Well, like the title and description says...

I have looked through the Runner's Havens sourcebook for 4th edition, and we are preparing to start a game set in Hong Kong, mostly to be different from our last Seattle game. Basically, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to make it feel unique from Seattle, and I'd appreciate any tips/pointers.

Thanks!

PatriotArrow

I suppose you could make the locals more xenophopic to outsiders to start, and everyone's generally pretty superstitious in one way or another. But from what I've read from it so far it doesn't appear to be that much different from modern day HK to me.

I've been there before and the first thing to get across is the heat, humidity, smells of compacted humanity and the crowds. My god the crowds! People everywhere stacked on top of one another. Traffic moves at a crawl and you are better off walking than driving. Many people use the subways exclusively and it goes every where. Everyone is trying to sell you something if you go by the markets and some will get in your face about it.
If you get out of the core city and into the suburbs (basically up the mountain) it gets better but then in SR terms it means higher security.
Some of these pictures will give you a good idea of what it is like. Look up Kowloon Walled city pics as well. That place exists in the SR time line.

More crowded, difficult to use ground vehicles. Mystical and magical (the random table for wild magic in the old SR3 Magic in the Shadows book helps lots), with power lines, the Wuxing Skytower. On the other hand, high tech clinics, a technomancer enclave, the walled city horror. More waterfront than Seattle, and water vehicles or hovercrafts are more useful. Steep mountains, surrounded by hostile warlord nations, a mercenary haven just across the bay, an aquatic Arcology (iirc?) in the bay area, highly secured with sensor nets.
Triads as the main power in organized crime, gambling and pachinko parlors, bias against gwailos, superstition is taken very seriously with numerology, feng shui etc. pp.

Just a few buzz words

That sounds about right and its hobo central in some places/horrifically cramped living conditions.

The criminal world is pretty different from Seattle's. The following isn't exactly canon, but it's an extrapolation from today's situation:

Outside of the lawless zones, all major crimes fall under the supervision of the Triads. Even when you're a freelance runner, you still get to meet the Triad bosses and bring them gifts regularly. Gangs can be group of as little as four people. They have a trade somewhere (drug dealing, racket, prostitution, etc.) or can be for hire (bodyguards and enforcers) or even freelance (doing heists). In all cases, they'll need the protection of a triad if they want to stay in the business. They can do their business as they please as long as they don't go against the business of the triad and they are expected to bring gifts to the triad's boss (especially at Chinese new year).

Triads deal with the police regularly. The police is aware that it will never be able to completely stop the Triads, so it will let them have their business as long as they don't cause too much trouble. And the Triads try to expand as much as possible despite the police.

Also, play some Sleeping Dogs before every session.

Thanks for the info so far! It's really helped me think about things a little more clearly. I'm open to anything else people comes up with, of course.


PatriotArrow

Check out some of the Hong Kong police movies like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Infernal Affairs 1 & 2 and Hard Boiled. They can give you an insight to how (fictional) cops deal with the place and were the inspiration for a lot of Sleeping Dogs. Also, it is a pretty cosmopolitan city with people from all over present. Of course being a city in China, people from that part of the world are represented in higher numbers but you can find people from nearly anywhere there. The SR Hong Kong is full of refugees from the wars going on in mainland China too so crowding and culture clashes can be quite common.

@DamHawke, staying in a hostel there was bad enough, especially after coming from mainland China and how cheap everything was there compared to HK. I didn't need to go looking for hobos to add spice to my stay .

Just don't use Deus Ex as a foundation for Hong Kong.

~Umi

Wasn't that city supposed to Shanghai? But yeah, Shanghai isn't like Hong Kong. Shanghai has a fuckton more people for one thing.

Deus Ex, not Deux Ex: Human Revolution.

~Umi

Whats that one movie with Dakota Fanning where they have psychic powers? Push? Not really critically acclaimed I guess, but it gets the ethos of the place wierdly spot on. Pretty sure it was in fact filmed there.The psychic powers bit jives with Shadowrun to boot. Yknow Ridley Scott based the feeling of bladerunner on the feeling of Hong Kong. Heard he actually got the idea at Victorias peak in fact.

I was once stranded overnight on the street in Hong Kong. Unique experience. The place hums with neon. Folks from everywhere speaking every form of gibberish, but at the very depth of night Like a vast glowing cavern.

Shanghai is big like BIG. Everything there is just MASSIVE and sprawling. I imagine Seattle to be like that more. HK is more like New York. Big, yeah, but big UP. People just stacked and crammed and every nook and cranny utilized.

Can't imagine that the sixth world could take the street savvy out of the native hong konger. I see it being dog eat dog in almost every way that it is now while still maintaining stasis for the worlds financial elites just like now.

Superstition seems to me the awakened version of not trusting anybody or anything but yourself no matter how it looks to other folks. The religious freedom plus the awakening would spur a rennaissance of superstition there and in Taiwan.

