I just took a trip top San Francisco, and I loved the city. Now I'm wanting to set a SR4 game there and I'm looking to find whatever resources are out there. I know about the California Free State book that set the basics for 2056 (or so), but I've heard that other sources have more up to date info. Where can I find it?

Anyone ambitious enough to give me a brief timeline for the Bay Area from 2056-2070?

Shadows of North America, Threats 2, maybe Year of the Comet, too.

I've lived in SF almost all my life; feel free to run a few questions by me.
I imagine that SF and its neighbor cities in 2070 will still have lots of leftover tensions and damage from the JIS occupation. Uncleared mines, munitions waste product toxic spills, and accusations that so-and-so was a collaborator. JIS troopers who deserted and "went native", especially those that weren't male and ethnic Japanese (if you're an eta or Okinawan or Korean who got drafted and sent to SF, deserting to a culture that might treat you as an equal could be attractive).
I like to think that the emphasis on innovation and counterculture that's helped us become a software center, also makes 2070s SF a leader in magical innovation, and perhaps there's a local WuXing presence and/or competition, and many of the hot new spell formulae are written here.

On another hand... are there any big earthquakes in the official timeline? To some extent, faultline pressure builds up slowly and releases in quakes, so the longer it's been since an earthquake, the more possibility of a large one. (small ones are in a way good news.)

I dunno about the counterculture thing - I'd think the Japanese occupation kinda squished the counterculture dead.

After the first mass protest got machine gunned and buried in mass graves, street protests were greatly reduced. . . .

Yeah, and I can't see the Japanese being very supportive of the rest of the counterculture. Or, any counterculture-type thing, really.

The whole idea of a counterculture would probably have died gruesomely after the first few months.

(I'm not sure SF has always been the center of any sort of counterculture, anyway - I seem to remember learning that San Fran prior to the 1960s was a rather conservative, conventional sort of place, socially.)

I've looked over the sources that talk about Saito coming to power, but where is his fall and the subsequent events covered?

With my luck it's probably in System Crash - one of the few books I don't have access to...

Ah, you may be Shadowrun gurus, but your counterculture fu is weak. Massing in the streets when the JIS troopers are willing to massacre, is pitting weakness against strength, and counterculture does not always equal stupid or naive. Feminism, gay pride, race equality, youth empowerment, paganism, etc. all went *underground* in SF during the Occupation - or just over the border; the JIS were never able to take Silicon Valley, and I doubt they could effectively patrol Marin let alone Humbolt or Mendocino.
It's possible that a few JIS officers were seduced when off duty with recreational drugs, kinky sex, or other non-JIS-approved entertainment, then blackmailed into turning a blind eye to resistance activities.

I don't think anyone's saying all of San Francisco's counterculture movements were wholly squashed -- just that they don't quite run the city quite as much as they're reputed to do today. You won't see any pride parades (for anything but pure Japanese bloodlines) under Saito's watch, that's for sure. They might not be gone, but they're certainly not popular or obvious about their presence.

I remember a published adventure that took place in San Francisco (or thereabouts), too, and it might have some information in it that was a little more recent than the Calfree book.

I don't remember which book it was in, but here's a brief synopsis for those who might be able to help find it...



I read up on the CalFree book pretty seriously, because I had a wild hair to run a former terrorist type (and decided on the Metahuman People's Alliance). Tyler's turned into one of my favorite characters, since. I've always thought it'd be a fun campaign to try and run, just being a bunch of folks fighting the Japanese invasion force (and later Saito's boys in particular), similar to some of the "everyday schmuck when the shit hits the fan in the Arcology" type of games, or something like that. Who wouldn't love trying to play Red Dawn in an urban setting instead of a rural?

Penta and kzt seem to have some strong opinions on counterculture. (shrug) I think you're setting up and shooting down "straw man" arguments. I brought up counterculture and innovation as an industrial/economic factor; willingness to try new things has served us well in technology - there's a reason that Hewlett-Packard and Macintosh got started here! If you really, really think that Saito managed, in ten years, to make San Franciscans value conservatism (as anything other than "fake it when the occupiers are watching"), then suit yourself. Pun intended.

