Bay Area and Saito Options

[Ghostfire]

Greets,

Currently, I am looking for a non-Seattle setting based in North America. My group has played Denver, Chicago, Seattle, and LA (along with the badlands around most of those places.). We're looking for a new challenge.

The problem, however, is that SR4 and System Failure leaves WAY too much in the air about current events for my taste. I desperately need some idea of what ultimately pushed Saito out of the Bay Area, and what the current disposition is of a) the Ares forces in the South Bay, b) the metahuman forces in the East Bay, and c) what the corps are up to.

How was Saito pushed out? What's the status of Sacremento? Do any of you folks out there have any idea? I'd love some basic hints just so I can develop cohesive theme that doesn't range too terribly far from canon.

[hahnsoo]

Well, Saito is gone by 2070 (the text implies that he's gone by the time the CalFree earthquakes happen in 2069), but he's still very much in power by the time MCT pulls out of Tsimshiam and moves to San Francisco in 2065(?). There is NO fiction at this time written about what happens to Saito in the intervening years. There are several options as to how he gets taken out, I guess:
1) Shadowrunners and the Oct. 29th Resistance
2) The Earthquakes killed him.
3) MCT decided they didn't need a power hungry dictator ordering them around and killed him in a corporate coup of the military dictatorship
4) Nationalist Japanese forces re-invade San Fran and take Saito out of power, in accordance to the Emperor's pull-out plan.
5) Ares Macrotechnology decides they've had enough of Saito and kick his butt seven ways to Sunday.

As I said before, there is no fiction whatsoever written about this.

Your best bet, I think, is to take the CalFree section of SoNA and base a campaign either shortly before the Crash 2.0, or just after it in the turbulent years following MCT's move to San Fran (which would give a BIG boost to Saito's power).

[Dashifen]

Or, instead of worrying about the metaplot, pick your favorite line of reasoning from the above 5 and design a campaign where the players can help to oust Saito at what ever level your game resides. Street level runners could be running arms or medical supplies for the resistance, or dropping poison into Saito's troop's water supplies, mid-level runners might get wetwork targetting lieutenants or confidants, high level runners might even be offered an assassination of Saito himself. From the flip side, you could have the runners working for any of the other parties above (MCT, Ares, etc.) who are destabalizing Saito's power base. Don't worry so much about material that has not yet been published and blaze your own trail!!

[Grinder]

As most players don't keep track of the metaplot, don't worry too much about future relases which might include the development in california and which might only been read by a handful of your players, if any.

Make your own path. :)

[hahnsoo]

Yeah, but I would just like to note that while most people don't follow the metaplot, it is nice to have a general framework of the power players and motivations in any particular aspect of the Sixth World. Maybe that's all the OP needed.

[Cynic project]

[Ellery]

I suggest not playing anything in CA. CA tends to be a favorite target for big canon changes (including a magnitude 8+ earthquake every five years or so), and the authors tend to display very little knowledge of modern-day or historical CA (from culture to politics to geography). To some extent, they seem familiar with inaccurate stereotypes (though it's unclear that they know they're inaccurate)--but many locations get the stereotypical treatment, so that's not really a distinguishing feature.

But you might wake up one day and find that your campaign is underwater, or in Alaska, or has been taken over by communists, or a dragon, or something, and anything you read about CA itself, or look up with Google maps, or something, is as likely to be contrary to canon material as it is to be helpful.

If you're going in and out quick, that might not be a problem. But for a full setting, I'd choose somewhere else unless I was going to make up my own background and not worry about what FanPro does. Maybe they'll do things differently from now on, but I wouldn't count on it.

[hahnsoo]

Although they DID predict that Ah-nold would go into politics...

[evil1i]

[SL James]

[hahnsoo]

Oh, I can highly recommend Las Vegas as a setting. We've been playing a 2058 campaign in Vegas, and we're having a blast. Lots of crime, exotic venues, and the occasional Mormon conspiracy to boot. :) There's ALWAYS a secure meet site, too, on the Strip.

[Grinder]

We're playing a very cool campaign based in Miami. Very cool setting where you can have every kind of run from drug-smuggling into the CAS to extractions of execs while they're on a vacation in Miami and even some full blown gang war.

[Seizure]

When it comes to Saito, i noticed something odd.

I'm not saying this is what the SR writers intended, but for my campaign, i find it hilarious, so i'm using it.

Saito has a big scar on his face.

Loffy left Tir land around the time Saito arrived.

Saito stuck around for a while, but after his brother scampered away, it looks like he found better things to do, morphed back into Almaise (the scarred dragon) and went home.

:spin:

[Grinder]

Iirc Loffy left TT some years after Saito decided to stay in SanFran?

