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Serial_Peacemaker
I've been running a Shadowrun campaign recently, and its been swinging between 'normal' runs, and having the runners come against things that should not be. However being set in Seattle I'm trying to think of a good place to set a small and secluded town. I'm thinking of having it set up more or less as a luddite enclave that specializes in harvesting magical radicals. The question is where is a good place close to Seattle? I'm currently considering sending them out to CalFree probably somewhere a bit mountainous.
Kyoto Kid
...personally, I would set something in "small town" CAS or UCAS Midwest. Lots of strange things happen in these parts that can totally mess with a city boy.

Unfortunately outside of the Metroplex proper, everything else is Salish land until you get down to the TT (which since the Crash could have some pretty strange places as well).
Cheops
QUOTE (Serial_Peacemaker)
a small and secluded town...The question is where is a good place close to Seattle? I'm currently considering sending them...somewhere a bit mountainous.

Dude that's the definition of the Pacific Northwest. Seattle is on the coastline side of the Cascades. Pick any place within about a 2 hour drive of Seattle and you got your setting.

My former boss used to live on the Nooksack River, actually on the Reservation (3 minutes from the casino) near Mt Sumas. It is about as secluded as you can get. Bellingham is only an hour or so away but you're surrounded by mountains and farmland. Her husband was off hunting for some deer on Mt Sumas one day and his truck slipped off the road into a ravine and they couldn't find him until the next morning even though he had a radio.

It'd probably be 2 hours tops to get from Seattle to Deming (the nearby town).
FriendoftheDork
Twin Peaks!

Erhhh, well it's in the pacific midwest isn't it? Probably taken over by indian shamans for all that white/black lodge goodiness. I'm guessing that would ruin the small-town feel a bit.
2bit
Nothing within the seattle sprawl is going to fit your needs. Pick a town very close to one of the mountains that blew up. Guaranteed to be a small town, it'll have an interesting backdrop, and you've easily got, "We rebuilt this town with our bare hands!! (and with our dark secret: corporate donations/crazy native magic/werewolf strength/evil free spirit that demands our essence). We won't let you ruin it!"
PBTHHHHT
QUOTE (2bit)
Nothing within the seattle sprawl is going to fit your needs. Pick a town very close to one of the mountains that blew up. Guaranteed to be a small town, it'll have an interesting backdrop, and you've easily got, "We rebuilt this town with our bare hands!! (and with our dark secret: corporate donations/crazy native magic/werewolf strength/evil free spirit that demands our essence). We won't let you ruin it!"

Heh. I can see the real estate agent trying to sell a house in that town in a srun/comedy game.

'Sure it's had more than a dozen owners in the past five years, but look at the view from this place, ain't it to die for?'
Spike
I live in the general area. For a while I was staying in Shelton, which in addition to having one of the last working lumber mills in the area, also had some wicked meth production going on in the woods around the area. Just up the state road a ways (and mind you, everywhere you go around here involves staring at lots of trees with weird plots of land every so often...) was Port Allen, which obviously is on the water, but was maybe a block long. Two churches, a coffee stand, a couple of bars, burger joint and a place where they sell driftwood carved with chainsaws.

Then you are back in the nearly endless woods. Now, mind the waterfront is going to be affluent, rich homes, but its facinating how fast they degenerate into trailerpark methlabs within a few hundred feet. All this within an hour of Tacoma or Olympia... Of course with the weather, the state of the roads, the mudslides it will be harder to get there in 2070 shadowrun...
Wounded Ronin
I hold the belief that farmers are deadly. City folk like me, sure, we're sarcastic and arrogant. Farmers may act friendly and down to earth and give the impression that they're devoted to fair play but they actually know all about how to hide in the brush all day and shoot you in the head with a rifle. They also know about plants and animals and are therefore more likely to comfortably wait overnight in some plants while a city person like me has to huddle near a fire with a big cup of coffee. When the coffee makes me go somewhere to pee the farmer can execute a silent kill with his knife and my caffinated blood will pour out on the ground where he will lap it up.

