A couple of years ago when I started my Shadowrun campaign, I told the players that the entire Seattle metroplex has instead of the printed 3 M people, 10x as much or 30 million. It seemed to make more sense at the time, it gave more places for runners to hide, and it painted a bleaker picture of the future. Aside from that, I didn't make other changes to the setting.

Now that I am coming back to the game, I would like to explore Seattle with 30 million people a bit more. What things would change from the official setting, and what would stay the same?

If anyone has any experience with living in a 10+ million city today, it would be great to hear their feedback.

New York City has barely 8 million people today. A little over 20 million if you include the suburbs and surrounding towns.

London is similar. Shanghai has about 14 million, 17 including surrounding areas. Beijing has about 13 million.

30 million seems a little excessive. Especially given the massive death toll over the last 30 years of Shadowrun history.



-k

The "Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area" is 15,000 km^2, probably including the lakes and bays. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area

You are talking NYC or LA population density across all 15,000 km^2. 2000 people per km^2 average, with areas much denser. There are no unpopulated areas. The barrens is as full of people as the Bronx is. The lava plains are full of people.

Acording to IBGE, the Brazilian institute of Statistics, São Paulo has 34 million people. Yeah. That much. If you count surrounding areas, the number rises to 41 Million people.

http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/po....shtm&uf=35

So i guess it's closer from the situation you are asking for in Seattle. I never lived there (it's actually pretty far away from where i live. as in 2k kilometers away), but i go there due to work at least once or twice a year due to work. I think the OP also wanted to know more about the feeling of being in place like that. I will describe a few things, i hope i don't offend anyone that lives there, and should be taken with a spoonfull of salt.

I find it crazy. It's a Sprawl in the cyberpunk sense. 248.209,426 km². That's 2.91% of the surface of the whole country on a single city. It has it's effects on people indeed. Perhaps it's not as crowded as NYC because it was way more area. There is a strange mix of ups and lows that does not happen in the rest of the country. The VERY RICH may (and sometimes do) live complete lives without touching the ground where others, but some also walk the very streets and mingle with people who are poor because they share the same tastes, niches and vices. Doesn't matter how strange you think you are: There is someone like you somewhere in town. Drug Dealer? Sure. Japanese Yakuza? sure. Rocker? sure. Punk? Sure. Anti-Gay Neonazi in the city with biggest GLS parade on the planet? Sure thing. Ony guy died due to a beating he received from a few middle class dudes not a year ago, so, yeah, sure. It's a city with a japanese population large enough you don't have to speak portuguese if you live in the Japanise neighbourhood, and you may never need to learn it to do anything except watching TV and go to the movies.

3-6 hours of traffic jams are not unheard of. They aren't really day to day, but people commute huge distances to work sometimes. And there is a thing about the way people walk. I don't live there, so perhaps it is clearer to me, but there is a strange kind of... well, maniac/effervescent sense of PURPOSE on the way people walk. People hit the pavement half stomping it, and if you walk slower than they do, you will be pushed aside, shouted out, or carried along, specially on the subway system. It rare to see people smile, but they are known to smirk by themselves, ocasionally People eat in a hurry food that comes from all over the world and get back to their work. And they work. A lot. Rio de Janeiro is also a megalopolis ( And it's a city i completely fell in love with), but it's not a quasi-cyberpunk feel. The paulistas seem driven by some hidden motor all the time, always on the edge, exhilarated and exhausted at the same time. Things are expensive, like, crazy expensive compared to other areas, as i find the cost of living there through the roof. You can find anything. There are several seafood-based high cuisine restaurants in São Paulo, but the city is has no coast. You can eat lobster at 4 AM, if you want to, you just have to able to afford it. It's a monster of a city, that is fed with the food produced all over the place an all over the world. Chef Anthony Bourdain described it venomously, but apptly, "It is as if New York was thrown up all over Los Angeles."

A fun thing you can do with your players. FORCE THEM to use public transportation. How? the way the São Paulo administration tried to reduce the ammount of vehicles on the street: plate rotation. Only a fraction (a large fraction) of the cars were allowed to get on the streets. With Gridguide/Drones it's easier to control that sort of stuff. Make the investiment the rigger made in license plates be worth of it. And as i noticed, not all PC buy cars, but the DO own clunky illegal pieces of hardware commonly.

