I know the default setting for shadowrun has always been Seattle.
I am curious how many GMs out there run a game in another part of the world.
What differences do you run into based on this setting.

I run my game in Las Vegas, where all my players live, which allows us to know the setting more intimately.

In vegas the chief corporate entities are the Casino Corporations that may be subsideries of other corps, their own entities or orginized crime corps.
Also because we are in the PCC armor is considered illegal so that is represented by giving all armor an R availabilty (and if it was already an R it is now an F)

These are just some of the changes based entirely on location.

Im just wondering what changes the rest of you have implemented by having a dfferent setting than Seattle


Thanks
Henry




(Oh yeah, and it doesn't rain as much )

I run my campaign mostly in Chicago. Some differences obviously include the CZ, which i represent by having gear much more difficult to come across. also, its not uncommon to run across a random bug in there...so social excursions to the CZ are limited.

We at SotSW had two GMs both running in the same world, so to avoid stepping on each others' toes the second game started in Chicago (as luck would have it, scant months before Bug City).

The game went on hiatus after we broke through the barricade in, I think, early September, but our plan was to move shop to Denver.

~J

Mine is based in Seattle but I've REALLY wanted to setup side adventures in Boston and Montreal but it just hasn't worked out that way. They will go through Ghost Cartels and thus, go global. After that I'm not sure. I like the idea of a purely transglobal SR campaign. I've never done it that way before but in all honesty, I don't see why they wouldn't (transporting gear is the largest constraint).

- J.

Seattle is such a colorful city. Why run anywhere else?

My GM is running our campaign out of Leeds, England. I do not know if -any- info is in print about Leeds, but in our campain it is cut in half by a lay line and the city has this post ww2 Berlin thing going on because of that. We've only had one session so far so thats about as much info as I have for now, but its certainly been .... interesting thus far.

After Ghost Cartels, I am ITCHING to run campaigns all over South America.

- J.

I would love to hear what your GM has done with Leeds and the North of England. Now are you running out of Leeds because you are in Leeds or your GM has familiarity with the area? or just because?

I vaguely remember some material being published for a UK setting long ago (London or somesuch), back in 1st or 2nd Edition, but I could be remembering it wrong. Sprawl Sites, maybe?

You mean the London Sourcebook?

Never read it myself, but I know there have been some… er, "choice words" about it on these boards.

~J

One of the games on DS is being run out of London.

I've been running out of Montreal and Vancouver recent, and once we played in Hong Kong for 3 sessions. We've also done a pseudo-campaign in Paris, France, but we are back to Morth America now.

I have a copy of it actually; it uh.. wasn't really a quality setting book. Bug City and Seattle were both much better.

other than that it didn't really have anything that jumped out at me as "never in MY game" material, it was just... kind of bland.

I can do a review of it in a few weeks when I go home for christmas break (I only have current material at school) if people are interested.

I'm given to understand that it has some exceptional attention to detail even by Shadowrun standards, including such gems as a city (Inverness?) being placed on the wrong coast.

~J

Having never been to London or the UK I'd need to consult a map, but given the low production values generally I wouldn't be remotely surprised

Miami, with frequent trips into the Caribbean. Big Players are the Mob, and Gunderson Corporation, and gangs. We're not following the canon timeline, of course.

Over the last twenty years I've run games all over the place: Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Detroit, NYC, Kiel, Atlanta, Tampa, Los Angeles, Miami, and many more.

Currently my game is set on the road starting in Boise City, OK, UCAS.

I have to add that my campaigns run for years. I have played weekly since 1992, and I am on my third campaign as GM.

New Orleans.

Lots o spirits & magic, few (obviously) large corps, lots of magical threats. And of course the joys of smuggling and piracy (the last true bastion of Pink Mohawking).
Of course we incorporate the Caribean League; it's cool Miami and Key West are a part of it. They also get to run into Texas and make runs into Aztlan.

Otherwise the other GM runs in Seattle alot, but since we live here, we use alot of the surrounding areas, like the east border w/ NAN, the military bases, Whidbey Island, the Peninsula, and so forth.

(Rome was fun to.)

