably getting close but there is a good chance that the civic pride of orting would enact enough zoninglaws to keep the worst of the sprawl at bay and preserve some of the small town feel. Tuff and ash fall absolutely would drive everyone who could leave out. The ash from Cascade volcanoes is very high in silica and very fine, when inhaled it mixes with your bodies moisture to form a kind of abrasive mud in the lungs. A Mount Rainier eruption would have Tuff, Dacite, Ash and possibly Scoria (if the prevailing wind was right) raining down on Orting, Carbonado, Eatonville, South Hill, Puyallup, gradually decreasing as you moved north and west as long as the volcano was erupting. Build up of only a few inches of volcanic ash would be enough to collapse the roofs of most of the houses and older buildings. Sure after the eruption stopped and a couple of good rain storms moved through (got to love sulphuric acid rain courtesy of a volcano) Orting would be a dust choked Squatter's haven. I don't know how well developed the drainage infrastructure is in Orting, but with the Puyallup SPrawl approaching rapidly if you need an expanded sewer to make your game work it's plausible.

Posted by: Kyoto Kid Jun 9 2006, 04:56 AM

QUOTE (coolgrafix)

QUOTE (Kyoto Kid @ Jun 7 2006, 04:13 PM)

(and Yes, the Brewers finally have won a World Series - actually four of them by 2061)

COUGH! =) 2061 is not THAT far away. lol

Speaking of baseball teams in need of repair, you have GOT to check out this Onion story on the Royals...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/49108

...sweet.

Considering the"Crew" finally ended an 8 game skid (including being swept in 4 games by the lowly Pirates) makes me wonder if Tom didn't stop by Miller Park on the way to KC.

Posted by: Kyoto Kid Jun 9 2006, 05:00 AM

QUOTE (Shrike30)

...I know. In the TT sourcebook the Museum of Science and Industryin Portland was still up on the hill by the Zoo. It's been on the Willamette waterfront now for more than a decade. I know, I helped sand bag it during the flood of '96.

Posted by: bigdrewp Jun 9 2006, 03:37 PM

It is nice having a completely blank slate to work with, the only problem is it is a completely blank slate. That pdf that was linked earlier is helping out immeasurably, but it isn't the right vibe I am going for, so I will be doing a lot more work on my own. I can adapt some of it though, so I guess that accomplished my goal, as I was looking for something that would make my job a little easier. Thanks all,again.