Sunday, October 29, 2023

Fantasy Cyberpunk Games

The last major version of Shadowrun I bought into was the 4th Edition, and I skipped 5th and 6th. I hear the 6th is a complete mess, so I am not in the market until another major revision. I never liked any of the editions and the rules, we spent more time figuring out the rules than playing. I still like the concept, but the setting always felt a little forced.

We had a d20 Modern version of a fantasy cyberpunk setting when we played D&D 3.5, and it was very over the top compared to the more serious Shadowrun. It assumed a modern world, plus all the monsters and races from the 3.5 SRD were present. It was like the Urban Arcana setting for 3.5 but turned up to eleven.

When you put a full load of 3.5 monsters and races in a modern world, with magic, a lot of strange things happen. I don't even know if the world was Earth; it was some messed-up generic 3.5 setting that got shifted into a modern reality with full cities, industries, freeways, and nations. The land between cities was too dangerous to trek in, so the cities were fortress towns filled with all sorts of crazy neighbors. We had one scenario go through a slum where the PCs encountered a beholder sleeping in his home, surrounded by dozens of empty TV dinners, and the beholder hoarded televisions and had a few hundred (all turned on and in every room) in his run-down house. They let him be, and that beholder is probably still living there to this day.

There weren't really "monsters" in this setting, not how D&D has this ingrained xenophobic and genocidal outlook against monsters in the setting. If a monster was halfway intelligent, it lived in the city. If it wasn't intelligent, like a basilisk, those could possibly be tamed and kept as pets. Pretty good home security with a pet basilisk, I tell you, and the beholder had one in a doghouse out back. Like factions (drow, dwarves) tended to group in places they liked and had jobs benefitting the city. Dwarves ran the underground trains and maintained the infrastructure below the streets. Drow drifted towards security, infiltration, and corporate espionage and lived in windowless ebony tower skyscrapers - keeping with that web-like theme of their influence, isolation, and eternal darkness.

The government has to be evil (and very powerful) to keep things together, but they tolerate good factions in the city. Good factions were insular and tended to have their own communities. Dragons (with armies and control of nukes) ran the government, and they used lawful angels and devils to keep everyone in line. The angels and devils had a truce, mainly because they knew neither of them could challenge the dragons, so they acted as enforcers and "the feds." The government let everyone live as they wanted, but if things got too out of control, teams of angels and devils would sweep in to keep things from blowing up civilization. The locals had their own civil and corporate cops that handled the low-level stuff.

There were a few good dragons working within the system to make things better, and they (and their supporters) were the eternal underdogs. Demons (the chaotic ones) were the troublemakers wanting to tear it all down, and they had a couple allied factions helping them. Chaotic and violent monsters lived outside the cities where they were constant threats.

It was a cool setting, one that had a few long-lasting and popular NPCs stick with the group, so the setting always hung out there but was never used that much. It was a fun "alt-Shadowrun" with a more 3.5 flavor and a lot of zany black humor and silly monsters hanging out in unexpected places. It was almost too wild for our group's tastes, but as an exercise in imagination, it was a great alternative setting.

If I were to do this today, I would likely use Cities Without Number as the base system, and augment that with the Swords & Wizardry (revised) game for any of the fantasy stuff. I am done with the 3.5 rules, and CWN does a good job of merging the B/X combat, AC, and hit-point systems with cyberpunk concepts and plenty of random charts. And any Sine Nomine game can drop in B/X characters, monsters, races, and magic without many changes at all, and it just works.

Cities Without Number is a great "basic B/X" rule implementation, cross-compatible with everything. I am liking this system the more I read it since it allows a great deal of customization while keeping the core mechanics very rules light. Having B/X characters drop in and work as-written is also a huge plus. They assume a lower power level and like to carefully consider spells and magic before they are added to the world since high-fantasy magic can be game-breaking. I tend to agree with that assumption.

If I used Earth, I would change it so much things would be unrecognizable. The "magic storm" the planet went through would shift continents around, raise some out of the ocean, create inland seas in others, and generally mess things up to keep things fresh. you could probably hex-crawl and randomly generate the world and it would work, and just keep the major landmarks and cities in the same places and meld them in. Things outside cities are more 'Thundarr the Barbarian' ruins with chaotic monsters infesting the ruins. Call everything "The Wastes" and keep people in cities and you have a great campaign world.

That is what I did in Shadowrun 1.0 back in the day. We assumed the shift in the world destroyed the outside world, made rural areas too dangerous to live in, and kept cities their feudal cousins. Low Fantasy Gaming's excellent (and beautifully made) cyberpunk-fantasy game Lowlife 2090 does the same sort of thing, with a 5E shell and compatibility. You could run the same style of game here in 5E, with cities filled with fantasy races and wild wastelands between the major feudal population centers.

For cyberpunk, you want characters (and everyone else) stuck in cities. This is a genre requirement and sets up rural areas as no-go danger zones filled with monsters, destroyed ruins, and Max-max-style roving gangs (if you are not doing fantasy). When we finally read the Shadowrun world books for 1.0, we were a little shocked they assumed rural areas were filled with safe havens. Not in our version of the world, those hoop snakes were killers.

I like the fantasy and cyberpunk mix since it is the peanut butter and chocolate of cyberpunk gaming. The genre outgrew Shadowrun for us, which always tried too hard to explain things and make them realistic. Also, the cities outside Seattle felt 'meh' to us, and never could live up to that one amazing place - which was a huge weakness of the setting. With the Cyberpunk rules, I could make Dallas engaging as a setting, whereas Shadowrun always felt like it couldn't. Seattle became the too-popular focus of the world, like Waterdeep in the Realms, and killed the game world, and also, the game itself.

With a B/X set of cyberpunk rules, I could make all of Manhattan an arcology structure, a large sealed-off mega city run by the corps, and have the surrounding areas be crime-infested areas with plenty of places of interest to have adventures in. I could even have Manhattan Island be several competing arcologies, each run by a different mega-corp and trying to grow into each other and take each other over in a Game of Cities sort of conflict. That is a cool story.

Mixed with a cyberpunk-fantasy theme, that is an epic story, especially if you flavor the factions with traditional fantasy races and monster types. The Drow of Wall Street and their shadow dragon allies are eating up the south, with the elves and green dragons controlling Central Park and the surrounding areas, and no one gets along.

It would be a fun setting, and pay tribute to the original game that started this, but play on a wider variety of fantasy tropes.

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