anyone ever import an idea (character types, creatures, weapon, gear) from another RPG to SR to make it more interesting?

like i have been considering a short mission for my players where they run into the SR equivalent of Dog Boys from "Rifts". I will eliminate Mega Damage weapons/armor of course.

one other idea was to borrow a character class from a sci-fi rpg from 20 odd years ago and the name of it escapes me. but the character class was a creature that was part of a religious sect.
they were pacifists and their behavior was such that others around them would fight for them.

they had high charisma and were healers, but lacked magic.

lastly, i wanted to have a "WTF?" session by bringing in the team concept from "TMNT & Other Strangeness".
not necessarily a team of mutants, but just a group of characters who get bonuses for being brothers under the microscope, coming from the same lab experiment.

not super powered or cartoonish, but a bit altered from most people.

i am having fun expanding SR into other directions, just didn't know if you experiment as well.

A wghile back I played in a Vampire the Masquerade adventure where a bunch of vampires had become convinced they were Turtles, that the other vampires were Foot Ninja and so forth. It was hilarious.

I added Hobbits to the List of playable SR Metaraces

with a Dance in the Shires
Medicineman

I often use bits and pieces (or references to) the Warhammer 40K universe, and the Cthulhu Mythos. In fact, I've run a couple Cthulhutech adventures (from what will now be known as the Shadow war, for a lack of mecha, and it'S fight-the-dark-powers theme). I've also introduced, at the request of a player, stuff and ideas from a show called Huhntik, albeit strongly modified with more than a touch of the above mentioned 40K and Mythos.

Oh yeah, does Earthdawn count?

The (new*) World of Darkness Tremere Lich is conceptually pretty fucking awesome as a 'psychic vampire' variant, that happens to fits perfectly with my single favorite character. Unfortunately, the mechanics are terrible. As such, I ported over the concept, but with different mechanics. Turns out Essence Drain/Loss is perfectly suited to represent an immortal who survives by consuming others' souls.


*In new WoD, the Tremere are actually a Mage Attainment, not a Vampire Bloodline.

I'm gonna add the Wee Free Men...

Color me surprised. Because this is what shadowrun vampires are supposed to be about.

The shaman I'm currently playing is a "drow."

Well, he's really just a human elf posuer who got SURGED with pitch black skin. He goes around referring to others as "mortals" and talking about his people and the Underdark.
All complete BS, but only a handful of the other players know there aren't any drow in Shadowrun/Earthdawn it's fun to gauge their reactions.

No, not exactly. Essence in shadowrun represents a few things, of which a 'soul' is thought of by some to be one of them. Shadowrun vampires, like most vampires, feed off a character's life energy, which just happens to result in essence loss. Granted, some believe they feed off the soul, but that really is just a theory with no backing.

Despite many similarities, the tremere are conceptually very different than vampires. Also, I actually use Energy Drain (Essence) rather than Essence Drain - the latter is just a specific version of the first, so this allows me flexibility in the transition method.

what a relief to know that it's okay to tweak the game like that.
i suppose as long as i don't try to "GURPS" the game to encompass everything i want and wind up with things that just don't jive in SR, i am remaining faithful to the game's concept.

I do have one more question- i like the original WoD concept for "Mage:the Acension" that the mages are fighting to establish their vision of reality as the true reality of the world. In SR terms would a magic user that has that belief system, would he be someone who's got Flaws (Schizophrenic, delusional, etc) or could he just be a byproduct of the environment that helped develop his abilities?

hint: i'd love to have a Sons of Ether type running around trying to convince street sams that he has the answer, lol.

Uh huh. Essence is cnsidered either life energies or a holistic oneness of body and soul, so it either is the soul or what's keeping the soul in the body (depending on which authors you ask). So it's reasonable to assume that eating essence seriouslymeses with the soul or is downright eating it. That even goes with the Mosaic idea of souls being entirely separate from the bodies that WoD so singularily subscribes to. So no, SR vampires either eat or seriously mess with the soul (which then implodes into the Astral). Either way they destroy it thoroughly.


Well. You should stay the hell away from my games with any WoD crossover and sparky vampires who eat souls which totally is different from essence because vampires are special snowflakes, but if you're heavily into WoD, go for it. Sr4 is a very modular game and in fact comes close to ADD 4 in being pretty much open to anything (nevermind it'S mechanics being deeply flawed on principle in some areas).

