NEWS

Know any maps of (parts of) the Orc Underground?

  • 19 Replies
  • 6800 Views

mcv

  • *
  • Chummer
  • **
  • Posts: 202
« on: <02-04-19/1146:44> »
Does anyone know which publications include maps to parts of the Ork Underground?

The only two I know:

  • DNA/DOA has a sewer map of part of Tacoma that also connects to hideout there, though it's never officially called the Ork Underground
  • Back in Business has a map of the Goblin Market near Lordstrungs entrance to the Ork Underground; it's small and simplistic and I'm not terribly happy with it. (Edit: This map is also in Sprawl Wilds, presumably for Ashes, though it doesn't quite fit the description there.)

All in all, that's not a lot. I'm sure there's more out there, but I don't know where to look.
« Last Edit: <02-05-19/0347:41> by mcv »

Stainless Steel Devil Rat

  • *
  • Errata Coordinator
  • Prime Runner
  • *****
  • Posts: 4572
« Reply #1 on: <02-04-19/1153:28> »
The mission called Ashes (in the Sprawl Wilds CMP) takes place in the Underground and has a map for one scene... also of the Goblin Market near the Lordstrungs entrance.
RPG mechanics exist to give structure and consistency to the game world, true, but at the end of the day, you’re fighting dragons with algebra and random number generators.

mcv

  • *
  • Chummer
  • **
  • Posts: 202
« Reply #2 on: <02-04-19/1703:17> »
The mission called Ashes (in the Sprawl Wilds CMP) takes place in the Underground and has a map for one scene... also of the Goblin Market near the Lordstrungs entrance.
I'd somehow completely missed that when I read Sprawl Wilds, but you're right. And it's the exact same map as in Back in Business. Which is doubly weird, because I noticed the escalators on map in Back in Business contradicted the stone stairs in the description in Ashes. And now it turns out Ashes also has the escalators map. Which already shows where the fire is going to stop. I think it's clear that map was meant for Back in Business and has been added to Sprawl Wilds to give Ashes a map too, with no check whether the map fits.

This discrepancy is actually one of the reasons I'm asking if there are any other maps of parts of the Ork Underground anywhere.

As for the stairs vs escalator, I'm leaning towards having escalators lead from the street to the basement of Lordstrungs, and having the stairs lead from there to the Underground. That seems to me the most logical layout, although it contradicts the maps in Ashes and Back in Business. In fact, Ashes could really use a map of the entirety of the exit and the street outside, considering there could be interesting stuff happening there.

Bull

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 2449
  • Crotchety Old Ork Decker
« Reply #3 on: <02-08-19/1642:32> »
Not sure if this link will work or not, let me know if it doesn't...

This was a very rough Google Maps file I was using for Season 4 stuff.  It's not a map of the Underground, per se, but there really isn't one.  It's largely just a total maze that sits beneath much of downtown, and has tendrils reaching out to most other districts as well.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1vclEmUFbeshBsuBBJrAWynIkXUM&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&ll=47.60433315975793%2C-122.34167159251808&z=14

Tarislar

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 1820
  • Uzi's + Fireballs .... Why I love Shadowrun!
« Reply #4 on: <02-08-19/2037:29> »
I feel like you could insert any old D&D underground dungeon map for the Underground.

Or for that matter any alley/urban map could fill in as an Underground map just assume there is no sky above.

I mean isn't it fluffed as destroyed parts of the city that was built over & also part of the subway system ?

Would I be wrong in this assumption?

Beta

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 1946
  • SR1 player, SR5 GM@FtF & player@PbP
« Reply #5 on: <02-08-19/2105:20> »
Thanks Bull, that helps me visualize things better :)

Ajax

  • *
  • Omae
  • ***
  • Posts: 438
« Reply #6 on: <02-14-19/1259:25> »
Shadowrun’s Ork Underground is actually just a cyberpunk distopian expansion on the very real Seattle Undergrouns. Although similar “underground cities” exist or existed in San Francisco, Hong Kong, New York City, London, and Paris. The Seattle one is the most “city like” as its core was literally an above-ground neighborhood that essentially sunk...

For the Ork Underground’s “public” spaces, you could basically take any urban block and cut off everything above the ground floor. Since, like the real Seattle Underground, it is made up of what had been the street-level storefronts and apartment block groundfloors... But then it sank and got paved over and built on top of. However, behind these “public” spaces, there would be an absolutely incomprehensible maze of maintenance tunnels, basements, sewers, subways, as well as hand-dug bolt holes, smugglers tunnels, speakeasies, opium dens, and the like.

