The NYC Earthquake of 2005, Details? Options

[Penta]

Yup. I'm sending my campaign to the NY Metro area soon, and it's as likely to venture into New Jersey and the outer boroughs as Manhattan.

Now, I live in Jersey, so I got that covered...Will admit falling prey to the classic local syndrome of "I live a train ride from the city but have never been", but anyway.

In SR, it mentions there being an earthquake in 2005.

Never mind how unlikely an earthquake in NYC of any appreciable magnitude is.

Supposedly this quake screwed up Manhattan, but do we have any other details?

[kjones]

Obvious question: Do you have the book "Manhattan"? It's short (32 pages IIRC) but has lots of good detail about what happened to the city, and where it is today.

[Black Jack Rackh...]

There's also the Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America. It's got a pretty detailed description.
Mark

[Penta]

Obvious question: Do you have the book "Manhattan"? It's short (32 pages IIRC) but has lots of good detail about what happened to the city, and where it is today.

Never heard of it.

[kjones]

Sorry, I should have double-checked the title. The Rotten Apple: Manhattan

If you're planning on running a campaign in New York, at $4 that book is a steal. It'll tell you everything you want to know. Basically, MCT took over the island and made it the HQ for the CC, and the whole place is a fascist, rigidly class-defined city... except for the places run by the Neo-Anarchists. And the Underground. (When the 'quake hit, they basically just built over the rubble, leaving all sorts of interesting stuff below...)

Seriously, read the book. It's pretty good.

[MJBurrage]

If you get The Rotten Apple: Manhattan directly from BattleCorps, our favourite publisher gets more money for the same price to you, and their is no ugly watermark added to the PDF.

[Snow_Fox]

NAGtNA is the best source but it is hopelessly out of print and they weren't put together to well to begin with-construvtion not writing-so they are hard to come by. The long and the short is that pretty much any building over 5 stories tall EXCEPT the Empire State building collapsed in a mass of rubble. So figure everything pretty much south of 125th except the brownstones is gone.

This meant the corps came in and made Manhattan their own little enclave as they rebuilt, tightly controlled. Manhattan seceed from NYC but keopt the name leaving Brooklyn, Queens, SI and the Bronx to hang.

Where the WTC stood has become a serries of towers controlled by Mitsuhama. I use to live North of NYC- Westchester- and we allowed osmeof the more famous bulsings to survive but trtashed a lot we didn't so the Dakota is still there but Lincoln Center is GONE!

[Penta]

Having read through Corp Enclaves and the Manhattan PDF, some quick thoughts:

I...dislike the preponderance of buildings 150-300+ stories tall.

Okay, it makes some sense from a cyberpunk perspective, but (maybe this is post-9/11 mindset speaking here) I just can't see people working even 100 stories up, let alone living. One fire and you're screwed, after all.

And if any of those buildings falls over, collapses, etc? Debris clouds and the like don't respect extraterritoriality. You can't even demolish them in a controlled fashion.

I go with it for the convenience of my players, being as I GM online, but it's with my mind balking at the imagery.

[Snow_Fox]

don't think of it as a scattering of extra-territorial state like in Seattle. it IS the extrateritorial state.
One cannonical part we didn't adopt were the passes. officially it is so controlled no one gets in without a pass but with the traffic from what is not the outer boroughs, Westchester, and Jersey just to porvide a work force it just wouldn't work.

OK it would with 4th ed tech but not with the 2nd and 3rd ed tech's where it started.

[MJBurrage]

Remember also that 9/11 never happened in Shadowrun. Therefore, no War on Terror etc., and a bunch of Dubai style buildings in Manhattan is more plausible.

The time lines diverged circa 1990 when the game was first released. The first notable difference is that Jeffrey Lynch was elected the 42nd President of the United States in 1992. So Shadowrun also never had the Clinton's or Bush Jr. as notable contributors to national politics.

U.S. Presidents in Shadowrun:

• 1992 & 1996 – Jeffrey Lynch
• 2000 – Martin Hunt
• 2004 – Philip Bester
• 2008 & 2012 – Jesse Garrety
• 2016, 2020 & 2024 – William Jarman (allowed by constitutional amendment during second term)
• 2028 – Andrew McAlister (becomes first UCAS President in 2030)