It does kind of boggle my mind that quite a lot of cities exist with a population larger than my entire country.

Howdy folks, long time no see.
Just puting my 2 nuyen here as Garou asked for me to add something.

As Garou mentioned, yes, São Paulo is fucking huge. I mean, HUGE. I don't know how many cities are there that behave like this, but São Paulo has "sub-mayor halls" to manage several groups of neighborhoods. Honestly, I don't know why anyone would want to be the Mayor of that place.

Now, I've learned that the definition of "how close" something is to paulistas is not the same for anyone else. I had gone there for the first time in 2005 for the first concert in Brazil of Pearl Jam. I'd stayed at the cousin's house of a friend of mine that was going with me. We asked his cousin if the stadium where the show was going to happen was close to his house and if we could arrive there walking. His anwser was 'yes'. We walked for nearly two hours, passing through two subway stations that we could have taken to reduce the walking but he said it wasn't necessary because it was too close and it would be too crowded. I mean, it was almost 10 miles away and this is "WALKING DISTANCE" for paulistas.

Also, the first thing you ask someone you might want to have a romantic/sexual relationship is where they live. If they live more than 20 miles away it's better not to take it forward because you will neve see each other.

And yes, the town NEVER SLEEPS.

Lol. This whole topic of "describing locations in snarky comments" felt very Jackpont-y for me. Especially when you ask help from other jackpointers to do it.

@Garou thank you very much for your description, that is exactly what I was looking for.

Going with population density of Sao Paolo of 7,200 /km^2 in the municipal area, and according to Seattle 2072 the total land area of Seattle is 3904 km^2, that brings the theoretical population to 28 million people. So close enough.

However, as others have mentioned that means people living on lava flows, in the glow and so forth. So lets say that the total Seattle population is lower, about 15 million or so (this includes the SINless). To allow more open spaces in the city we can assume that in 2072 there is more vertical living then today, which would allow some areas to have a very high population density (lets say downtown has a average of 10,000 people per km squared), which will allow other areas to have relatively few inhabitants.

This means there is little land left for farming inside the metroplex, and it is guarded zealously. Unguarded open terrain is quickly destroyed as the poor salvage and scrounge all they can. 90+% of the food is imported, so it makes the food grown in the metroplex all the more valuable. Water and power supply is hardly stable with frequent blackouts and shortages for all except the corporations and the rich.

So if you have any more comments please keep them coming.

"What do you call ten thousand Humanis members filling up the lava pits?" "A good start."

You are forgetting you don't really need land for farming in 2071. Hydroponics and laboratories can produce a LOT of foodstuffs. Actual farm grown foodstuffs probably are for people of high lifestyle and above.

30 million? Yeah, not bad. Metropole has 200 million souls. Two HUNDRED MILLION. Of course, it also encompasses the entire space between Sao Paulo and Rio, but that's still a pretty fucked up number. And, the place is a fucked up hell hole governed by things that basically view those 200 million fraggers alternatively as meat Popsicles or annoyances.

Rhine-Rhur Megaplex comes in diiiiistant second with 75 million.

The whole idea of Metropole is screwed up. They guys that write SR are great and all, but they don't get the distances in Brazil, and neither they have a hint on populations. 200 milion people is more than doubling the actual population of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais ( a HUGE state that is halfway in the middle the two). The actual distance between the cities is more than 430 kms. That's a lot of ground. It's as if the whole brazilian population lived on those areas, and the rest of the country had not a living soul. Last Census around here gave us a 194 million souls. So either there was no VITAS and UGE on Brazil, or everyone packed their bags and went to São Paulo and never came back. Not counting the fact that there is a huge 'friendly' rivalry between Rio and São Paulo that extends WAY beyond Football/Soccer...

Huh? Sixth World Almanac states the population of the RRP to be "more than 35 million". I guess that means less than 40 million, because otherwise they'd given the next highest rounded figure. (SoE gave a population figure of "26 million citizens", but I guess that doesn't include SINless).