[Seizure]

true. But what's a few years to a dragon?

He didn't assume this role and usurp power for Lofwyr alone.

plans within plans.


For instance: He /really/ hates anything with TIR in front of it.

Calfree was pretty weakened up, partially due to him. Some nations grabbed land.
Some nations owe him favors now potentially, which he'll use to get back at Saeder/Tir.

A new dragon is on the Tir princes list. Haven't decided yet whether this is for his interests or against them. Depends on how Hesty and him get along, and really that's unknown at this point.

Meanwhile, he usurped a large portion of the japanese army, giving that nation even more disasters than it needs, which directly helps out Lung and Masaru. More elbow nudging and pretty favors passed back and forth, backs are scratched, and eventually he'll ask for reciprocation.

Even with the anti meta slant that he took with his army, if he just left them to rot in the end, it's actually pro-meta when they rise up and take back what's theirs. Depending on the PR spin, it may fall right into Masaru's plans.

And he was another force keeping Aztlan from nudging any farther north after Ghostwalker laid the smack down. Backs are scratched.

It just goes on and on.

[Eyeless Blond]

[Canis]

Yeah, Cali has been really beat up in SR. I haven't purchased SR4 yet but it sounds like now they also have a major earthquake that tore the place up. Oh well, there are several things I think are interesting about the CFS but in general we don't use what was written in our games. But extreme change and destruction tend to make better fiction than static and mundane, I enjoy it anyways even if it sometimes makes me cringe.

[FrankTrollman]

Yeah, let's just say that the people who wrote up what happened to California in the SR4 shift were.... not geologists. There's supposed to have been giant earthquakes and a huge crevice appeared that filled up with water, transforming California into "Escape From LA". Now, EFL was an awesome movie and all, but the fact is that the new map calls for a new inland sea that you could easily fit two Chicxulub craters into. And since we'll recall that the creation of one Chicxulub Crater also involved the K-T Extinction some 65 MYA, we can safely assume that geologic activity of that scale would involve Las Vegas and Tenochitlan falling down, as well as Tokyo and Sydney being devastated by tidal waves. The visceral and non-sensical hatred of California by the original authors has obviously continued into the present edition (remember, Seattlites tell jokes that have punchlines like "We have lots of Californians, but we recycle our bottles.")

So yeah, using canon California is something that you only can do if you want to tell broad farce or simply have no idea what you are talking about and don't care. But let's assume that you want to use something kind of similar to the official storyline without being 10 pounds of stupid in a five pound bag. Here's a half hearted attempt:

California in 2070:
First off, the border of the Cal Free State is just the California border, all the border movements depicted in Shadowrun make no sense at all (San Diego is the largest military outpost on the western seaboard, if Aztlan could take that, they'd take LA as well - the PCC's population is smaller than the population of LA, even after supposedly absorbing LA, etc. etc.), so we just ignore that stuff. This has the advantage that you can look up actual maps of california instead of trying to figure out what the hell is going on from little scribbles at the end of the SR book that were apparently drawn by a five year old from the BRD.

Los Angeles:
The first important thing to understand about LA is the scale of the place. The Los Angelos basin is 300 kilometers across, and that's all city. In the 20th century it was hailed as "The Horizontal City", where most of that was single story buildings, and the entire place was crisscrossed with giant arteries of freeways and streets. To get from any place to any other place was such an ordeal that people wrote songs about how walking in Los Angeles was impractical. In 2070, the population of LA is actually not much more than it was during the turn of the century, the entire metroplex scarcely crests 13 million people - but it no longer claims status as a horizontal city. Soaring fuel prices combined with changes in manufacturing and sales strategies in the 21st century have created an economic need for condensation that was simply unheard of before the awakening. So while the population hasn't changed much, the population density has. The days of strip malls and single occupancy suburbia are largely over - the Los Angeles of today boasts Arcologies belonging to most AAA corporations and several AA corps besides.

So what happened to all those extra buildings? Nothing. Arcologies were built up all over the basin in places that were determined to be most economical for that purpose, and as people moved out of the rest of the city, noone moved in to take their place. With so very much space available, there was no need for all that horizontal city nonsense - and especially no need to fund services for it. The city is now confined to "enclaves" of wealth and opulence. The rest of the city is "Sacrifice Zone" - areas where building something modern would be marginally more expensive than building in any of the other 30,000 square kilometers that make up the Los Angeles metroplex. The sacrifice zones usually have chain link fences around them, and no connection to the power or water grids. Officially speaking, noone lives in the "Sea of Ruin" that stretches between the islands of corporate territory.