I've read a lot of Vietnam War memoirs written by former agriculturalists and I think that when it comes to being able to rack up large enemy body counts city folk like me are weak and pathetic whereas agriculturalists have their instincts honed to a terrifying degree in ways that are appropriate to dispatch you in a natural setting.
Ed_209a
There's a good correlation between growing up country and growing up hunting. That's one thing that makes a lot of country boys dangerous.

Beer is another.
Kyoto Kid
...yep...
Ravor
And a third that is partially related to hunting is that most people growing up on a farm/ranch is exposed to life & death from a very young age, and while growing up almost all of us help "work" the animals, which in the case of livestock includes castritating, ear tagging, and branding the animal at a relatively young age.

When an animal gets sick most of the time any medical attention given to it is adminstered in a squeeze-shoot (A device that is designed to hold the animal more-or-less still by simply 'squeezing' its sides and holding it in place.) by a ranch-hand with no offical training as more often then not a vet bill will be more then the animal is worth.

Personally I believe that it is the detachment towards "necessary" suffering that the lifestyle folsters that would make agriculturalists seem more deadly in those Vietnam War memoirs.
Serial_Peacemaker
Thanks for the responses. The only reason I ask is because though setting the game in Seattle I'm on the east coast. So I really don't have much of a clue for whats around the area. By the sounds of it I can quite easily pop down a small insular town easily. Ah the joy of having a Street Sam crying for his mommy.
Ravor
Just don't get the mistaken idea that an insular rural area will look anything close to people in the movie Deliverance. At least not until after the Elder One/Free Spirit drops its masking powers... nyahnyah.gif vegm.gif
MadHamish
Just hit Googlemaps and found a charming place smack in the middle of Washington called Chelan. It's smack in the middle of the state on a good sized lake/resevoir, is in a mountainous region, and even has a big waterfall nearby that would be a good place to find radicals.
Should serve.
Serial_Peacemaker
Excellent though I wonder where the church is.
MadHamish
How 'bout under the boat marina at the south-east end of the lake. Give your runners a chance at a high-spirited boat/jetski chase at the end of the run. vegm.gif
Serial_Peacemaker
No, the public church. Not the crazy cultist den.
MadHamish
Check out the satellite views on Google maps.

Take your pick...proof.gif

St Francis Catholic church: A red roofed building near the center of town across form a shopping center looking building.
Mormon Church: At the north-east end of town, across from a field.
Methodist Church: Across the river from the marina, about 100ft from the shore and next to a little park looking area.

There's a couple others, but these would probably be the best ones. Just type Chelan WA church into Google maps.
mfb
i don't have any advice on specific locations, but you should consider setting it in one of the NANs. they have 'white reservations'--non-injun communities that were allowed to remain on their land, and are now basically self-governed and secluded. you can put pretty much anything you want out there, it's not like the NANs have population density high enough to care what some crazy hicks are doing out on the back forty (even given SR's... optimistic ideas about the size of the NA population).
Kyoto Kid
...reservations for "white eyes", now that is an appropriate twist
Wounded Ronin
Hey, maybe you could have the yokels try and castrate the PCs while squeezing their sides.
Ravor
Only if they had built custom squeeze-shoots first... biggrin.gif
Ed_209a
"Next of Kin" with Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson is a pretty good movie to show what people in very rural parts of the country are capable of.

Wounded Ronin
QUOTE (Ravor)
Only if they had built custom squeeze-shoots first... biggrin.gif

Oh, christ! That's rapidly spiraling into some kind of BDSM horror. You could have a town full of depraved hicks who want to take it to the man by killing all the travellers who pass through their area. That part is pretty cliche (see Children Of The Corn the short story, House Of A Thousand Corpses, etc.) but the non cliche part would be the agrarian terror theme with various things used to kill animals adopted for use against humans.


