I ran a brief story with SR5 for the sake of testing out the rules and giving my group something to do while one of the players was away. They've liked it enough to request more, so I'll be running a small Wednesday campaign. I'm wondering what all should be done with the setting. On the one hand, yay! On the other hand, I kind of wrote my plot with only one story in mind.
Session summary:
[spoiler]Session 1: A Technomancer by the name of Honest Baker apparently invented the best program since sliced bread--called YggHelix.exe. Renraku tried to recruit him, failed, and murdered him when he refused. They thought the program was lost. Mr. Johnson thinks it still exists, and is willing to play the PCs 100,000 Nuyen each for its recovery. Mr. Johnson's best guess is that either his sister knows where the program is, or the Sons of Avalon (a Mage Gang Baker hung out with) do. PCs try to find the sister, she's hold up in a back-ally hospital that's under siege by a Rigger/Decker team. PCs murder and intimidate the NPCs, respectively, finding out they are a group of "Freedom Fighters" who believe YggHelix should be freeware. Some sloppy camera work gets one of the PCs on the news.
Session 2: They talk to the sister, who apparently had a stroke and is senile. It may have something to do with a lot of her head/brain being replaced with lots of Datalocks. They loot her stuff, and find some encryption codes inside a nanopet. The group Technomancer didn't return, so being hit by a sniper rifle was suddenly a lot more lethal. In place, a Sprite whose icon is a Hawk on top of an Eagle contacts them and does plot exposition. Their key leads to a box the Sons of Avalon have that leads to half of the program. He warns them to beware the "Snake" and that he'll help them when the time comes. They drop the sister off with one of the PC's contacts in Ares and raid the Sons of Avalon's hideout. They find out the sister is a rather powerful, but burnt out mage thanks to smoething her brother was doing. They talk their way into Baker's old room, tip off Renraku what's going on, and Renraku threatens them / offers money to make them go away. They refuse, beat up a Red Samurai, and flee. One of the PCs gets a call--Ares found out about the girl, thanks to the news report from earlier.
Session 3: While Ares has the girl, they don't know why she's important. The Sprite comes back and explains that she has half the program, and that from what it can tell Ares will probably sell her off. He offers to tip the PCs off when the exchange is happening in return for them activating YggHelix inside the girl's skull. The PCs agree. What follows is a rather simple raid on an Ares caravan. They activate the program... and everything connected to the Matrix starts to fry. The program writes itself specifically for her brain, becoming useless outside of it. By the time they escort the girl back to the pickup, pandemonium has broken loose--largely thanks to basically every car on the road crashing / breaking down. They just start to realize what's going on, but resolve to finish the run. They hoof it to Mr. Johnson, apparently a rich billionaire. They pass the girl off to him, get their payment. Some allusions to him being a Dragon are made.[/spoiler]
So, I have to take care of two things: the fact that the PCs would get far more money than they should, and the setting implications of YggHelix. The former is easy, I'm letting everyone respec as a Prime Runner, throwing in a timeskip, and waving my hands around all the plot holes. The latter, all that's IC right now is that its a virus like in the backstory of the .Hack series. It somehow weaponized the Renraku Grid (particularly its DemiGOD), murdered everyone in VR, and bricked almost every Matrix device in existence.
We're time-skipping 5-10 years. Society has more/less put itself together. Event/Virus that still needs a cool name has gone down in history. Only AAA corps and local corps survived economically, although a few of those Local Corps are vying for a larger position. The Renraku Grid has apparently been quarantined off, although everyone in the Matrix can see a massive but unreachable tree icon in the horizon--like a Host. Renraku -could- just shut its Grid down or disconnect it from the Matrix, but they hope to somehow reclaim their Weapon as a recoup to their losses. For now they are studying the effects of YggHelix. Lowfyr or some other Dragon has the girl that caused the mess, but apparently the YggHelix is sentient and resists his attempts to control it.
Thing is, the game is running smack into my lack of setting knowledge. I'm not sure where to... go from here. Nor am I sure the extent of socio-economic changes this would cause. I'm wondering if you guys have any ideas or insights or setting elements I'm not familiar with that'd be helpful. Ultimately, I'm going to run it a tad episodic, like a season of Avatar. Things tie into the main plot occasionally, but its not the only thing, so I can buy myself some time.