I may be running a one-shot this Saturday, and am wanting to run it in a cyberpunk fantasy/Shadowrun flavor with minimal changes. I know there’s a similar stretch goal in the works, but here’s my plan. I’d love any input on where I’m going overboard or off-base.
At this point, players will focus PC concepts around group choices on the gang framework by Andrew Shields, tweaked slightly for cyberpunk flavor.
Each player will have to choose whether all spirit/supernatural/ectoplasmic stuff on their sheet either stays spirit stuff (for mage/shaman-types) or swaps for equivalent digital/VR stuff (decking, rigging, etc). I think this may nicely handle the essence balance business of canon Shadowrun where cyberware/digital paraphernalia saps your essence which you need to power magic and shamanic spirit wrangling.
To further the cyberpunk skin (hopefully without too much complication), I’m thinking of adding two cards/index cards. Players choose one of each to supplement or replace parts of their sheet.
1. One for each race/metatype, offering 4 racial special abilities (choose 1 in addition to the starting playbook ability). Most racial abilities are just other playbook abilities tweaked, inspired by Sixth World.
2. One for each classic cyberpunk archetype, replacing the sheet’s friends section (and maybe offering more modern gear list options). These can also recommend playbooks that fit nicely.
The biggest change I may make is more due to being one-shot than the skin. Players choose a key-like drive card to guide investment in the world and mini-personal arcs (from a drawn hand depending on how many players there are). Option ideas are in a comment on this thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/116748546962488989608/posts/KiJE48s8Qkr
Sounds good. Minimal effort is key here. No need to go nuts. I’ve run two Shadowrun games with slightly tweaked Blades character sheets and it was fine.
Sounds like fun, please post about the result.
Ahoy, just as follow-up, I didn’t end up running this game. I did all the prep for it though, so I’ll let you know if I end up running it, and maybe share the tiny customizations I made or considered.
For those who are interested, here is my cyberpunk NPC generator modified from the NPC Generator 2 (GoogleSheet) linked on the community sticky post. Most of the details are inspired by Sixth World, and I haven’t yet modified anything about the factions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n3YvShVgKyFRwSjggF5OFWkfyWd1ZeQr4E0_WPCw0es/edit?usp=sharing