Tell me the story of San Francisco in 2070, what sourcebooks tell the tale? Options

[HappyDaze]

I just took a trip top San Francisco, and I loved the city. Now I'm wanting to set a SR4 game there and I'm looking to find whatever resources are out there. I know about the California Free State book that set the basics for 2056 (or so), but I've heard that other sources have more up to date info. Where can I find it?

Anyone ambitious enough to give me a brief timeline for the Bay Area from 2056-2070?

[raggedhalo]

Shadows of North America, Threats 2, maybe Year of the Comet, too.

[Riley37]

I've lived in SF almost all my life; feel free to run a few questions by me.
I imagine that SF and its neighbor cities in 2070 will still have lots of leftover tensions and damage from the JIS occupation. Uncleared mines, munitions waste product toxic spills, and accusations that so-and-so was a collaborator. JIS troopers who deserted and "went native", especially those that weren't male and ethnic Japanese (if you're an eta or Okinawan or Korean who got drafted and sent to SF, deserting to a culture that might treat you as an equal could be attractive).
I like to think that the emphasis on innovation and counterculture that's helped us become a software center, also makes 2070s SF a leader in magical innovation, and perhaps there's a local WuXing presence and/or competition, and many of the hot new spell formulae are written here.

On another hand... are there any big earthquakes in the official timeline? To some extent, faultline pressure builds up slowly and releases in quakes, so the longer it's been since an earthquake, the more possibility of a large one. (small ones are in a way good news.)

[Penta]

I dunno about the counterculture thing - I'd think the Japanese occupation kinda squished the counterculture dead.

[kzt]

After the first mass protest got machine gunned and buried in mass graves, street protests were greatly reduced. . . .

[Penta]

Yeah, and I can't see the Japanese being very supportive of the rest of the counterculture. Or, any counterculture-type thing, really.

The whole idea of a counterculture would probably have died gruesomely after the first few months.

(I'm not sure SF has always been the center of any sort of counterculture, anyway - I seem to remember learning that San Fran prior to the 1960s was a rather conservative, conventional sort of place, socially.)

[Kyoto Kid]

[HappyDaze]

I've looked over the sources that talk about Saito coming to power, but where is his fall and the subsequent events covered?

With my luck it's probably in System Crash - one of the few books I don't have access to...

[Riley37]

Ah, you may be Shadowrun gurus, but your counterculture fu is weak. Massing in the streets when the JIS troopers are willing to massacre, is pitting weakness against strength, and counterculture does not always equal stupid or naive. Feminism, gay pride, race equality, youth empowerment, paganism, etc. all went *underground* in SF during the Occupation - or just over the border; the JIS were never able to take Silicon Valley, and I doubt they could effectively patrol Marin let alone Humbolt or Mendocino.
It's possible that a few JIS officers were seduced when off duty with recreational drugs, kinky sex, or other non-JIS-approved entertainment, then blackmailed into turning a blind eye to resistance activities.

[Fortune]

[kzt]

[HappyDaze]

[Critias]

I don't think anyone's saying all of San Francisco's counterculture movements were wholly squashed -- just that they don't quite run the city quite as much as they're reputed to do today. ;) You won't see any pride parades (for anything but pure Japanese bloodlines) under Saito's watch, that's for sure. They might not be gone, but they're certainly not popular or obvious about their presence.

I remember a published adventure that took place in San Francisco (or thereabouts), too, and it might have some information in it that was a little more recent than the Calfree book.

I don't remember which book it was in, but here's a brief synopsis for those who might be able to help find it...

[ Spoiler ]

It's the adventure where the college student goes missing, and it turns out he's gay and in love with a fire-oriented free spirit, or something like that. I remember the group got smuggled around the city by some of the counterculture groups, etc, etc, which is why I think the adventure might be on-topic for the discussion at hand.

