>>98160807 Going by your pretty lose definitions, probably not. Most games don't have starting characters capable of redefining the worlds they exist in, because most games are looking to played for longer than a couple of sessions before the players get bored of mucking around in the sandbox. Players start comparatively weak to their end-points, so that they better appreciate it when they are in a position to shape the world that they've spent time having to work within the confines of, assuming that's the intent and tone of the game being ran in the first place.
In Shadowrun specifically, you can impact things, make the stocks of one Megacorp go up or down, maybe even topple one, but without deep and fundamental societal changes that are way beyond the span most games care to focus on, the others will just fill the gap, or another AA Corp will pull moves to rise to fill the empty seat.
Excluding magic and high levels of tech (which are, y'know, huge parts of what makes Shadowrun the game it is), and presumably no metatypes beyond human, you're left with a bunch of freelance mercs, spies and agents...which we already have in the real world, so nothing fundamentally changes. If you allow for metatypes beyond human, then you have a genetic deviation that likely gets studied before you even get to the whole "shadowrunner" part.
>>98160807 I forgot the specifics but if you summon a great form spirit it can cast some ridiculous AOE shit that can level a whole building or part of the city, so you can destroy the corpo arcology of your choice I guess. Might need metamagic. Alternatively you can make some combat monster or super assassin and gank a low tier metaplot NPC.
>>98160807 Probably some kind of weapons manufacturer. And I don't mean guns and shit, I mean way heavier stuff. Spread enough of that shit around and watch the chaos unfold.
I have never even thought about 5e's crafting rules in all the times I've played so I don't know how feasible it would be, but the skills themselves do exist so maybe it's at least theoretically possible.
>>98160807 Depends on what you mean by challenge the status quo. Probably not anywhere in North America, but I could see a starting party going out filibustering and becoming a significant faction in the Caribbean League for example.
>>98160807 No, the setting is simply too entrenched to change. The closest we got was breaking into the Renraku Arcology with runners we've spent 3 years building up. We got to the point where each of us had a collection of Red Samurai swords as trophies, and a Thor shot was threatened at one point. But even at this absurd level, we still couldn't nuke a city, or take down Lowfyr for instance.