This is based on a discussion that arose in discussing Spy Games.
On another forum, someone said that SR has turned into the Marvel Universe. I laughed because I've said the exact same thing since Arsenal came out, and especially after Runner's Companion. You can literally play Marvel superhumans in SR now because of power creep or whatever you want to call the fact that there are now rules to make nearly anything possible. Not that it wasn't before. I saw rules legal robot ninjas in 3e (I GMed them, in fact) and other crazy things. But now the floodgates are open.
Anyway, the suggestion is that this is a Very Bad Thing.
Fuck. That. Shit.
This game could give good old King Jack Kirby himself a run for his money any day when it comes to high concept ideas. So let's not pretend James Bond is beyond the pale. This is a game where an AI took over a cubic kilometer pyramid in downtown Seattle for 16 months to experiment to death on 90,000 of the 100,000 inhabitants in order to draw its creator out from hiding so it could download itself into 1,000 peoples' brains and then reupload itself to be a free-floating Matrix-dwelling AI during the IPO for one of the biggest corps in history until its "birth mother" fought it to the death as a Norse apocalypse cult teamed with a sociopathic computer-brain hacker blew up the Matrix and set off a nuclear weapon above the server farm as part of a plot to bring about Ragnarok/recreate the Matrix in her image.
That's canon. And that's one of the most hardcore adventures/campaigns and storylines I think has ever been published for SR (Well, RA:S, Brainscan and the Deus stuff in System Failure. As a whole that book is hit and miss, but it does not lack for vision). It's one part of a vast tapestry of ideas that are ultimately up to the players to actually set the tone according to their own whims.
I ran a year-plus long campaign that went even further down the rabbit hole. It took that insanity and jacked it up to 12. It begins with three runners paid an insane amount of money to successfully kidnap Nadja Daviar at the beginning of the campaign during a massive firefight at Sea-Tac. And then are ordered by Lugh Surehand, who was being hunted by his own men, to team up with a guy who is nearly an archvillain to rescue/kidnap someone from inside the SCIRE while a fragment of Deus and Tadashi Marushige tried to retake the building as part of a plan to take some measure of permanent political power over Seattle as a new haven for the Banded that ends with two ghosts and an ex-Mafia adept hitman performing a multi-combo kill of Marushige as a multi-thousand karma PC extracts a general from the SCIRE command center with a Delta team and a mage/drone battle occurs on the rooftop. And yet to this day almost everyone tells me it was a deep and compelling look at the closure of, well, Shadowland, and a satisfying closure to a lot of long-running character stories.
When those three runners acted in unison to destroy Marushige's magical protection (one PC), throw him through a wall (another), and then shoot him in the face (third) it would have looked like something out of The Expendables (actually, Statham performs the move the adept used to throw Tadashi through the wall during the fight in the tunnels) and yet it was dramatic and tense because two of those PCs have been looking to kill him for literally years IRL.
It's all to your taste. So why not toss a bone to the people who want to have some wacky hijinks every now and then? But there is nothing that precludes a dark and gritty story, even if you're using fairies and free spirits, AI, or robots.
I hope SR is like the Marvel U. Some of the most mature stories aren't the tortured, talky nonsense of Bendis, et al. It's Tobin and Parker writing the all-ages Marvel Adventures books where the Avengers became MODOKs and played baseball vs. Galactus, and tell stories without the lazy and overwrought tropes available to "adult" books. Oh, no. Purple Man isn't a mass-murdering rapist in Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil. Still one of the best Doom stories written in decades. Stories and games don't suck because of ideas or characters. Ideas and characters are neutral. It's how they're used. And that's what I hope people understand.
If we do our job right, any type of story is possible. Any genre. Any theme. And to be fair to the last 20 years of authors of SR, who've I've given no end of shit to when I was young and stupid, they made a relatively sane game with batshit crazy elements. But now there are rules for some of the wackier stuff. And that's awesome. Because to paraphrase Predator: If there are rules for it, it can die.
Remember, Rule Zero for every group should be: Have Fun. Shadowrun is Awesome Town, population: You.
Besides, it's just a game. If you don't like it, ignore it or change it. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you use technomancer critter swarms and kitteh protosapients (I just don't like using contemporary names for stuff).