Portland’s “Shanghai Tunnels” and Seattle’s “Underground City” are both open to the public, in part, and you can visit them on tours. I highly recommend them, they’re just neat... and the extra appeal for any D&D or SR gamer should be obvious.
Evil looms. Cowboy up. Kill it. Get paid.

mcv

  • *
  • Chummer
  • **
  • Posts: 202
« Reply #7 on: <02-16-19/1642:28> »
This was a very rough Google Maps file I was using for Season 4 stuff.  It's not a map of the Underground, per se, but there really isn't one.  It's largely just a total maze that sits beneath much of downtown, and has tendrils reaching out to most other districts as well.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1vclEmUFbeshBsuBBJrAWynIkXUM&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&ll=47.60433315975793%2C-122.34167159251808&z=14
Wow! That's a fantastic map. Thanks! It also makes me realise I imagined a couple of things in the wrong place, so this helps me out a lot.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Nice to include the Night of Rage warhouses. I just finished reading DNA/DOA. I expected them to be further away than this and not so directly connected to the downtown underground. But then, I somehow thought Tacoma was to the north rather than south, so my grasp of Seattle's geography is still lacking.

Shadowrun’s Ork Underground is actually just a cyberpunk distopian expansion on the very real Seattle Undergrouns.
Yeah, my players were quite surprised when I showed them actual photos of what some parts of the Ork Underground looks like.

Quote
For the Ork Underground’s “public” spaces, you could basically take any urban block and cut off everything above the ground floor. Since, like the real Seattle Underground, it is made up of what had been the street-level storefronts and apartment block groundfloors... But then it sank and got paved over and built on top of. However, behind these “public” spaces, there would be an absolutely incomprehensible maze of maintenance tunnels, basements, sewers, subways, as well as hand-dug bolt holes, smugglers tunnels, speakeasies, opium dens, and the like.
For Ashes, I decided that the tunnels where they found the Alamos 20k death squad (my players hunted them down rather than staying put), were these kind of underground streets, whereas the Tourist Highway was that transit tunnel (at least in my head; no idea how I communicated that).

Quote
Portland’s “Shanghai Tunnels” and Seattle’s “Underground City” are both open to the public, in part, and you can visit them on tours. I highly recommend them, they’re just neat... and the extra appeal for any D&D or SR gamer should be obvious.
Never been in the vicinity, sadly, but I've been in Paris' catacombs. Totally different vibe. Particularly the part with the million bones and skulls stacked in geometric patterns. Much of Paris' tunnels started as a medieval underground quarry to get stone for the city, and later got turned into an underground graveyard, because the city had no other place to put all the dead bodies. If that doesn't inspire magic/horror adventures, I don't know what does.

Bull

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 2449
  • Crotchety Old Ork Decker
« Reply #8 on: <02-16-19/1820:49> »
Quote
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.

Quote
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.

Quote
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).

Quote
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.

Wakshaani

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 2228
« Reply #9 on: <02-17-19/0031:25> »
Yeah, I pulled *heavily* from Bull's work. He made an absolutely amazing bit of work, but I had a teensy wordcount and had to adopt his stuff for the post-admission to Seattle, where it moves from the Ork underground to the Seattle underground. There're several projects that talk about the ongoing gentrification down there … Seattle Box Set, No Future, Better than Bad, (redacted unannounced PDF), and I *think* a few bits go into the Neo-Anarchist Streepedia… I'd have to check if I snuck 'em in or not.

Currently, there are four "rings" to toe Underground … the core, along the main passage, is heavily gentrified, with scads of young pretty people moving in, tossing money around, and ooing at the local culture (as they destroy it) … it's been cleaned out of most of the Orks and Trolls, with a few tokens left behind here or there, with real honest-to-ghost water mains, electricity conduits, and Matrix trunks giving legit feeds.  The Neo-PD is the law here, Renraku's shiny happy smiling super-pretty high-tech cops who give tourists directions and wave and says "Have a nice day!" while puttering along on electric scooters.

Ring two is abutted with ring one, where the Ork have been bundled up to, but are being gradually pushed out of. For now, if Ring One is the Las Vegas Strip, Ring Two is where the people who work at the casinos live. Adjacent to, but removed from, the prosperity. As One expands, they're pushed further out. Both hard Corps and Wolverine are active here, rousting 'squatters' from homes that they've had for generations. The Ork gangs used to be the law, but they're not doing well against the savagery of those two law ENFORCEMENT groups.