I've been running my game in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but we've had side runs in Thunder Bay up in the AMC and Hong Kong. In the next few sessions we'll be visiting Rapid City in the Sioux Nation as well, along with possibly Boston or Lisbon. And at some point we're making a trip to Laos (yes, Laos, not a typo, hehe).

My last campaign started in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but quickly moved away from there, after my players badly screwed themselves. They went to New York after that. With 3 new players I'll be sort of continuing this campaign, not set back in Seattle again (because of the shiny new book and the players not being too familiar with the setting from start).

If your looking for a good SR page for running in Boston I tend to use this. Boston 2050 I live in Boston and I can tell you that is is pretty accurate to how I think the city should be. I was working on my own Boston netbook, but loosing my job and then having a baby and then starting a job has cut into my "free time".

Currently I'm running the campaign set in Omaha which is a NAN city state surrounded by UCAS territory that maintains postivie ties with the UCAS (a sort of counrter seattle if you will). A lot of the intrigue in the city is political or criminal in naturehowever Ares and the Azzies both have an enclave and an arco in the city respectively and do more then a llittle bit of fighting amongst themselves. The city itself is very much a telecom hub so it also has representaiton from Renraku and SK. Most of my campaign up to this point has been about the criminal cartels fighting with Tempo allowing the Vory backed Sons of Sauron to push into the area being resisted by both the Mafia and the Hidden Path smuggling cartel ( local Koshari off-shoot). We're also working through emergant themes and before too long the characters will have to make some hard choices that may affect the status of the city one way or another and will in all likelyhood force them to leave town at which point I plan on giving them a choice between LA, Denver, or Manhattan as those are the settings that most interest me in a lot of ways.

The biggest difference I play up about Omaha is the shadow community is very small and everyone tends to know what everyone else is up to at least at the runner and fixer level there's also a much higher emphasis placed on the gangland war.

I've run games based in Boston, London and New Orleans before. All three were really fun settings, with New Orleans being my favorite simply because of the awesome combination of atmosphere, voodoo magic, the infected, the underworld as a whole, and (best of all) pirates. I wish more games took place there. I really don't dig Asian culture too much which is another reason I enjoy it, I think. Far less of that there than in, say, Seattle.

Once my games reach a certain power level Seattle tends to just be where the team is based out of, it is easy for shadowrunners to globetrot if you do it right and keeps things interesting. It also makes language skills a hell of a lot more important.

As far as I can tell, because he can make it almost all up. Basicly, a large number of "Awakened Hippies" got fed up with the corps using and abusing the lands surrounding certain lay lines and began a revolt. Somehow they are able to stalemate the corps / gov't (probably help from awakened beings & spirits). In the cease-fire agreement, the "hippies" got about half of England including the area surrounding leeds. Leeds itself has a lay line that runs right through the middle of it. As a result Leeds gets cut in half and both halves are walled off except for two raised highways connecting them. The English gov't and the corps got to keep these two sections while the "hippies" got the lay line.

Now, thus far in leeds (not sure how pervasive this exists in England) meta races are treated as second class citizens (the "hippies" are guilty of this as well), Elves are lucky and are afforded significantly more rights than Dwarves, Orks, and Trolls. It is illegal for my character (an Ork) to posesses a normal SIN, any firearm or explosive, and while technicaly it would be illegal to kill me in general, just about everyone looks the other way. That being said, most of the metas actually live outside of the city in slums or worse, thumbing their noses at the Humans and most Elves and there is an underground brotherhood of Orks (which I presume is actively trying to fight for meta (or least Ork) rights or at the very least over throwing the local gov't.

I don't really have much more than that currently. Our session for last Wednesday got post poned for a week due to numerous illnesses, but I would be happy to give you more updates.

I used "Awakened Hippies to refer to the resistance group because I forgot their real name, but that was the phrase the GM used to describe them and I found the idea of militant hippies wielding magic brilliantly hilarious.

That tactic only worked in the creation of the NAN because the rest of the world still had no idea what was going on as far as magic went. There's no way it would work now when the governments and corporations both have an equally disproportionate number of highly trained Awakened assets at their disposal.

SotSW? Gah, I really need to get back up to speed on the various acronyms.


