I have great love for Shadowrun, and I wanted to develop a variant that hewed very closely to the ideas present in that setting.
I have not developed and filled in the playbooks yet, but feel free to keep an eye on it as I work and monitor the development. When I am done with the immediate work I will open it up for comments.
Confession: I think about porting the Shadowrun setting to damn near every game system I encounter. I love the setting, but hate the game.
So here’s my thoughts on your porting of Shadowrun to The Sprawl.
1 — flesh out your racial moves into full supplemental playbooks which players would select as part of character generation.
The race playbooks would consist of a stat mod pair (plus to one stat, minus to another), and a few unique moves that a player can pick from. Moves that grant situational bonus are fine, but try to come up with some more meaty ones too.
2 — make playbooks for each of the magic using archetypes. Make sure that there are enough moves in each book to emulate the various flavors of mage/shaman/adepts you may encounter in Shadowrun.
Don’t wouldn’t worry about cases where someone wants to play a Touched Dwarf Soldier. Just hit the archetypes.
3 — instead of adding Touch as a new stat. ‘Touched’ characters replace Synth with Touch. In cases where a character without Synth needs to roll Touch, they roll using minus Touch. In cases where a character without ‘Touch’ needs to roll Synth, they roll minus Touch. etc.
4 — the Facing the Darkness move is really just Act Under Pressure but with a different stat. Instead, consider allowing Touched characters to use plus Touch instead of plus Cool for Act Under Pressure when dealing with the Rifties.
Interesting ideas.
1. I don’t think I will develop the race into more of a playbook, because even in shadowrun all they are is a minor stat mod and a racial power..its not worth a playbook for that. And stat mods in Apoc World..are a lot tighter of a system.
2. In all the times I have played shadowrun…the casters basically fill one of these basic 10 roles from Sprawl. A combat mage is more of a killer..a tracker mage is more of a hunter…a mind mage is basically a pusher. So making them supplemental playbooks just makes more sense to me, your filling the same role..your just doing it with a little more wizardry. 🙂
3. As for the synth/touch exchange…that’s not a bad idea…ill think about it.
4. I was seeing face the Darkess as Basically an extra move. As long as your avoiding the threat…your fine…but you have to challenge your own fear before you attempt to engage it directly…
I also almost always try to port shadowrun into other games too. And their are a couple of other games I am waiting to come out with their shadowrun themed mods or to come out fully since they also remind me of shadowrun:
Blades in the Dark (basically a game about heists)
Red Markets (a game in a zombie apoc that’s basically an RPG economy game…that reminds me a lot of the weird econmy of exchange in shadowrun)
I’ve drafted my own set of metahumanity rules – should I post them here for discussion, or in their own post?
I would post them in a separate thread. They will get far more noticed.