Ring three is Deep Ork, with lots of tunnels and where the people used to go who wanted to be left alone, rather than clustered with the relatively civilized Ork Underground. As more people are driven from ring Two to Ring Three, this area is getting effectively explored. There's no law out here other than the gangs.

Ring Four is the feral area... ghouls out there, plus who KNOWS what else... nobody's ever needed to explore it since there used to be plenty of room. Now? Some people are getting desperate. No telling what's out there. There's no law out here at ALL.

The whole thing is ripe for all kinds of stories and I'm super-excited to see some of it getting explored. The struggle between the Orks and the intruders is ongoing... wonder which side more people will pick?


Longshot23

  • *
  • Omae
  • ***
  • Posts: 952
« Reply #10 on: <02-17-19/0506:03> »
Great map! Love it!

Only downside to it I can see is that I can't switch to satellite view . . .

mcv

  • *
  • Chummer
  • **
  • Posts: 202
« Reply #11 on: <02-17-19/1053:59> »
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.
That sounds like a normal shopping street. Is that really something exotic in the US? I do know the US has really massive malls, but I'd never really considered that that might come at the cost of regular shopping streets.

Quote
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.
Ah, that's why it makes sense to have escalators there, of course. I thought it was weird to have escalators leading to the Underground, so I had the escalators leading to the basement of Lordstrungs and have the stone lead from there to the Underground.

I love this is all so rooted in reality.

Of course there should have been more entrances to that transit tunnel, but I imagine the city closed all public entrances a long time ago, and the Big Rhino and Lordstrungs entrance were the only ones to survive because they're on private property.

Quote
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.
What I mean is that it would have been helpful if the adventures themselves mentioned briefly what kind of tunnel you're in. The Narrows get described, for example, but there's no clue about whether the tunnels below the Gravity Bar are ancient streets or recently dug, for example. But I suppose that's actually one of the easiest bits I need to improvise. I'm just trying to paint a consistent picture of the place. During our group's previous attempts at a Shadowrun campaign (with a different GM, mostly 2nd edition), the world always stayed a bit too abstract, and I want to make it more alive this time. Make it feel real.

The Season 4 missions with their many recurring characters and locations are already great for that, but any additional detail on Seattle and the Ork Underground will help.

Quote
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.
Wait, did the Orks kick the Dwarfs out? I can imagine the Orks feeling persecuted by topsiders, but Dwarfs already living there aren't topsiders, and I imagine a more mixed population is healthier for the Underground too. I believe DNA/DOA mentions it's not just Orks who fled underground, but also many human relatives.

Quote
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.
I was assuming the part in DNA/DOA was not the central part of the Underground, and indeed the book mentions it's sewers. Maybe they migrated from there to more pleasant Downtown once they dug a connection?

I'm thinking maybe I should read 'Never trust an Elf'. A novel might also help me get a feel for the atmosphere, although I must admit I'm not usually into game-related novels.

Quote
So one of the ways I did that was the Great Ghost Dance.
I really like how something local like the Ork Underground ties a lot of old Shadowrun themes together. The Great Ghost Dance, the Night of Rage, and some of the missions themselves involve Maria Mercurial, a piece of Obsidiman liferock (presumably), and probably some other stuff I forget right now. Makes the while thing feel like it's part of a much bigger whole.

Quote
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.
Sounds reasonable. They may use sewers to survive, but nobody wants to live there. As the situation stabilises, only abandoned and thoroughly cleaned sewers are likely to get used.

It does raise another question, though. The city likely has plenty of infrastructure running underground, not just the sewers. The existence of the Underground outside the city's jurisdiction is a major threat to that. Underground denizens probably tap water and electricity wherever they can get away with it, which makes it odd that the city doesn't want jurisdiction there. Harsher and more official ways to clear the place out seem justifiable. That means there's a good reason for the Ork Underground to try to appear smaller than it really is. I imagine topsiders only really know about the Tourist Highway and its immediate surroundings, and that the OU is significantly larger than that is something the OU tries to keep as secret as possible.

Quote
Quote
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.
So when Ashes seems to conflict with Season 4, Season 4 should generally be taken as correct. I'll keep that in mind.

Quote
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).
That sounds like how Hiding In The Dark portrays it. Ashes makes it sound like the Goblin Market is quite accessible to the topside public, but I get that Hiding In The Dark is more correct. I've already run Ashes, though; I'll check with my players how they understood things, and maybe retcon a bit if necessary. Would it be correct to call the market in Ashes the Bazaar instead? That seems to be the more legal and public counterpart of the Goblin Market, right?