I remember in the old FPS "Damage Incorporated" the first mission involved storming an underground detention center set up by white supremacists which they called "The Abbatoir". Since "Damage Incorporated" was just essentially an extensive Marathon mod "The Abbatoir" consisted of dark passageways and a few cells. But it would be possible to do a modern take on that where "The Abbatoir" is in fact some kind of hideous butcher factor being used on humans.

I also think that we can take a valuable cue from the first Soldier of Fortune video game. There was actually a slaughterhouse level in that game. I feel like it's actually one of the more unique levels I've ever played in a FPS. Basically, John Mullins had to go through a slaughterhouse where he is assaulted by the usual paramilitary guys but also blood-stained butchers wielding cleavers and deagles. It starts out pretty clean outside but as you go deeper and deeper the ambient sound begins to include cow agony and there's chunks of meat everywhere and chainsaws and the like. Finally, you jump down a pipe and it's like something from a nightmare. You land in the drainage system where you're knee-deep in blood and viscera. The walls are caked with reddish goop. Chunks of meat and bone fall down from the ceiling onto your head. That's one of the most memorable things I've ever played through in a video game.
2bit
nummy
ornot
You know when I first saw this thread I thought he's going to run 'Children of the Corn' Then it morphed into the Wicker Man, then Deliverance, and now finally Children of the Corn.

As for FPSs in abbatoirs, there was rather a fun level in the third Hitman (I think it was the 3rd one anyway), where the mission took you into an abattoir that was doing part time as an S&M club. Certainly an interesting juxtaposition.
Spike
Ironically, for my second post of the thread... I grew up about 20-40 miles north or so of where children of the Corn was set. My long ago nickname from highschool was Malachai.

So I have seriously got your rural creep vibe thing going in my life...


.... and I consider myself a city boy.





Mostly.
Shrike30
Even parts of some of the "larger" towns nearby like Issaquah are shockingly rural. When you get into the mountainous areas, you've got pretty significant ridges (it's hard to understand if you come from the east coast/midwest, but what gets classified as a "mountain" in some parts of the country gets classified as a "steep driveway" here). These ridges mean that while you may only be a quarter mile from a heavily developed part of town, you might be in essentially wooded territory, with the occasional trailer or run-down shed and unpaved roads running wherever they developed.

If you're looking for just the other side of the mountains and you're checking out Google Earth, feed it "Cle Elum, WA" and see what you think.
Serial_Peacemaker
Well a little town is a means to an end. I want a very insular town, that I can send the Runners into and turn into a small, and very active section of hell. I want them cut off from home, without their contacts. I want them to be thinking "Screw How Many Bullets Do I have left?" I know that small isolated towns are good for that. I do think I'll use Chelan I'm just trying to figure out where the town put the wall to keep out the Go Gangs.
Roadspike
Mmm... Cle Elum. Perfect place to whack some city runners.
Kyoto Kid
QUOTE (Roadspike)
Mmm... Cle Elum. Perfect place to whack some city runners.

...been there. Most definitely.
Cain
Cle Elum is perfect. If you want the real small-town feel, though, look up Twisp. Sheltom, Belfair, and Marblemount also fit your bill, although Marblemount is probably the best fit.
Cheops
How's this for insular for you.

Town converted to Universal Brotherhood back in the day. Turned the local Baptist church into a UB Church and most of the citizens converted. When the bugs got revealed the hive went underground so that when the bug hunters came through looking for it all they found was an abandoned Baptist church.

Hive is still there but on the face of things it is just a small town like any other.
Wounded Ronin
QUOTE (Cheops)
How's this for insular for you.

Town converted to Universal Brotherhood back in the day. Turned the local Baptist church into a UB Church and most of the citizens converted. When the bugs got revealed the hive went underground so that when the bug hunters came through looking for it all they found was an abandoned Baptist church.

Hive is still there but on the face of things it is just a small town like any other.

I suppose it depends if you want to take it in the direction of supernatural horror or horror at yokelism.

