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

If anything that’s toned down from the setting’s “corpobrats literally hire mercs to babysit them while they hunt metahumans for sport in the barrens” canon. I feel like Shadowrun and to a lesser extent Cyberpunk are tonally basically the Disco Elysium “mask of capital” quote except the mask has been whittled down to like some novelty sunglasses and still nobody cares, because the average person is so blackpilled that TV stations run liveleak grade videos at primetime on network TV, with the only alternative being Disney grade bottom of the barrel flavorless nostalgia slop.

That is to say you literally cannot be too heavy handed in making the setting a bizarre and horrifying mirror of reality, because that’s what it’s supposed to be. Write it like it’s an onion piece mocking [current fad] and slap some neon paint on there and it’s fine.

It starts with a Fortnite clone, where kids compete for fun. Then it graduates to E-Sports and becomes competitive. Analytics tease out players that are unusually pliant and skilled, and diverts them into the E-Sport. Several “special events” have individual or teams of skilled players remotely control drones that hunt shadowrunners for points. Broadcast it on TV/Live Studio Audience/Twitch. The whole thing is controlled by a megacorporation.

Call it Surreal Tournament 2099

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.

There is technology available now that is truly horrific in its implications should people with sufficient imagination and a whole lotta fucks not to give start putting thought into it. I’ve workshopped a few possibilities with my SO (an electronics engineer). Here’s the two best:

Example 1: Lazy Dog Drones

A commercial cargo drone can be picked up for a song and a dance when compared to even a tiny malcontent terrorist cell’s budget. It is trivial to build a metal box with racks that can be opened and emptied by remote control. It is also trivial to manufacture a bunch of lazy dogs to put into said drone’s box. Now you just need a cheap rustbucket pickup truck and a canvas tarpaulin and you’re ready to go.

Park your truck somewhere without straight line-of-sight surveillance. Uncover your drone in the back. Launch it and fly nap-of-the-earth until you’re a distance away and then go for altitude. Fly to wherever there’s a crowd of people you don’t mind killing and maiming. When overhead (about 30m) and going at full speed, release the lazy dogs. While this is going on you relocate your truck (in case someone saw the launch). Have the drone fly off nap-of-the-earth to land in your truck. Cover the drone with your tarp and leave. Reload with lazy dogs and repeat at will until you’re out or until you’re caught.

An amazing number of lazy dogs can be held in a box that even a relatively modestly-priced cargo drone can carry with ease. Imagine the carnage one of those would have evoked had the Las Vegas shooter used it instead of relatively ineffectual rifle fire. (Yes, I’m calling the worst mass shooting in American history “relatively ineffectual” by comparison to a single load of lazy dogs.) And even better (from his perspective) he wouldn’t have had to put himself at risk while gleefully slaughtering hundreds.

Example 2: Laser Blinders

You can get very strong lasers for under $500. The kind that will blind you in milliseconds if aimed at your eyes. You can buy servo kits that can be controlled by a microcomputer for well under $100. The kinds of microcomputers you’d need for this little toy are fairly pricey, though. About $50. (No, I’m not joking. My SO has a kit with an “SoC”, whatever that is, that is more than capable of pulling off this attack.) Add about another $300 for assorted optics (a camera, some lenses, etc.) and you’re ready to rock.

This system will be a small turret, in effect, that aims that laser. A camera will be used both to identify targets and to shift the laser’s position around to ensure the target is appropriately struck. In Phase I you decide who your target is and train an AI model (not Degenerative AI but still Deep Learning AI) on that target. You could decide you want to attack white folk, say, or police officers, or politicians, or … I don’t know, street sweepers? … whatever crazy sociopaths want to attack. For professions, you spend some time in advance doing things like scouring police web sites for faces, or have some people in the field taking surreptitious pictures of street sweepers. For racial types, it’s easy to buy image sets that are already nicely categorized for you so you can just go wild. In the end you have training data that will with reasonable accuracy identify your targets. The turret is set up somewhere hard to notice and set to running. It identifies targets based on its training data through the camera, then brings the laser roughly to bear on the target. The laser is fired very briefly—far too quickly for the human eye to detect—at lower power and the camera identifies where the spot was and adjusts the turret. When it’s on target (a process that takes under a second … by far) it fires full strength, destroying the target’s vision (likely cooking the eyes!) before the target can even process what’s going on.

On a crowded street it can do this with impunity for quite a while before people understand what’s happening around them. And there would be no real escape if you’re one of the targets if the terrorists put up two or three of these turrets to set up a kill zone with no angle uncovered. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people could wind up horribly blinded and tracing the attack to specific individuals could be fiendishly difficult given that most of the components are off-the-shelf.

And remember…

This is technology we have right now. This isn’t some far future thing where we have better and more powerful computers and other technology. One of the reasons I can’t get into cyberpunk gaming is that the world presented is … charmingly backwards compared to what the world is now.