St. Louis Missouri UCAS: The Gateway City

General History: Once a hub of manufacturing, transportation and trade St. Louis fell on hard times in the early part of the 21st Century. As manufacturing jobs fled the country, and crime and poverty worsened St. Louis like many US cities saw its standard of living drop dramatically. As more people fled the rural areas for the false comfort of potential urban jobs, and a higher standard of living the city grew dramatically. By the time of the awakening the city was bursting at the seams, having seen its population nearly triple in ten years. Crime rates soared, and as city leaders made drastic cuts to goods and services the city became increasingly dangerous. Organized crime syndicates seeing a variety of opportunities threw their weight behind various gang factions in the city. As the citizens of the St. Louis greater metropolitan area tried to survive the violence they barely had time to notice what was going on in the world around them.

As the United States Congress approved the Resolution Act in secret, utilizing powers the government had granted itself during the various conflicts in the past decade in the War on Terror St. Louis became an instrumental hub in transporting undesirables of all sorts to relocation camps throughout the Midwest-places like Abilene, Wichita, Alliance, Rapid City and more. Unprepared for this sort of mission the military subcontracted a variety of this work to various private corporate security providers who rapidly purchased large tracts of land in St. Louis to set up transfer and temporary detention centers in St. Louis. As the Guerilla War grew, suddenly the city found itself all too close to the front lines of an American Civil War! As the war grew in scope, and more military units transitioned through the city on their way to meet both Guerilla’s and some units that had completely switched sides. When the Sovereign American Indian Movement simultaneously detonated Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood, Mount Ranier and Mount Adams the city was already on edge, and riots and looting broke out for nearly a week, before peacekeeping forces from both the military and various corporations interceded to quell unrest. Following the Treaty of Denver the city suddenly found itself a strategically located and convenient place for various military units.

Because much of the city’s infrastructure had been looted by various city officials or corporations and hadn’t been properly maintained in decades the Crash of ’29 really didn’t damage the city as much as other cities. In fact the city benefited from the various post crash resources it suddenly found the money to upgrade a variety of infrastructure projects, including Scott Air Force Base which found itself home to the newly located 12th Air Force Command. The secession of the Confederated American States in November of 2034 saw tensions running high in the city, as many feared a new civil war; however the transition was pretty uneventful.

Suddenly finding itself on the border of both nations St. Louis benefited as embassies were erected, trade deals inked and the next thirty years saw a period of great prosperity. A number of megacorporations expanded their operations in St. Louis-especially Ares and Saeder Krupp-whose heavy industrial subsidiaries gained a number of prestigious construction contracts. The second crash hit St. Louis hard-and disenfranchised entire neighborhoods. Gang violence and looting was again suppressed by a joint military and corporate peacekeeping force. (To this day Knight Errant suffers from poor public perception in most of St. Louis.) The city was again thrown into turmoil when the new Revolution tried to take control of the UCAS-but a combination of distance from Washington and apathy on the part of the citizenry combined to make this an almost anticlimactic event.

After Seattle went live with its wireless matrix project the city has spent the last several years making deals with various companies to get its own wireless network off the ground. Thanks to massive support from both Ares and Saeder Krupp, as well as support from the local military bases this has been a successful project, bringing a variety of new jobs to the city!

Facts at a Glance:

Population: 3, 876, 450 (Includes the Metropolitan Area)

• Human: 47%
• Elf: 6%
• Dwarf: 7%
• Ork: 32%
• Troll: 7%
• Other: 1%

Per Capita Income: 16,108 (UCAS Dollars)
Below Poverty Level: 26%

On Fortune’s Active Trader List: less than 1%

Corporate Affiliation: 17%

Education:

• High School Equivalency: 56%
• College Equivalency: 20%
• Advanced Studies Certificate: 13%

Climate

St. Louis lies in the transitional zone between the humid continental climate type and the humid subtropical climate type (Köppen Dfa and Cfa, respectively), with neither large mountains nor large bodies of water to moderate its temperature. It is subject to both cold Arctic air and hot, humid tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico. The city has four distinct seasons. Spring is the wettest season and produces severe weather ranging from tornadoes to winter storms. Summers are hot and humid, and temperatures of 90 °F (32 °C) or higher occur between 35 and 40 days a year, while days of 100 °F (38 °C) or higher occur usually no more than five days per year. Fall is mild with lower humidity and can produce intermittent bouts of heavy rainfall with the first snow flurries usually forming in early or mid November. Winters can be cold and snowy with temperatures frequently below freezing. Winter storm systems, such as Alberta Clippers and Panhandle hooks, can bring days of heavy freezing rain, ice pellets, and snowfall.

