[norwalkvirus]

I'm working (very early in concept) on a CAS campaign, based in New Orleans.

Basic idea for the overarching plot is that after the Aztlan-Amazonian war ends and things seem like they might be cooling down, intrigue starts heating up in the CAS.
- The CAS politicos are looking for ways to improve the standing of the CAS in the world, through various political and politico-economic initiatives.
- In particular, the CAS is looking to take advantage of rumors that the Corporate Court might restrict extraterritoriality among AA corps, by forming stronger relationships with CAS based AAs and encouraging others that do a lot of business here to relocate their headquarters (read: Lockheed-Northrop). This includes contingencies for whether or not anything changes or one or more AAs lose and/or gain extraterritoriality.
- The (re)establishment of New Echota, just northwest of the Atlanta Sprawl, is under heavy negotiations, but has been complicated by the PCC's acquisition of parts of Texas. As potentially new NAN, under the Cherokee tribe, there is some interesting intrigues and angles.
- A few lesser Dragons have recently begun to be significantly more prominent in certain CAS affairs, around New Orleans in particular. The SIS is interested in why and what that may mean for the nation.

I told some potential players that they'll get to decide what type of game they want to play, based on the type of group they put together. I'll be suggesting that their core be formed around Smuggling or Espionage. However, I've also said that I'd prefer they start out really Green, at or near the point of being brand new Shadowrunners. Corps-wise, the game will revolve mostly around AA intrigues, with any AAA involvement being very veiled (at first) or distant (until they smell strong opportunities). Not much in the way of Great Dragons, but I have some interesting ideas for not-as-great Dragons. Lots of Nation-State espionage heavily involving CAS, PCC, Sioux, Aztlan, Amazonia, UCAS, Caribbean League, and maybe some guest spots from other nations potentially interested in the region. Voudou is likely to feature, whether or not my player-runners focus in that area. I'm also interested in exploring the Awakened ecology of the region (and mythos).

I'm working up a lot of background right now to flesh out the key areas of the CAS that will be touched in the campaign but mostly focusing on the Gulf-Coast, Texas, and Atlanta. I'm very familiar with New Orleans/South Louisiana and somewhat familiar with DFW & Houston (in real life). I'm reading up as much as I can within published material. Anybody interested in donating some ideas? As I work on this, I'll vet some of my ideas through y'all as well.

[Ursus Maior]

I'm doing the exact same thing. 

Well, almost. We started a SR3 campaign last year, set in 2060, and our GM asked where we wanted to play. I voted for CAS and New Orleans and convinced the rest of the party. We then started playing DNA/DOA, later migrated to SR5 and I inherited the group from our GM, who left. I then started to write a campaign combining a lot of your elements with official Seattle-elements (Kenneth Brackhaven is Kenneth Desoto, that sort of thing), so I can use SR5 adventures and NPCs sometimes.

The CAS has some great opportunities and I don't get, why no-one ever wrote a dedicated supplement. I own basically every sourcebook that covers anything on CAS and New Orleans in special (I recommend "Dirty Tricks", it's great for CAS!), but it's really spread far and wide. To me the CAS are a lot more similiar to the modern South of the USA than UCAS are to the North. It feels like a corrupt, politico-driven state in the middle of rival nation-states with lots of rural areas, fewer metroplexes and a mix of dystopian "the man runs your life" and hopeful "Little House on the Prairie" remote communities. Everything is just a little bit smaller and less developed. But in the end that just means, that doom is yet to come.

In the CAS and New Orleans especially, you can get all the nations vs. nations skirmishing and backstabbing you want, since all these nation states are essentially regional to continental powers, but none are superpowers; although some could be, if they would manage to get their act together (CAS), shake of the yoke of the 'corps (Aztlan) or transcend their ethnicism (PCC, SN). In New Orleans you have the perfect mix of smugglers, mafia and magic with zombies, voodou and fewer 'corps. So basically it's Neuromancer on Halloween.

I know that's just the fantasy of a European guy, who's never been there, but my party seems to like it.

