Editing Rivers in the Barrens:Main Page (section)

==Setting Information==
'''Year:''' Summer 2072

===Country: UCAS (Seattle Territory)===

The United American and Canadian States is the remnants of the United States and Canada after the Ghost War, the secession of the California Free State, the Confederation of American States, Quebec, and Florida joining the Caribbean League.

While still one of the wealthiest nations in the world on paper and a nuclear power, the UCAS is by and large a hollowed-out shell propped up by the megacorporations. The megacorporations find the continued existence of the UCAS convenient, because they rely on the economic scaffolding and laws laid out by the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

===City: Seattle===

Seattle is a territory of the United American and Canadian States, and the nation’s only remaining port on the west coast of North America. The Seattle area was inhabited by Native Americans of the Duwamish tribe  for at least 10000 years before being colonized by Europeans in 1851. The city was retained by the USA, soon-to-be UCAS, following the Treaty of Denver in 2018. Since then, Seattle has existed as UCAS territory while completely enveloped by the Salish-Sidhe Council on all sides. Within the borders of the territory, Seattle expanded into and merged with several satellite cities, including Everett, Redmond, and Tacoma.
 
The city’s peculiar political position is the product of conflict avoidance, corporate convenience, and mutual benefit between the Salish-Sidhe Council, Tír Tairngire, and the UCAS. The city allows UCAS to maintain a presence on the west coast, gives corporations a port free of the NAN’s strict customs and environmental policies, supports Salish-Sidhe’s tourism industry, grants Tír Tairngire a trade window to the world without completely opening itself up, and gives all three nations around the Emerald City a way to exchange cultural and political dissidents. These competing interests, and the city’s premier placement near national borders by land and by sea, makes Seattle a haven for smugglers and shadowrunners.

The Emerald City is home to over 3,000,000 people in 2072. Seattle is home to a diverse and multifaceted culture, arising from the unique crossroads where people from the UCAS, NAN, Tír Tairngire, many Asian nations, and other international travelers and immigrants meet. Seattle’s original culture is strongly rooted in the old United States, but time, isolation from the main body of the UCAS, and elements from foreign cultures have led to many changes in Seattle’s social character. This social character is further granularized by the metroplex’s division into 1 consular and 11 municipal districts.

===District: Puyallup===

Puyallup is the second major barrens district in Seattle – bigger than Redmond in area, but with less than half the population density. Prior to the Ghost War of 2017, Puyallup was comprised of various Seattle suburbs grading into parks and fertile farmland. Then, in deterrence against the United States’ and Canada's genocidal Resolution Act, Daniel Howling Coyote and allied magicians detonated the Cascade Range in 2017. Puyallup took the collateral damage head-on, as pyroclastic flows and lahars swept down from Mt. Rainier into the southeast Seattle suburbs. The survivors of the eruption were soon joined by exiles fleeing the formation of the Salish-Sidhe Council and the other Native American Nations, unwilling to abide by NAN laws or believe assurances of peaceful co-existence*. Seattle and the megacorporations initially tried to rebuild the Puyallup region, some seeking to exploit lava fields for geothermal energy, but Crash 1.0 derailed those ambitions. Abandoned thereafter, what was left of Puyallup slid into becoming what is now known as a “barren.”

''>* In contrast to the default ''Shadowrun'' lore, in my version of things the NAN reasserted their ancestral rights to the land and attained self-determination without exiling every non-indigenous person. The goal of the NAN was to create a harmonious, culturally diverse, and sustainable society - results since 2018 have varied, but the fears of the refugees who flooded into Seattle never came to pass.

The district’s reputation as one giant refugee camp was cemented in 2039 under the human-supremacist regime of Governor Victor Allison, who rounded up all the city's meta-humans into a series of warehouses for “deportation.” The situation exploded when the Metroplex Guard began opening fire on the trapped masses, with the ensuing slaughter and desperate escape resulting in countless deaths. Protests and riots erupted in a "Night of Rage" as the escapees fled and new of the atrocity broke, some led by metahumans and their progressive human supporters, others led by fascists trying to “finish the job." A large number of metahuman refugees fled to Puyallup in the wake of the Night of Rage and never returned to their former homes. A second Puyallup revitalization effort was subsequently begun, and swiftly abandoned, in the 2040s.

In the three decades since, Mountain Rainer erupted again, several more humanitarian crises ensued, and the SINner population of Puyallup contracted towards Tacoma as the barrens expanded. Throughout it all, a steady stream of debris — both ash and people — trickles into the Puyallup Barrens.

Puyallup district is informally divided into further sub-districts or neighborhoods, most of which are not officially recognized by the metroplex government. The most important of these are:

* '''<span class="plainlinks">[https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php?title=Rivers_in_the_Barrens:Ashbarrow Ashbarrow]</span>:''' A neighborhood nestled within the rotting shell of abandoned urban sprawl, which experiences regular and severe ashfalls from Mt. Rainier. <u>''Your neighborhood''</u>.
* '''Carbonado:''' A collection of mining and timber ghost towns re-inhabited by refugees and squatters. The majority demographic is orcs, many of whose families fled here after the Night of Rage, but outcasts of all sorts are welcome in Carbonado’s derelict company apartments and mines. The residents have attempted to salvage from, or even revive, several of the mines.
* '''Hell’s Kitchen:''' An almost uninhabited field of lava flows, geysers, and boiling mudpots left in the wake of Mt. Rainer’s 2017 eruptions. The landscape is largely barren, save for the occasional rusting hulk of a derelict geothermal plant. Tourists and mages on pilgrimage are about the only people who come here, and never for very long.
* '''Loveland:''' The largest sub-district of the Puyallup barrens, Loveland covers the northwest of the region. Loveland is the most densely populated and violent region of Puyallup, with the crime rate driven by competing efforts to control the local vice industry, black market, and smuggling routes. The primary players are the Shotozumi-rengo and the Commissione, but both sides mostly use lesser street gangs as pawns. Despite all that, Loveland actually has (spotty) matrix-linked municipal services, facilities, stores, and restaurants, unlike the rest of the barrens. As a result, it is a popular, if dangerous, destination for tourists looking to slum in the local nightlife. 
* '''Petrowski Farms:''' The Petrowski family has stood tall against economic collapse, bandits, and volcanic eruptions for the entire duration of the Sixth World. They still proudly sell their organic produce at the Pike Place Farmer’s Market as they have for more than a century now. That said, some things have changed since the Fifth World, like the triple layered barbed wire and electric fences, or the armed guard towers, or the land spirits said to enrich and defend the place.
* '''Puyallup City:''' Sitting between Auburn and Tacoma, Puyallup City is the district’s seat of governance and where most “legitimate” businesses are located. The residents of this relatively middle class, clean, and safe neighborhood put much political effort into fighting perceptions that Puyallup is a lost cause. The dirty little secret of the “Light in the Ashes” is that Puyallup City is propped up almost entirely by organized crime. Administrations sink or swim (sometimes literally) by their ability to judge if the wind is blowing towards the mafia or the yakuza.
* '''Tarislar:''' The name of this neighborhood means “Remembrance” in Sperethiel. Home to a large population of elvish refugees displaced by the Night of Rage, as well as exiles and thrillseekers from Tír Tairngire, visitors to this neighborhood receive chilly receptions. Completely abandoned by the metroplex government, Tarislar residents only have access to goods and services they can create, gather, or steal. Security is mostly provided by the Laésa, a Tírian crime syndicate.