The average annual temperature for the years 1970–2000, recorded at nearby Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport, is 56.3 °F (14 °C), and average precipitation is 38.9 inches (990 mm).

Winter (December through February) is the driest season, with an average 7.3 inches (185 mm) of precipitation. The average seasonal snowfall is 22.2 inches (56 cm). Spring (March through May), is typically the wettest season, with 11.4 inches (290 mm) of precipitation. Dry spells lasting one to two weeks are common during the growing seasons.

St. Louis experiences thunderstorms 48 days a year on average. Especially in the spring, these storms can often be severe, with high winds, large hail and tornadoes. St. Louis has been affected on more than one occasion by particularly damaging tornadoes.

Some late autumns feature the warm weather known as Indian summer; some years see roses in bloom as late as early December.

Access:

Plane: Lambert-St. Louis International has gone through a number of upgrades, and remodeling especially after it was destroyed several times by tornadoes and other forms of Guerilla magic during the Indian Wars. Most recently a tornado destroyed several runways and corporate hangars in 2071. A joint venture between Saeder-Krupp and Ares saw reconstruction completed in record time. Close to both Whiteman Air Force Base and Scott Air Force Base Lambert St. Louis International sees a high level of both corporate and military traffic, in addition to civilian traffic on the field.

Automobile or Bus: Accessible by several major roadways getting into St. Louis is relatively easy from inside the UCAS-interstate’s 70; 40; 55 and 64 all lead into the City. From the Confederated American States northbound 55 and 44 lead into the city and security is pretty unpredictable. As tensions flare so does the level of security you can expect crossing the border. Despite frequent agitation between various groups trying to stir up trouble it’s relatively easy to cross over from one side of the city to the other.

River: Located on the Mississippi St. Louis is both a major trading port, as well as one of the busiest recreational ports in the UCAS. Security along the border is difficult to enforce due to the high volume of traffic on the river.

Random observations:

The Gateway Arch is only a third of a mile - 1600 feet - from the CAS border, but it is on the UCAS side.

There's a district or area of St Louis that's really very special: it's called Forest Park, and it includes such features as a golf course, The Muny outdoor theatre, the Missouri History Museum, the Jefferson Memorial, the St Louis Zoo, the St Louis Art Museum, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, the Jewel Box floral conservatory, a little woods, a pond where you can rent boats, the St Louis Science Center...hell, I can't remember what all else. The Olympics were there one year. It's an incredible place, and if you're going to set the scene of St Louis, and make it distinct from any other metroplex, it has to be part of the gestalt.

The park the Gateway Arch is in, while symbolic to outsiders [and a pretty chunk of riverside] is way smaller, and less precious to the locals. Forest Park is a big deal for people in St Louis, and I suspect for a while having half the city denied access to it would be like telling half of Manhattan they can't go to Central Park anymore.

In addition to Lambert, there's a smaller, regional airport called the Spirit of St Louis Airport, like, 15 miles west. It's the county airport, as opposed to the metro airport.

Again, because Shadowrun's creators haven't been able to read a map for 23 years, the CAS border is drawn on some expressways, presumably because they were the easiest things to trace over. It makes no sense, and would require tearing out the freeways and making new ones somewhere else. In this case, there's simply no reason for it: there are ample resources like rivers and rail lines that would make vastly superior choices for negotiated borders. If you gave a shit, it'd be easy enough for me to produce a map of St Louis with a border that was actually reasonable, while still being very nearly the same as the canon border.

One important question to answer for yourself is whether the massive population explosion you mention resulted in pushing development outside the sweep of the river. Right now, St Louis is butted up against the river, and beyond it is farmland; if they urbanize that, you're talking about a lot of very expensive bridges. For now, St Louis has turned inward and upward, and I think your population explosion can be contained in that, resulting in a high density core surrounded by nearly empty rural areas. We should talk sometime about drones and farming.

That said, the population of St Louis peaked in the 50s: it's steadily dropping still today, as people move to the suburbs. Tripling would require a darned good reason, after such a steady decline.

St Louis has eaten a bunch of smaller cities the same way Grand Rapids has, and they continue to exist: Jennings, Ferguson, University City, Overland, Creve Coeur. They each have their own stories, and could easily be given their own flavors, like Tacoma, Puyallup, and Redmond. If I can find one, I'll post a map with each of these cities' borders, like the Seattle district map.

What lives in the Mississippi River in the sixth world? Does it enjoy eating people? Maybe the river should have its own [smallish] serpent. Behemoths live in the Mississippi. Did you know that during the spring mating season, they gather in groups?