I plan on playing up until the second crash with the first season almost finished (introduction of the post-Fuchi universe). Second season will be year of the comet and , third season will lead towards the crash and a fourth season might take place in a post-crash society.

I'd love to swith ideas, but all I can offer is what my twisted mind made out of the source book material, Google Maps and a Deep South cliché. Amped up to 11 and mixed with zombies.

[norwalkvirus]

Not so bad. I live in New Orleans, and I plan to correct a lot of silly things and build on what already exists in the source material. When I've read about dedicated New Orleans material in some games (eg World of Darkness), it can feel like the person has only heard rumors of New Orleans and seen random scenes from movies that supposedly take place here.

For example of silliness, look at Louisiana Law:
That Louisiana is governed by Napoleonic Code is a myth. The territory controlled by France when the United States purchased it was not governed by the Code Napoléon/Code civil des Français. That was established as law a year later. The Louisiana Civil Code was finished in 1808, revised in 1825, and the current version was established in 1870 (and has since been undergone more regular but partial revisions so as not to be considered a new code). The 1808 code was in French and the 1825 code was in both English and French. The Civil Code was originally based on both French and Spanish Civil Law, while the most prominent modern civilian scholar is of Greek descent and has brought in influence from the Greek and, thus, German Civil codes while advising the Legislature through recent revisions, particularly in property law. The Criminal Code is roughly equivalent to American Common Law and is much less civilian in how it operates. Louisiana is very much a mixed jurisdiction, with civil and common law elements pervading the entire jurisdiction on both sides. The closest modern sibling is the Code of Quebec.

Not the most detailed summary, but far more than the inaccurate blurb from Target: Smuggler Havens (which is the primary source for the wiki, I believe). Most people may not care, but I'm in Law School studying Civil Law. I had to care.

The old World of Darkness New Orleans book, for a more egregious example, had no black people (city has been of majority African descent for several decades, though I'm not clear on when that became the case) and put a person-navigable sewer system in the city (the expense and maintenance would be nearly impossible in this terrain).

In all, the outlying areas in the city are great opportunities for mixing rural/semi-rural adventures with corporate territory (not necessarily extraterritorial territory). The region's landscape is dotted with marshland, woodland, oil refineries, rivers, wetlands, hunting grounds, swamp, bayou, non-beach shorefront landscapes, gulf islands, and more. There is a mix of large-scale saltwater and freshwater ecologies. It is a region that needs a lot of conservation in the modern era (deterioration of wetlands), so there is a number of ways to take that (eco-shaman revitalization projects/success, toxic dangers, hidden influences from numerous sources).

I want to put together enough material to really be worthy of its own supplement for the city (whether or not anyone officially uses it or I write something that is used officially). But I'd like to flesh out the whole of the CAS, too.

[norwalkvirus]

Just to give you more of a glimpse at stuff I was looking to incorporate:

New Orleans was designated as a major port of destination for Vietnamese refugees during and immediately after the Vietnam War. There are three somewhat different communities of Vietnamese heritage in the GNO (Greater New Orleans Area) including 1 in New Orleans East and 2 in the West Bank communities (the West Bank, strangely, being the south side of the Mississippi River of the Region) each coming from a different regional heritage in Vietnam. Almost all Asians hailing from Louisiana are from one of these three Vietnamese communities. To help flavor them, I was thinking about creating a pair of twin eastern dragons (most likely adult) and incorporating them into legends based on the Trưng Sisters.

The first recognized Mafia family in North America was the Matranga Crime Family in New Orleans. They largely displaced the Franco-Spanish-styled gangs that had run crime in New Orleans prior to their arrival from Sicily, toward the end of the American Civil War. They were rivaled by the Provenzano's, who led a gang that seemed to organize later into a more familiar mafia-style organization. The mafia influence in New Orleans largely petered out with the incarceration of Carlos Marcello, then head of the Matranga family. These New Orleans gangs isolated themselves from the mafia organizations in the rest of the country, due to friction from different roots. I plan to bring these two families back into play, pressuring the strangely slavic-named (Polish?) Kozlowski family from published material.

