Shadowrun’s original setting is only a few decades in the future now 
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.
Probably too heavy-handed, but might workshop it.
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.
Urban Brawl would be the same, just more obnoxious and plastic-feeling
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
Go just one step further and it’d be like that one
movie for sure.
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.
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.
Wasn’t Taco Bell winning the franchise wars a thing in Demolition Man?
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
Removed by mod
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.
I know that feeling very well… and I admit that both of those possibilities you mentioned, and things already done with microwaves and even fucking neutron bombs are just waiting for a sufficiently imaginative monster to apply them.
