Ruminating on Shadowrun a bit, and trying to decide on a direction to take this arc's big bad: Humanis, specifically being spearheaded by a player's mother.
As an aside, I like that I can use the "Read More" as a soft Content warning. An extra layer if need be. Briefly mentioning terminal illness below.
Humanis, for those who don't know Shadowrun, are a political group who is human-centric, to the exclusion of every other metahuman type. They wield a lot of money and influence, board members at Megacorps belong to them, and they try to rabblerouse the lower classes of people, to blame them for the ills of society.
So they're the Republican Party.
Rodge, the mage of the group, is estranged from his family He's lived a life of seclusion, and fled to Seattle to get out from under the thumb of his oppressive mother, and father who kowtows to whatever she wants. After the party fucked over a Humanis politician in a Seattle election, they flew in from cross-country to run damage control.
So now they're in the same city as Rodge again, and have tried to reach out. Mother has been shut out, but added as a -3 loyalty (To represent the fractured relationship, essentialy 0 loyalty I guess) and connection 10 contact.
I'm thinking about the ways this could resolve, and part of me wants to make it unsatisfying. No grand reconciliation, no admission of wrongdoing, no even catharsis of getting your revenge. Terminal diseases come for us all, and having a scene between Rodge and her in the hospital, clashing to the end, seems fitting for a broken family story.
And it feels on brand for cyberpunk.
This is sort of against my type, because Heroic [genre] is the space I like to be in. I like happy endings, and a feeling of catharsis, but this doesn't feel like a story that can end that way. This feels like it can only end in bitterness and resentment, and I feel like ending it with a terminal illness at an undisclosed point in the future.
When I asked the other day, in the middle of the night, about TTRPG being used as therapy for players primarily. And I normally don't see people discuss this from a GM's side. And I guess it's just a numbers game. There's way more players than GMs. Part of this desire to do this may be me wanting to put something out there about my mother's stroke last summer that took her life. And then I was wondering if it was even fair to use my game to do that, since it'd be targeting 3 other people with it.
Back to the game itself. I don't know where else I could take this. I could just do a thing where they leave the city, humiliated, which would be the happiest ending I can think of that might make sense. And who knows, maybe it'll end up there if the party makes Humanis the prime target this arc. But man, I don't know.
Need to use today's session to get a feel where everyone's at.