Heavy Weather:
In 2069, the rains came and hit LA hard. Los Angeles is subject to flash flooding at the best of times (what with being a desert shaped like a giant soup bowl), and the lack of maintenance on most of the city rendered drainage suspect in the best of areas. The canals had long ago been allowed to fill up with broken cars and piles of trash, and the sewer system had been left overflowing during the dry season. When November came around, it heralded the largest rainy season on record. March came along and the rains did not stop. The sunshine state didn't see more than three days of clear skies in a row until late June of 2070. By then, the sea of ruin was a sea in fact rather than metaphor.

While the corporate arcologiess have done fiarly well (the Horizon Garden Arcology, for example, has its own water-proof walls and pumps), the residents of the enclave areas surrounding those arcologies have often been forced to evacuate. And the residents of the no-light districts got no services even when their homes weren't under water. Hordes of refugess attempted to leave the city in all directions, but were turned back by California Patrol, Aztlan Warriors, and PCC Troopers on the gorunds that these "looters" would increase crime in any place that they managed to get (what with them living illegally where they came from).

Power Grab:
The relief effort has gone spottily at best. The CalFree State has contracted with Horizon to provide clean water, food, shelter, and evacuation to the flood victims, at least those flood victims as came from economically prosperous regions. Horizon, in turn, has contracted the California Troopers to "protect its corporate interests" by preventing other sources of food and water from getting into the city. Meanwhile, claiming that the officially sponsored relief efforts were "unfairly discriminatory" to hispanics in the LA basin, Aztlan has mounted its own humanitarian aid program to relieve those people previously overlooked. Austensibly because the place is such a warzone and looter-fest, Aztlan's relief efforts are heavily armed, and have on several occasions come into armed conflict with CalFree soldiers. Aztechnology has begun construction of a Pyramid Archology in an area secured by Aztlan relief teams. Not to be outdone, the Pueblo Corporate Council, on the urgings of Wuxing international, has begun a special armed relief effort aimed at protecting the lives of Chinese Californians who they say have been caught in the tg-of-war between California and Aztlan.

Life in the Canals:
Dead bodies, chemical plants, feces, and worse feed poisons and bacteria into the stagnant flood waters of Los Angeles. While the "relief wars" wage all around them, the residents have resigned themselves to life in a city drowned in water where drinkables are scarce. Small fortresses have been made out of ancient malls and wharehouses. Many of the former corporate employees who were not effectively evacuated have been forced to join up with scavenger gangs just to survive.

----

See, that's the kind of disaster that actually happens to California. We have, you know, building codes, and 8 point earthquakes kill perhaps dozens of people. They just aren't a big deal around here. The last time we had an earthquake in the 7 point region, we lost less than 60 people - and some of that was frightened tourists running cars into walls.

Note also that the idea of a corporation contracting a national government to prevent donated aid from undermining their for-profit aid isn't that far fetched. That actually happend in the Katrina cleanup. Wallmart's donated water tanks were turned back on the grounds that FEMA had contracted for water tanks from a private distributer and therefore did not need any free water for civilians to drink.

-Frank

[SL James]

Wow.

Someone who actually makes California makes sense.

This heathen must be burned at the stake for heresy!

:-)

Badass, dude.

[Slipshade]

Great job Frank. I may just use that in my next campaign.

As for the SF Bay Area, I pretty much never used the Japan take over or Saito. I just made it an extension of what is happening today. San Fran and San Jose show a heavy corp influence while the burbs are bedroom communities wage slaves. Oakland/Berkeley/Richmond/Concord are Barrens. Walnut Creek/Alamo are for the Rich.

Central Valley is run by the Agro-Corps. Overt racism definetly exists, but not so much from the Agro-Corps which are happy to use keep metahuman labor, but from the few independent farmers that resent the major corporations.

I have taken Monterey and Santa Cruz as undergoing a major clean up that is now a AAA Corporate Vacation getaway. Big Sur however is still a toxic wasteland. I kept some of the Piracy as well, but the pirate groups were mostly corp backed or "Free Agents".

Haven't really done anything with the Redding area.

Slipshade

[SL James]

Ah, fuck it.

If Deborah Jim was captured by the Haida Front and decapitated,

If Kyle Haeffner was assassinated and Daviar disappeared,

If the Sioux is in turmoil,

If the Ute is in such turmoil that it was annexed by PCC,

If Lugh Surehand was deposed and is in the book hunted by the Ghosts and needing shadowrunner protection,

Then I think it's a safe assumption that the insurgency in Cal Free and Ares managed to cap Saito's ass.

[Cynic project]

[SL James]

This is Fanpro we're talking about, Cynic. When has anything they've done made sense?

[Cynic project]

Ares give C.A.T.o the smack down?

[Demonseed Elite]