Something inside me doesn't like running any game in the 'status quo' setting cause I get alot of joy designing my own little worlds. Years of playing that old standard had much of my design time going into self-contained dungeons and simple towns. A medieval town is easy to imagine, so whats left is the juicy oddities and hooks because all your players have a framework in their mind.
I guess it was a mistake going into SR without a real setting in mind. The word Seattle is in every other dang paragraph and every example in every book is in Seattle too! I picked Sacramento cause Cali's a cool place and I liked the idea of a small nation setting because it would be easier to detail it and let them explore in time just about everything interesting there is. It' been hard and I've been nervous about setting any concrete laws of the land, introducing high-level NPCs, or creating area-appropriate missions. I just don't have a history of working knowledge that pertains to the Shadowrun world, so I haven't given them any wide-reaching area maps or information cause I have little to go off of.
My older brothers played 2ED and I dug through our roleplaying stash and recovered a California Free State book. It's much different from the details I'm used to from the core book and despite the chance for disaster in picking a random setting I like it quite a bit and believe it has good levels of chaos and interest for a Shadowrun campaign that could go from meta-racism to the water wars to gypsy intrigue to mercenary work with or against neighboring nations. It still gave me almost nothing on the capital city though.
I am curious if there are other supplements on the CFS outside the 2E book. Anything from another editions setting book, premade missions, paragraphs in other rulebooks, or SR fiction would help!