You're going to be tempted at some point to introduce a free spirit who's a vigilante that protects the city by fighting crime, named The Spirit of St Louis. Don't. ;)

Heh. I based a '50s campaign out of St. Louis. Actually since I haven't officially canned it, I guess I still am...although its quite comatose as it hasn't been progressed for 3 or so years. So perhaps not.

Your St. Louis is quite a bit different than mine, but some things I have to mention.

1. Don't forget East St. Louis. Hell, it's nearly a demilitarized zone today. When you factor in potential SR-related changes ESL can become a VERY entertaining location indeed!

2. Mississippi River...also I remember, I think in ParaCrittersNorthAmerica, there was this bird (boobrie?) that was somewhat dangerous but was really deadly once whole colonies up and died from an extremely virulent disease. Anyway, they are all up and down the Mississippi if I remember the Range map from the book correctly. Can make, er, "river walks" (if you know what I mean) rather problematic.

3. St. Louis is rather near Chicago, so factor that in. ESPECIALLY factor in Bug City. Actually considering the area, St. Louis wouldn't be a bad area to have some significant Bug Spirit activity itself.

4. The area to the north/northeast of the city (a bit out from it actually) is pretty flat, farm country. You could factor that in...I always thought that area, with some work, would be a nice little spawning area for Toxic Spirits. But YMMV.

5. Washington Park is a nice location in real life (at least during the day), and has a lot of fairly unique areas that could be good to cover in a writeup of the city.

6. Not sure how you want to handle the UCAS/CAS border. I sort of ran with a mildly unobtrusive checkpoint system that concealed some pretty mundo firepower if anyone screwed around the border, that split the city in half (so a North STL and a South STL, so to speak). Of course there were plenty of leaks if you knew where to look; had the split as described from my notes here: "The section south of I-44 (and following onto I-55 and the Poplar Street Bridge) is CAS territory, while the northern section is in the UCAS; The CAS section does not extend to the eastern half of the Mississippi River at this point, so that section still part of UCAS Illinois (and therefore so is East Saint Louis)". Whether one would consider that a realistic option or not is a different matter, but it worked for us...

I probably have more, but that's what is off the top of my head ATM.

LordHaHa

Blimey. My compliments to your memory. Paul, that's Paranormal Animals of North America, page 38. Even if you don't use them as a portion of plot, they're an important piece of Mississippi flavor. I'll take a look at some of these other range maps while I'm here.

Page reference is Paranormal Animals of North America, followed by its SR4 reference, if applicable.

Bandit, p24 [Running Wild, p151]
Birdman, p28 [Running Wild, p140]
Black Annis, p30 [Running Wild, p141]
Bogey, p35 [Running Wild, p141]
Boobrie, p38 [Running Wild, p107]
Corpselight, p44 [n/a]
Deathrattle, p46 [Running Wild, p110]
Devil Jack Diamond, p48 [Running Wild, p116]
Devil Rat, p50 [Running Wild, p152]
Dzoo-noo-qa, p56 [Running Wild, p66]
Fideal, p60 [Running Wild, p116]
Gabriel Hound, p66 [Running Wild, p153]
Gloaming Owl, p72 [Running Wild, p135]
Greater Unicorn, p76 [n/a. Unicorns: Running Wild, p121]
Hellbender, p84 [Running Wild, p116]
Incubus, p90 [Running Wild, p155]
Lesser Thunderbird, p98 [n/a. Thunderbird: SR4a, p300. Greater Thunderbird: Running Wild, p106]
Loup-Garou, p102 [Running Wild, p67]
Man-of-the-Woods, p105 [Running Wild, p181]
Munchkin, p116 [Running Wild, p138]
Nomad, p122 [Running Wild, p180]
Saber-Tooth Cat, p134 [Running Wild, p105]
Salamander, p136 [n/a]
Serpent, Freshwater, p140 [n/a. This must still exist in SR4; it's the Loch Ness Monster. But I'm not sure what it's called.]
Shadowhound, p144 [Running Wild, p156]
Siren, p146 [Running Wild, p105]
Stormcrow, p154 [Running Wild, p156]
Tachypus, p156 [n/a]
Talis Cat, p158 [n/a!]
Toxic Earth Spirit, p162 [Street Magic, p144]
Toxic Water Spirit, p164 [Street Magic, p144]
White Buffalo, p170 [Running Wild, p121]

[Per PAoNA, Behemoths don't range as far up the Mississippi as St Louis. YMMV.]

As a 'local', I should point out a few things:

The Olympics were held in St. Louis in 1904 concurrent with the World's Fair, something that the city crows about to this day.

