Hello everyone, this is my first post on Dumpshock, and I'm hoping to get your help setting up a new campaign. First some background info- This will be my first time running Shadowrun 4e, but I have played before and GM'd plenty as well (D&D, World of Darkness, Harn and Star Wars). This game will be starting in the summer, so I have plenty of time.

I've decided on Sydney, Australia for a few reasons- 1. We're doing Seattle in our current SR4 game, and between other rpgs we've done almost every other American city. 2. The constant Mana Storm will be a great thorn in the player's side (I'm planning on doing a "Random Storm Effect" table to roll on). 3. My players are unfamiliar with the area IRL and in Shadowrun, so I can edit with abandon.

I've read the info presented in 6th World Almanac, but is there more published material on the subject?

Also, have any of you developed the area in your games?

And finally, any general thoughts on "Running Down Under?" Thanks, -Wolfgar

There's a whole bunch of stuff published on the Aussies in Target: Awakened Lands.

Thanks, looking it up now.

One thing bugged me about the write-up Australia got in the Almanac. The way they described Canberra, it sounded like the government was moved there after becoming a Republic. Now I'm no expert on history, but I do know that Canberra's been the nation's capital since we first needed one. There are two Parliament houses there, after all - the old one that's just a historic building now with a big statue of George V in the main hall, and the new one you always see on the news.

You're right about Canberra, ShadowFighter. The article in the Almanac is referring to the New South Wales government moving to Canberra after Sydney gets hit with a manastorm (for an American analogy, it would be like Virginia making Washington DC it's capitol if Richmond blew up). The Almanac seems to simply quote Target: Awakened Lands rather than add anything new about the Australian Republic.

After reading Target: Awakened Lands (T:AL) I am definitely doing this setting. Plus, I told my players and they're pumped up for it. The time will be 2073, using SR4A rules. I plan to ignore the water shortage fluff presented in T:AL because I don't think worrying about water and dieing over dehydration is something my players would like in a game (unless they're in the outback, of course). Since the manastorms play havoc on wireless communication, I'll need to stress datajacks and fiber optic cables to any hackers we have. Any other thoughts on the setting?

California Free State has a great table for a crazy mana warped city that I've been using for LA. I think it would work for Sydney too.

Well, now that I've had a chance to work on the setting a bit and make it my own, I figured I'd share it. Here's the text document I'll be sending out to my players to prep them form the campaign.

Running Down Under

Intro
Neighborhoods
Manastorms and You (File Not Found)
Corp Info

G’day, mates. Heard you boys and girls were interested in moving to Sydney, our little hell-hole down under. Let me be the first to welcome you. First things first, you’ll need to be up to date on some basic info if you’re gonna run for me. This document will provide for that, and I’ve asked a few friends to comment on it and keep it fresh. I don’t have to be just your fixer, I can be your friend too, as long as you stay alive and keep my budgets in the black.
I’ll start you off with some info on Sydney’s neighborhoods, but you should know this first—The following 5 companies make up the Sydney Metro Council advisory board- Knight Errant (Ares), Aztechnology, Baird Communications (Renraku), Tanamyre, and Wuxing. These 5 corps are the big boys in town. Saeder-Krupp also has a major facility in the harbor, on Goat Island. -Sparrow

Sydney Neighborhoods- The following six neighborhoods represent the urban landscape of Sydney, circa 2073. The vast majority of any runs will take place within these locations, and I have included the lifestyles prevalent in each region. If none of these locations appeals to you, let me know and I can help place you somewhere else. Sydney in 2073 is highly compartmentalized, with other regions like Chinatown, Lakemba (an Arab suburb) and the Italian-Australian neighborhood of Leichhardt. Info on these regions can be grabbed as needed.

