So, talking about Cutting Black, I was thinking about running an heavily modified version for my players, it would have been their first big run (they usually only ran for small actors in Eastern Berlin so obviously that was big.

Basically, the first few sessions were about how they came into Detroit, the atmosphere of it and them trying to find a way to have some semblance of matrix access so the two technos could breath a little. So since they managed to hack an Ares 'link and piggyback on its connection for a few days they felt like they could explore a little bit.

The specialist of the group ("Streit") had always been the kind of guy to shoot first and ask questions never, to the point where some members of the team would regularly express their discontent directly to his face. It's not too much of a surprise the group didn't try to hard to reason with him when he had the idea of exploring one of the No Go Zones.

He found an Ares military camp, he tried to just walk to it but he found himself with a red dot on the shirt and a sergeant shouting at him. He thought he could reason with the still-shook sergeant. He could not. The sergeant's wife (a low level combat mage) showed him her mojo, thinking it would make him think twice about doing something dumb... After a warning shot Streit took cover behind a car and used a Called Shot to pulverize the mage's brain into a fine mist.

After some shenanigans the rest of the group see Streit walking back, covered in blood (he killed ~10 Ares soldiers, including some that tried to stop him from exiting the NGZ) with some bad wounds, not exactly what they had in mind from a simple exploration mission.

The group was not amused, half the group called him a liability, saying he was on his last chance and he blew it. They decided since they were ill-prepared that run wasn't worth it and that they wouldn't run with Streit anymore. A single other PC stayed with Streit, the group's Black Mage/Face, Whitemane.

That was effectively the end of the entire campaign, after a mere 2 days in Detroit. Streit's player told me he was honestly kinda tired of Streit and told me to retire him so I wrote a 13 chapter novel to explain exactly what happened in Detroit and we continued from there.

Honestly, I'm glad things went that way. Sure, The campaign seemed really interesting but the 2.5h of drama-filled RP and the lasting consequences on their characters was so worth that price.