And yeah, it's best to take the canonicity of SR:Returns with a bit of a grain of salt. There was some fact checking done, some Telestrian family tree checking done, some timeline checking done (I know, I did some of it)...but I, personally kind of think of it as a spin-off "What if?" universe, a little bit of an alternate reality, if you will. I tend to treat any video game in any franchise that way (each playthrough of each game is someone's spin-off universe, just a little different from everyone else's)...but that's just me.
To add to the confusion regarding what is canon and what is not,
World of Shadows contains a story based on SR Returns, Annie Bellet's
Queen for a Minute. (Yes I'm reading
World of Shadows these days, which is why I'm resurrecting this old topic ^^).
There's at least three rather big incompatibilities between the video game's story and the established canon:
* in the video game, Marie-Louise Telestrian is James III's daughter. In the SR canon (see
The Land of Promise), Marie-Louise is James'
sister.
* in the video game, Lynne Telestrian is James' sister (at least according to the family tree found in the
SR Returns Anthology, see
here), while in the PnP game Lynne is his (and Marie-Louise's)
niece.
* Lynne may die at the end of the video game or end in an insane asylum, but in the PnP game she's alive and well in the 2070's (as seen in
Storm Front).
I don't know if it's intentional, but
Queen for a day could actually be a sort-of-retcon so that the pieces can more or less fit:
* James III has a daughter named Marie-Louise
* Lynne is Marie-Louise's cousin, so that makes her James' niece
* The way Lynne is described in the short story, she seems to be under Jessica Watts' spell. So she might have survived the whole Universal Brotherhood episode and gotten better after some time in "de-radicalization" (or should it be, "debug"? :p)
On top of all that, in
Storm Front the name of James' sister is now spelled
Mary-Louise. Which might also be a typo, but could also be a way to help both character exist as separate entities (considering SRR was in development around the time
Storm Front was being written, IIRC).
Of course now someone has to tell the various Shadowrun wikis out there that it is Mary-Louise (James' sister) and not Marie-Louise (James' daughter), who became CEO of Telestrian after he entered politics, and is a Prince of Tir Tairngire... :p