A Yakuza presence seems absurd, given the relative rarity of Japanese in the city (there are far more Chinese and Malaysian-Chinese, all dwarfed by the Vietnamese). So, instead of shoehorning in a Yakuza/Triad/Tong presence, the Mafia will be in contention with Vietnamese Gangs, Vory, and Good Old Fashioned Street Gangs.

[Ursus Maior]

Hmmm... I did not know about the Vietnamese community. I like that, it adds a new element to the game. Vietnam is seriously under-represented in SR, although being a growing economy today. Maybe that's a left-over from the game's inception in the late 1980s. I also like the idea of a Viatnamese dragon. Usually I do not incorporate dragons into my games to keep them a distant threat, looming in the shadows (pun intended), but a young Eastern Dragon gathering his human flock of a minority group around him, might just work.

In my 2060 New Orleans I also don't really care for the Asian mafia. My players have not had any contact to the mob so far, neither the Kozlowski (yepp, Polish) nor their Italian sub-families, but they battled a Zobop (voudoo mafia) fraction that followed a petro-cult of a demon- and zombie-conjuring female magician, but where otherwise all orks and trolls. They fitted into my racism-triad of Gov. Desoto (based in Baton Rouge, but owning Desoto Investments in NO), a metahuman-rights group and the racist orks and trolls of the Sons of Sauron chapter.

I created several major sites in the New Orleans metroplex (which is New Orleans, all of the peninsula down to the Gulf and everything west til you hit the Baton Rouge sprawl), which are constantly referred to in the game. There are two major corp-zones (except downtown). One is the Research & Development Park, which ist today's Research & Technology Park, housing mostly biotech and some start-ups. The other is a newer development, which I dubbed the "Floatation Canal Development Park", down at Port Fouchon (https://www.google.de/maps/place/Port+Fourchon,+LA+70357,+USA/@29.1058325,-90.194444,2994m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x86206c4fb7cb059f:0x51100d5488ecf163). It allows the corps access to the bayous (biotech galore!) and the Gulf all at once. The Petro corps dwell here as well as a sizeable ghoul population we met in DNA/DOA.

The most important other locations are Bridge City, a E-zone of orks and trolls which spiraled into a Z-combat zone lately due to racial violence and across the bridge Elmwood, which used to be D or E, but became a combat Z-zone as well, when the police hit the Zobop compund and their Sons of Sauron supporters. Additional sites are Mosca's restaurant (Italian ork-mob: http://moscasrestaurant.com/) and Black Pearl, which is home to the ork market (now a farmer's market: http://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=farmersmarket&find_loc=Black+Pearl,+New+Orleans,+LA) and home of the legal ork-underground. They can reach Bridge City through a DIY tunnel that conencts to derelict freighters on each side of the river, though.

Last major site is "The Circus", a luxurian brothel run by a vampire, which lies close to the piers in the south of the city proper. The vampire is an ancient relict of days gone by and she's a capable magician, too (maybe a nosferatur?), but mostly tries to stay out of the new racial violence. Too much attention ist unhealthy.

[norwalkvirus]

Looks pretty solid. I think you're the only person outside of S. Louisiana who has ever heard of Port Fouchon (my old Eng. Firm had some projects there).

Loyola University's main campus is on St. Charles, next to Tulane, but Loyola Law School Campus is on the (SW) corner of Broadway and St. Charles. I'm familiar with the area around Black Pearl. There is a nice little French-styled sandwich shop called Tartine right next to that plaza. Uptown/Garden District/Carrollton is heavily populated by NIMBY's (not in my back yard), which in real life like to prevent economic development uptown (like buildings 3+ stories tall and rezoning for certain types of businesses). Along Maple Street (between Broadway and Carrollton, on the other side of St. Charles) are all the Tulane/Loyola college bars and a few niche college-age appealing coffee shops and small restaurants. Vincent's Restaurant, on Fern & St. Charles, is rumored to be owned by a former mobster (who likes to rent and park Italian cars in front of the place). Nestled around Freret St. on Broadway is all of Tulane's & Loyola's legitimate Fraternity houses (no Sorority houses because of brothel laws). The Riverbend around St. Charles and S. Carrollton is another area with a bunch of smaller restaurants of varying style/ethnicity, generally to appeal to college kids. The same thing exists bound between Oak St. and Willow St. and the Oak St./River Road junction. Lots of areas with a mix of of commercial and residential area good for safehouses and meets. The area between Broadway and Carrollton is a juxtoposition of upper middle class and lower class neighborhoods. It is like that, basically, in the box between Napoleon, Broadway, Claiborne, and St. Charles. On St. Charles itself is largely very expensive, sometimes seemingly fortified homes with corner store gaps at Napoleon and Louisiana.

