So I'm preparing to run a game in St. Louis which is split (along HW 44 conviniently enough) between the UCAS and they CAS. The question is, is there any kind of wall or prevention on migration between the two nations? Border patrols, anything like that?

I suppose not, since the UCAS and CAS aren't too hostile.

I almost find it surprising though. Aparently there's some corp out there that specializes in the fabrication of big ass walls to throw up around cities on short notice. How else do you explain Chicago, L.A., and I believe Berlin (?). Their sales department must be itching fo another national disaster, and in the mean time would be lobbying to try to get national borders fenced in. I think I'll use it in a run, and leave it up to the players to decide if I'm being serious or not. It just might be crazy enough to work.

Don't forget Denver, Portland and Austin (?).
Probably more.

Walled-up cities are about as common in SR as nuclear meltdowns.

That said, i don't think there'd be a wall in St. Louis, but i'd expect some border patrols and customs offices, unless the UCAS and CAS have a far-reaching free trade agreement i haven't heard of (which might be possible, as i'm not to familiar with most of North America in SR).

Of Course. How I forgot to include those first to, I have no idea. Shame on me.

I would posit a sort of border crossing similar to what currently exists between Canada and the USA now. Two checkpoints, set up like this one with about 10-20 feet of no man's land inbetween. I would expect some sort of security between the two borders in the no man's land simply to keep shadowrunners from evading security by fleeing from one jurisdiction to another.

Halliburton, anyone?

Sadly, that appears to be the case in real life.
It seems that "separation barriers" are much more common outside of the USA.

I could imagine the divider going right up 44. That's what it more or less looks like by the map of the US in the book. As far as the divider being a wall? The highway itself is enough of a divider, but as we have underpasses like Kingshighway, Hampton, Vandeveter and Grand and such, there would be checkpoints underneath the highway and anywhere the highway is elevated probably a good helping of chain link with razor or mono wire topping it. Minor overpasses that would allow access would probably be removed so there were fewer checkpoints...

Yes, this is probably closer to what I have been thinking.

Guess I've always just assumed it was more along the lines of major checkpoints at large crossings, smaller checkpoints at smaller crossings, and maybe some haphazard attempt at border patrol in between. If the areas are friendly toward one another, the checkpoints are mostly just for tracking shipping and movement of population, and the border patrols are few and far between, and mostly to combat smuggling, etc. If they aren't, scale up to suit.

Uhm ... no offense intended, but I was under the impression you had one on parts of the US/Mexican border? And there were some plans for extending that all the way from San Diego to the Rio Grande?

I might well be wrong there, but considering how short on borders North America is, that'd be 50% of borders ... if I'm mistaken there, the better, because that always felt like total insanity to me.

Anyway, fortified borders are common in many parts of the world, and have been for a long time, from Rome's Limes and the Great Wall of China to the Maginot line, North/South Korean border, inner-German border, and today's Israel/West Bank and Gaza Borders. Still, it's not, and has never been, the norm.

As for the highway, maybe it's Ares-owned, and thus exterritorial, and there're just checkpoints on whatever exit you take, and the guys controlling you would be either CAS or UCAS, depending on which side you exit to?

I could imagine since St. Louis is a big smuggling city, as it is the major gateway in between the UCAS and the CAS in the western states, checkpoints would be pretty tight and there would be big efforts to stem smuggling. According to Shadows of North America, the writers said that smuggling was more of a free for all than it was in MSP and New Orleans or Denver. That to me implies that there are still good and not too many corrupted borders and smuggling isn't subsidized under syndicates like in other cities. So, I would imagine that a lot of smuggling routes are actually viable routes through checkpoints, however you have to rely on good hiding tricks and hidden compartments to make it through. There would probably also be a few routes that are for small vehicles (like bikes or drones) that take smugglers through the some sewer systems and through some abandoned 19th century under-city structures. St. Louis is renowned for it's turn of the century caves and water systems underneath parts of downtown. I've seen most of them myself as some of my friends have taken me on some urban exploring runs through dead parts of both the south side of 44 and the abandoned factory district off of I-70 and Hall street. According to SoNA as well, smuggling routes by TBird don't go over too well because both sides of the border might mistake a breach of airspace as an attack from the other nation as both have large standing numbers of troops just outside city limits. However I would bet that there are some air smuggling routes making use of the rolling hills and riverways that are abundant around I-44, like the Meramec River among others.

