Designing Cascade | Trinity Continuum: Anima
I first came up with the core idea that ultimately became Anima while playing what was, at the time, Dontnod’s newest game, Remember Me.
That was in 2013, a few months shy of 11 years ago as I write this. Remember Me being set in 2084 was, of course, an intentional reference to Total Recall (itself a reference to Orwell’s 1984). Both properties are about memory alteration, and also feature a character called “Quaid.” We don’t have a Quaid, but 2084 was fit perfectly into the existing Trinity Continuum timeline, so I had to use it.
My original pitch for Anima was likewise going to be much more focused on memory alteration, but Rich purchased a pitch from a fan named Dominic (Yiodan) about a setting where people with neural implants access a virtual MMO-gone-wrong, asked me to find a place for it, and it naturally fit in with what I’d already sketched out for Anima. But I’m not going to speak on Dom’s behalf about his pitch. Let me talk about the city.
In fact, that’s what I was originally planning to call it. The City. The FSA government so desperately wanted this new construction to be the shining example to the world, the template, the ur-city, that they didn’t even give it a name: it was just The City.
I pulled from a few sources for my reasoning:
In The Matrix, probably the biggest cyberpunk media of all time, the city is unnamed (although secondary sources have since named it “Mega City”). Phone booth signage reads “City.” Phone books seen in Neo’s work cubicle and in the Oracle’s kitchen read “City Phone.” The hotel seen at several key points is the “Heart O’ The City.” While it uses many names from Chicago for streets, it was intentionally made difficult to pin down its intended real world location.
Half-Life 2 and its associated games take place in City 17 — an Eastern European city whose location was intentionally made difficult to pin down. The name was likely a reference to the Soviet practice of numbering closed cities instead of naming them: Arzamas-16, Krasnoyarsk-26, Tomsk-7 and numerous others.
And perhaps most relevant:
“The City,” the setting for Mirror’s Edge, was a strong visual inspiration, full of tall white blocky buildings. Again, its exact location was difficult to pin down: the coastline resembled areas of the Pacific Northwest, and Mandarin seems to be a secondary language, but in-game signage indicated it was in the Eastern time zone.
So: a place simply named the City calls back to a number of appropriate source material. But exactly how difficult should it be to pin down?
While we wanted to maintain the excuse that you could put the City anywhere you wanted, we also wanted a sort of default location for it, a city in the Pacific Northwest.
Mirror’s Edge, as mentioned, is vaguely PNWish. One of the suggested locations for the City on the ME wiki is Vancouver.
The city of Vancouver from Mass Effect 3 is full of large swooping white concrete structures, also serving as strong visual inspiration.
We settled on Vancouver early on, with the additional meta-joke that so many movies and TV series film in Vancouver, having it stand in for other cities around the world, so likewise our replacement-Vancouver could reasonably be placed anywhere the Storyguide chooses.
I also made the decision not to mention the word “Vancouver” anywhere in the book’s text. Some things you kind of leave unsaid, waiting for players to discover, so they feel clever for figuring it out. The FSA doesn’t care about what was, they’re looking to the future. And if you’re part of the past they’re trying to erase, well…
Rich made the decision that the City should have a strong identity. “The City” is all well and good, and I do kind of miss it, but he’s right: having a solid name is better marketing. Both for the FSA and for Onyx Path.
So what to do?
The Cascadia bioregion sweeps down from Alaska through most of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The PNW is sometimes called Cascadia. There’s actually a Cascadia secessionist movement to have BC, WA, and OR split off as a separate country or state.
One of the new Districts of the FSA in Trinity Continuum: Æon, covering this territory, is the Cascadia District (Terra Firma, p. 28).
Going back to Mirror’s Edge, the reboot, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, is set in the the nation-state of Cascadia, although geographically it seems to be southern Australia.
And to top it off is one of my favourite references for a modern-day Talent, although it’s less fitting for a cyberpunk source: The Sentinel, an action crime drama that ran from ’96 to ’99, is set in the fictional town of Cascade, Washington.
Lots of Cascadia regions, and one Cascade town. So that gave us the name for the City: Cascade.
I’ve already gone over some of the visual inspirations: Mass Effect’s Vancouver, the City from Mirror’s Edge. I’ll throw in a few others.
Finally, the watchful eye of the fascist government needed a presence.
The Norsefire government from V for Vendetta was represented by body parts: the Head (executive), the Hand (executive branch), the Finger (state secret police), the Eye (visual surveillance), the Ear (audio surveillance), the Nose (police), and the Mouth (propaganda).
Mirror’s Edge (yes, we’re back there again) employed the City Eye as the primary news service, and the City Ear as the primary telecom company.
One of our writers created a secretive group representing the government. I think they were originally Operations and Integration, OI. I had them change it to Intelligence and Integration, II. Because, of course, they’re “the Eyes.”
And thus the stage was set for the city of Cascade.
Trinity Continuum: Anima is currently available in PDF and print from DriveThruRPG.