City Center (also North Sydney)
Lifestyles- High, Luxury

The City Center is the heart of corporate and political life in Sydney. Blocks of skyscrapers and Australian landmarks (Town Hall, Museum of Sydney, Parliament House) run into the Republic Botanical Gardens and the Sydney Opera House. Knight Errant and Aztechnology have their regional headquarters in this area, and AA Corp Tanamyre has it’s top HQ here as well. Security is tight, with CCTV and Knight Errant patrols the norm.
Corporate and Government workers, as well as tourists, reach the City Center via the subway, driving in on the WD Freeway, the Cahill Expressway (Sydney’s last two major highways in good maintenance), or by Air Taxi. Most major buildings have at least one air-pad, and Air Taxis run to all the corporate neighborhoods. Living in the City Center means living in a Corp-controlled High Rise apartment.

Between a plethora of air-taxi services and the multitudes of private choppers and VTOL vehicles, Sydney’s skies are crowded indeed. Knight Errant has a well-funded air patrol division, and the city has had to implement rigid air traffic laws to match those on the ground. –Sky Skraper

Through ground traffic is light, Sydney’s roads are administered by the government and are somewhat the worse for wear. The ground level GridGuide is almost always malfunctioning, creating traffic jams for two or three hours at peak times. In some ‘hoods, the pot holes are big enough to live in, let alone wreck a car or bike. –Ped X

The City Center itself is closed to road traffic, and is instead serviced by light rail and trams. It’s expensive, but safe, and extends into other areas of the city as well. Armed guards on all trains; CCV surveillance; decent Matrix security. Better odds than driving, though. –Sky Skraper

The trains outside of the city center run infrequently between 11pm and 5am, and “protected service” is also discontinued then. No guards, and the trains are rigger controlled, making it a criminal paradise after hours. Don’t get on without heavy weaponry and a willingness to use it. –Sparrow

If you want to get around, buy a bike and drive fast enough to lose the KE traffic cops. It’s that simple. –Kirra

North Sydney lies across the harbor, reachable by the Harbor Tunnel now that the bridge is off-limits. While the high security lifestyle is the same as City Center, here Baird Corporation and Wuxing make their homes, and their influence keeps out the riff-raff.

The Rocks
Lifestyles- Middle, High

‘The Rocks’ as the area squeezed between the City Center and the harbor is known, is a handful of city blocks containing Sydney’s bohemian culture. Relatively clean and gang-free, this is where corporate youths move too to be rebellious and piss off their parents. The Rocks are dotted with coffee shops and ‘scene’ bars, as well as turn of the century brownstone apartments. Those seeking to blend in can do it here, as Sydney’s normal cultural biases break down in the Rocks, with all types of metahumans and cultural backgrounds to be found. Low-rise apartments and Townhouses are common. Oh, and you can find me here as well, at ‘The Fortune of War’ inn.

Giving out your contact info, Sparrow? You aren’t worried about these new runners turning you in?- Kirra

Nope, only worried about you, K. That’s why I gave the bouncer your photo. -Sparrow

King’s Cross
Lifestyles- Low, Middle

King’s Cross is where Sydney-siders come to play. Bars, nightclubs and restaurants provide for legitimate entertainment, and as fronts for illegal casinos and the city’s red light district. King’s Cross is the stronghold of the Capizzi crime family, a Mafia outfit with ties to the American and Sicilian ‘Costa Nostra.’ Running the traditional vices of gambling, girls and guns, they hold on while the Russian Vory and the ‘Green Gang’ Triad pick off other syndicates around Sydney. While you don’t need to know the Capizzis to have fun in King’s Cross, if you do know them, you’ll find it that much easier to get into that VIP room your target’s in. Low-rise apartments above booming nightclubs are the norm.

If you’re American, you may find it difficult to support the gun-loving habits you’re used too. You can’t walk into any corner store and pick up an AK here, let alone a hand gun. That being said, there’s a man named Jimmy Two Hands in King’s Cross, and he can hook you up with your beloved firearms. –Ped X.

Bondi Beach
Lifestyles- Middle, High, Luxury

When the manastorms aren’t keeping everyone inside, and when the holiday heat hits us in the southern hemisphere, we Sidney-siders flock to Bondi, baby! Bondi Beach is the most popular stretch of sand around Sidney harbor. Just inland from the beach lies the Bondi suburbs, a collection of houses and luxury condos, all mostly quiet neighborhoods. A number of Corp execs call this spot home, commuting via air taxis between here and the City Center.