The London Sourcebook was the second edition book that covered London and a brief overview of the rest of the country. The UK got some mentions in Target: Smuggler Havens, Target: Wastelands and a rather large section of the third edition sourcebook Shadows of Europe which was the last major update we got AFAIK.


Yeah, as one of the people saying some of those "choice words" I can confirm it's not that great on several topics IMHO.

My GM has thrown us about the Globe rather violently. We've gone from Seattle to Japan, Hong Kong, then back to Seattle. Then to Norway, Italy, and the Philippines, and now we're in Singapore. But, I guess most of that comes from chasing down the BBEG so many times, and killing each of his clones, only to find out there's another one... And also, some of it had to do with the horror that was the music boxes... We thought we were done with all the weirdness, but no, today he went and had us find another one. I understand that this makes no sense to any of you, but believe me, there is nothing more mentally anguishing than trying to hunt down and reunite a pair of magical music boxes that it seems everyone else in the world is trying to prevent from happening, and will kill you like raptors whose eggs you've stolen regardless of if you have the box(es) or not... Not to mention all the money we make, then subsequently lose in the process... And the fact that we can never bring enough of our gear with us, because we're constantly traveling... And the fact that whenever we get someplace new it takes forever and a week to get even marginally reliable contacts... Sorry, too much sugar, not enough caffeine...

I'll add that I'm not as big a fan of Boston 2050 as BRodda is, but between that and Target: North America they give a good feel for running in Boston. Eventually I'll put the notes up for the stuff I was writing up for campaigns that never happened.

I run all my games in Ostopa, Kansas. I can't even imagine running it anywhere else, to be quite honest.

It has a very different feel than other sprawls, as it's much smaller but is a very modern city with distinctly anachronistic areas. Contrast is what it's all about and it gives the place a unique vibe. Plus, as a relatively new city, there's this crazy sense of optimism running throughout the shadowrunning community, as new businesses are pouring in now (due to recent events that are shaking up the entire sprawl) and more intrigue is making jobs all the more plentiful.

On again, off again I run some players who live in Toronto, in Toronto. Entertainment business, BTLs and dockside abduction of street people for 'training' for paranormal security animals.

My group has based a lot of our games out of Seattle, with Atlanta being a strong second place showing and Boston being the setting of a mini-campaign. Hawai'i was one GM's white whale (every game he started there ended after two sessions, once because the group blew itself up-- with 20 kilos of C4-- in an argument over who took someone else's APDS), and we had one-shots in London and Germany.


The last two SR games I ran were set in Cartagena and Africa. The former was a fairly standard SR setup, just in SA, the latter was more of a merc campaign.

Our current campaign is set in Lagos, Nigeria (based off of Feral Cities). To get around, you need to know at least 6 languages, half of which are not in linguasoft form. They also have people who make their own money, literally, called "Hawala" networks (it's basically like the Bottlecap economy in Fallout), making payment a bit of an issue. So far, we're having fun with it, as Lagos is NOTHING like the rest of the Sixth World sprawls.

Our previous game was set in Hong Kong, but that had a "Seattle, but in Chinese" flavor to it.

EDIT: Oh, and one of our most beloved campaigns took place in Vegas, too, like the OP. Viva Las Vegas!

One thing to consider is an "escape" style campaign-- I'm GMing one right now. My players started in Cape Town, Azanian Federation, and had to find a way to get back to their base in Seattle...

I found it a way to make the default setting more refreshing/exotic. After all, when one of your considerations in finding a way to get back is smuggling in some of the African contraband you've picked up, things get interesting.

And in the last campaign I was in as a PC, (I played as an S-K company man, interesting perspective) the GM sent us all across North America, with the party visiting Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Detroit, and the finale taking place in the Yucatan. Even with the company hook-up, all the SINs, weapons considerations, etc., made it a pretty interesting time. To be fair, though, the GM in question was big on sort of "epic stop world destruction" style campaigns in the first place. That much travel should be impractical for your average 'runner.

All the same, I'm interested to hear how your Vegas campaign is going! I always liked the idea of a Vegas run by the various Amerindian syndicates...