St. Louis has a healthy history of bootlegging and smuggling. Being the confluence of three rivers and a central rail line means we get a lot of cargo. Sitting on the limestone as we do means there's plenty of caverns as well, and there's an extensive tunnel network under the city that most people don't really know about.

There's a lot of medical research going on here. Both Washington University and SLU have medical research centers and STL is one of the top cancer research centers in the country. As people push out of the city proper and into the suburbs, the financial power of the medical-industrial complex has kept the Central West End (that's the Forest Park area) strong and expensive.

Aerospace: The Lambert complex is home to satellite offices of many aerospace tech firms, such as Northrop-Grumman and Boeing. STL isn't the "Air Capitol of the World" like Wichita claims, but there is substantial business that is done here.

Brewing: The U.S.'s largest brewer has its headquarters here, as well as numerous smaller craft breweries. Call it a throwback to the bootlegging days, but drinking is still alive and well through 2070, and the bootlegging of booze over the border from CAS to UCAS and vice-versa could make for a very engaging campaign.

City Spirits: Lots of them. Hearth spirits would be all over Laclede's Landing, Soulard, and downtown St. Louis via Washingon Street. I expect the Bevo Fox to be its own spirit that wanders Soulard, stealing lunchboxes. The architecture in this town is its own beast, and a mana-slinger would have his hands full if people really started dicking around with the buildings.

Being the racial climate here in St. Louis, i think that can be a good story to tell in SR. You can stick to the black/white divide in St. Louis. Most areas are pretty heavily either black or white, or do a human/ork thing if that is a more comfortable stance. I also like to point out that University City has a large concentrated asian population on olive and I-170 (for triads, different kind of magics, etc) and the Soulard part of town is a french quarter with a large mardi gras, and can be used for different flavor of magic (voodoo) and a different feel.
Let's not also forget the air national guard units at Lambert and Jefferson Barracks. I know lambert also has some marines and navy units and some army may be moving in too.

Here is a Link that shows large corps that are in St. Louis today. The area also has a number of DoD agencies like NGA and DISA.

Awesome real-life local information, guys. Thank you!

Once you've decided whether you want to use a logical border or the canon border, I can apply it to this map of St Louis neighborhoods so you can see which are on each side of the line.

I already know that if the split were along 44 as they suggest it is now, I would live in the UCAS and cross the border to work in Soulard every day. =P

Hard to say how they would do the split. I know if it split along 44, CAS gets little to no access to Forest Park, gets the Botanical Gardens, the breweries, and little else. UCAS gets Forest Park, the research hospitals, the majority of universities & other research centers, the financial district, and the aerospace industry.

Splitting along 40 doesn't change much. CAS gets more of Forest Park, the Science Center (although the planetarium is north of 40, ha!) and IIRC they get SLU's hospital as it's on Grand just south of fo'ty.

Tough to say. Were it me, I would go even further south and call the line on 55/270 because it makes little sense to call the border so freakin' close to Downtown. Nothing would get done.

I'm not ignoring this, it's just been a busy day. I work tomorrow but then have a few days off. I promise to read through everything and keep everyone posted on what I do.

That's good to know. I am definitely going to take you up on helping me over lay the maps. I'm in the process of getting some neighborhood write ups done, and figuring out what gangs own what turf; as well as seeing where the border falls in Canon-and if that suits my needs.



The nice thing is I don't feel obligated to keep the border in some weird or unreasonable situation. I am off tomorrow and the wife and kid will be gone, so I'll start work on it then.



Wikipedia currently lists the metropolitan area population at 2.8 plus million. I added a solid million to that number-which in my mind accounts for people pushed out of NAN territory and the massive explosion of the Ork population. As I see it some of it went up; and down-but some of it has to move outward-which indeed means bridges, and other costly infrastructure projects. Which in turn give various mega-corporations a reason to get involved. But my number as listed above is the entirety of the metropolitan area, not just Downtown.

As the location is strategically as well as tactically important I relocated several military units from the Southwest-obviously some of them would cease to exist; have transitioned to the CAS; simply switched sides to the NAN; etc...but some units would need to be placed in new bases. St. Louis is a major metropolitan area, that has several air bases close to it currently.



Agreed. As I said above the number is entirety of the metropolitan area. This increase is due to several factors: relocation of citizens from the NAN; relocation of some citizens from the CAS-but this would basically be a wash since some people would transit to both sides; as new jobs come into the city people follow the jobs; and the massive explosion of the poor, racially diverse ork population.

*Nods* It's one of the reasons I picked this city.



Yup, we cover this further down!



Ha! Never crossed my mind, and I promise to brutalize anyone who tries.



