New border in SR4 Options

[Wireknight]

Fortunately, I happen to live in Pennsylvania. No one comes here, and little of global importance happens here, now. It's quite plausible to assume the same is true in the Shadowrun era.

"Um, well, the Amish are now Awakened. They're all adepts, and they can build barns in twenty minutes. Let's never speak of sixth world Pennsylvania again."

[Aristotle]

[Euchrid]

[Penta]

[Tal]

[hermit]

[mfb]

they're all walled up in the anglo reservations in NAN territory.

[Penta]

That could make sense.

Personally, what a lot of the location books illustrate to me is what a bad idea it is to have locals writing them.

In the other thread linked about people's hometowns, one can smell how much a book on an area would be used to indulge personal fantasies or otherwise grind axes. (Observe how the Jersey Shore gets treated. ARCOLOGIES? ARCOLOGIES? :grr:)

Locals bring interesting thoughts re the terrain, but outsiders should really write the "events" side, IMHO. Locals tend to turn their places into either blatantly-political fantasies, shiny happy stupidity, or "We suck more than you do!" one-ups-manship.

[hermit]

[shadow_scholar]

[Jrayjoker]

[FrostyNSO]

[MagicalGirlPrett...]

For those who care, there's a really good link here to some information on the demographics of North America, and an interesting balkanized map it draws for the 21st Century. If I were to have made Shadowrun (and we're probably all better off that I didn't, but that's another matter), this is what I would have based it off of. It would simply take me too long to explain and relay all the information at this link, so I've decided to just go directly to the source. In another area of the site, there's another discussion of so-called "Edge Cities" like Silicon Valley, and the new commerce centers of North America.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

The idea of MexAmerica is laughable. Too many people hate each other to ever form any sort of cohesive political agenda or organization. I like how he dismisses the self-identification of "Spanish" in New Mexico as snobbery. Snobbery is one thing, but a lot of people are just friggin' racist against Mexicans.

[frostPDP]

Well, border-redrawing is one of the funnier conversations I've watched. I'm a New Yorker, and one of our players/GM drew up secnerios for New York which came very close to what was written up by the bigwigs. Just ironic I suppose; but as screwed as NY and the US get, we don't really mind much. Its a fantasy world.

At the absolute worst, if you want to stick to canon, you can have your players/teammates undertake a large campain to force war against Atzlan and take it back. Your runner team can just go on random kill-all-enemies missions against Atzlan bases and boom, perhaps the CAS will take interest. A GM could well make the re-conquest of Texas (or more!) the focal point of everything.

So really, the borders can be as much an issue for pride as anything. But you should never act out of pride; I think the US is split up fairly nicely. The United States of today has marginal interest in the mid-west area, due to sparse population, etc. If that's all the NAN wanted, they might well let go provided they still get the western parts of California. The CAS sceeding? Well, I'm sure we've all seen those pictures of "Jesusland." Seriously though, much of the south hasn't even been integrated for 50 years; that's a cultural difference of titanic proportion. Hell, the CAS didn't even leave with that much animosity behind it - The scession was relatively peaceful. Its very possible that the two would team up and just retain seperate political structures, provided Atzlan made a number of expansionist moves (or it was discovered their Blood Magic was bringing back "The Enemy.") toward conquering the rest of NA.

Also remember that a divided target like Atzlan is incredibly suspect to attack. Anyway I've rambled on enough, have fun tearing me :)