However, I find the canon population figures for the AGS actually too high. The AGS' population (99.8M) is 22% more than that of the FRG 2012 (81.8M). Either Germany wasn't hit at all by VITAS and we've had a ridiculously massive surge in birthrates and/or there was absurdly high immigration. The population figures for other European states given in SoE are much closer to current RL figures (sometimes almost identical), so I'd guess it's unwillingness to retcon nonsense from the original Germany Sourcebook.


I believe that was pretty much the idea behind the metropole sprawl, that the Amazonian government more or less forced the people from the rest of Brazil to move into metropole, so that the awakened wilderness could reclaim the country?

Although I agree that SR writers sometimes don't seem to "get" other regions. Heck, I've seen some patently ridiculous fluff text about parts of Germany in the FanPro Deutschland-produced German sourcebooks, and there we're talking about authors from the same country.

Not exactly true. Most major cities are still in place. Brasilia, Salvador, Manaus and even João Pessoa are quoted. That made people of my own hometown, Recife, right south of João Pessoa, poke fun at being ignored. We alsopoke fun at João Pessoa IRL, calling it an "outer neighbourhood" of our own city. We do so to voice our envy, because their city is much more civilized than or own.

You forgot the Awakened population. Since Amazonia includes pretty much all sentient creature as citizens most of those 200 million won't be the traditional metatypes. So any losses to VITAS and UGE are more than offset by the influx of free spirits, dragons, and other types.

Aren't Nagas native to the area?

Suspiciously like that, suspiciously like that....

In fact, that's exactly what happened. I think calling it a single city is a stretch though, I agree. I always saw it more as the two cities at the poles and less urban land in the middle. I mean, a city that size isnt comprehensible from the current perspective - it boggles the mind how you would manage it. But that's kind of the point of it. It's by far the most disfunctional hell hole in the SR universe. The Amazonians don't really care about the filthy humans, so humans are forced to figure things out. I see it almost as a Victorian, Industrial revolution sort of place. Complete survivalist capitalism. Build a company, make money, carve out a fiefdom.

I'm sure it probably rubs locals the wrong wy, but that is a truism of settings. Locals always think its wrong. Doesn't mean it isn't cool for the ret of us.

My idea was that the formation of NAN forced a lot of people into migration, and the bulk of the west coast came to Seattle. Thats why it would have a large population compared to the official setting, even with VITAS and the crashes. The people probably didn't move in all at once, but over a period of 10 years.

Still, a big influx of people at one time would be expected, and would create its own problems, the most major of those is how to distribute water and supplies to those people. Whole areas of Seattle would have been tent towns until the construction would catch up. Construction would be probably be the most efficient type of building to house many people, so multiple high rises of apartment complexes would predominate.

The complexes would be of poor quality, with small surface area of apartments, and often house a large family. Socialist style building in a word.


Does anyone have first hand experience of favelas, or any kind of undeveloped area where a lot of people live?

Honestly, I don't see that resulting in a 30M population for Seattle. The combined population of the states of the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho) was about 12M at the 2010 census. Montana and Wyoming would add only another 1.5M. And a fair number people might also migrate instead east into the UCAS "heartland" or southward to California.

Also according to SoNA the relocation of "Anglos" was far from complete, especially if they had professional skills the NAN needed. IIRC the SSC is one of the most liberal NAN member states concerning citizenship or at least right of residence based on even distant native descent or "spiritual kinship" ("pinkskins").

I dropped it down to 15 million. Also Canada was largely affected by the NAN states forming, so sizable amounts of population from Alaska (0.7), BC (4.4) and Alberta (3.5), along with the 3 million already living in Seattle could theoretically bring Seattle in 2072 to 15 million.

You all forgot a major factor as far as Seattles population goes: Orks give birth in litters

Seemingly also forgotten by the SR authors, since the logical effects are pretty much ignored in any sources on populations and racial percentages that I'm aware of. Not to say that you can't have a 15M Seattle metroplex that's 80% orks in your own campaign, but that'd be a setting very different from the official Seattle.
(Apparently by the published numbers, ork percentage in Seattle has actually gone down from 19% in 2053/2060 to 16% in 2072. )

At the risk of sounding heretic, ork birth rates are one of the things I'd retcon if I published SR, because they seem rather nonsensical to me. No RL hominid species has primarily multiple births. And, as said, the long-term effects seem to get ignored by the authors anyway.

