Utopias: a cyberpunk-ish, urban degraded, modern day, real Earth setting

[Chas Kramer]

I am pretty serious about building a modern day / real-Earth whole setting.
The flavor of it would be a little cyberpunk-ish (or Shadowrun-ish, if you know what I mean), but less technologically advanced and more diversified.

Urban degraded areas will be the place where PC will mainly leave, and movies like "1996 Escape from LA", and "Nirvana" by G.Salvatores will be the main source of inspiration.... However the world is supposed to be VERY diversified. It is NOT a huge megalopolis, there ARE still villages, uncontaminated wilderness areas, as much as there are scarred places where humans can't live (but other things might).

Also, magic and magic users are present, in a certain way... although magic will not be an alternative to technology. It doesn't allow you to cast fireballs, or any other flashy and tangible feat of magic...it is more an intangible force.

What I am looking for is a collaborative effort to build this world. I have the underlying ideas, and some main elements. But I need the texture for all of this. Cities, realms, stories, heroes. I have a soul but I need to build the body for it.
That's where you, guys come into play.
As soon as I detect interest, I will disclose more and more elements. I don't want to bore you immediately with a pretty long lore.
Also, after we finish building the world, I may start working on a specific rule set / gaming system (I have some ideas there as well), but that is another story for another time.

So, anybody in?

[brian 333]

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew it would happen. They predicted it as far back as the 1920s, when they had received orders to control the annual floods of the Mississippi. Still, it took the twelve million inhabitants of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area by surprise.

When the Corps cleared the Atchafalaya River and made it navigable they dropped the water level of the Red River by forty feet. Where the Red and Mississippi came together they built a dam to prevent the Mississippi from diverting down the Atchafalaya. The dam, built on mud, leaked. So they built another dam designed to pump mud behind the first one. It worked.

For a hundred years the Red River flowed down the Atchafalaya and only mixed with the Mississippi when the annual floods were high enough to threaten floods in New Orleans.

When the Old River Control Structure failed it happened at night, after a momth of dire warnings that almost everyone ignored. Surprise!

Within hours the only thing left of Vacherie, Louisiana was its Internet web page. The hunting and fishing camps all through the Atchafalaya Basin were forty feet underwater, and the town of Morgan City was washed out into Terrebone Bay. The Atchafalaya River had ceased to be; it had been subsumed bx the Mississippi.

Without a river current the cutoff Lower Mississippi filled with sediment and salt water. The navigation channel to the Gulf of Mexico was gone, and so the big ships went elsewhere. With the Port of New Orleans went jobs, and the heart of the New Orleans economy stopped beating.

New Orleans is a zombie city now, like Rome after the barbarians. Perhaps twenty thousand people still live there in the flooded streets, haunted by memories as the swamp reclaims land the Native Americans had claimed was cursed four centuries ago.

[Chas Kramer]

Thanks, Brian. Stuff like this is exactly what I need. Stories and settings for specific places of the world.

Now, your New Orleans setting may need a little adaptation with the timelines to fit into the world that I have in mind (which I still haven't shared...), but, yes, that's what I am looking for.

In fact, if this world building project sees the light, there will be enough "diversity" in it, that every contributor will have full creative freedom over specific areas / stories / relevant NPCs. I picture a mosaic of mini-settings, with an underlying theme.

I'll share more as soon as I have 1 h to jot it down.

[brian 333]

Adam and Abigale Toussant

Adam is a fisherman of Creole descent who poles a pirogue through the streets of Lakeview where huge old mansions of the former elite rot into the new swamp.

Abigale is his wife, or he is her husband, really, as she is the dominant partner. She practices voodoo, and has placed a spell on Adam to keep him faithful. She also practices medicine for the local community, and is a licensed nurse practitioner.

The youngest of their four children still lives with them in the upper floor of a carriage house behind a rotten mansion. The rest have moved away. Benjamin is a website designer who hacks on the side. He works mostly at night, and is usually ferrying his mother around in his motorboat by day, sleeping while she handles her business.then waking to drive her to her next stop.

Adam is respected in the community, and casually crosses the borders between rival gangs. If seeking a guide to make introductions anywhere between Metairie and New Orleans East, from the I-10 to the lake, no one could do it better than Adam Toussant.

[brian 333]

The Bridge People

Many highways in southeast Louisiana are elevated, so when the pumping stations went offline and the land reclaimed from the swamp refilled many squatters were left homeless. They drifted to the I-10, I-610, and Pontchartrain Expressway bridges which became miles-long ramshackle cities as salvage and scrap was used to build shelter. Gangs control 'blocks' of the bridges, through which very little vehicular traffic passes.

Monthly MRE drops are conducted from army helicopters, but when word got around about the Earhart Massacre the gangs put an end to the practice of trying to shoot down the helicopters.

The massacre occurred on the Earhart Overpass when, as was all too common in the beginning, gang members and other desperate people tried to shoot down helicopters so they could get all the food and withhold it from their rivals.

When a Seargeant Jendai was shot and killed as he tried to lower a pallet of rations onto a clear spot in the squatter camp, the door gunner opened up on the shooter and then on the crowd which had assembled to get their share of the food.

The food drops were suspended for eight weeks, and in addition to the many killed and wounded, (estimates are in the hundreds,) many uncounted thousands starved to death. Now, if anyone tries to shoot a helicopter the gangs kill him immediately.

Some gangs survive by salvaging and repairing old equipment from the city. Others fish and/or farm plots created on the bridges with swamp-bottom mud. They trade with one another.

What they seldom do is leave. The highways all eventually end in the swamp or in towns north of New Orleans which have their own problems and don't want more. No man's lands are built between the city and neighbors, patrolled by armed soldiers who shot first then shoot some more.

Brian Pezon is a short man of nearly sixty who pedals a bicycle along the I-10 doing electrical work for whoever needs it. As a lifelong union electrician he knows how to hotwire makeshift power systems without gettimg electrocuted. His value to many gangs makes him as safe as anyone can be among the Bridge People, and he passes through many gang barricades on his daily rounds. He barters for his services and his bicycle-mounted tool boxes carry his day's wages back to his 'flop' located above Tulane Avenue just south of the burned and abandoned University Medical Center.