Slow me down if anything is not particularly useful. I find the intimate mix of upper, middle, and lower classes in some areas of New Orleans to be something interesting, in real life or as I'd like to explore in Shadowrun.

Bridge City (across the Huey P. Long Bridge) makes a lot of sense as a combat zone (as would the ridiculously named Westwego right next to it). Elmwood is currently a growing area of the city, but would make a wonderful area to have deteriorated with its mix of large stores/plazas and industrial/business. That area also has a water treatment plant, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and a lot of question mark businesses. Harahan and River Ridge adjoin with the Elmwood Region as small municipalities where residents work nearby but they want to feel like they're not in the Sin of New Orleans. That region and an area on the lake near the border of Jefferson and Orleans Parrishes (called Bucktown) would be the first places I'd think of when I think Humanis or Alamos 20,000.

If you're looking for ideas about various parts of the city, let me know. I can tell you how they're like now, to help if you want to evolve them from that. I like what you've done with the place. Voudou and Vampires make all too much sense, as do Ghouls.

I wasn't planning on making the Dragons particularly close to the action in the near term (if ever). I just think it makes too a lot of sense that the Dragon situation in the CAS and, in particular, New Orleans is very different. There are a lot of Pho restaurants across the city and the area around Michoud Blvd and Chef Menteur highway is particularly Vietnamese settled (as well as a little isolated from other major settlements). NASA and Lockheed Martin made the External Tank (large orange part) of our Space Shuttle at the Michoud Assembly Facility and is still owned by NASA (currently rented out to others, for the moment) and would make sense if it were acquired as Extraterritorial by Ares Space (and it will be in my game and probably the most significant/visible AAA influence on the region). Lockheed has facilities across the street and around the Avondale Shipyard (currently and mostly a Northrop Grumman holding, though I believe they merged into a AA for Shadowrun). Chalmette across the canal is home to an Exxon-Mobil/Venezualan jointly run refinery and a refinery of the smaller oil firm Valero. Shell has refineries in Norco and several other areas between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. I don't know what happened to Royal Dutch Shell in Shadowrun, any clues?

An article came out today which gives some insight as to how the US and parts of Canada or Mexico (a little) differ culturally. That is more useful for the CAS as a whole than New Orleans in particular.

[Crimsondude]

I want to put together enough material to really be worthy of its own supplement for the city (whether or not anyone officially uses it or I write something that is used officially). But I'd like to flesh out the whole of the CAS, too.

Just to be clear, if you publish it online, it will never become official. (Speaking as an IP-focused 3L myself, if fiction writing is an area you're interested in pursuing alongside the law, you should definitely take an IP survey class or dedicated copyright law class).

If you really think you can put together such a supplement, you're better off contacting jshadowrun@gmail.com and at least giving him a head's up, maybe to work on an ebook like Montreal 2074 or something similar like the upcoming (eventually) Shadows in Focus: Sioux Nation. I would not be surprised if a future SIF location is the CAS, because it is a region a lot of the writers want to expand upon.

[norwalkvirus]

Fair enough. I'm finishing up Copyright right now. I understand the common policy of not republishing most material found online, even if I don't agree with it. Ideas are not protected, only the expression. Further, it is a trivial thing for the proactive author to assign his rights to the publisher, particularly if his contract already relinquishes most of these rights for material initially published in whatever supplement. But I understand the policy and I'm not ready (or interested enough) to fight it. I'll see where this goes and thanks for the info!