There is no "true" SR, despite what angry purists like me like to say. If you feel crossing Cthulhu, WoD, or Spawn of Fashan into SR, the system probably can take that, and it'S your game. Just don't expect evertyone to be happy when you show up with a Cullen for a character (or a Hobbit).

Ah yes, forgot to mention: I am working on a viable Space Marine build in SR4. He's set to be just as powerful too, abusing the hell out of the exoskeleton in Attitude and that it never mentions what initiative is used wearing it fully rigged. 5 IP for the Space Marine (or, "how does something so big and heavy move so damned fast?!"). Even got it'S own thread here somewhere.


It'S been SR canon ever since SR2 that the mage's belief systems shape how his magic works. Back then that meant differnet mechanics, which they dumbed down streamlined for SR4 because apparently it'S too much to ask of players to memorise three tables. Powerful NPCs like Harlekin or Great Dragons have a very divergent belief ystem and hence magic that works fundamentally different from SR's.

So, if I understand your question correctly, the magemakes the way the mana reacts for him, works for him. Reality, though, is not shaped by the mage, SR's world is, esentially, a lovecraftian, uncaring universe that doesn't give a toss about what people think of it (unlike the very anthropocentric, chrisitanity-influenced WoD, SR was originally written by New Agers heavily into Shamanism and Hindusim with a good dash of CoC). So no matter what your mage believes, the universe will not just bend over backwards because he believes. Your mage is, however, welcome to subscribe to the belief he can remake reality if he just believes enough. It's just, canonically, never gonna work for him.

There's no stopping you houseruling it does and going with the Mage:TA worldview, of course.

At one point I pondered how to stat up a Promethean as the magical equivalent to a cyberzombie, but I never really went anywhere with it.

In our game, we had a crossover some time back where a single, capable Virtual Adept got pulled into the SR universe from his own. He had all of his own normal capabilities. In a nearly paradox-free environment, he was insanely powerful. Thankfully, he was a rarely used NPC for extremely dangerous missions.

Concepts and ideas port into SR from other systems with little issue, so long as one works within the SR mechanics to approximate that concept (as we've done on this forum innumerable times with superhero builds, iron man, Binky, etc etc etc).

I've always found the otherworldly cosmic horrors in deadlands were far more compelling then the ones in Shadowrun and tend to borrow them on occasion.

ImO Cthulhu Horrors, Deadland Horrors and Earthdawn Horrors are all the same
and can be exchanged easily

He who Dances with Cthulhu
Medicineman

i plan to avoid that, hermit.

i think i may simplify my mage idea bit. i may just make him a nutjob with lots of flaws, just like Robin Williams' character in "The Fisher King". he has magical ability, but was traumatized by his upbrining so much that he took something he read or saw and adopted it as his new reality.

he'll basically follow WoD rules- avoiding the use of vulgar magic, fearful of Paradox, etc. just to complicate things for him. Imagine a nerdy combat mage with Asperger's and knows 1950s-1970s sci-fi by heart.

i really want to have fun with him.

Perfectly viable. There was, in one of the 3E magic books, a few examples of such mages - one who practiced magic according to superhero comic books, one who practiced 'psionics' based on 1960s pseudoscience. And a friend's character's patron is a Transformers character (Starscream, of all things). Consequently, the character interacts with her patron by watching ancient cartoons, over and over. So that's perfectly in line with the basic ideas of Shadowrun canon.

My problem with WoD in principle is that it made Vampires no monsters but noble suffering angsty goth creatures whose enternal lives are spent in a perpetual state of Sturm und Drang and whining about their loss of humanity (a somewhat edgier version of Stephenie Meyer). I just don't like that. YMMV. Not attacking your character as a given, it's more a general dislike of WoD's principle world view. Rules-wise, nWoD and Sr are prettymuch compatible. I actually like that social combat system, for instance.

I've recently started reading again SLA Industries to help me get the 80s cyberpunk feel in my "old-school" campaign. But it's more about the feel and the setting than specific elements.

Well, I've also integrated some CP2020 stuff long ago. There were Chromebook conversions for SR3. Some of that stuff was pretty neat.

Personally i have nothink against WoD or nWoD vampires games and think that there are many nice thinks in the various books, but i have never felt a particular need to crossover anything from them into SR.
But i have spend sometime thinking about porting in some of the hunter organization from the nWoD hunters game, like Taskforce Valkyria, Maiden's blood sisterhood(Monster hunting sorority ) and few of the others.
But thats alongside of thinking about porting in Public Security Section 9, Dollhouse, Warehouse 13, Alpha Protocol, Global Frequency, Order of Hole Sepulchre, Sanctuary, The Guild of Companions and few others

I'm calling the Gaming Police on all of you guys.