If you have notes, I'd love to see them! This is still a work in progress.



Yeah I haven't gotten to my Organized, and unorganized crime section. It's one of the major factors in picking this area actually.



Definitely a reasonable avenue that could be explored.



Cool, thanks.



Yeah this is a spot I'm still hashing out.



Yeah, as you can see from the list you posted there's a lot of wild life for us to potentially explore.

Cool. That will dovetail nicely with some ideas I have...



This fits nicely with what I plan on doing.



Did not know this, cool thanks.



Yeah a lot of the air ports the area are part of what attracted to me using this as a setting.



Did not know this. Thanks.




Yeah, it's going to be a theme in this game.



Cool. I was prepared to not have very many Asian syndicates in the area.



Yeah it's a tough call.

Damn quote block limits.

I used that guy's Google Earth overlay, and I definitely recommend it. What I'd like to do is use the projector, and a decent-sized sheet of paper, but we'll see how brutal we get with the border, and how detailed with the neighborhoods. That Wikipedia article with the neighborhoods listed and mapped is awesome; I suspect we could lay it over the street map pretty easily.

Just my two 'yen here. I lived in Chesterfield, which is really outside the greater STL Metro area but even 5 years ago, it was going to high end gated communities and boutique stores. The people IRL threw a fit when the MetroRail wanted to extend out to them, because they didn't want urban trouble in thier neighborhoods. Extrapolating off that, how about making that area (near Lambert Field) the exclusive Corp enclaves?

Wait. Crap I did write that the population tripled. Okay I need to review what I've done so far...

West Country would make sense for that. Chesterfield, Creve Coeur, Ballwin, Ladue. You're talking AAA+ luxury areas in Creve Coeur and Ladue, whereas Chesterfield & Ballwin would be where the agricorps start setting up enclaves.

Hey locals: I've been thinking about this idea of increased population and what it means about development around St Louis, and I'd like some help. So what follows are a couple questions, followed by my notes to Paul and myself about things I suspect to be true based on what I know now, but which depend heavily on your advice.

Okay, since image posting doesn't seem to work, a link.

Area 1: This area is completely saturated with agriculture, rare for this corrugated area. This is because it's so comparatively flat, correct, being in this area of where the two rivers join?

From a development standpoint, this [and flooding concerns?] would likely mean this area would actually remain agricultural, even as suburbia expands.

Area 2: Here, the agricultural areas southeast of 255 are confined to low areas, and the green space is all forested hilltop [cut through with houses]. Why is agriculture confined to the valleys like this? Because of the obvious, irrigation?

If you had to irrigate it [because you needed the farmland you'd lost to the NAN and CAS], you'd be looking at major water demands [and thus political excitement between the UCAS and its downstream neighbor] and/or major financial investment [and thus megacorporate involvement]. Either seems like good potential for plot.

If you didn't need the farmland, but needed suburbia, then instead of replacing those trees with more farms, you'd replace them with houses and yards. This seems more likely: small [but likely corporate-collective] valley farms cut through with ribbons of suburban rat warren. Whee! Realistic, but maybe less interesting plot-wise.

Area 3: Why is this area neither urban nor agricultural? Elevation, right? Steepness of terrain? Are there socioeconomic factors, as well?

You can bet this wouldn't last. Mostly you're looking at a whole new generation of developments, right up the face of these wrinkles. This is SOP when running out of room. It would also be interesting, however, to see some Asian [and Latin and South American...but mostly Asian] megacorps come in and buy some of this land and use it for terrace farming, using techniques which are well-developed in their home nations. The reaction on Old Sugar Creek Rd is a pretty predictable one, when a bunch of Asians come in, buy up half a ridge, move their own people into the houses on it, cut down all the trees and start cutting stairs into the hills to grow quinoa.

Area 4: I don't have any questions here. The progression here is very predictable: the green is replaced by grey, and the grey's population density skyrockets. The older neighborhoods become low-rent slums, packed with metahumanity in every color of the rainbow, while the super-dense urban center houses the educated underclass in segmented single-family dwellings and converted industrial buildings, and successful professionals filed into progressively taller towers of glass and steel. The truly wealthy live in what green is left, and at the top of the towers, and wherever else they choose.

Also, fuck humans. Really, I'm the last guy who should be allowed to look at Google Earth and imagine what's about to happen to what I see.

That entire area's a massive flood plain. It makes for wonderfully fertile soil, but several feet of standing water when you have a wet spring. Such happened last year. Southwest of the 1 you have St. Charles (and the county of the same name) on the same side of the river, and Earth City and the start of the industrial warehousing complexes of the Northwest side.

