Reading up a bit about tunnels under Seattle (as you inevitably do preparing this), I came to the conclusion that Seattle had a bus tunnel running south from Nordstrom's, and that seemed like it might correspond with the Tourist Highway. Is that what you mean with your Downtown Seattle Transit? Is the Tourist Highway largely an old bus tunnel, rather than the (more interesting) underground streets from the old Seattle Underground?
The original tunnels are pretty small overall, and we wanted to the Tourist Highway to be something bigger, something that felt like the main strip in a mall or one of those ouutdoor shopping center streets you see in anime sometimes. A place big enough to have shops lining either side, with room for a lot of people and even bikes and such to move through.
Doing research, I came across the
Downtown TRansit Line, an underground line that's only 1.3 miles lone. It originally served as an underground bus line throughout the 90's, and had a rail line installed in 2009, which was the year before I started working on the Missions line and working up the earliest Seattle missions (Several as part of the 2010 CMPs).
We hadn't really mapped everything out at that time, nor really defined the Underground too heavily (and we deliberately never really did), but the Transit tunnel seemed to be a good real-world object to use as an anchor for the Ork Underground, especially since it fit pretty well between the Lordstrung/Nordstrum entrance and the Big Rhino one. Thus was born the Tourist Highway.
Because that gets me to another thing I'm struggling with: what do the various tunnels look like? I don't need a map, but it would be very helpful to know if I need to describe a certain set of tunnels as underground streets, traffic/transit tunnels, sewers, natural caves, or dug tunnels.
Here's the "Tell It To Them Straight" text that was written into
CMP 2010-02: Copycat Killer -
The Ork Underground is a unique experience. In places, it’s barely more than a dirt and stone tunnel small enough that a troll would have to stoop. In others spacious caverns were carved out several stories tall with ornate support columns and intricately detailed mosaics along the floor. The buildings are similar, with some being little more than caves hollowed out of the dirt, to several story buildings that were obviously built by skilled architects.
The Underground is a maze of tunnels and streets, only about half of which are clearly marked. The map is even less helpful, since it only marks out the path meant for tourists.Basically, the Underground is a complete hodgepodge.
One of the ideas for the Underground that I had was that for some of it, no one knows how it was formed. The tunnels directly underneath downtown are remnants of the original that was built over after
The Great Seattle Fire as well as the Transit line, plus work done by the dwarve Stonemasons who originally lived in the Underground with the Orks after the night of rage (until they we later kicked out). A lot of the expansion was done by them.
But, Shadowrun is weird. Despite the Ork Underground being a major feature and location in Shadowrun, there was surprisingly little actual data about it in the books. Between
The Seattle Sourcebook, New Seattle, and
Seattle 2072, there was only like a single page of information about the OU, most of it from the SSB. It was featured in a couple novels, but only
Never trust an Elf had any real info, though that had some decent meat since it talked about one of the "mayors" of the OU, Kham's grandfather. Other than that,
DNA/DOA took place in the OU, except it had the Underground down in Tacoma instead of Downtown. And scattered other references in novels, adventures, and sourcebooks were likewise as random, with talk of entrances in the Barrens or Payullup. And I had to reconcile all of that.
So one of the ways I did that was the Great Ghost Dance.
The GGD blew several volcanoes in the general vicinity of Seattle and caused earthquakes and other disasters. And while Seattle (Primarily Payallup) took some damage, it was more from lava and ash than anything else. That much violence and those quakes should have done some major damage, but didn't. Why?
Magic.
And a byproduct of the volcanic action and the earthquakes was that a combination of natural caves and tunnels were uncovered {or shaken loose) throughout Seattle combined with the formation of a ton of naturally cooled lava tubes.
So when the Night of Rage and all happened, the metahumans who had taken refuge started immediately digging and expanding, and they broke through the original man-made tunnels and found networks of natural tunnels which they claimed and began to further expand and work.
So yeah... It's a mix. Stuff in Downtown will usually be more "civilized" and more lived in, while the further you go out the more rough and natural it will be. Though there will be pockets that are well-worked and have buildings and streets.
As for Sewer Lines, they cross into the Underground, but I imagine most of the Sewer Tunnels are blocked off, for various reasons. Since the city had pretty much decided that they wanted nothing to do with the OU and pretended it didn't exist, they would have separated the city services from those sections of the Underground. As for the Orks, well... Even living underground, they have standards, and don't want to live in sewage. Though I imagine there are some ancient sewer tunnels that had fallen into disuse that were claimed.
I'm also struggling a bit with what the Goblin Market is. You have a set place for the Goblin Market which, according to Hiding In The Dark moves around, but according to Ashes it's between Lordstrungs exit and "The Ork Underground", which I've taken to mean the Tourist Highway, but I'm not sure that's correct. Of course it might be moving around since the fire destroyed the original location, or possible Ashes is confusing the Goblin Market with the Bazaar, which actually seems more likely, considering the descriptions of both
Keep in mind we were just winging things with the CMPs, which were written almost a year before Season 4. We hadn't entirely decided where Season 4 was going to be set at, so me and the other couple authors that wrote Seattle based adventures for the CMPs just sorta made stuff up. When i did season 4, we based the info on what was written in those CMPs, but changes occured.
The Goblin Market is not the Tourist Highway though. It's kind of caters to the denizens of the Underground and not intended for outsiders to find or interact with. And it's much smaller. It's more of a flea market and farmer's market, with a dash of black market on the side. It doesn't have a single fixed location, but moves around within a general area (so you won't find it up in Bellevue or down in Tacoma, it will always be somewhere in Downtown).
I'm somewhat surprised that Pirate Cove is not at the coast. I expected it to be in a somewhat more sparsely populated area north of Seattle, not under a Downtown city block. I guess the "path to Pirate's Cove" is an underground waterway that boats take?
Yeah. Underneath the piers of
Edgewater Hotel, there is a guarded waterway that the hotel is heavily bribed to pretend doesn't exist, that opened up after the Great Ghost Dance, and leads into a large underground cove. I very much imagined it as a combination of something like the big cove that One Eyed Willies ship was moored at in The Goonies combined with the pirate haven of Tortouga from Pirates of the Caribbean.
Anyway, at one point I was supposed to write an Ork Underground eBook for Season 4, but I never had the time and then we wrapped it and moved to Season 5 and SR5 and... So I have a lot of this stuff in my head and in a few notes floating around a hard drive. I know Wakshaani used some of them when he wrote up the Underground for the Seattle Boxed Set, and I hope to get more of them into official canon some way, some day.