Chummer's Guide to San Francisco

Let's be honest: it's been a rough few decades for the Bay Area. Between the Japanese occupation and the earthquakes I'm surprised there's still rubble left to squat in. Sure, Saito's been put down. Everyone's seen the footage of the bastard's head on a pike in Union Square on the Trid. That doesn't mean life is suddenly all sunshine and rainbows for everybody. Not by a long shot. Here's the basic run-down of the way things are on the San Francisco Bay.

A Brief History Lesson
Back in 2061, San Francisco belonged to Imperial Japan. Then the Ring of Fire erupted all over the Pacific. The Bay got rocked by some particularly nasty earthquakes, so the Emperor pissed himself and ordered all Imperial Marines recalled back to the homeland. One particularly ambitious Colonel didn't like that. So Keiji Saito promoted himself to General and set up his own little dictatorship with the 25,000 marines under his command. He basically made it a capital crime to be anything other than human and Japanese in the city of San Francisco, and exiled or purged everyone who didn't fit that picture back to Berkeley or Orkland.

Now Saito had the backing of the Human Nation in this, and used the support to rebuild San Fran proper within a year or two. Ares was quick to send their people in to Silicon Valley to rebuild their facilities there.

As for the rest of the Bay, Saito had it walled off and consolidated into one massive metahuman ghetto and left it to rot. Pollution, disease, open gang warfare, all of it went effectively unopposed by the official regime for years.

Things started to change in 2068. Mothers of Metahumans had been leading the metahuman rights crusade against Saito's government more or less from the start, but they'd been having limited success thanks to all the gang animosity in Orkland. Then Ares stepped in. To this day, nobody knows exactly why. Maybe the AAA just wanted to protect their interests in Silicon Valley a little more aggressively. Maybe Damien Knight himself finally got pissed off at Saito and wanted him gone, who knows? What's important is that MOM finally had the corporate backing they needed to mount a coup.

And what a coup it was. For three months, Ares and their metahuman allies waged a bloody guerrilla war in the Bay Area. Firewatch Teams fought side-by-side with Spikes gangers, Ancients delivered Ares munitions to MOM soup kitchens, and nearly very building that could house troops safely did so. Saito's marines quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the gangers' push from the South and East into San Francisco. In a desperate ploy, Saito had all bridges into San Fran blown. But by then it was already too late. Ares T-birds and tanks landed in SF and unloaded their cargo of gangers, shadowrunners and Firewatch personnel. A few hours later, Saito was dead and his troops surrendered.

Ares pulled the plug on their support soon after, and MOM was left with an army of pissed-off metahuman gangers they had no hope of controlling. CalFree government stepped in to reclaim the city of San Francisco, but the gang alliance fell apart without Ares calling the shots. Japanacorps like MCT and Renraku were quick to step in and rebuild San Fran proper, eager to regain public favor after years of Japanese cruelty at the hands of Saito and his goons. Orkland and Berkeley weren't so fortunate.

Major Areas
San Francisco:
Rebuilt by the Japanacorps, San Fran is the largest city in the California Free State. Once again a thriving corporate hub, 'Frisco has seen a revival of sorts. MCT is the largest corp player in town, though a number of smaller Japanacorps do their business out of rented MCT offices. Saito's ban on metahumans is no more, and that's brought an influx of metahumans from Orkland back to the city. The Triads also moved back into the city, reestablishing their power base in the largest Chinatown on the West Coast. Renraku has rebuilt the Golden Gate Bridge, but the Bay Bridge to Orkland still hasn't been fixed, even though its been five years since Saito's ouster.

The Rock:
In a show of good faith, after Ares helped liberate the Bay Area from Saito's regime, the CalFree government gave Knight Errant exclusive rights to law enforcement in all non-corporate zones of the City of San Francisco. Officially, this doesn't mean much, since MCT  and the other Japanacorps own most of the real estate in town, but KE has been able to renovate and reopen the infamous prison at Alcatraz to hold the Bay Area's most dangerous criminals.

Silicon Valley:
Everything south of San Francisco proper might as well have an Ares Macrotechnology stamp on it, because the UCAS-based megacorp owns this region. Much of Ares' R&D goes on within the enclaves here.

East Orkland:
Perhaps the most diverse region in all the Orkland Barrens. Also the most violent. Gang turf in East Orkland can literally change by the floor in some places, so keep your Commlink on and for drek's sake pay attention to the RFID tags most gangs use to advertise their turf. The Ohlone Nation is the biggest gang here by far, and their numbers are growing daily, but that's still a drop in the bucket comparatively. Pretty much any identity group you can think of has a gang active in East Orkland.