[Ursus Maior]

The note on IP and producing an official piece of work is very much welcome, Crimsondude. I would actually be interested into contributing minor parts or team up with someone. NO and the CAS really interest me and as mentioned somewhere else, I'm a historian. So telling a story and reading into material is not far from my daily work.

@norwalkvirus
Thanks for the kind words and the input. I fency Google Streetview, but it only works up to a certain point. The ideas about Humanis-specific neighborhoods is perfect. I will need a show down zone at the end of the season and Bucktown is at the exactly right spot, because the Elmwood combat zone is close by and Humanis can send its thugs in. I had Westwego in mind as basically the human version of orkish Bridge City. Thus far it's no combat zone, because humans dominate it and certain gangs (Humanis, the mob) keep it "safe" (aka defend their slice of pie). But that all might change as soon as the National Guard start to plow through the insurgents.

I also noticed Michoud and the NASA facility, eventually coming up with similiar ideas as you did. It's Ares territory, but several tenants rented into it, including a trid-studio (I read about that on today's Wikipedia). Ares is not especially mentioned in previous publications on NO, the focus seems to be rather on biotech and petro-chemicals, which led me into designing the Shiawase vs. Saeder-Krupp plot. It also fits into the group's background story, as they fled their former life as Fuchi corpsec before the crush, just to hide out in NO. Little did they know...

Due to that, I kept Ares out of my game thus far. I guess, I will run is as some form of "you've been transfered to Alaska" for Ares CAS employees. A site that is large, but understaffed, underappreciated and very much forgotten by the higher ups. The major sites of Ares in the CAS should be Atlanta and Space City (AL), I think, so once more NO drew the straw on that one.

Last but not least I thought about NO being a tourist attraction and how it would make sense to the city government to make it appear shiny and new, but don't have to pay for it. Preferably while creating permanent jobs that can be given to loyal servants of the powers to be. I found inspiration in the new Stolen Souls description of NYC: The easiest way to make your shopping mile look like a tourist attracting, romanticistic "re-creation of former times" is by signing a law that makes every shop owner put so many "historically accurate" AROs in front of and into his shop that no-one can see the demise. The joint venture of the New Orleans Police Services, the big corps and city hall is called NOMOS (an acronym New Orleans Matrix Operation Services and Greek for "law") and enacts matrix protocols, security and "a common design for the augmented reality of our historical city that guarantees a maximum of fun, safety and authentic feeling to our guests and friends from all over the world". In short, every house, shop and street is programed to look like a reenactment fantasy of the 19th century in AR, while in real life it might just look like, well 2005 all over. Of course corps and their buildings, hosts etc. can buy themselves free of those regulations for the sake of "maintaining their corporate identity". Gosh, I love the possiblities of a corrupt dystopia.



As for Royal Dutch Shell: They seem to have merged into "Regulus Joint Industries" a British-Dutch megacorp (AA). Its covered in Corporate Enclaves (116-118) and Shadows of Europe (28, 211, 213) as well as numerous German publications (mostly translations of the above).

[Crimsondude]

Fair enough. I'm finishing up Copyright right now. I understand the common policy of not republishing most material found online, even if I don't agree with it. Ideas are not protected, only the expression. Further, it is a trivial thing for the proactive author to assign his rights to the publisher, particularly if his contract already relinquishes most of these rights for material initially published in whatever supplement. But I understand the policy and I'm not ready (or interested enough) to fight it. I'll see where this goes and thanks for the info!

We could delve deeper into the whys and hows, but as far as I can tell, there are also business and philosophy reasons for why this has been the case. And I guess I shouldn't have said "never," but ... It's much simpler than trying to suggest how to circumvent.

Besides, if you're good at something, never do it for free.


Though it's a lot easier to judge your capabilities on actual written material. So ... It's complicated. If you want to write something official, don't put everything up. But it might help your case if there are 5,000-10,000 words with your name on them.


I think I should just shut up now. And remember, none of this should be interpreted as legal advice.