Personally, terrifying yokelism is more disturbing and haunting to me than supernatural horror. It's harder to dismiss in my mind. Like, I fully believe that if I went to a small rural town somewhere and said, "I don't approve of some of George W. Bush's policies" the yokels *would* castrate me in a squeeze shoot. I don't believe that I would ever encounter insect spirits, though.
Kyoto Kid
..hmm, I may have to set a scenario in Hancock County Wisconsin sometime.
Ravor
Naw you don't have to worry about that, at least not in the Rural West where I hail from, even in Wyoming very few people really like Bush despite having voted for him twice. (Lesser of two evils is the reasoning that most people give me when I ask why they voted for someone they don't actually like.)

Now if you started making "anti-gun" or "pro-tree hugger" statements then all bets are off... cyber.gif

Whipstitch
There's a Hancock, Wisconsin, but it's not a county. For the record, as long as Bush has been brought up, Minnesota and Wisconsin are traditionally blue states, although Wisconsin is by a fairly narrow margin these days. People forget that while the states around the Great Lakes area have vast chunks of agricultural area, culturally we're very much centered around our large shipping and urban sectors, so we tend to live and vote accordingly. One can even easily make the argument that the farmers out here are very business oriented, since unlike truly secluded rural areas, most of the farms here are -huge- and require a fair amount of pure business savvy. The Great Lakes states in general are pretty hard to call isolated until you start getting REALLY up north. Treacherous terrain is the way to go if you want to get into the scary secluded types, and much of the midwest is actually ideal for travel, if anything (although it's boring as hell, flat terrain makes for easy driving). The real reason a lot of MN/WI is seen as backwards is due to the sheer density of the Scandinavian population here. And yeah, we do talk kinda funny.
hyzmarca
QUOTE (Wounded Ronin)
QUOTE (Cheops @ Apr 15 2007, 02:55 PM)
How's this for insular for you.

Town converted to Universal Brotherhood back in the day.  Turned the local Baptist church into a UB Church and most of the citizens converted.  When the bugs got revealed the hive went underground so that when the bug hunters came through looking for it all they found was an abandoned Baptist church.

Hive is still there but on the face of things it is just a small town like any other.

I suppose it depends if you want to take it in the direction of supernatural horror or horror at yokelism.

Personally, terrifying yokelism is more disturbing and haunting to me than supernatural horror. It's harder to dismiss in my mind. Like, I fully believe that if I went to a small rural town somewhere and said, "I don't approve of some of George W. Bush's policies" the yokels *would* castrate me in a squeeze shoot. I don't believe that I would ever encounter insect spirits, though.

But just think of the terrifying hilarity of yokel bug spirits. Just think of all of those poor fleh-forms and good merges whose insect sensibilities were overwhelmed by the yokel personalities of their hosts.
From the Bugs point of view, it is existential horror at its worst, but it can be yokel horror from the PCs point of view.
bibliophile20
QUOTE (hyzmarca)
But just think of the terrifying hilarity of yokel bug spirits. Just think of all of those poor fleh-forms and good merges whose insect sensibilities were overwhelmed by the yokel personalities of their hosts.
From the Bugs point of view, it is existential horror at its worst, but it can be yokel horror from the PCs point of view.

I'm just remembering that joke--"You know you're a redneck when... a bug zapper at twilight is quality entertainment."

Hmmm... makes me wonder what the UB did in societies where fried insects are considered a delicacy...
Wounded Ronin
Wow, I learned something about rural places from this thread.
Kyoto Kid
QUOTE (whipstitch)
here's a Hancock, Wisconsin, but it's not a county.

..ack! And to think I used to live in Wisconsin, frequently traveled through Plainfield on my way between College in Stevens Point & Milwaukee, and was a geography wiz back in school too. Too much moss on the brain from living out here in the "Pacific Northwet for the last 27 years...

...or is it all that heavy strong beer they make out here?
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