Quote
Yeah.  Underneath the piers of Edgewater Hotel, there is a guarded waterway that the hotel is heavily bribed to pretend doesn't exist,
Who is paying those bribes? Are the smugglers organised enough to bribe the hotel? Or is it possible the hotel itself is involved in the smuggling somehow?

I haven't read (or bought) all of the season 4 missions yet, so it's possible this relationship gets explained there somewhere. (Or maybe I did read it and I missed it.)

Quote
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.
I really appreciate you sharing this here. This is better than I'd hoped to get out of this thread. Thank you!

Yeah, I pulled *heavily* from Bull's work. He made an absolutely amazing bit of work, but I had a teensy wordcount and had to adopt his stuff for the post-admission to Seattle, where it moves from the Ork underground to the Seattle underground. There're several projects that talk about the ongoing gentrification down there … Seattle Box Set, No Future, Better than Bad, (redacted unannounced PDF), and I *think* a few bits go into the Neo-Anarchist Streepedia… I'd have to check if I snuck 'em in or not.
More stuff for my shopping list. Well, my campaign is in 2072 and well pre-prop 23, but there's no doubt relevant details there. I probably should have had the Seattle Box Set already anyway. I'll order it straight away. Possibly the others too.

Ajax

  • *
  • Omae
  • ***
  • Posts: 438
« Reply #12 on: <02-17-19/1237:47> »
Quote
That sounds like a normal shopping street. Is that really something exotic in the US? I do know the US has really massive malls, but I'd never really considered that that might come at the cost of regular shopping streets.

This depends very much on time period and place. Massive shopping malls really only came about in the late 1970s in New York/New Jersey, spread nationwide in the ‘80s, but have been slowly dying off since the later 2000’s. The rise of Big Box Stores (e.g., Wal-Mart, Costco, Best Buy) in the Nineties began their down turn in prominence and then online shopping and home delivery (esp., Amazon) pretty much killed them off. They’re still around, but are clearly struggling to find a new “ecological niche.”

They were also largely a suburban phenomenon, making them rare in rural areas and urban city centers. They weren’t always indoors either, in the American Southwest they tended to be open-air... Which confused the heck out of this Midwestern Suburban Kid the first time I saw an open-air mall in a movie when I was seven or eight years old. It was way more exotic and alien than anything else it whatever D-List post apocalyptic zero budget schlock I was watching. Rusty cars, roving gangs, and running gun fights? I’m from Detroit. That drek was called “Friday night.” But a shopping mall without a roof!? Totally bizarre.
Evil looms. Cowboy up. Kill it. Get paid.

Wakshaani

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 2228
« Reply #13 on: <02-17-19/1300:02> »
Yeah, the Biz is a collection of open-air (well, underground but you know what I mean) vendors with shanty booths or just plopping down blankets on the ground and hawking wares at anyone passing by. Essentially this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLDmFBTJeJ4

So you have plenty of the gentry kids firing up CU3 drones and liveblogging Biz shopping, picking up local food (Genuine rat-on-a-stick! Wiz!) and gawking at the low prices but also how much is cobbled together and recycled. (Look at this. They were calling it a commlink, but, this is like five commlinks from twenty years ago, jammed together and … look! Literal duct tape! There's no WAY this thing runs more then three minutes before it explodes.)

And for the one who asked above?

Yes, the Orks kicked the Dwarves out. Or, rather, the Dwarves and Orks carved the original place out and upgraded a lot of it, but Orks kept showing up and breeding and were crouding the Dwarves out. Tensions grew, tempers flared, and there were some altercations. The Trolls stepped in as peacemakers and the end result was that the Dwarves packed up and left, heading out to Pollyup. Buuuut, as Prop 23 passed, suddenly a bunch of Dwarves came stomping back. They had eyewitness accounts, photos, and a few deeds/contracts written up from the founding and demanded that the city give them their land back. The Orks had nada (Well, great granpa settled here... paperwork? What the frag are you talking paperwork?!) so the authorities bounced them and handed their land over to the Dwarves who could proove claims. There's a Dwarf Supremecist group there, the Axegrinders, who are aggressively retaking the area, jacking up prices and rents, and gouging the new gentry people to make serious cash.

More about all of that in the Seattle boxed set. :D

Bull

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 2449
  • Crotchety Old Ork Decker
« Reply #14 on: <02-17-19/1414:55> »
Also the necessity for cars in the US because everything is just so damn big makes shopping streets hard to manage. We don't have neighborhood shopping centers anymore.  You need to shop, you drive there and park at one store, do your shopping, then drive to the next store.

They do still exist, but they're rare and have been killed off largely by big box stores, as Wak notes.