So, you tell us - if Saito convinced all San Franciscans that "the outstanding peg gets hammered down", and we all started ancestor worship at Shinto shrines, then what happens after he leaves?

Make a choice:

Poland, after the Soviet liberation and Communist mass murders, followed by the Nazi liberation and Nazi mass murders, followed by the Anti-Nazi uprisings and subsequent/concurrent mass murders, followed by the Soviet liberation and mass murders, followed by the anti-soviet guerrilla war that was eventually put down in the 50s with a great deal of brutality.

Or France, where the mass of the government had actively cooperated with the Nazis and ended up covering up the collaboration and got promoted with no side effects. Like Maurice Papon, later prefect of Police in Paris and Francois Mitterrand, later president of France.

It's not likely to be fun city. Too many collaborators and victims.

IIRC, the Dutch acted much like the French, except for the total denial that any Dutchman had actually collaborated. IIRC, the person who got paid by the Germans for turning in Anne Frank (and dozens of other Jews) lived happily ever after.

Riley: Where I got vehement was the idea that after...20+, 30+ years? (I forget when the JIS occupation of SanFran started) of foreign occupation, San Francisco would be anything -but- scarred and traumatized and having a societal case of PTSD, to a massive extent at least.

France and the Netherlands are not relevant examples. Period. They were occupied for 6 years at the most. The people who took leadership positions immediately after the war in many cases were involved in politics before the war, too. (De Gaulle is the obvious exception here, I grant.) At the same time, they had governments-in-exile that really maintained a lot of the institutional memory of government during the occupation.

Once you go past 10 years, 20 years at max, then your political infrastructure, the people who remember what life was like and perhaps were politically active before the occupation, starts to really degrade. Because people get old, they die, and so forth. And the number of people who even remember what life was like before the occupation gets smaller and smaller. People may get that "Japanese occupation is bad", but that says nothing about the post-occupation situation. If your political infrastructure doesn't exist, how can you say anything about life after that?

The gay pride movement really exploded here in the SF Bay Area. Reference the Stonewall Riot. We're talking about a population that was pretty brutally oppressed/beaten/etc. for decades, with police raids on bars, bathhouses and other subculture meeting sites. What happened when the oppression lifted (because of resistance and struggle)? If you don't know, come see Gay Pride week (brought to you by Miller and Annheiser-Busch!) At least one of the older gay bars in the East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland) has a special basement hiding spot for that very reason.

The cops here aren't particularly gentle. I got shot eight times with wooden dowels and rubber bullets and rammed twice by motorcycles for shutting down the Port of Oakland to stop shipment of war materials a couple years ago. If there'd been fewer cameras or more black kids it would have been real bullets.

On the game note:
SF isn't a city in isolation. It's fifteen minutes on BART to Oakland or Berkeley across the Bay. SF is pretty small (about 750,000 people and 47 sq miles) and the metro SF Bay Area is 7.2 million people and a much much larger sq mileage.

One thing my players have just gotten a taste of is the Life Imitating Art aspect of Japanese mechs. Some are tech, some are magic. None are the massive BattleTech 50 ton monsters. Most are simply powered armor and exoskeletons with guns. Some are ally spirits. All are bad news for lightly armed/armored resistance fighters.

Much resistance is located in the East Bay (where most folx without loads of cash had already relocated.) The Bay Bridge has scanners and mm wave radar to check every vehicle for suspicious 'ware and weapons. Treasure Island (roughly midway along the Bay Bridge between Oakland and Berkeley) is a heavily armed way station for intercepting raids. Last transBay run my players went on, a friendly mage Shapechanged three of them (sust foci) and they just flew across. That being said, the Bay is only around 6 ft deep for most of it. The shipping channel up the middle is dredged to 42 or 400 ft deep (i forget which), but is rather narrow.

A lot of hardware is funneled into the East Bay (SF is the West Bay) by other corps who lost facilities or freedom in the Occupation. (Like Rome or the US, it's cheaper to send weapons to the neighbors of your opponents than to send armies.)

San Jose and Silicon Valley are closely held by Ares and the JIS did NOT send enough Marines or gear to take on Ares.

