I am a GM who is going to start a new series of Fourth Edition Shadowrun games for our group in the next few months, and I am thinking about setting them in a location without a lot of published game material. One thought I had was Panama, which should be a major center of trade in the 2070's, and, from what I remember, not under the control of any one Corp [like Detroit is in the pocket of Ares].

Has anyone out there done this?

or,

Does anyone have any cool ideas that they think might work for setting up the shadow culture down their that they would not mind sharing?

or,

Does anyone have any other comments on the idea that they would like to pass along [From general thoughts on the idea to specific things that might be cool to make the players deal with]?

Essentially any thoughts, ideas, or comments on the concept would be very greatly welcomed. And, if anyone should foresee any particular difficulites or specific things that will reqiure special attention to make the game work, those would be most welcomed as well.

I could be completely misrememberng this, but didn't the book mention that there was a new canal going through Nicaragua by the 2070's? If that did happen, certainly suggests something major occurred in Panama since you don't normally do something that majorly expensive just for the fun of it.

Yeah, there was small paragraph in SF about it. The Panama canal suffered badly at crash 2.0 and the overall end of the world, so Aztech decided to built a new one at nicaragua (which will be under their control then).

Riiight. Unless something exceedingly destructive happened I figure it'd be much cheaper to simply repair the old one than dig a completely new canal, and possibly even enlarge it a bit whilst you're at it. After the whole Ensenada incident I can't really see the Corporate Court and all the other Megas letting freakin' Aztechnology control one of the worlds major arteries of trade and commerce. Plus, would the massive cost of constructing a wholly new canal be worth the possible influence it might give you?

You keep talking like logic and reason matter to the general timeline.

The same guy who wrote the California entry probably wrote the paragraph about the canls incident.

Funny, I don't remember writing about California.

The Panama Pan-Corporate Zone was badly hit during System Failure: Jormungand virus, EMP nuke, etc. There's a very good reason as to why Winternight would target the PPCZ so heavily, but it's mostly in Shadows of Latin America (where the Zone and Panama City get a whole section). I think it's also mentioned somewhere in the SF book, but I don't have the book at hand.

Construction of the Nicaragua Canal began long before Crash 2.0, and I must note that it is Aztlan's property, so it does not fall within the Corporate Court's authority. Aztechnology is just a contractor hired for the job, anything else you've heard is negative PR from angry competitors.

The Panama Canal has size problems. It has them in RL nowadays, and it has a similar (maybe worse) problem in Shadowrun, as explained in the Aztlan SB.

There might be more than that, but I'm not fully comfortable talking about it as long as SOLA isn't released.

The 110' width of the Panama canal is a major problem now. About 20% - 30% or so of the cargo ships running around now simply can't fit through the canal and Panama is worried that shipping traffic through the canal will suffered badly (and fees to the country). The shipping industry actually has a term that describe ships too large to fit: Post-Panamax.

Maintainance is a problem as well. Continuous mud slides into parts of the canal require constant dredging. The canal also doesn't recycle the water required to raise and lower ships through the locks. Granted the jungles have done a good job of replenishing that water supply.

Talks have been going on for years about building a new, wider canal next to the current one just to accomodate the larger traffic. Since the canal was hit with a nuke in System Failure I wouldn't be surprised if Aztechnology or someone else built a canal through Nicaragua. From an engineering point of view, though longer in distance, I've heard it is easier country to build through.

Oh, for the love of god. It's not like they dropped a 25-megaton Satan on it.

The other obvious advantage of having an Aztlan controlled canal for Aztechnology would be the avoidance of fees or tonnage duties, I'm sure the corporate court charges them on everyone, Aztlan would probably charge them on everyone else. Additionally Aztechnology might not have to file copies of their shipping manifests with the Aztlan canal authority.

Building a canal sounds like a good job for Shape Earth and a whole lot quicker than digging. Combine it with Shape Water and what is the big deal about dredging?

If I remember correctly Azt didn't have control of ther original canal. a 2nd one through Nicaragua might give them some thing newer, better wider to appeal to new traffic and give them a new hold on the economy.

As a fact the original canal was supposed to go through Nicaragua but they wanted too much money as a bribe so Roosevelt arranged for Panama to break away from his parent state and of course they were beholden to the US so pretty much gave away the keys to the kingdom to their new Masters.