You do not want to be caught out on the beach when the manastorms flare up. I’ve got a link somewhere around here to a vid of some tourists caught outside sunbathing. The storms hits and POOF! their skin starts to melt off. Now where’s that link… -h4xx

Thanks, h4xx, but I think they get the picture. -Sparrow

The Bridge
Lifestyles- Streets, Squatter

Just after the manastorms first wracked Sydney, the Metro Council decided to shut down the famous Sydney Harbor Bridge until it’s structural integrity could be re-evaluated. Then one night some of the city’s homeless, desperate and deprived of shelter after the storms, jumped the barricades and began squatting on the lower deck. By the time the Metro Council got around to clearing the bridge, the squatters were fully entrenched, and it set off a riot that blasted trhough downtown. That was twenty years ago. Since then the Bridge has been a pain and an eyesore for the powers that be in this city.
The bridge itself is now covered in shacks and shanties, some reaching all the way to the tom of the bridges arches, held on with ropes, welds and even duct tape. Below the bridge lies a small flotilla of house boats and barges tied to the support pylons, long rope ladders and pulleys connecting them to the village above. The whole place is considered a no-fly zone for Knight Errant, leaving a small black market to flourish amongst the slums.

This is the best location to get hot items in the city, IMHO, especially if you can’t deal with the Vory or the Capizzi Mob. -Kirra

Punch Bowl
Lifestyles- Streets, Squatter, Low

Once you get away from the City Center, the Sydney sprawl begins to spread out towards the west, one blasted neighborhood after another. But if you’re looking to simply blend into the background, then Punch Bowl fits the bill. Named for the fact that it sits in a depression of the landscape, Punch Bowl is considered by some to be the ‘Orcish Oz.’ While it’s true that Australia never had to face the same metahuman hate riots the rest of the world did, we Sydney-siders tend to quietly congregate around our “social and cultural equals” rather than march and riot. This leads to a dozen different culturally aligned neighborhoods in the sprawl. Punch Bowl is for Orcs and Trolls.
Aside from specialty big and tall shops, and a few troll-sized apartment houses, Punch Bowl is also home to the Punch Bowl race track, the last center for equestrian sports in the city. If you want to live here, you can probably score a quiet house on a side street, or slum it up on one of the sprawls abandoned freeways.


Manastorms and You- Surviving the Weather

“)- ‰˜æº‰° A7rµJRB¥ª hª¨€fSp/.–<)ÁR_ÞHwŸÅt¸IZÿ*%¦nmA¾¿ )DÊ ˆ(ó:à—„a¸fî”p‚
0gìèÈ+J Ÿ­ÈØÑ ävðTnd F� |(Hô§ðŒ uÏ#’5ÉÊóÓŽßk7/ëëDñ ° Ѓµ˜è O7
[Ãì‘Zï 100100100101011001010101110101001
V1Hùf³ Wô6†§ !SF¢Pì—Ì ;cÇ'+ô, qK )W¤Ó yíF%ª3~–õsÇ ,öxw£YfC ¹
k¡±^q/©œ+þËìè©š ?&*HÄ å Ôãƒo —qödHLNa÷³ +?‹“k)ÓoÒúU [òK—Þ|¸ èì" ºÔžg.ü•i
vM½VÔòï{« ”ÚÒWÐ}…[8ô >¢¦” ’PÊqX…yÐ+ ?—ÙØó »,,‚ ð”f&� è¸

Hmm, seems something didn’t work right, this was supposed to be how-to to survive the worst manastorms. h4xx, you got anything? –Sparrow

Nope, I’m coming up blank. Looks like the file is totally corrupted. But I did find that link to that tourist vid from earlier. –h4xx

Answers still no, bud. Perhaps Elaine can shed some light for us. -Sparrow

With pleasure. While modern magical theory has yet to classify the manastorm phenomena, I can speak from personal experience that they are dangerous and unpredictable at best, and apocalyptic at worst. One particular storm cell has loomed near and above Sydney for almost fifty years now, since the first days of the awakening. It sweeps in for a few days a week, usually dealing minor environmental damage, and then leaves without notice or fanfare. But sometimes, it kills.