I read up on the CalFree book pretty seriously, because I had a wild hair to run a former terrorist type (and decided on the Metahuman People's Alliance). Tyler's turned into one of my favorite characters, since. I've always thought it'd be a fun campaign to try and run, just being a bunch of folks fighting the Japanese invasion force (and later Saito's boys in particular), similar to some of the "everyday schmuck when the shit hits the fan in the Arcology" type of games, or something like that. Who wouldn't love trying to play Red Dawn in an urban setting instead of a rural?

[Riley37]

Penta and kzt seem to have some strong opinions on counterculture. (shrug) I think you're setting up and shooting down "straw man" arguments. I brought up counterculture and innovation as an industrial/economic factor; willingness to try new things has served us well in technology - there's a reason that Hewlett-Packard and Macintosh got started here! If you really, really think that Saito managed, in ten years, to make San Franciscans value conservatism (as anything other than "fake it when the occupiers are watching"), then suit yourself. Pun intended.

So, you tell us - if Saito convinced all San Franciscans that "the outstanding peg gets hammered down", and we all started ancestor worship at Shinto shrines, then what happens after he leaves?

[kzt]

Make a choice:

Poland, after the Soviet liberation and Communist mass murders, followed by the Nazi liberation and Nazi mass murders, followed by the Anti-Nazi uprisings and subsequent/concurrent mass murders, followed by the Soviet liberation and mass murders, followed by the anti-soviet guerrilla war that was eventually put down in the 50s with a great deal of brutality.

Or France, where the mass of the government had actively cooperated with the Nazis and ended up covering up the collaboration and got promoted with no side effects. Like Maurice Papon, later prefect of Police in Paris and Francois Mitterrand, later president of France.

It's not likely to be fun city. Too many collaborators and victims.

[Simon May]

[Riley37]

[kzt]

IIRC, the Dutch acted much like the French, except for the total denial that any Dutchman had actually collaborated. IIRC, the person who got paid by the Germans for turning in Anne Frank (and dozens of other Jews) lived happily ever after.

[Penta]

Riley: Where I got vehement was the idea that after...20+, 30+ years? (I forget when the JIS occupation of SanFran started) of foreign occupation, San Francisco would be anything -but- scarred and traumatized and having a societal case of PTSD, to a massive extent at least.

France and the Netherlands are not relevant examples. Period. They were occupied for 6 years at the most. The people who took leadership positions immediately after the war in many cases were involved in politics before the war, too. (De Gaulle is the obvious exception here, I grant.) At the same time, they had governments-in-exile that really maintained a lot of the institutional memory of government during the occupation.

Once you go past 10 years, 20 years at max, then your political infrastructure, the people who remember what life was like and perhaps were politically active before the occupation, starts to really degrade. Because people get old, they die, and so forth. And the number of people who even remember what life was like before the occupation gets smaller and smaller. People may get that "Japanese occupation is bad", but that says nothing about the post-occupation situation. If your political infrastructure doesn't exist, how can you say anything about life after that?

This post has been edited by Penta: Oct 23 2007, 01:51 AM

[stormcrow]

The gay pride movement really exploded here in the SF Bay Area. Reference the Stonewall Riot. We're talking about a population that was pretty brutally oppressed/beaten/etc. for decades, with police raids on bars, bathhouses and other subculture meeting sites. What happened when the oppression lifted (because of resistance and struggle)? If you don't know, come see Gay Pride week (brought to you by Miller and Annheiser-Busch!) At least one of the older gay bars in the East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland) has a special basement hiding spot for that very reason.

The cops here aren't particularly gentle. I got shot eight times with wooden dowels and rubber bullets and rammed twice by motorcycles for shutting down the Port of Oakland to stop shipment of war materials a couple years ago. If there'd been fewer cameras or more black kids it would have been real bullets.

On the game note:
SF isn't a city in isolation. It's fifteen minutes on BART to Oakland or Berkeley across the Bay. SF is pretty small (about 750,000 people and 47 sq miles) and the metro SF Bay Area is 7.2 million people and a much much larger sq mileage.