Has there ever been any other mention of St. Louis in a SR book outside of SoNA?

Well, that is something that was being bandied about, and a little progress (as some might say) was made, but for the most part, it was never built. There are a few chain link fences along the border (in Texas at least) but overall, little has been done. The current election and economic crisis has pushed the illegal question to the back-burner, which means the border fence idea is there as well.

As to actual border walls in Shadowrun... I can see them being in use (more so in Texas with CAS and Aztlan than the CAS/UCAS border), but overall, they are not very efficient. With the advances in transportation, it would be extremely easy to bypass them, and guaranteed that smugglers would have tunnel routes all over the place (see San Diego now with the drug running tunnels).

Fences along the US/Mexican border are all extremely half-assed, mostly due to the fact that to build a fence that is actually capable of impeding illegal crossing would be absurdly expensive. Proposed fence solutions are no less half-assed, generally taking all of 180 seconds to bypass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obsf_oMaGEA
Fast Forward to 5:50.

Between two nations where the relations are friendly, the border won't be super-tight. So in St. Louis, which I suspect would be split along the river, you'd have checkpoints at all the river crossings staffed by border security guards, but other than that nothing too significant. If it's not split along the river, then I would expect that most streets crossing the border are closed off with a barrier, and the major roads remain open with checkpoints staffed by border security guards. There's also probably some sort of low-grade wall with regular patrols and sensor security, but no big anti personnel zones that would necessitate tearing down buildings or anything. Just enough security to discourage most of the illegal cross-border traffic.

Actually the military ran some tests years ago on fencing systems for secure complexes. They found that the best didn't slow down motivated attackers more than 60 seconds. Cardboard, carpet and ladders worked well, even against multiple fences. You need to cover them with direct fire to actually STOP people. Adding land mines significantly increase the delay time against people who don't want to die right now, but they can still get through a 20 meter deep minefield pretty darn fast if they know what they are doing, particularly if you are willing to use explosives to blow the mines.

Well, the guys in the video took three minutes at the longest (climbing over). Digging under and tearing a hole in the wall both turned out to be faster solutions for a team of two. Of course, unless we're dealing with impractically tough materials planted impractically deep and built up impractically high, at least one of these three solutions will be viable. The fourth solution, just go around the thing, would take the longest.

The river doesn't split the city in St. Louis. It runs north-south along the east side of downtown. On the other (east) side of the river you have rail yards and flood lowlands and chemical processing plants (not to mention an unbelievably high concentration of strip clubs) in a small town called Sauget and you also have the destroyed bombed out looking areas of East St. Louis, IL which despite some attempts at gentrification, still succeed in being horrible areas of town. To the north in IL there are some other small communities but nothing noteworthy.

There is the Missouri River, but that only splits St. Charles County (which is serious middle class suburbia with heavy doses of racism, sexual repression, rampant right wing attittudes, and isolationism. They keep turning down mass transit rail propositions from STL county because they don't want the city-folk coming in and upsetting life or stealing their TVs from their homes and riding the train back home with them) from St. Louis County and dumps into the Mississippi north of the actual St. Louis city, closer to Alton, IL.

There are a bunch of other highways that could separate the north (UCAS) STL from south (CAS) STL. Even though the border follows I-44 up along through Southern Missouri, I think that 44 through St. Louis would be too much of a loss for the CAS. They'd want a geographically equal portion of the city itself, so when I tried to run a campaign in STL, I had the border split along 44 until it hit I-270, and it followed that north a few miles to I-64 and followed that east to the river where the border runs south again. 64 is a much more symmetrical split through the actual city areas. Most of downtown is still north of this highway, but seeing that the CAS gets the short end of the stick more often than not, it would make perfect sense.

