What do people do when they're at home and bored? well I dont know, but I start digging through all the old ttrpg books I pirated and do some light reading. After seeing that weird cult being dead on about Bill Gates and his microchip fetish I decided to let my autism fly and see just what type of foreshadowing we might have gotten elsewhere. And with all the focus on whether or not California is going to survive the homeless apocalypse I figure, why not start with a book entirely devoted to that shithole of a state?
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Shadowrun is an infuriating to play but fun to read cyberpunk ttrpg set in an alternate reality where magic ebbs and flows in cycles. In this world the year 2012 saw the end of the current magicless age, the 'fifth world', (The Mayans predicted this shit because they're calendar gurus) and the beginning of the 'sixth world', a place where Dragons are Trump's Chosen People, Orcs are niggas and Elves are just cunts.
The California Free State is just what it sounds like, a free state. It seceded along with several other large chunks of the United States before the game's first edition (Yes, those good old boys down in Dixie finally kicked those Northern fucks right in the balls). It is also basically a battleground during 2nd edition, around 2057. An invading Japanese military force has taken over San Francisco, The Pueblo Corporate Council (more Indians, not really important) occupies most of Southern California and San Diego is occupied by Atzlan, an aggressive nation formed by drug cartels to control Central America and is heavily involved in some real shady shit.
Most of this book is useless. Without a sudden secession movement gaining steam, a miraculous return to the 1980s when Japan might have actually been a contender for world dominance, or a bunch of drug lords deciding to band together and form a fucking megacorp, the geopolitics of the CFS are not going to come about. Because of this we also won't be looking at San Francisco, because without a brutal military dictatorship suddenly seizing the city and purging everyone who's skin is the wrong side of brown we just don't have the foundation for Shadowrun SanFran culture.
But Los Angeles? Oh I can totally see 2050s Los Angeles happening right fucking now. As of this book LA is a free city in a free state, cut loose in 2046 by the government in Sacramento because it just wasn't worth spending any money on. Los Angeles is a heavily stratified city state torn between Hollywood and aerospace moguls, ultra rich walled communities that have taken full advantage of corporate extraterritoriality to ensure that dont have to pay anyone taxes (another reason why LA was abandoned by the CFS) and everyone else, who live on a meagre supply of recycled water provided by entire beaches filled with desalination plants and lots and lots of crime.
The Los Angeles of the mid 2050s is a city of sharp contrasts. Hollywood, Mulholland Drive, Westside, UCLA and 'Fun City' (A tourist town that covers a big chunk of Orange County that was bought up by studio execs and showbiz types after the county went bankrupt) are islands of light and life floating in a sea of urban blight. There is no need for the rich to leave their enclaves for anything; you work there, you sleep there, you eat there and you play there. They are, for all intents and purposes, cities within cities.
The rest of LA is...well it's what you'd imagine a fiction writer would create to contrast as heavily as possible with the aforementioned walled off gardens of eden. Crumbling Streets, burned out tenements, dead cars and unwashed masses pawing through garbage cans and no basic services. The government of LA is corrupt and incompetent, they line their pockets with embezzled funds and fuck off after their terms are up. Drug and chip use is common, corps dump toxic chemicals wherever they please and violent gangs roam the street. It's like if 1990's Compton spread out across the entire town (fun fact, Compton and its surroundings are now their own walled off city called El Infierno. It's a lovely place as it sounds)
Now, all you need to do is replace all of the shit that happened in the US to cause this in the Shadowrun timeline (Native American's using magic supernukes, the South rising again, Elves making their own ethnostates in Oregon etc) and replace it with one single pandemic. Because remember, the California of Shadowrun is California before it went insane.
California, OUR California, is a perfect storm of incompetent government policies, overtaxed infrastructure and a mind boggling homeless population. Mark my words, the state that show-biz built is right on track to end up like it's nightmarish cousin in the 2050s.
On the plus side at least the Dragons havent showed up yet.
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