The area's agricultural, nature preserve-y,and likely to stay that way unless ecological disasters start making it toxic. Personally, I might look at starting to treat it like the Joshua Pines out near LA.


'Hilltop' is a strong word. Haven't been down Dupo way in a bit, but what I remember from it is that yes, irrigation and water rights could be an interesting flashpoint in that area. You start getting into distance issues and transportation bottlenecks as well in that area, leaving it small compared to the creeping urbanization in Area 1. Less wheat, more soybeans as the years went on, and I could see agricorps setting up in East Saint Lo-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*wipes tear* No, I can't finish that thought. Agricombines and 'mom&pop' operations would be in that area, slowly being bought out or encroached by Big Agra. Suburban encroachment on the northeast side would continue pushing into the concrete jungle of East Saint Louis, then likely south until the agricombines stopped it. Depends on how dear food would get in this area.



IIRC, that's 44 out of town. Hilly, lots of limestone carved, not a lot of use for agriculture because it's a bitch to get a combine up the hill. Land is cheap and difficult to develop due to trees, rocks, and elevation changes. The folks with the money out there like their privacy from what I remember of it. Been a city boy too long.

I would see the ultrarich who don't want to live in the bright lights and big city of Downtown settling out here. Carve out a 40 acre plot and build it as a testament to their own personal wealth. Walls, guards, terraced houses - you name it.


Ha, STL proper. The bombshell at the river is the Arch site and everything spreads from there. So far gentrification in the downtown 'bombshell' area is fighting a pitched battle with the urban blight the next block over. It's anyone's game in STL.

The Ork enclaves off Locust are going to be fighting tooth and nail to keep the development coops from turning the area into loft apartments and gastropubs. Grand Boulevard has the Fabulous Fox theater next to SLU, and magnificent cathedral architecture turns to run-down redbrick tenements not two blocks north. Hell, the Tongs, Seoulpas, and the Vietnamese are having a shadow war on South Grand not two miles off (the Rings own Ballwin) when they aren't banding together to chase out the Families off Shaw at The Hill. Tourists and ecohippies rub shoulders on The Loop at Delmar with the talisleggers near Des Peres until 10PM when Eagle Security's curfew takes effect and the Metrolink locks down before another banner year in murders and assaults after midnight makes the UCAS News & World Report.

Meanwhile in Clayton the AA's smile down south at Kirkwood where their enclave mites are trying to elect a new Mayor and play up the 'small town' vibe to the hilt for the cameras. Unversity City is all but a 'protected historical district' so the intelligentsia have their homes to huddle into and pretend they're better than everyone else while another 14-year old Human girl disappears in Forest Park as the sun goes down. The grunge clubs fight with the ravers on Choteau while the smoke-filled gin joints on Laclede's Landing keep the blues alive well into 2073.

The blight travels in a different method into Pagedale and Overland, rotting single-families replacing the busted tenemants. Indstry is too small in that area and it becomes a dumping ground for the people who can't afford the enclave, but still clean the toilets of those who do. If you want homegrown 'natural' highs this is the place to be. The harder stuff is manufactured in South County or out in JeffCo to the southwest, or imported out of the trailer parks of Woodson Terrace across 70 from Lambert's sprawling air cargo complex.

It's a new Gateway for a new year, chum. Instead of planes to China, it' T-Birds into Sioux lands, fights over who really owns Cahokia Mounts, and wondering if that patch of corn you're growing in the backyard is going to eat you, just like in Soviet Branson.

This would be a useful way to have an easily memorable "wild" area, where a lot of our wilderness paranormal animal encounter stuff can happen. Is there a name for this area, where Calhoun county, Jersey county by the river, and St Charles county by the river all meet?

See, the thing is, we can't present the setting in all its complexity to all our players, many of whom have only the time they're at the table to do anything related to roleplaying. So I want to be able to set it up like Grand Theft Auto, where there are easily memorable "districts" that we can use as shorthand. If one wilderness run happens "west of Grafton," and another one, "out Batchtown way," and still another "down t' Cuivre Island," they're never going to know what those things are all within a few miles of each other. [I still have this problem with Seattle, and I've been doing this a while.] But if we can add can say, "up in north St Charles," and say that every time they go there, they'll get that these are all geographically similar places.


That brings up an excellent question. I haven't been down to St Louis in lo some many years, so I can't remember a lot of the local geographical descriptors. [For example, what I would call a valley they would call a holler in Appalachia; what I would call a mountain they would call a hill.] The terrain in Missouri is, as you know, heavily crinkled, but not quite to the mountainousness people think of when they look at the Rockies or even out East: it's all rolling folds, carved by water, with little hollows and ridges everywhere. What do people there call these incidental valleys and uplifts?