Just my $0.02.

pax,
stormcrow

Ah, thanks Penta. I went back to SR4 BBB to check the duration of the occupation, and I'd thought it was under ten years but looks more like 30; CalFree secedes (or is booted) in 2036, tangles with TirTairngire and Aztlan, brings in the JIS, then the occupation lasts until late 2060s. Yes, on that scale, one gets effects somewhat like the Warsaw Pact nations. My mother, a journalist, went to Chechoslovakia to cover their first post-Soviet elections... it had been a long, long time and they didn't have familiarity with how elections work. As a frequent staffer of polling places, I can imagine the difficulties of running a fair and fast-moving polling place when neither staffers nor voters have any experience. Brrr. Imagining three decades of my hometown being patrolled by JIS troopers with bayonets makes Shadowrun a bit scarier for me. In the last decade, Saito is rogue, having defied the 2061 order for all JIS units to pull back to the home islands. No reinforcements, just whatever new troops he can recruit from those who have adapted to the new regime.

Post-occupation SF would have plenty of the edgy dystopic aspect of Shadowrun; the Big Brother aspect would have been recently extreme, but presumably it's a while before anyone gets social controls in place again, unless they take over whatever surveillance cameras and informants and so forth Saito had in place. Meanwhile, the dynamics of who you can trust could be very tricky, and there'd be room for gangs and shaman-based tribes and other "outsider" organizations to gain social capital.

Counterculture comes in various forms. Big festivals are one. Replacing ties with tie-dye is another form. Questioning authority is another; don't openly defy a JIS patroller, but I dunno that SF families became quite as patriarchal as Saito would have liked. I speculate that the JIS might have been quite frustrated that once they purged the Bay Area of all the wacky free-thinkers, the high-tech industry stopped being quite such a tax-base cash-cow... kinda like the way that after the Spanish Inquisition got rid of all the Jewish bankers and scholars, the Spanish economy took a big hit.

So... how long after V-E day did Amsterdam and Paris regain their aspect as cities with intellectualism, hedonism, liberalism (in any sense of the word)?

As was pointed out before, 5 years isn't 30 years. 30 years means many people there grew up with this as the way things are, and many of the older counter culture types would have died off (from one reason or another).

Ask Frank about Prague. I like his blogs name "Waitinginline".

Frank has a blog? Do tell. I'm always interested in what he has to say. Especially when he rants, it amuses me greatly. Linky? My search fu has failed me thus far in google.

Chris

I really like reading Frank's posts on CA. They make me all warm and cozy. Maybe it is the heat radiating from his posts that do it...

By the way, I totally agree with what he says. I have lived in the South Bay for almost all my life (5 years I was in San Diego) and what has happened to CA is a joke.

Oh, and there is no West Bay. There is the North Bay, East Bay, South Bay and the Pennisula. If you look at a map of the region, it makes sense. West Bay, yesh. Did you pick that up in Frisco? Tourist.

No, iron mouser, i've lived in Oakland and Berkeley for most of the last decade. Many of us living in the East Bay refer to SF as the West Bay. It's a sort of joke at SF-centric mindsets. Sheesh. Resident. ;-P

Excellent write-up on the discrepancies, Frank. In our local group (IRL living in East and West Bay, and playing in Occupation Era Bay Area) we scrapped/rewrote some of it for greater coherency and fun.


On a toxics note, the Farallones provide an excellent offshore toxic site. They lie 27 miles (43 km) outside the Golden Gate, 20 miles (32 km) south of Point Reyes. They are visible from the mainland on clear days. The islands are officially part of the City and County of San Francisco. If you don't want to read the lengthy bit below, the summation is GIANT TOXIC GREAT WHITE SHARKS vs. SELKIES.

From 1946 to 1970, the sea around the Farallones was used as a nuclear dumping site for radioactive waste under the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission at a site known as the Farallon Island Nuclear Waste Dump. According to a 1980 report by the Environmental Protection Agency, approximately 47,500 containers, 55 gallon steel drums, were dumped in the vicinity of the Farallones. The primary military agency which used the dumping site was the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, in San Francisco, which was charged with decontamination of the ships from the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in 1946 and carried out additional radiological work throughout the period. The irradiated US Navy ship USS Independence, which was used as a target at Operation Crossroads, "loaded with radioactive waste from NRDL and other generators, was towed to sea and sunk," apparently near this site. According to the United States Geological Survey, "The exact location of the containers and the potential hazard the containers pose to the environment are unknown." The 1980 EPA report argues that attempts to remove the barrels would likely produce more of a risk to humans and the environment than simply letting them remain on the bottom of the ocean.