The effect of the manastorm can somewhat be compared to an out of control spell. Sometimes the storm will sweep down a side alley, turning all inhabitants to statues or melting the paint off the walls. Sometimes the storm manifests as an invisible mass of energy, knocking out wireless signals for kilometers around. The best form of protection is a magically warded and physically secure structure. I also encourage any magicians to prepare a Mana Barrier spell before setting out for a walk-about the city. It could save your life. -Elaine

The Corps do a good job of warding their key facilites and the homes of their management. Wuxing especially seems immune to the worst of what the manastorms throw at us. Average citizens and the sinless must either shell out for private ward, or pile into the Storm Watchers Guild’s various shelters around the city. Hey Elaine, aren’t you a Storm Watcher? –Sparrow

Oh, Sparrow, a gentlemen never asks, and a lady never tells. –Elaine.

Corp Info

Like I said before, we have 5 big players here in town. Back after the manastorms first hit, the state government picked up and left Sydney for Canberra, leaving the city to fend for itself. Some of the local politicians left behind formed the Metro Council, but it never got anything done until the Corps stepped in and formed the Sydney Corporate Advisory Board to support the Metro Council. Today, these 5 corporate officers have more political pull than any of the poor elected sods in office.
I’ll have more info about the Corp. make up in this city later, but this will get you started.

Knight Errant (Ares)- Knight Errant, or KE as it’s known on the streets, was the first major security company to set up shop in Australia, beating Lone Star here by about five years. They snagged the Sydney contract early, and now that they are on the advisory board, they won’t have to worry about any pesky contract negotiations for a while. Fully fifty percent of their resources are concentrated on the City Center and the skies above, leaving their patrols out into the sprawls erratic at best.

Aztechnology- Everyone’s favorite boogeyman, the Azzies manage most of the agri-supply and farming industries around the city, feeding us soy and shipping wool out to markets around the world.

Baird Communications (Renraku)- A once local company now owned by a Japancorp, Baird operates the majority of Sydney’s remaining light industry, producing consumer electronics and software packages for mass and niche markets. If you’re looking for reliable Matrix connections during the manastorms, look into what there guys are doing, because never go off line.

Tanamyre- Our own home grown megacorp, Tanamyre is a AA focused in mining and ore refinement. Rumor has it that Saeder-Krupp has been looking to snatch them up and expand their presence beyond tiny Goat Island.

That’s been a rumor now for thirty years, Sparrow. SK is to busy making boats out in Perth to bother with a company on the other side of the continent. –Sky Skraper

Wuxing- Finally, Wuxing rounds out our top five with it heavily warded tower across the harbor in North Sydney. To be honest, I don’t have much info on them, other than they’re involved in the profitable telsema taken from the outback. Elaine, anymore info?

Only that Wuxing has been quietly against the Storm Watchers Guild from day one. At least, that’s what my friend said. –Elaine



Well, there you have it. That should get you primed for your move out here. Let me know when you’ve settled in and are ready for a run. –Sparrow

Also, here's a google map I did of the above locations.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&i...128231&z=13

Summer is almost over for Australia.

If you wanted to make your handout more authentic you could replace all the regionalised American spelling deviations with regular British / Australian spellings. If your players are American, and they notice, that will add flavour and remind them the setting is subtly different.

Might be worth putting up a link to this in that thread about home writeups we had way back.

In before drop bears.


In all seriousness though, if you're going to do an Australia campaign I think it helps to take a good long look at the globe for a moment and remember a few things:

1. We have the current vision of Australia because right now the population is largely made up of white conservative English speakers in a corner of the globe that's closest to Southeast Asia than anything. That's pretty unusual and something you should keep in mind when considering the next few bits, particularly since the population isn't so big that things can't shift fairly easily in a post-VITAS world.

2. In Shadowrun, global politics is no longer so dominated by the west and the White Australia immigration policy has been effectively dead for roughly a hundred years.