I'd expect something similar to how Denver is split along the UCAS-CAS border.

i.e. read missions...

Either way, it's feasible. There are walls between neighborhoods in L.A. Of course they say that's for the flooding issues, but they built a few of 'em as they were segregating the city. So if it can be done there, it can be done elsewhere.

Two 12-foot electrified chain-link fences, 40 feet apart; mono filament wire at the top, and land mines between the two fences. checkpoints at border crossings. patrolling drones, spirits, and customs officers. tear-gas grenades on tripwires.

What self-respecting barrier salesman would push a concrete wall when he's got a warehouse full of anti-personnel mines and tear gas that have to move?

Yeah, your border is much better. But still, I don't think that the UCAS-CAS border in St. Louis is going to be anywhere near as militarized as the Berlin Wall was. I would expect border security checkposts much like those that currently exist between the U.S. and Canada at major crossings, and fences elsewhere. No land mines, major antipersonnel zones, and automatic cannon turrets on the wall. They're not hostile nations, and as free a flow of traffic across the border is good for commerce.

Yeah, I can't imagine much beyond fences either. The highway makes a really good divider, and where it is ground level the highway would have high chain-link fences on either side with some razor or mono wire at the top. Where the highway is elevated close to downtown, there would be fences underneath it with said wire devices at the top. I can't imagine staffing more than 5 or 6 big border crossings throughout the city, so there would probably be big checkpoints at MAJOR roadways that run North/South like a few that I listed earlier. A lot of the smaller highway exits and crossings would most likely have been destroyed or barricaded to prevent use anymore.

I do run a game set in St Louis, and I used a parallel to separate the city, opposed to the highway. But it cuts the about where the high way is. My mentality was that it was more realistic to close smaller roads and exit ramps, set up border booths on the highway itself; than to use the highway as a border. Less patrolled areas get a stronger boarder treatment, like walls and drone security; but heavily traffic areas have personnel and wire top fences.

This parallel allows UCAS to retain most of St. Louis, as my interpretation of the NA map has the border line going up to St. Louis but not entering it. In my version of things, CAS has created their own sprawl for the city of South St. Louis, and regard it as a strong place to launch international companies due to it's approximation to the border. This creates a supreme business dynamic as companies with their UCAS west branch in Chicago will still have their CAS west branch in South St. Louis. Likewise in regards for CAS Dallas branches and UCAS St. Louis branches.

I also tried to create a dynamic shift from the way things exist in the area now. Once the Native American population gained such affluence, a group (I refer to as the Amerindian League) bought up lower economic strata land on the east side to cement their holdings on both the nexus of rivers and the Cahokia Mounds. Both of these area potent landmarks. The two rivers becoming one creates a geological potency in the sixth world, and the Cahokia Mounds was an ancient gathering place for NA tribes across all the western hemisphere (as advertised in their current museums in the real world). The League set up a corp, named Sacred Sight, to solidify their land grab (the idea of a NA land grab makes me chuckle, historically speaking), and offers municipal security, like Lonestar called The Sight, as well as other services. This transformed East St. Louis from a burned out suburb, to a thriving metropolis in it's own right.

This created a triple sprawl, hugging two borders. I liken it to Minneapolis and St. Paul but with an extra city. Plenty of sprawl to get lost in, chummer; with jurisdiction issues that will bring a tear to your eye. A runners paradise.

I have a few traditional angles, like the rise of Anhieser/Busch as a triple-A (all of this before the Inbev situation); but very few, as I like the SR setting for it's differences rather than it's similarities. I am interested in hearing more of your ideas as to try and create a unified St. Louis setting for shadowrun, and feel free to borrow from mine if it aids you.

We should collaborate and send a pitch to Catalyst for a St. Louis write up in a settings book for smuggling. 2nd edition had Smuggler's Havens but was mostly about New Orleans. We should see in print was some major border towns would be like, first and foremost, STL.

