The Great Salt Lake Desert may not be the driest and sunniest place in North American, but it's close. This is why it has been touted as a potential site for a spaceport since the end of World War II. FASA missed this when setting up Salt Lake City in its Native American Nations supplement, but it is easy to add one. I have placed it at the eastern edge of the desert proper, at Knolls, within easy reach of Skull (formerly Spring) Valley and Tooele (formerly Tuilla) Valley. The maglev rail line being built to connect the coast ends in Wendover in my game, but connects to the east. Across Nevada it is still in the planning stages. Tooele Valley is already becoming a major air freight connection, with a freight-only airport far enough from Salt Lake International that planes can land and take off without interfering with each other. This would mean the Tooele/Grantsville area has been built up tremendously during the sixty years between the present and game time.

Space freight would be handled from Tooele Valley in much the same way because facilities are pre-existing.

Shadowrun Salt Lake is under the rule and laws of the Ute Nation but is still mainly non-Native American and the Mormon Church is still the dominant social influence, if not political (and political is still quite possible—the Church is very strongly pro-Native American in its doctrines and practices). I have named Salt Lake's mayor as Philip Rath, a Ute chief and the last governor of Utah before the NAN revolt. He is in his eighties but still sharp and still very much in control of the government of the city, though the nation is in other hands. He does not figure much in this adventure, however.

Space—FASA in rejecting this module said, "We aren't sure how we're going to handle that yet." They still aren't years later! But the problems are easy to figure out. Magic: Shamans get their power from totems who are tied to the earth's umbra, so shamanic magic grows weaker as one gains altitude and drops off entirely by space. Hermetic relies on principles rather than borrowed power, hence would work the same anywhere. Space is a factor in game design, as witness the orbital banks, which referee the corporate wars and keep the world's money supply reliable in value. This means artificial environments in geosynchronous orbit (where communications satellites are already located). People live and work there, and of necessity play there. Therefore, shuttle service to and from the AEs must be regular. Many types of research and assembly works best in a null-grav vacuum, which makes orbiting research and manufacturing facilities are a component, and orbiting resorts for the spacers and the rich of groundside. Again, shuttle flights for passengers and freight is a required part of the equation. Many companies could be providing these services and shuttles; GSM is just the one involved in the game adventure.

Crews for these shuttle flights would have to be rotated regularly. Because of the special nature of the skills and knowledge required to fly shuttles, training has to be available to the public. Temp services can retain people with the knowledge but not enough experience to prove reliability to employers. They are a great way to spread the extra people around to where they are needed, and get them the experience and reputation for reliability that will enable full time employment. Temp services will be used to get a shadowrun team or part of one into space for this adventure. We

'll name a couple of them: Startemp, Inc., and Crews At Large Inc. or CAL-Temp. Both will have offices in the Tooele Valley part of the Salt Lake Metroplex, a city of some 2,000,000 people spread from what is now Ogden to what is now Provo, wider than Seattle but about as populous. And shadowy.

Say your game is set in Seattle or San Francisco or elsewhere. Does this create problems? Not at all; it just means your players won't have as much background knowledge of space as people who live and work near spaceports. If it irks you to use Salt Lake, please feel free to move the spaceport and support facilities to somewhere you're more comfortable with, such as Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg AFB or Edwards AFB. Take the temp services with you. This way you won't have the players dealing with Ute customs and immigration at border crossings. You'll have California and/or Confederate American States instead.

Behind the Scenes

(for GM eyes only!)

Ruth Pratt is the saboteur in the story. Her husband is newscaster Warren Pratt, who owns his own cable news network, PrattNewsNet or PNN. He is a Walter Cronkite figure, fatherly, almost grandfatherly, with a well-modulated voice and a delivery that makes him very comfortable to listen to. PNN is run from an orbital AE, and Warren lives there. His ratings have been slipping in recent years as flashier channels have taken a larger portion of the pie. He has fixed bureaus in several major cities around the globe, and a large crew of roaming reporters based in Los Angeles.

Warren's problem is that he is tired of just chronicling events. He sees an end to his career in a few years, and wants to go out with a splash, making news instead of just reporting it. So he has enlisted the aid of some investors and has sunk his personal fortune in what is being billed as a lunar orbital resort, where people can come, spend money relaxing and looking at the moon instead of the earth. That's just a cover. His investors and he are actually building a space ship for piracy. He wants to be the first space pirate in history before he dies, be something that will be remembered as long as humanity plies the space lanes. These investors are partly smugglers and back marketers, and partly organized crime.

Magic is required for cloaking and false identification of the ship, hence a shipment of orichalcum was going up for a hermetic mage investor to use to enchant the ship. Ruth Pratt, Warren's estranged wife, learned of this and decided to stop the pirate adventure once and for all, by sabotaging the shuttle carrying the magic metal. She was planning to steal it and hold it for ransom to get her husband to cease his insane scheme. Captain Jenks beat her to the packet, though, and dropped it into the Pacific with a beacon that only she holds the activator to. It is a very short-range beacon that can't be accidentally triggered from the surface of the ocean.

There is already too much money tied up in the pirate vessel, and only public exposure will stop its commissioning, public exposure which Josephine Jenks and the PCs will have to be instrumental in obtaining.

More Shadowrun ™ in Space

Shadowrun ™ in Space: Introduction
Shadowrun ™ in Space: One Lone Hero (fiction)
Shadowrun ™ in Space: GM Notes and Set Up
Shadowrun ™ in Space: Tying the PCs into the Adventure
Shadowrun ™ in Space: PCs in Space
Shadowrun ™ in Space: PCs on the Ground
Shadowrun ™ in Space: PCs in Lunar Orbit
Shadowrun ™ in Space: Payoff