Speaking of which, Paul, rail is a huge, huge factor in St Louis, particularly East St Louis, and it'd probably remain so in the 2070s, as much as anyplace would.


From overhead, it really is ridiculous how much it looks like a bomb blast, with highways as ejecta, and it really does center on the arch. Something metaphysical ought to go along with that.

Mind you, I'd have to hop on the bike when it isn't 12 degres out and do some sightseeing to get some more accurate ideas, but out here it be flat. I can see trees across the river from where I sit right now not doing my work, but I can't see any hills out Illinois way! The bridges over Ol' Muddy are taller.

As I am originally a desert rat from the Hinterlands, north of the Kingdom of Nye, the local ideae of 'hills' here is anything that one can trip over. I'll have to pick some brains for the lingo.


As for Area 1, call that area on the flood plain 'The Confluence' and that should work pretty well. 'Lewis & Clark Country' or 'The Great River Road' are also workable names.

Also: Futurehobos that travel the rails and hack the defense systems so the turrets don't blow them off the train car carrying Natural Vat EZMeelz.

Mostly because I just wanted to say futurehobos.

We mostly just call any change in elevation hills until you get farther south and/or west (into the Ozarks where they're called mountains), and you'll find them mainly south of the Missouri River.

I can't really speak to the north or east sides of STL, but I can tell you that Area 3 is along the I-44 corridor and right now most of that green zone is actually state parks. During the resource rush it's likely that that area would have had most of the timber cut down, and mining done to start removing the limestone - there is actually a decently sized mine there already that you can see in the picture (from the bottom left corner it's the white spot about a quarter of the way directly to the right). It's highly unlikely that everything there would have been mined out by now as most of the mines I know of in the area are sitting on 100+ years of known reserves right now and economically speaking you can only mine so much limestone before it stops being financially viable.

A few other things to consider:

Bridges are expensive to build and replace, especially the sized ones needed to cross the Mississippi, so I think they'd likely be moderately to strongly secured. *cough* SRM3-03 *cough*

South of the city in Herculaneum is a lead smelting plant that also recycles batteries. It's basically on the site of an older smelter, and the whole area is mildly toxic already from the old run off and the existing natural lead in the ground, so it'd be pretty easy to make that area a toxic zone.

I think they're building another bridge across the river, actually. I'm sure you actually know this already, but I don't have teevee.

It's been an age since I last read Bug City, which I'll have to rectify fairly soon now that I think about it, but wasn't there a sizeable refugee movement of Chicagoans that managed to get out before the walls went up and the general area went to hell? Large numbers of new people with nothing but the cash they have in the bank and whatever they can put on a credit card, or at best what they're driving and anything they managed to throw in the back, could make things somewhat interesting. Especially since they're liable to be shunned once word about the bugs gets out and people suspect they might be invested with insect spirits and panic, mostly unnecessarily but I'm sure some would probably sneak in. Also adds a nice population boost to local metro area.

Locals would never let them live it down. They're Cubs fans.

Because this thread got big I've moved my notes here. Comments here!

No I didn't actually. It's been several years since I lived there and when I did I seldom went into the 'city' itself (I was down in the Festus/Crystal City area). The bridge thing was me obliquely throwing out a potential plot hook - the plot of the mission I referenced could pretty easily be re-purposed with St Louis as the setting instead of NYC.

Again I am not ignoring anything-I'm slowly getting ready to start working on my neighborhoods write up-not all 70 mind you, but several of interest. And Locations of Interest.

Oh! Well yeah. They're building a new interchange at the Interstate Confluence where 70, 64, 55, and 44 all meet.

Or just north of there, on 70. Looks like it will handle car traffic since more and more are communting from IL.

Bridges and rail as plothooks would be an interesting idea. Or how the Army Corps of Engineers has to have a team of mages/shamans on hand when some crazy toxic tries to summon the spirit of Ol' Muddy to smash Arch 3.3.

Herculaneum is awesome! So going to do an industrial/toxic run there.

Where I'd hang out, of course.

A minor problem of wastewater: location WW1 marks the wastewater treatment plant that services St Louis [although there must be others upstream; for obvious reasons, though, the big ones are always downstream of the city], while location WW2 marks the location of the wastewater treatment plant servicing East St Louis. Allow me to draw your attention to the position of the borders of the UCAS [green] and CAS [red]. Now, all this must have been sorted by 207x, but it means political moves somewhere along the line, and probably a massive expansion of East St Louis' capacity, since the UCAS gave up everything downstream on the west bank. There's room in East St Louis, but it's low, and would put a lot of wastewater in one precarious place. You want toxic, there's some toxic for you.