But yeah, it would make sense to close a highway and turn it into the no-man's land. This works especially well with I-40, since the north would have a major east/west highway being 70, and the south would have 44. Also, since most anything of importance to STL is north of the I40 split, it would still give good reason to see rise of a South St. Louis.

I used to agree with you about the North vs. South St. Louis, splitting it down I-40. I lived in St. Chuck(St.Charles,San Carlos) and detested 40 much less anything south. But then I started hanging out with people from Webster, and people who frequented Soulard Market, and actually going to Tower Grove park and the like. Now I visit the whole city and I find (IMO) the line where St. Louis truly becomes south is well into south county(and I'm talking Festus, and Crystal City). My parallel, that splits the city, is much farther south because of it.

The other reason is that all St Louis highway converge downtown, so 64/40/61 as a no-man's land would eat away much of downtown. I assumed the politicians of St. Louis would try to avoid that. Not to mention, why bother giving the CAS anything of any value, anyway. (Knowing I might be starting a war) I'm not the largest fan of the south, and I pretty much detest the bible belt.

TKDN, where in St. Louie do you hail from? I would love to collaborate, or even play North versus South with you (you can pick the side) to see how land we can get for our side. Hell, if we can do it here we could get supporters any campaign for UCAS or CAS.

I'll watching the post.

Well, I'm from Florissant myself, living in St. Charles now, and I'm still working on coming up with my campaign (the players are waiting to start until they finish their degrees this semester). Great to know others from the area are on dumpshock.

Back to the split though, I've looked at the official campaign map in SR4 very closely, and the best I can tell the split is actually along 44. 64/40 is too much of a central split, and 44 leaves much of downtown proper as well as West County and of course NOCO firmly in the UCAS. I think I'm going to go with that split, though I'm still working on border crossings. I think the border itself will use the highway as others have suggested, where it is ground bound with high fences and monowire, and where elevated the same with additional prefab concrete walls here and there, as well as most of the minor exits being blocked or simply demolished. I figure the UCAS will patrol the highway while the CAS will man more specific locations with both present at major crossings, one of which being 270. I'm also working on a personal google map if anyone would like to see it...

Here are the regions in the UCAS I will be using at first:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&i...742c493e2b21903

And here are the locations I am placing:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&i...a370bd&z=12

Hope you find these useful for St. Louis...

You know, I would expect there to be a butt load of smuggling in the south west Kansas/Oklahoma panhandle/Texas panhandle area, considering that the UCAS, CAS, Pueblo, and Souix borders really merge there. Though, it's possible that the over-abundance of border patrol personel in those areas may make it unfeasible. I may just be predisposed to using the area in games since that's where I grew up, and I happen to know almost every good dirt road between Wichita, Amarillo, and Colorado Springs.

I also live in St. Charles. Well, when looking at the map and comparing areas, even if the CAS end up with Webster, Soulard and Tower Groves, even though they are sizable areas, they lack any kind of real money making potential like Clayton, Downtown, and the Central West End. That's what I meant by there isn't anything south of 64. Sure, there are a lot of communities, but I Imagine that the CAS would still at least like some of the city proper and fight for anything as far north as they could get. I think the split along 44 is growing on me more.

Alright, should we do this then? Lets start from the beginning and establish some things. Lets tackle it like we would the Seattle write up in Runner Havens.

First, we need to figure out districts and boundaries and the overall tone within (upper, middle, lower, barrens, corporate, industrial, etc, etc). We also need to figure out which civic services are contracted out and to whom (do we go with the Star or the Knight?). We also need to detail where border patrols would be obvious and armed forces are stationed and what level of threat gets them mobilized.

Then we need to figure out Major Corporate players in STL and where they would reside. They don't even have to be a lot of the AAA corps either, but lots of AA and STL native corps too. We have to pinpoint what their interests are and how they'd establish a relationship with each other that would be good breeding for runs or why they'd be of interest to the game.

