Shadowrun’s original setting is only a few decades in the future now meemaw and there was already the idea of NERPs (“New Exciting Retail Products” that caused explosions of consumerist violence a bit like the szechuan sauce riots some years back), so unless it was too uncomfortably close for my group or too on the nose, I was tempted to have a setting where a prevalent presence and potential threat was a bunch of affluent bazingas with combat drones that are scoring epic hero points for their battle passes and season passes and so on by remotely shooting undesirables (such as Shadowrunners) that are visually reskinned as zombies or whatever so they can be “just like in the treats.”

If I wanted to go extra heavy on the meta-narrative the bazingas would themselves be fantasizing about being Shadowrunners while gunning down Shadowrunners, and they’d see Damien Knight (or the equivalent tech billionaire, though Damien really needs to catch up with actual contemporary billionaires for evil) as the “ultimate rebel” and the like.

soypoint-1 my-hero soypoint-2

Probably too heavy-handed, but might workshop it.

  • erik [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    My Shadworun campaigns implement a lot of this type of stuff. Like, for example, Taco Bell exists at our table, but instead of being considered low end fast food, it’s high end fine dining, as they’ve continued to use the same ingredients since the early 2000s while everyone has been forced into a soy-based diet.

    For some flavor text, I re-wrote a puff profile of Richard Spencer from like 2016 with our in game equivalent head of Humanis Policlub and I honestly didn’t need to edit much for it to fit.

    It’s a setting that works great for exactly this type of thing.

      • erik [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        It was. In that they won the “restaurant wars” and did actually become classy. Our joke was that everything’s gone to such drek that a Taco Bell from today would be a high class experience

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 months ago

      while everyone has been forced into a soy-based diet.

      I can easily see Humanis-enjoying chuds shooting up Stuffer Shacks while screeching about how pure-blooded humans only eat barghest meat.