Push.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465580/

While A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled are very good Heroic Bloodshed movies, they don't aim to be realistic and they don't show much of Hong-Kong.

Infernal Affairs might be more interesting for the setting (you can also add the third one to the list), but if you really want to get an idea of how the Triads handle things, Election 1 and 2 are even better.

Gambling and Number-mysticism is very important for the People of Hong Kong
and their main goal in Live is getting a better/bigger Home.
They are always in a Hurry (Elevators and Staircases run at double Speed)
and everybody is online
I've been there in 2008.Hong Kong is a Multi Cultural Hub
The Shadowrun Hong Kong could/should be very Meta Human friendly

With a Dance in Front of the Waterside Skyline
http://leadership.uoregon.edu/upload/images/hongkong.jpg
Medicineman

Lots of great responses here to work with. On pages 8 and 9 of Runner Havens, I mentioned some of the things an outsider should take note of in Hong Kong, and those same things give the GM some advice on cultural differences to highlight. For example, Blade mentioned above the concept of meeting a Triad boss and giving him gifts. That's part of maintaining one's guanxi network in Hong Kong, which is very important to shadowrunners and wageslaves alike.

And Mantis's post about the crowds, the humidity, and everyone trying to sell you something is great to keep in mind also. In Shadowrun, that extends to a noisy AR environment where just about everyone uses filters and everyone else continually tries to find ways around those filters. And yes, in Hong Kong, the crowds are very much mixed with all sorts of metahumanity. There's a line in Runner Havens where I mentioned that a human in Hong Kong is generally more comfortable with a Hong Konger troll than he is with an American human.

Modern day HK is the most western and relaxed city in China. It's about the only city in china where the locals don't shoot Caucasians 'oh my god, the Yeti actually DO exist!' looks (and, yes, take an occasional photo). Hawke's right, the writeup is basically today's Hong Kong with weird/wild magic because all those Feng shui attacks in architecture work as rituals in SR.

Of course, being Western also has advantages: the locals have a hard time figuring out where your social standing is respectively to them. Especially in cities that aren't big on tourism, but have a significant amount of foreign investment, they are visibly uneasy when dealing with you. I made an arrogant young pilot (captain, air force uniform) stop cold when pushing ahead in a queue in a post station because he was not sure whether I was somehow attached to a business in Guangzhou (and pushing past me would cause me to call my friends higher up in the hierarchy than him, report him and make his life uncomfortable) or whether I was just a dumb tourist and pushing me around was inconsequential. In the end he decided to err on the side of caution. Heh. The foreign ministry also advises to have a photo handy with some politican to wave in front of policemen and claum that this is your uncle/aunt and if they harrass you more you'll call them and they'll be very sorry. Apparently that has a high chance of working, go figure.


And the smell of foreign plants. This is actually the first thing I noticed stepping out of Chek Lap Kok, too. The place has a smell to it that is very distinct to anyplace in western civilisation (which largely smell similar, either side of the Atlantic). It's a melange of grime, seawater, jasmine-like flowers, wet, rotting rainforest leaves, people, spices, and diesel fumes (from all those ships). Also, the reserve in Hong Kong Island's inland means you may well walk down a narrow cyberpunk alley criscrossed by wires and dotted with AC units and neon signs (if you're notably taller than an average chinese, watch your head or be prepared for bruises, seriously) and suddenly see a 5 meter high fence and behind that rainforest.

The second thing I noticed is that everyone has the same hair color. This is much more of a strange impression than I would have imagined. IT also means many Chinese dye their hair - usually men, not women, since it's a status thing. It seems long fingernails for men are also back in fashion, to show how they don't really have to work at all. Fashion is very colourful and uses combinations that would never go in the West, probably to make up for the uniform hair. The city is relatively clean, and you see not too many Graffiti, less than in major German cities at least and much less than in places like Paris.

Also, forget vehicles in this city. If possible, use the subway, it'S the fastest way to get around. In SR it is, I think, tightly surveilled, so the ferries might be an option too, or walking. If you need vehicles, try RVs, bikes, or hijack cabs. The streets are narrow and winding in ways I think an American can hardly believe (for comparison: the narrow alleys between city blocks where dumpsters are and fire stairs end are average roads in Hong Kong; they're narrow for a European, who in turn finds all American cities he saw - which is quite a couple - vastly spaced). Buildings also are often very high, and very narrow - a 10 by 10 meters base may reach up 20 stories.

And there are plants everywhere. Seriously. If there is an unused corner, some Chinese puts a potted plant there. It's cute and unexpected and gives the place a certain unique feeling.

http://jonasdero.deviantart.com/gallery/ has some awesome mood pics for a cyberpunk-esque Hong Kong.

Found this on the Web:
https://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=20432...b=2&start=3
Someone took google maps and made a shadowrun hong-kong overlay.