Then we need the underworld element. We need to figure out which branches of organized crime are involved in STL and what their territories and interests are. Obviously, being the UCAS/CAS border town, lots of these would be smuggling and trade routes, regardless of what is being pushed. Since according to the write up STL got in SoNA, we know things aren't under control of any one organization yet, we can assume it's like a massive free for all between factions and there isn't a dominant entity.

We can't forget about gangs. I personally don't know any STL specific gangs, but I am sure there would be an assortment of themed gangs from anywhere to militant pissed off students to gun loving CAS rednecks that are "racially pure." We'll get to this when the time comes.

Lastly, we need locations, shops, bars, clubs, restaurants and points of interest that give the city some character, but at the same time would make good places for runners to go. There should be a smattering of personnel and figures at these places that likewise give a little flavor. While on that note... Why is the Creepy Crawl listed at Locust and Tucker? It moved last year or so. That is, unless you want it back where it originally was.

I lied. This is what we need last. We need a section to detail how big smuggling is and the different various ways it happens. Much like the professional and run oriented material about Seattle in RH, we need this to detail routes that are really popular, which ones are being cracked down on, how the border patrols handled smugglers if caught, when is it appropriate to drop cargo or duck and run, etc. This would be pretty meaty as a section and probably need quite a bit of work.

If I am missing anything, feel free to let me know, but I feel this would be a good framework to actually get this project rolling.

Ninja, I had already outlined and had players make characters before I found this thread. I also followed the example set in the first Seattle sourcebook using districts, gangs, and famous landmarks. I also outlined the corporations I wanted to use as well as which of the big 10 had their midwest hq's there. I like how Caul presented it on-line, but I went a bit overboard.

I have (count them) twenty-four districts:7 in Illinois, 3 in South Missouri, and the rest in Missouri. The St. Louis mentality can be summed up in one question: "What high school did you go to?" Unlike Seattle, I assumed St. Louis districts would be smaller. Then I broke them into city groups; each district has one to six of these, with the average around 3 or 4. Each group is classed by lifestyle, like you suggested, and I even claimed a priority of residential, commercial, industrial, or agricultural. I have three different municipal security agencies, one being home grown because their parent company is an attraction to the game. I was currently sluffing boarder issues, creating possible encounter difficulties opposed to hard examples, but definitely including metroplex(I believe that's the UCAS version of the national guard).

I have 7 additional corps, above the big ten. The all have symposium sites downtown, and economic influence in Clayton; but they also have regional HQ in various neighborhoods. I feel all companies must have an influence in Clayton, regardless of their size or holdings. I have four types of organized crime but have not broken them down into families/rings yet. I feel that gangs are pretty vanilla regardless of the setting, and they are more of a tool of the syndicates rather than entities of their own. So i did include gangs, colored them up a bit, and said what syndicate they worked for (whether they know it or not).

This is about where I stopped development. Anything else I needed I could cram into the game and keep notes as I ran. I felt that if I over developed it, then it would begin to bog down. I run things episodic and can just create the checkpoints that are appropriate to my individual ideas, keeping them more conceptual than outfitting each one. But what do I know....

The info I have is rather extensive and I can't figure out how to put this on the internet(being mainly computer stupid). But I figured you know the Fantasy Shop as it is a staple (read as monopoly) of St. Louis. If a face to face is reasonable, let me know, and I will see if my work schedule can support it. I play a every-other-Saturday game there anyhow.

God, I'm long winded.

Just wanted to chime in and say that you've produced an excellent use of Google Maps as a gaming aid. Truly a wondrous world we live in, what with the interwebs and all. I wish my GM would have done more stuff like that.

I can't claim the idea for myself. A guy in another thread was doing the same for his Manhattan campaign, so I ran with the idea as well.

But how. I would love to put my ideas here, and that was simple and elegant. Can you give the small directions, yes?

I think we should meet up and discuss some things and see where that takes us. The fantasy shop is always a good place to meet as I am sure we all know how to get there and that it has a large meeting section off to the side.

FYI, I sent a message to Peter Taylor to see if we could even get some guidance from some of the devs and writers to make the setting as cohesive with their Sixth World as we can. He hasn't replied yet, but he is a busy man.