South Farallon Islands
Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI) is the largest island, with an area of 0.31 km² or 310,406 m²) and is the only inhabited one. The island is pyramidal in shape and 109 meters high. The peak, Tower Hill (actually a double peak consisting of Lighthouse Hill and Little Lighthouse Hill), is the location of a lighthouse, the Farallon Island Light. The large flat area in the southeast of the island is called Marine Terrace. Immediately south of it is Mussel Flat, about 30 by 120 meters, which is cut off from the main island only during high tide.
Seal Rock (Saddle Rock), about 250 meters south of SEFI is, about 80 by 250 meters in size, and 25 meters high.
Maintop Island (West End) is immediately to the west of SEFI, separated by a narrow impassable gorge, The Jordan (Jordan Channel), which connects Mirounga Bay in the south to Maintop Bay in the north. It is the second largest island, and 68 meters high at Main Top hill in its eastern part. The Great West Arch, a rock formation, is in the west of the island, and Indian Head in the South.

There are a bunch of other islands, but they are small (less than 150 m across and ranging from sea level to 25 m high.)

The largest island is the wintering ground of several species of migrants, and regularly attracts vagrant birds (about 400 species of bird have been recorded on or around the island).
Five species of pinniped come to shore on the islands, and in some cases breed. These are the Northern Elephant Seal, Harbor Seal, Steller's Sea Lion, California Sea Lion, and the Northern Fur Seal (the last of which, like the Rhinoceros Auklet, began to return to the island again after protection).
The elephant seal population attracts a well-known population of Great White Sharks to the islands as well. By the year 2000, biologists were logging almost eighty attacks in a single season. No one had ever documented such behavior among great whites before.
The Farallons are unique in the size of the Great Whites that are attracted. The average length of a full-grown great white shark is 4 to 4.8 metres (13.3 to 15.8 ft), with a weight of 680 to 1,100 kilograms (1,500 to 2,450 lbs), females generally being larger than males. Farallon Great Whites range between the "smaller" males at 13 ft. to the females which generally range between 17-19 ft. (The largest accurately measured great white shark was a female caught in August 1988 at Prince Edward Island off the North Atlantic coast and measured 20.3 ft).
Humpback whales pass through this part of the Pacific Ocean on their migrations; moreover, in December 2005 one Humpback was rescued from netting entanglement east of the Farallons by staff of The Marine Mammal Center. The islands are in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, which protects the feeding grounds of the wildlife of the refuge.

Honestly to Frank: Thanks for the summary. I don't have *any* pre-SR4 books, so it's helpful to see what others are working from.

I don't share the apparent level of outrage that various writers and cartographers - and I'm guessing that they weren't well-resourced - are inconsistent with each other. I'm used to it from other multi-author fictional settings. Star Trek is perhaps an extreme example. Then again, I was a classical history major, so Thucidydes shaped my understanding of conflicting accounts of events. I can readily imagine a resident of 2070 SR San Francisco having read accounts all of the events in your summary, and noticing the incongruities, and deducing that SOMEONE must have been fudging history to fit their political agenda. In much the same way that there is STILL some disagreement about whether the Union or the Confederacy is at fault for the gunfire at Fort Sumter, or whether the government of Turkey killed any Armenians in the 1920s (Clinton and Bush both asked Congress not to use the term "genocide"). And if someone conquered all of Italy on the *pretext* of an invitation from the Vatican, well, that's precedented in history, no? Certainly there's disagreement about whether Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, or something else defines "California".

I do share annoyance at the idea of elves or dwarves forming nations only a decade after the first year of UGE births. Unless there's a good explanation out there.

Bias disclosure: I am a player in Stormcrow's group. Giant Toxic Great White Sharks? Dude, so glad I didn't know that when my PC was flying over SF Bay, shapechanged into a bird.

I was born in SF, raised in SF and Marin (the county on north side of Golden Gate Bridge), and am fully used to Oaklanders referring to SF as the West Bay. It's kinda like people describing modern "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe" in terms of the division of the Roman Empire. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Iron Mouser, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

What about that nuke that detonated over the bridge, eh?