3. Australia is already very centralized around large urban population due to its arid geography, which is interesting given that even just Queensland is much larger than Texas. And that geography has only gotten more deadly post-Awakening. As cliche as it may be, people from outside the cities probably would be real hard-asses, and many SINless sprawl dwellers probably don't bother to leave their city very often.

What all that says to me is that if Australian cities are very compartmentalized (and I guess the books do indicate that they are, for whatever reason), it's probably more along lines of wealth and class than ethnicity, or, at the very least, the ethnic enclaves are going to be relatively large compared to the ones seen today. So while it makes sense that Ares and other very "Western" corps would have their fingerprints all over Australia, it might also be interesting to have a perhaps surprising number of the AAs to be Wuxing or Japanacorp subsidiaries. I'd also bet that the relative danger of travel means that each city's local scene is probably more insular than you'd see in say, east coast sprawls in North America.

Fat chance on getting a pistol, easy-as getting a decent rifle. Smartlink's a no-no but you'd be astounded what falls off the back of a sufficiently-rewarded Armoury Sgt's transport. Electronics are good, (and cheap) as is the transport. Brisbane is laid-back, Sydney is under siege with the rats ignoring the local mana-storm, Canberra is a snakepit of DC proportions, Melbourne is Oz's grimey underbelly (Ha), Adelaide is where you go to disappear, Perth is home to the Vorzy, good boat-builders and boredom and Darwin's a madhouse - everyone's bonkers up there.

And everything in the Outback is poisonous, barbed, venomous, frenzied, fanged, infested with parasites, radioactive and/or on fire. Everything


There's a reason our million K team of hardasses don't want to do Oz, they've read the sourcebook.

-Tir

their is also an army base in sydney that houses the comandos, and the military jail. it dose other things too, but this is the only things that would be relitive to a shadowrun game, its about 1 hour out of the main sydney area

Thanks scarius, I almost forgot to plot out where the military is and what they're up too. Probably just ducking and covering through the manastorms.

Whipstitch- I get what your saying about shifting worldviews in the sixth world, but from what I gather in Target: Awakened Lands and Sixth World Almanac, the sixth world Australia doesn't take kindly to cultural diversity. If I were to hazard a guess why the writers wrote it this way, it's to provide a change from the meta-human hate present in the Seattle and American settings. Meta-human racism is rare in Austrailia-as-written, and is replaced by old fashioned forced cultural isolation. Hence the various neighborhoods. For now I'll go with what's written (there needs to be some underlying tension, after all).

My point wasn't really intended to just be about shifting world views, although I can see how it came across that way in retrospect. It's about how a lot of those dyed-in-the-wool Australians aren't going to be white boys even if their behavior is decidedly Australian. I mean, I live next to a guy of Chinese descent who talks with with a southern drawl. Which, is kinda weird for Minnesota, but you probably get my drift.

That makes a lot of sense, Whip.

Due to my studies I ended up hanging out with a predominantly Asian crowd after moving up to Alberta from Minnesota, and I feel I stand out way more in that group for being American rather than Canadian, behaviorally speaking, than I do by not being Asian (I'm white). Cultural diversity and ethnic diversity are totally different things. I'd be willing to be the nonwhite Australians would be maybe even harsher on unassimilated immigrants, from a standpoint of "My family assimilated, why can't yours".

if you want i could write up a thing on the military for you... it could be along the same lines as what you have all ready written up too.

i dont think that the army would be ducking and covering because of the mana storms, becuase the storms started in sydney some time towards the end of 2011, its now 2073(?) for your game, so i think that they would of sorted something out... also the comandos have a standing job of TAG east (tactical aussalt group east) where they look after the whole east coast of australia, the SAS have TAG west doing the west side, but the police in each different state have a SWAT (for lack of a better term) group of their own, each is named differently like in victoria its SOG (special operations group) in queensland its SERT (special emengery responce team)

but you know thats now, not the future...

Okay, now I get what you're saying. Just because Punchbowl is full of Orcs and Trolls, it doesn't mean they're not Aussies. It does mean I'll need to work in some Ork culture to set up Punchbowl as a unique neighborhood.