Shadowrun

A mix of fantasy and modern-day, street-level missions, magic and technology, monsters and artifacts, and vehicle combat. Starfinder uses starships, and Shadowrun uses vehicles. Your team of mixed magic-and-tech characters gets a mission to go to a place and use transport to reach there. It is structurally the same game.

This was the better Starfinder - at least in the setting.

I know the 6th Edition has MAJOR issues. If I got this, I would likely use Cypher System, Savage Worlds, Year Zero (already very close and has an SRD), or GURPS as my ruleset and ignore the broken system.

The setting is still great. Iconic. An all-time great.

The rules need help.

My version of Shadowrun is much more post-apoc than the official setting. The mega-cities are the only place humanity can live. The awakening has overrun everywhere; small towns and sparsely inhabited places do not exist. Monsters and wild magic are everywhere, along with raiders and other inhuman monster groups. The most significant areas outside cities are heavily defended corporate megafarms, often under constant assault.

But nobody lives outside the cities. The native nations may claim the land, but they can't even control the devastation of wild magic and creatures that devastated the world. You go outside the cities and are in for a constant fight with monsters and raiders - like something out of Mad Max or Aliens.

It is like a Rifts setting mixed with Car Wars.

There is also a heavier fantasy element as "forces from beyond and the past" appear to change the world, and even the forces of Hell get involved in a limited way, threatening the world with a Doom-like apocalypse.

This is how our game has always been since SR4 and how it ended a few years ago. My players loved it. The default setting assumes small towns and rural life exist, and my players understood our game-setting was more extreme and had that sharp divide between cities and rural adventures. We also had a few more fantasy races in the mix; mysterious fairies were flitting about, demons lurking in the shadows, dark elves were rumored, and I planned on having goblins show up with their machines and constructs. They used the same designs, just with a few changes:

• Fae - use elf, limit STR/BODY to 3, flight
• Goblin - use dwarf
• Demon - use orc, troll, or elf (depending on type), custom qualities as needed
• Gnoll - use orc, berserker trait
• Dark Elf - use elf, they get limited "Predator movie" stealth

So, the five new races sort of piggyback on the existing ones and are more "flavor options" for the game. A few may have custom positive and negative qualities (like a succubus getting flight wings and charm as positive qualities). So they don't unbalance the game and open the door to more strangeness and mysteries. I can also use online tools (Hero Lab) to create characters and have the race selections work without custom options.

The fae are the (not the illusion, but real here) ones from the cover of the Shadowrun 1 Grimoire, and we called them chroma-fairies since they had different magics based on their colors. They were rare in general life, but in high magic areas, they could be seen out and about, flitting around, sitting on shelves in arcane libraries, appearing in bars to cause a little trouble for fun, and the people accepted them as a side effect of high magic areas drawing in all sorts of strange phenomena.

They did not have traditional IDs and never really went on runs, but they were great NPCs, sources of information, and side characters that immensely added to the magic side of the game for color and feeling. Mages liked visiting arcane universities and libraries and seeing these unique fae flitting about.

The rest of the new races followed that "magic pulls them in" model, where goblins could appear in high-machinery areas, demons in regions of dark magic, dark elves in areas of high shadow magic, gnolls in places of high violence, and so on. The actions of the world started drawing in "the others." They became character options if a player really wanted them and they fit the story. Otherwise, they made terrific NPCs and increased the WTF factor of the entire setting.

The undead were coming one day, but that would be more like an invasion of the dead in areas and a huge turning point for the world.

What makes Starfinder hard for me is the stories are not straightforward. You can buy an adventure path, but I like games where the stories write themselves. In fantasy, it is easy; the stories write themselves. There are times I feel Starfinder was written for a collector's market. They tend to throw everything and the kitchen sink at you, and then you need to figure out how the mess of disassociated parts fits together.

Shadowrun challenges you. It is a very low-level street game with a flat progression system. This is survival: social, environmental, magical, urban, wilderness, and staying one step ahead of trouble. The stories come from action and mob movies. There is an element of 1984 and Big Brother out of the Paranoia game. In Starfinder, there are moments where they write conflict out of the game for some idealistic worldview - and they are afraid of making factions fight (or even creating opposing ones). The 9-axis alignment system is in the game, but I have never seen it used.

Shadowrun is the opposite; everyone has a reason to stab each other in the back.

At least, in the setting - whatever version is your favorite.

The stories are simple here.