Very cool! I did a Google Earth overlay for Shadowrun Hong Kong a while back, it should still be linked on these forums somewhere.

I needed a good thread to post a link to an awesome Kowloon Walled City infographic. I think it works here.

Yikes. And half the damned city is probably like that (or worse) in SR. That'd be some serious culture shock for even a jaded Seattleite.

I visited Hong Kong about ten years ago and I completely agree with this... the place is insane. For the more touristy areas, if you and your players have the benefit of living somewhere that has a large Chinese population, the way I've typically described it to people is "okay, imagine going to Chinatown on a busy Sunday afternoon, but with ten million people and no signage restrictions on the buildings". It doesn't really do it justice if you've been there, but hopefully it'll give your players a mental image to work with.

e: This might actually work better in the SR universe than in real life, since it has a balance of "regional flavour" and "a sprawl is a sprawl". Hope that helps a little.

My experience wasn't quite as bad. But maybe thats because I only visited the more touristic areas. No comparisation to for example India. In SR though that would certainly fit.

What I remember is that well off parts of the city, for example the shopping district and districts for low class workers were very close together. Religion is a big part of Hong Kong, although not in a "true believer" way but more becaus "it can't hurt".
The SARS scare is still felt (and I guess in SR with VITAS it will be the same). People wear masks when they are ill to not infect others and on the airport were health inspectors who pulled out anyone who looked ill.

For a quick and dirty view that probably won't reflect realism too much but will be mostly relatable to your players, take the Undercity from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and add about fifty years, the Awakening, and Augmented Reality. Hell, since the geography won't have changed, you can always go ahead and plonk Hengsha from DXHR right across the bay from Shanghai, should your players every migrate there from Hong Kong. Somehow, I see that as the kind of project a megacorp would make given the right circumstances (near complete control of a city, but almost completely unable to bulldoze anything to build a massive arcology - just build a new city literally atop the old one.)

When you are using video games as example don't forget Sleeping Dogs.
Its representation of Hong Kong isn't half bad. Just too few people and there is too much space.

Dear gods, it's been decades since I was there.

The thing about the Triads is, they're everywhere. Some are perfectly legal "Benevolence societies", with no more criminal activity than your local chamber of commerce. Others are so dirty, they need to look up to see the gutter scum. You can't do business in Hong Kong without involving Triads somewhere, legally or otherwise.

Just as a bit of flavour, it is nearly impossible to get actual marijuana in hong kong, but hash is common as dirt. It might be a little different with Deepweed, given the coastal setting and the way Deepweed is grown, but it could apply due to tradition and preference.

A story a friend told me from hong kong; A western girl, living in hong kong was walking through a market when a hash dealer approached her, offering hash for over three times it's normal value. She had been there long enough to know what it was worth, so told him to walk on, and he smiled and pointed to the police officer standing three feet away. She realised in a case of culture shock that she would actually be arrested if she didn't buy from him. That's the sort of relation between triads and police you can think about and use in game encounters.

The more I've read up on the Triads, the more....startled...I've been. There really is no overstating how entangled they are with the culture as a whole, how long they've been there, how thoroughly imbedded they are in the whole system. I think when we hear "Chinese mafia" or something, this gross simplification, we get very much the wrong idea about them from our Western point of view.

My local Chamber of Commerce might or might not be a hive of scum and villainy that would make a den of Tatooinian gangsters say "at least we're not pretending what we're doing is legal."



That's pretty much the definition of corruption, sadly.

And very well highlighted by our GM, time and time again. What an amazing campaign city.

It's a function of the value of "family" and "community" in Chinese culture (speaking from experience - with the culture, not the Triads). There's every bit as much focus on the community in Chinese society as there is on the individual in Western societies. It's not exactly a case of "the Triads have infiltrated all levels of society" in the sense that every person willing to help the Triads is a member, but thanks to that wonderful concept of guanxi (the "network" thing), it only takes one Triad member in a network to take advantage of the social norms of favour-trading. Honestly, from a GM's perspective, it's probably more accurate to think of the Triads in Hong Kong as "the old boy's network with some criminal elements" rather than "the Chinese Mafia".

*resurrects thread*

Brand new article over on Vice on the Kowloon Walled City, or as the article's title accurately puts it, "The Internet's Favorite Cyberpunk Slum."

Thanks, this goes into my ressource links. Especially the links it bundles are interesting.

Play the original Deux Ex and blatantly rip off of their Hong Kong, complete with goofy accents and hilariously stereotypical characters.

"Rever one rabs."

"Issac is letting anybody back here these days."

"I spill my drink!"

"JC Denton, as dark and mysterious as his brother!"

Watch your game devolve into a wild evening of nostalgic in-jokes.

"Ay wonted ohrenge! Eet gave me lemon lime."

~G. Hermann

Eet eez zhe maintenance man! He knows I like OHRENGE.

.. Johnnie To's The Mission and Exiled are also good watching..