Nation-building: America style.

Ah, the good old days.

"God, I miss Communism. The Red threat... people were scared... the agency had some respect and I got laid every night." -- George Kaplan

Okay, so setting aside whatever people might think one way or the other, how much potential damage could Crash Part II realistically do to the canal do people think?

Losing power would mean they couldn't pump the water from one lock to the other or possibly open them so you've probably got traffic stuck part way through. The main danger that I could see would be if one of the ships coming into the start of the canal had it's nav-comp scambled and went all ahead ramming speed on one of the lock gates. One of those taking a large enough whack could cripple or make it unsalvagable, which would put the whole affair out of order for some time I'm guessing.

Which brings up another question of mine, how is the canal built? Is it built with concrete sides and a concrete bottom to it, or are only the sides reinforced to keep the banks out and the bottom left as compacted earth?

Actually when you consider that most freighters and tankers probably travel using a satelite matrix linked auto pilot there could well be enough grounded vessels in the canal to require years of salvage and clean up operations. If a lock gate tried to close on a vessel or if a vessel rammed a gate that could require major repairs, and of course a vessel could have wedged itself in one of the narrow sections. The volume of vessel traffic through the canal makes it likely that there were multiple vessel incidents at both ends and all through the canal.

As for how it's built I believe it's a combination of both along with some dredged out natural water ways and lakes fed by mountain run off (which is where the silt problem comes from)

I suppose that depends on if they still used human pilots or went over to completely automated systems. But either way when you're in that tight and restricted space you can bet that they'd have people on duty following things pretty closely so even if things did start going wild I'd see them stopping the engines as a way round it. *Shrug*

Cutting the engines won't stop a loaded freighter or tanker, it will just allow it to start coasting to a stop. Keep in mind we are talking about thousands of tons of ship, even moving at only 2-5 knots like they would in the canal they would have enourmous amounts of inertia. Stopping a ship "quickly" usually requires throwing the engines in to reverse. Even if their were rigged pilot tugs along, which is highly likely in some of the more constricted areas but not every where in the canal, by the time the ships were able to effect a manual override of their systems it may be to late to prevent a grounding or collision.

As a side note, are their any other players who have found it to be a bit anoying in the past when game cannon was published that seemed to serve no purpose other than to make it harder to set a game in a specific city-absurde security arangements that would make commerice of any kind impossible, natural/(meta)human-made disasters of such magnitude that no comercial or public infrastructure exists to support normal (meta)human inhabitation, open or covert warfare of such intensity between groups (corps, governments, immortal beings, rebels) of such power that they completly dominate the shadows (and limit the game to characters of excessive power level even for Shadowrun), etc...? Here I am talking about cities like Essen, Detroit, Washington DC, New York, etc....

And for all of you who have posted on this-thank you for your time and effort. I have never had any problem changing game cannon as far as background setting is concerned (things like what buildings are where, which divisions of which corporations are located where, what they make, what the security is like, who is running what group and who is on top, and who thinks they would be better suited to be calling the shots than the current top doggs); but it is nice to have people point out things that need to either be changed to fit my game or dealt with if leaf alone.

So, again, thank you for your replies (By the way, I am not trying to kill the tread here, any other suggestions will still be quite welcomed, just wanted to take a minute to thank those who have, or will reply).

Well, it IS impossible to run in Washington. That's not the authors, it's just the way it is.

Yes, if you are thinking about it logically your point about Washington is right, that is just the way Washington is and it would not be possible to have anything like a Shadowrun occur there. And the other cities on the list are mostly home to institutions that have the same kind resources that the Federal government has, with a lot less restrictions on how they deploy their security assets. But, working the willing suspension of disbelief angle a little on the hard side, is there not something lost if we make it well neigh impossible to set up a series of Shadowrun adventures in the political thriller genera? As long as things don't go completely off the tracks into la-la land shouldn't the game be set up to allow the greatest latitude possible in terms of what types of adventures are possible. Clearly, going back to the old Corporate Security Sourcebook, it has been easy in Shadowrun to design facilities that are not in any way extreme by the rules, but are in all practical impossible to penetrate. And, of course, I am not saying that their is not a lot of latitude in the game (I do still love Shadowrun, and love to GM the game), it just seems like some of the decisions make things harder rather than easier.