Downtown Orkland:
This area is home to Lake Merritt, the Port of Orkland, and not much else. During the '68 conflict, Saito's forces resorted to shelling downtown Orkland to disrupt MOM using it as a staging area for assaulting San Francisco across the Bay Bridge. Few of the buildings here are livable anymore between the ordnance and the pollution that years of Barrens living produces. When the city of San Francisco opened its doors to metahumans again in 2069, most of the Orkland government, along with Downtown's wealthier residents (those left alive, that is) fled to San Francisco to escape Saito's walled ghettos for good. Downtown today is largely a maze of blghted rubble inhabited only by devil rats and those squatters crazy or brave enough to eke out a living here.

Orkland Hills:
Orkland's elevated neighborhoods are home to the Ancients, the top gang in Orkland in a very literal sense. The higher elevation provides the Ancients and their patrons with a measure of security against attacks from other gangs below. Unfortunately, such security also has the effect of isolating the Ancients from the rest of the city, and they're pretty much dependent on supplies flown in from the north via T-bird.

Berkeley:
To say that things are a mess in Berkeley at the moment is the understatement of the decade. The city and adjacent university got hit hard by the '61 quake, and the city's only just now being reached out to by elements of the San Fran Triads, who want to build the city back up and set it up as a business hub for themselves outside SF. The Bay Area Triads are also doing their part to get Berkeley back on its feet, where their interest is in reopening the UC Berkeley campus. The main problem with all of these humanitarian efforts is Ribhohaal, Berkeley's most dangerous resident. The dragon made his way onto the ruined university campus in 2069 amidst the chaos of Saito's ouster, and made the university his primary lair. Ribhohaal's Talons swarm the surrounding neighborhoods, and have begun expanding as far as East Orkland. Needless to say, it'll be a while before UC Berkeley is accepting applications once again.

Movers & Shakers
Triads:
If the Yakuza had their day in the sun during Saito's reign, it's the Triads turn now. Triad syndicates have been moving aggressively into Orkland and Berkeley, setting up discrete cells in squatter turf to try and take over the drug trade in the area. The Triads are also trying a more legitimate angle by pouring cash into the area to try and rebuild the war-torn area. The idea is that once the city's rebuilt, the Triads will be able to convince numerous corps to move in, and keep a tidy slice of the profits from then on.

Talons: Ribhohaal's army of thugs, created from the remnants of gangs that tried to oppose the dragon when he first emerged on the ruined UC-Berkeley campus. The Talons, led by Ribhohaal's Mouth, an Ork named Troy Alvarez, have pushed outwards from the university campus, becoming the main gang in Berkeley and North Orkland. You can even find Talon turf in East Orkland if you look for it, though ghost knows why you'd want to. Owing largely to their dear leader's abilities, the Talons are one of the best-supported gangs in the Bay Area, with considerable cash flow from their numerous protection rackets and magical support from the dragon himself.

Ancients:
The SF chapter of this Seattle-based Elf gang is the number one outfit in the Orkland Barrens right now, and with good reason. For starters, nearly all of them are expats from Tir Tairngire to the north, and that puts the average Ancient's skills above the rest of the Bay Area gangs. The Ancients recently managed to end a turf war with their perennial rivals, the all-Trog Spikes, by more or less hunting down every Spiker they could find. The Orkland Ancients are based in the Orkland Hills, partly because the elevation provides them with a good geographical defense against rival gangs and partly because it gives their T-bird smugglers a place to land when they arrive to exchange goods from Sacramento. Unfortunately, without access to the freeways or waterways of the Bay Area, the Ancients don't have much growth potential in the future. That's something the Ancients' leader, Emerald, aims to change.

The Nation:
If you'd never heard of the Ohlone Indians before you moved here, nobody would blame you. The Amerindian tribe was supposedly wiped out long before the 21st Century by the Spanish when they first settled the Bay Area. That didn't stop a particularly cunning shaman named Storm Crow from getting a few dozen Amerindians together and becoming one of the fastest-growing gangs in East Orkland. The blue-and-brown clothed Ohlone Nation counts a large number of bear shamans amongst its ranks, and they control much of the trade in typical Amerindian drugs in Orkland, as well as dealing in awakened plants and reagents. Rumor has it Storm Crow has designs on downtown Orkland, perhaps a private crusade to clean up Lake Merritt.

MOM:
The ringleader of the alliance that ousted Saito, MOM these days has fallen back to their old methods. Without an army to lead, MOM is back to doing general humanitarian work in the Orkland Barrens. You'll often find an MOM shelter or soup kitchen wedged in the middle of gang turf, and for their part, gangers are usually good about leaving MOM well enough alone. That's not to say that MOM places are safe zones, however. Fights and riots are commonplace whenever food runs short at MOM facilities, as it usually does. MOM is also home to more than a few of the Bay Area's more radical activists, those odd nutjobs who figure Ares didn't go far enough.