One thing my players have just gotten a taste of is the Life Imitating Art aspect of Japanese mechs. Some are tech, some are magic. None are the massive BattleTech 50 ton monsters. Most are simply powered armor and exoskeletons with guns. Some are ally spirits. All are bad news for lightly armed/armored resistance fighters.

Much resistance is located in the East Bay (where most folx without loads of cash had already relocated.) The Bay Bridge has scanners and mm wave radar to check every vehicle for suspicious 'ware and weapons. Treasure Island (roughly midway along the Bay Bridge between Oakland and Berkeley) is a heavily armed way station for intercepting raids. Last transBay run my players went on, a friendly mage Shapechanged three of them (sust foci) and they just flew across. That being said, the Bay is only around 6 ft deep for most of it. The shipping channel up the middle is dredged to 42 or 400 ft deep (i forget which), but is rather narrow.

A lot of hardware is funneled into the East Bay (SF is the West Bay) by other corps who lost facilities or freedom in the Occupation. (Like Rome or the US, it's cheaper to send weapons to the neighbors of your opponents than to send armies.)

San Jose and Silicon Valley are closely held by Ares and the JIS did NOT send enough Marines or gear to take on Ares.

Just my $0.02.

pax,
stormcrow



:cyber:

[Riley37]

Ah, thanks Penta. I went back to SR4 BBB to check the duration of the occupation, and I'd thought it was under ten years but looks more like 30; CalFree secedes (or is booted) in 2036, tangles with TirTairngire and Aztlan, brings in the JIS, then the occupation lasts until late 2060s. Yes, on that scale, one gets effects somewhat like the Warsaw Pact nations. My mother, a journalist, went to Chechoslovakia to cover their first post-Soviet elections... it had been a long, long time and they didn't have familiarity with how elections work. As a frequent staffer of polling places, I can imagine the difficulties of running a fair and fast-moving polling place when neither staffers nor voters have any experience. Brrr. Imagining three decades of my hometown being patrolled by JIS troopers with bayonets makes Shadowrun a bit scarier for me. In the last decade, Saito is rogue, having defied the 2061 order for all JIS units to pull back to the home islands. No reinforcements, just whatever new troops he can recruit from those who have adapted to the new regime.

Post-occupation SF would have plenty of the edgy dystopic aspect of Shadowrun; the Big Brother aspect would have been recently extreme, but presumably it's a while before anyone gets social controls in place again, unless they take over whatever surveillance cameras and informants and so forth Saito had in place. Meanwhile, the dynamics of who you can trust could be very tricky, and there'd be room for gangs and shaman-based tribes and other "outsider" organizations to gain social capital.

Counterculture comes in various forms. Big festivals are one. Replacing ties with tie-dye is another form. Questioning authority is another; don't openly defy a JIS patroller, but I dunno that SF families became quite as patriarchal as Saito would have liked. I speculate that the JIS might have been quite frustrated that once they purged the Bay Area of all the wacky free-thinkers, the high-tech industry stopped being quite such a tax-base cash-cow... kinda like the way that after the Spanish Inquisition got rid of all the Jewish bankers and scholars, the Spanish economy took a big hit.

So... how long after V-E day did Amsterdam and Paris regain their aspect as cities with intellectualism, hedonism, liberalism (in any sense of the word)?

[kzt]

As was pointed out before, 5 years isn't 30 years. 30 years means many people there grew up with this as the way things are, and many of the older counter culture types would have died off (from one reason or another).

Ask Frank about Prague. I like his blogs name "Waitinginline".

[HappyDaze]

[DTFarstar]

Frank has a blog? Do tell. I'm always interested in what he has to say. Especially when he rants, it amuses me greatly. Linky? My search fu has failed me thus far in google.

Chris

[Mercer]