I can't imagine why they'd want to make things easy. That's not "fun;" at least, not the type of fun of whoever wrote such things. It assumes infinite budgets, time to implement, optimal conditions and trained, reliable and vigilant personnel. Nothing has that. When I mentioned Washington, it's not only because of the security, it's also because most of the city is utterly useless to runners because 99% of the jobs can be done, are done, and have been done without resorting to using teams of armed covert operatives. The fact that there's a stupifying amount of mostly unobtrusive security (i.e., no D&D-style traps) that will stop 99% of people without resorting to the kinds of traps you'd expect in your average dungeon crawl - motion and IR sensors, MADs, guards, and containment; not monowire, sentry guns and gas delivery systems - is almost irrelevant.

For the sake of understanding, I did not mean "easy", just not impossible-your examples of the vast amounts of passive security directly connected to a whole hose of private and government security forces is exactly what I find irritating; what I would be interested in would be something in between a milk run and months of planing and millions of nuyen to achieve.

As for reasons to run, here I would disagree with you about opportunity. In the world of Shadowrun where corporate fortunes are made and lost based on political maneuvering, and corporate crime is the norm-I would think that there would be a great deal of need for deniable assets. If you need to convince a witness that they need to change their testimony (or a witness needs to disappear all together) before they appear before a Grand Jury or a Congressional committee, you don't want to have the people doing the job traceable back to you if they get caught. The same goes for stealing a congressional report, or changing the findings of a congressional investigative agency (GAO, CBO) before it is released (a data snach or manipulation as important and any corp. research or patent data). Convincing an influential congressional or presidential staffer to advise their boss a certain way, or getting an appointed regulator to make a specific ruling (or getting any of the above people to retire or disappear in order to make room for someone who is more "reliable". These and a whole host of other things seem to me like jobs that would be prime candidates for deniable assets in the town that brought the word Watergate into the popular lexicon.

The point of this being, however, not to have an argument over whether or not it would be possible to have Shadowruns in the Washington Sprawl in the world of Shadowrun (since the answer is obviously no-your points on that are all valid), rather, the relative merits involved in the decisions that result in the game being set up that way.

Which Washington are we talking about here, Washington State or the District of Columbia? While I don't know much about Washington state I can say with some certainty that DC should be easy to run, depending on your play style. I have a hard time seeing the murder capitol of the world as inhospitable to violent criminals even in the far flung future.

In 2002, the only US city with a higher murder rate than DC was New Orleans. It was, incidently, ten times higher then Seattle's murder rate. In general, all violent crime rates are higher in DC than they are in Seattle.

The thing about DC is that there are two distinct Washingtons. There is the nice Washington with manicured lawns where the lawmakers live and work. There is also the There is also the Washington that most third world capitals would compare favorably too. This is the washington run by gangers and drug dealers this is the Washington where you are more likely to be murdered than any other existing US city. This is a Washington where Shadowrunners would and should thrive.

So I must ask, since I'm not aware myself, does this aspect of Washington still exist in the 2070s? Is it overrun by Sinless. Is life there cheaper than a new pair of shoes? Or did they just level the place with an airstrike during a more conservative administration?

I think after the CAS seceded the DC Sprawl became highly militarized and that draconian martial law was imposed. Someone who read more of the novels can probably place this a bit better than I can, but I think this description is from Stranger Souls.

There was the novel Just Compensation by Robert Charette that revolved around a load of protestors going to Washington and camping out there, turning into a massive riot - with an attempted military coup and shadowy attempted annexation of Northern Virginia by possible forces in the CAs government. So I could see them tightening it up some, but I'm not really sure how official the novels really are since they've generally tried to politely ignore and work around the storyline in more recent releases. Although I've no idea of what System Failure might say about this.

The Neo-Anarchists Guide to North America has a section dedicated to the Federal District of Columbia and IIRC it's still pretty much the current situation of nice rich/governmental areas contrasted next to the complete shiteholes of the ghettos and gang areas. Personally I'd go with this version since I can't see them cleaning the place up without exporting their scumbags ala our New Orleans and that just seems unlikely IMHO.