Also: can you still get a good burrito in the Mission post-Saito?

Tir Na nOg was founded in 2034. By then, the oldest living elves with 12,000, give or take, and they highly elistist racist mofos who practices slavery and believed that they were The Passions' gift to metamankind and, by extention, elves were superior to all other races.

Spike babies would be about 34. Manipulations of the former lead the latter to create their own countries.

@Riley37 and Stormcrow - Odd, I have never heard the Peninsula called that by anyone, but I could have just been hanging out with a different group.

@G.NOME - Which bridge? There are two that lead into S.F city (Golden Gate and Bay Bridge), three to the south (San Mateo, Dumbarton and the (SR-created) Butterfly Bridge) and three more leading from the East Bay to points north (Whose names escape me, though I hear them in traffic reports each day).

The people of LA don't have full citizenship, according to SoNA. They have probationary citizenship. If the PCC only calculates it's population by counting full citizenship, it would account for the population discrepancy.

I know very little about Shadowrun history, but I am a military and foreign affairs buff. This whole Japanese invasion of SF has always sounded like the most asinine thing I can imagine. First of all, Japan has no military. The US defends it. Even if it did have a military, there are a lot more reasonable targets for invasion in that area of the world. Invade to protect economic interests? Trust me, pissing off your biggest partner and customer is pretty damn bad for the bottom line. Third, a naval crossing with an occupying force making it across despite vast US air and naval superiority would take a miracle. Surprise attack? Are you kidding? With radar, sonar, submarines and satellite surveillance? Even if there were a naval invasion… an enduring military occupation of the US… not a prayer.

It’s my opinion that writers of Shadowrun stretch a bit much at times to achieve justification for a setting to their liking.

Japan didn't "invade" in the traditional sense. First, you had the Azzies side with the CAS against the UCAS and California, not to mention the establishment of Tir Tairngire. Then you have the US countries disowning California. Even if Cali broke away, the UCAS didn't want them back cause they seemed a bunch of indecisive tree hugging pricks who simply caused problems. Regardless, once out from under the UCAS, that leaves Cali unprotected against Tir and the Azzies. So who do they turn to? The Japanese.

As for the Japanese, it's explained that their might isn't military, but technological at first. They developed satellites that could bring direct drone control into remote areas and invaded the Philippines and parts of Africa. To suddenly get a technological army on their side, San Fran essentially agreed to vassalage.

By the time Japan was able to take over, they were the biggest power in world and San Francisco was scared and helpless. Plus, since most of the corps in San Fran at the time were Japanese, it meant it was in their interest to support a takeover.

Sure, it's not the most likely scenario, but when you consider the depth of that timeline, it's also not much less likely than the UCAS never giving up control or the Azzies taking San Fran or Tir controlling all of the West Coast. Quite Frankly, inviting the predominant Superpower in to save you is a brilliant move in that situation.

There are already some debates about census methods, driven partly by desire to boost count for representation in House of Representatives; civil wars and people going intentionally off the grid may complicate matters. Some census takers may apply the "3/5 of all other persons" rule to DEOTs (dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls).

Iron Mouser, I've heard SF county called West Bay; dunno the boundary of South Bay - maybe SFO, or Palo Alto? Conflicts over water would be quite appropriate for Shadowrun CalFree history.

Heh. The skillset to make a good burrito has been passed on from generation to generation... even if Saito systematically eliminates the tacquerias, parents teach children in secret.

By the way... does Sixth World history have an explanation for the lack of rising ocean levels?

And yet that same California could kick the Tir -- a country entire books are dedicated to telling us how badass and awesome they are and you aren't -- to the curb, twice.

You forget that the entire US was in a recession. California probably, at that point, didn't have the money to viably finance a war without going into serious debt. And who would they go into debt to? A Japanese corp, maybe? Most of their money was federally controlled, so getting the boot would've seriously hurt their finances as well.

Regardless, with most of the San Fran corps being Japanese, it's in their interest to offer a few choice bribes and delay any private security force from saving the day. Plus the corps, Ares included, liked the Japanese deregulation of business since it allowed them immense profits thanks to little oversight.