I’m going to run in few weeks a BITD reskin for a fantasy-cyberpunk shadowrun styled setting. I plan to use “secure” for hacking, “tinker” for technology and science related actions that aren’t hacking, and leave the rest of the skills the same. Heritage will be race (humanelftrollect’) and background will be Etiquette (CorporateSecurityGangSocialiteStreetAcademic).
The rules as is are fine by me, but still – does anyone wants to suggest ideas about what else should be changed, modified or added for this kind of setting?
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To speed up “resist a danger” rolls we’ve implemented a house rule. If you make the effect roll to resist you have to take the stress, no backing out. It speeds up play and makes players a little more accepting of minor dangers. Should be added to any setting.
At least I’m pretty sure its a house rule…
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I’d make contacts basically flashbacks. you can use a flash back and take 2 stress to establish a new contact to help you out. but once a contact has been established they require a lil maintence (favors) or they might go rogue and sell you out.
An established contact costs 1 stress to call a favor out of the blue and no stress if you do the legwork before the job to say you met up with him.
Gonna have to wait for more concise faction rules but I’d make tiers out of the other factions in seattle. 1st tier being gangers, 2nd tier crime families, and 3rd tier being the corporations.
Blades in the dark end goal is becoming the baddest gang around, so you got to ask yourself whether or not your players feel like shooting for becoming corps themselves. Though a corp of shadowrunners is pretty kool.
has been thinking of a similar hack for a while
maybe write up some rules where indulging in your vice gives you a one time boost to a roll. I’m thinking someone takes some Jazz right before a shootout, or a decker with a simsense chip to help with hacking.
I guess you could call that a devil’s bargain.
I’d say be little more detailed – tier 3 would be low-level Corp, someone middle like MCT at most, Saeder-Krupp or Ares probably are at least tier 4 (you don’t fuck with a dragon, really). Also I don’t think you really become “Corp” on level 3-4, you are good enough to tackle them on your missions (or good enough to be hired by them on less expendable basis). Starting a Corp is probably possible, but isn’t really something you do in shadowrun stories (not that it can’t be done, it’s just not what setting is about) – if I wanted to try some Corp time game, I’d pick Corporation as a setting, it has much more focus on that, and, therefore, much more fluff to work with
I agree becoming a corp does not fit the setting in Shadowrun, but in Blades in the Dark most missions are generated from the gang faction politics. You are able to upgrade your own gang so that it can compete with the bigger gangs.
If i was going to hack BitD into a shadowrun game, and keep this feature. I would make the highest tier corporations and give the players options to make those corp like upgrades if they wanted to. If they don’t then its probably super important no one learns about their base or that they are running missions for rivals.
I’m running the game tomorrow. We have a mad scientist (whisper), master thief&hacker (lurk) and mage-striper-con-women (slide). We’ll see how it goes.
I’ve ran the game two days ago and I’ll write a full record of the run tomorrow.
But for now, the short version:
patent-infringementor-mad-scientist (whisper hack) illusion mistress (slide) and master thief (lurk) team up to form a gang of “drug dealers” that sells “ancient Chinese medicine” which is actually underpriced patented real medicine the team have stolen from biotech megacorporations. They take over rival gang by finding the underground rail-system mecha builders and exchanging a new hand for their leader with Troll-like full battle armor which is used to impersonate the gang leader, and then poison his lieutenant and achieve total domination over the local crime scene.
TL;DR: It was a blast.