They retconned that recently... forget which book it was done in though. I think someone at Catalyst finally did some number-crunching and found out that there'd be waaay too many orks in the world. I based a self-sustaining ghoul fiefdom off of ork farming once...

A big ork population would make for some really interesting social tension, realising that the sprawl dwellers outnumber the main city 10 to 1, and they're all Ork!
Now you just need some dragon or IE to mention their race proud history of forming hordes.

Or for some really really charismatic ork leader to be a Warhammer 40k fan.

As no one seemed to answer that one, i will. I do have a little experience of Favelas because in my own place (as it happens on most non-planned cities on Brazil) there are Favelas right next to any good neighbourhood, in a very SR-like style.
I did a little research on the subject at Jornalism University.

What effectively happens has all to do with the appropriation of terrain. Generally speaking, areas of favelas aren't good areas for construction, or else they would have been used in this way before. In my own city in the NW of Brazil, Favelas exist either by the riverside or by ou local kind of Bayou (Called Mangue). On Rio de Janeiro, which has a particular kind of favelization process (Due to the abandonment of goverment interest on those areas), Favelas are built on the high hills over the city, each structure being built halfway over the other on levels (Lajes). Such structures allow better use of inclined surfaces for construction. But neither case it allows for tall buildings of sevelra floor. 2-3 floors max, every structure half braced on the next.

In Rio's case, the favela's formation existed on a non-official pact with the state goverment. Up to a certain height ( and i mean it) the state didn't invest in the infrastructure, which left the place ripe for non-official ways of construction and terrain deployment.

One un-intended side effect of this style of construction is that the Favela was a hard terrain to navigate tatically, and are quite defensible by drug dealers and other shady types. Operations in such locations are much more art than science. Every year, Special Forces teams from all over the world come to Rio in exchange programs, because if you can Operate on a favela at rio, you can do it in pratically any urban enviroment in the world. It's a tough cookie.

I believe that's what happened in places like the Barrens in SR-Seattle.

The Ork Litter thing is stapled off by high infant fatalities in ork children unless they're in Middle Class+ families.

And, honestly, how many of those are there around?

This as opposed to Southern California, where everything is 20 minutes away. Not really, mind you, based on traffic and actual distance, but it's the mindset of the folk living here.

There's the dude in Tir Tairngire, and I think Evo employs three or so. That's about it

I think Mexico City and Tokyo have around 25 million. 30 million is just over the top. I grew up in the suburbs of NYC with a population of 8 million and 25 million in the surrounding suburbs of NY. LI, CT and NJ. Trust me This is plenty crowded in some areas with lots of space in others. There is no need to pump up the numbers so high. Just the 8 million in NYC has slums, open parks, woodland areas, industrial areas and brownstone streets, chrome and steel and everything in between. Add on the outlying areas and you have more suburbs,farms, more slums (Newark, Yonkers, ) small towns and small citiies (Stamford, White Plains) and the commuter 'powerbase' of strip malls and beaches. still while being well short of 30 million.

This is pretty much how I view the Redmond Barrens, an absolute maze of just-barely-acceptable construction that LS/KE only goes into with SWAT and above force...or just subcontracts out to the Metro Guard if they need a big message delivered (usually via 155mm shells). Watching a documentary on the favelas was certainly eye-opening, at least for me.

The Los Angeles area-Southern California should have 30 million or upwards to 50 million people by the end of this century, while the San Francisco Bay Area is at 20-25 million residents. The state of California itself may be home to 70-75 million inhabitants in 2100 in this rate of growth, except the rate of outward migration continues to other neighboring states in the western region. And Seattle does not have the room to accomodate 30 million for goodness sake, nor does Dallas, Denver, Houston and Phoenix have more population in their metropolitan areas.

Not true garou, João Pessoa is just as much violent as "Hellcife" but there is a difference of scale. Recife has much more people than João Pessoa.
And yes, the whole idea was that Hualpa ordered most people to move to the São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro/Minas Gerais area, but he was not so stupid as to not allow some other cities to still exist because of the already industrial infrastructure there. I mean, taking Pernambuco as an example, I'm pretty sure that they would allow only the Great Recife Area to remain, the other cities would probably be reverted back to the Mata Atlântica.