And this is why I have been trying to switch FD to decaf now for quite a while.

Nice! An alternative is to have a live feed of Bieber and Gaga closing in on the enemy via the front while your real team of shadowrunners get at them through the back. Any targets will point their guns at the front door waiting for Bieber and Gaga leaving their backs open to your real runners.

Then after the shadowrunners decimate the more powerful soldiers, leaving the wounded dregs for Bieber and Gaga to finish them off, the feed return to the POV of Bieber and Gaga's cybereyes as they prepare to stomp through the front door. The audience nor bieber and gaga will never know that the enemy inside are already 90% decimated.

Ratings will shoot up as the live feed show Bieber and Gaga performing joint MVs as they throw frags and shoot down the remaining twerps.

Knight Errant already has this show by the way.

Just saying.

But their soldiers are all ugly orks and trolls who can't sing and dance.

It is not a matter of just finishing the job.

It is a matter of finishing the job while looking good doing it.

Yeah, that's why they have their pretty boy as the star. Why have a bunch of stars when you can have your expendable cops do all the hard work and your celeb take the credit? The illusion of skill is good enough to trump actual skill on the trids.

Plus, celebs charge much less when they're not in actual danger.

So...why not declare yourself kings of this world and the next? It seems like the single most powerful force in the world would have better things to do than guard the nouveau rich while sexing them. And what you described is, easily, the single most powerful force in the SR world.

I mean if ultra-power fantasy is your game, have at it. Go kill the horrors, dragons have rules about never dealing with YOU dammit. You can kick off Eclipse Phase with your events. Explore all those cthulu-esque stories but without the dying and insanity parts. Stand as a few ubermenschen against the gotterdammerung. Ragnarok for dessert. Reshaping the world to your will. Don't waste it writing fanfic about prostitute bodyguards.

Just make sure your players are not going to rebel at the Mary Sue, or grow bored when their merely city size sessions cannot contain a univverse-sized character.

Thank you for saying this so eloquently. I understand that there is no such thing as wrongbad fun, but still... sometimes there are exceptions to the rule. In that light, I would have to say this game setting is exceptional.

Vlad

Well, that explains where all the Karma came from.

The beauty of this makes for a 'better' shadowrun environment in my opinion. Instead of a single entity you'd have to play off internal rifts, you can combine that with external stuff between competing organizations. One of the earlier editions had the story/narrative about (shadowtalk? I forget) of a runner recounting how they came off a big Ares run or something like that and were caught dead to rights by a Lonestar cruiser, and got out of it with a minor bribe by telling the LS guys they just got done kicking in Ares teeth. Or it was the opposite, I forget. Might have actually been in the Lonestar supplement tho.

In flavor, you could make it like we see in media, the "outside area cops (fbi, specialist team, whatever) characters have to visit a regional area with law enforcement that isn't very cooperative with the outside meddlers.

Instead of by zones, I might suggest by 'crime-type'. So say, Corp A gets 'traffic stuff' and Corp B gets "harbor patrol", Corp A gets maybe some or all investigations, Corp B gets Victim Support. Makes little sense from an efficiency standpoint, but I could see it making perfect sense from a profit point. So you have a constant flux, because corps are trying to get the 'choice' crime-types that give the most funding, but also that means the personnel in those divisions are stressed because every 5 years or so they may lose their jobs if the corp loses that section. So it becomes a wonderful clusterfark that Shadowtypes enjoy.