"What do you mine here?"
"Why, we mine terrorism, sir."

[edit: fixed link.]

Your first link 404'ed me.

Fixed.

These runs just write themselves.

Almost nothing in this city is north-south. Paul, this would be an interesting way to make the flavor of the city real: leave the grid of the dry-erase map north-south, but make all the street maps canted at odd angles, and the intersection of sets of odd angles. I would quickly go mad, had I need to live there.

Something that I had forgotten about STL. Rabid Insane Sports fans. As in if the Cards are playing, you aren't getting Downtown from West County in less than 6 hours.

It's not as bad now. I can get from the Stadium onto 40 with only six attempted manslaughter charges!

Okay I'm going to keep the border right where it is-yeah perhaps it'd have made more sense to have it somewhere else, but I like that those damned politicians can't get anything right. Yes it means I'll need to make some decisions on how downtown now works.

Testify. Sports are a major part of the atmosphere of the city [particularly during summer/fall?].


The biggest problem I've had is the expressway issue. As in, if you put the border on expressways, how do you divide it? This happens all over SR - thanks, SR1 map dick - and I don't have a real solution for it. Something I though of yesterday but haven't had a chance to flush out is the idea that the border would go down the divider of the highway, and each country would just [if they felt they needed it] build another lane on the outside. So you'd have two parallel expressways, separated by a border fence, with border crossings at each entrance/exit complex.

However, in STL, the CAS probably wouldn't bother to put up an expressway that wouldn't go anywhere [since their border is a peninsula], so they could replace their side with, whatever, surveillance, no-mans-land, park, a combination of the three, and it'd save you [and I] a lot of border redrawing.

The only problem I see with that parallel expressways idea is I drive for a living IRL and commerce would shut the hell down if I had to pass through a checkpoint at every exit ramp. The easy way to fix it is to have something similar to the EZPass toll transponder only this is BorderPass or something and you drive through a booth that gets your cars' transponder id and the time/date that you crossed. And this also builds in the ability for hackers to monkey with the system and the fixer guy to make a killing selling onetime use BorderPass units to groups that needed to do gangsta shit over in the CAS then boogie back to the UCAS.

Oh, no, sorry, I just mean to cross the border. If you were driving the expressway, and not getting off at an exit that went across the border, you'd just stay on the expressway as normal. Only once you got off and hung a left [as it were] would you come to a checkpoint, which would then need to go over or under the expressways. [I've been picturing under, for aesthetic, construction, and security reasons, but I'm still working on it.]


This raises a question I'm not sure of the answer on: how porous is the border, legally? Is it like Canada and the US, where I could live on one side and work on the other, and just BorderPass my way back and forth? Or do you need a diplomatic reason and paperwork to get across?

My plan is to have the border through the city itself rather porous-this helps facilitate business, but also reflects the rather friendly nature of the CAS and UCAS. Things aren't perfect but the two nations get along a little better than say the CAS and Aztlan.

I want that neighborhood map you linked to reflect the "open" or "free" part of the city where anyone can travel. Once you pass those borders then you'll need to have appropriate Identification-but I picture it being a lot less hostile than the crossings out of Seattle into the NAN. This means that the expressways can remain in their current location, and that overall traffic isn't too seriously impeded. (Now illicit traffic may face a different challenge level...) But with the advent of wireless identification technology today (In commercial trucking, and things like IPass in Illinois there's no reason perfectly legal citizens and commercial traffic couldn't just keep driving as they are remotely scanned by customs and security.)

One exciting side-effect of this is that the border is porous for people with SINs, but for people without, it's all about the smuggling, which, in a city like this, is going to be taking place all along the border, in various ways. Getting over the border can be a component of many runs, with the benefit that we'll have pretty awesome maps of the border!


Which also leads to people smuggling [themselves and stuff] by swapping cargo on a legitimate truck and putting false RFID tags on whatever you're trying to smuggle. All of which works fine until the truck is picked for a random search that day...

Found the upstream waste water plants. The northern one has room for expansion, too, many four or five times current capacity, if they're willing to eat up parks, which would infuriate neighborhood groups slightly less than not having potable water.

After VITAS, who would be around to complain?

Isn't there an underground defense department establishment nearish to St. Louis?

Can one of you locals tell me what, besides suburbanization, happened to St Louis Place? A lot of downtown is missing massive stretches of housing, but this is unlike anything anywhere else in the city.

edit: Seriously, this place gives me a hard-on the size of Mars. Makes me homesick for Gary IN. The only way to make a city tolerable: take out all the people.