30 thoughts on “Has anyone seen or down a shadowrun hack for sprawl”

  1. An official setting book called Touched is due out this year that adds magic and metaraces to The Sprawl. There have been hacks using PBTA games, but they all seemed kind of half baked.

  5. I played a trollkin Shaman with marbled stone skin. For each room I successfully made, I got to set aside one die. Each spell required two dice to cast, and the combination of the numbers defined which spell I could cast. Ex. Using two 6’s enabled me to cast a time rewind, which would allow my target to make a reroll.

  6. It was a fun mechanic. Hamish made the whole process of planning the mission a breeze, and acting against the cultists was a lot of fun: we needed to disrupt the imminent release of the enemy corp’s love potion that the cultists were producing.

  11. Yup Touched is the overall thing. It’s three settings. A Darkening Alley: early magic seeping into the world – think Lovecraft Mythos Cyberpunk, Prime: the full shadowrun style Cyberpunk/Fantasy and Rental: high magic transhumanist body switching goodness.

    Christo Meid​stoked you had fun! I am really happy with how the shaman and mage mechanics came out. 🙂 I need to rewrite the actual language but I like that the mechanic works and gives a nice physical interaction.

  12. Steve Wallace​ Yes, it does work well. One thing came up during playing was because of what is considered a hit in PbtA, you might have a lesser chance of getting a 1 or 2 into your dice pool, making a 1 1 combination perhaps the hardest to get.

  13. Shaman and Mage are separate in it? That’s interesting. I wonder if it’s possible to make a combat mage focusing on ‘Blow stuff up with fireballs’ to replace a Killer in a team.

  14. Eirin Amaya yup, they are separate. It’s a divide between scholastic magic and oath magic (pledging yourself to some nightmare from beyond the rifts). The Mage works by casting spells that are Adjunct+Shape+Effect sentences. Fire is one of the effects as well as lighting etc. So you can definitely throw fireballs, lightning bolts etc. Or giant slicks of grease etc.

  15. Right. I’m not 100% sold on the split (As non-corebook traditions made the split kinda pointless to the degree they got rid of it in the end because they were too overlapping) but it could be interesting.

    I’m mostly pondering my favourite shadowrun character, who was a Shinto Mage focused on healing magic, social stuff and spirit summoning.

  16. Steve Wallace I’m planning on running Prime for the Gauntlet Community in September, per agreement with Hamish Cameron (I’m sure there’s some contract in blood I still have to sign, but I’m up for it.). I’m psyched to bring more into the cult setting.

  17. Eirin Amaya​ honestly the split is more because I enjoy the two mechanics and they each lend themselves to different sorts of characters and less with Shadowrun. The Shamans casting ability is more powerful but more random, the mage is less powerful but significantly more surgical. They could easily be the same playbook but it would end up being way to much to fit in as reasonable format so splitting them up makes sense for both formatting and fiction.

  19. Right. I’m not sure I’d agree it makes more sense with fiction (At least, for a Shadowrun representation) but I guess I’ll have to wait and see as I’ve not had a chance to see the book yet.

    I suppose worst comes to worst I can do my own homebrew (Heck, I’m part way through that currently. It’s less playbooks though and more a template you can put over any other playbook. So you can have an adept driver or a medical mage by applying it over the Tech playbook)

  22. I wasn’t expecting you to. Just stating it might not line up with what I was hoping for. Different strokes for different folks.

  23. Eirin Amaya the magic in A Darkening Alley (the low magic setting) actually does work that way. Since no one starts off with magic it’s all just available via advances. You could just do the same thing with Prime if you wanted to.

  25. It was but it also was kinda needed. Basically every single tradition they released aside from the corebook pair was ‘This is somewhere in between the two’. Like Path of the Wheel, which could throw spells and summon but not bind (iirc).

    4e ended up just going ‘Stuff it, you are a mage and spellcasting and summoning are two different skills.’

    Traditions instead control the associated spirits (Kabbalah for example gets knowledge-based spirits rather than all the elemental ones) and which stat you use for resisting drain.

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