I play more WoD than SR, and if your experiences have been mostly about angsting around - mine haven't.

Actually SR has crept into our Vampire. Our party basically does shadowrunning jobs (B&E, extraction, wetwork, deniable asset) for the vampiric establishment.

Well, it's not just the angsting (though that IS an issue, that and moronic power tripping). WoD tends to attract a certain crowd over here. Also, the game is fundamentally anthropocentric, the world is deeply moralistic, and the core of the (Vampire and Werewolf) game is moaning your loss of humanity while reveling in your outsiderdom (at least, that's the impression the VtM core book makes on me). There are other, much more interesting parts of WoD - Changeling, Hunter - but I just don't like, personally, this anthropocentrism and the biased, moralising nature of the world put me off at a fundamental level.

Despite the massive powergaming that can result from Mage in WoD, my groups really enjoy the hell out of it. We manage to keep it very in check, and keep the threats always challenging. Of course, it helps to have a fantastic GM to weave a good and lasting story. But then, any game can be made or broken by the quality of the GM.

i feel blessed that i have only once encountered the folks that were LARP-ing V:tM.
i like RPGs, but that got awkward pretty fast. LOL.

with WoD, i am used to the original system/story, not that reboot they pulled. and personally, i loved Werewolf. but the others didn't have enough to make them fun to keep going.
(i wanted to eat a Roomsweeper after reading Wraith and Changeling.)


damn, now the idea of using Cthulhu is sounding really great.
a good ghost story turned into nightmare fuel would be a blast.
and would it be too much to ask that players create new characters that are totally disposable, considering what they'll run into won't be at all reluctant to eradicate them?

Try the Cthulhutech books, for easy Shadowrun conversion. You'll find good horror-themed adventures at the end of each supplement (all have short prewritten scenarios in them using their contents) that practically are cyberpunk Cthulhu already. With some, you just have to replace Chrysalis with Aztech and Nyarlathotheb's Avatar with Darke. Of course Trail of Cthulhu is also easily convertable, as are most detective-themed Mythos adventures (replace 'desperate person walking into PIs office" with "desperate Johnson you meet in a pub").

For Cthulhutech, I recommend Dark Passions and the core book for easy to convert scenarios. I ran most of these and it was pretty effective. All are nightmare fuel to a degree, the harshest being the abduction thing in Dark Passions. Of course, it's best to stick with the Shadow War (Tagers) adventures, since converting the humanity/space horrors war with mecha to SR really doesn't make much sense.

I like the Humanity theme, but my take on it is a bit different. It's a choice: you can do all manner of "evil" things, and that gives you more maneuvering room than people who stick with high Humanity. But to get that freedom you have to get uncomfortably close to being a slavering animal. But if you don't, then people will take advantage of you because you're "soft". Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

It gives me a real kick if I can come up with some ingenious way to foil my enemies without having to sink any deeper. On the other hand, I also enjoy taking the Boondock Saints style moral high ground, and going all "destroying them justifies the means" on them.

Also, I like the Frenzy concept; I enjoy playing characters who are very controlled and introspective most of the time, but sometimes frustrations just boil over and a-rampaging I go.

I also like the magical powers in the core (Camarilla) clans in VtM. They're very flavorful, it really makes vampires stealthy-social parasite-predators.

---

What I think is most applicable from Vampire to SR would be vampires as masterminds: well aware of what they have to lose in a fight (eternal life), so even though they're pretty strong, they prefer to manipulate people from behind the scenes. SR just tends to state that there are puppetmasters; Vampire really goes to town on that theme.

See, that's my problem with this system. What I strongly disapprove of is the WoD defining morality in absolutes, in game stats, and then judging all actions according to a set of Puritan moral values I neither share nor like.


Actually, that was the core idea of all SR immortals - dragons, elves, infected, even spirits to a degree - until Year of the Comet, when the writers team introduced Ghostwalker and wrote up all Great Dragons some form of unstoppable Godzilla monster that laugh at being bombarded with cruise kissiles. Tom Dowd once summed it up as (paraphrased) dragons were used to be top of the food chain and then woke up in a world that has AAMs. Too bad they strayed from the path to make Great Dragons all but unkillable.

However, in the ranks of SR immortals, vampires are hardly in the powerful position they are with the WoD, which has neither spirits, nor cybered-up mortals, nor megacorps with vast magical ressources or millenia-old immortal mages. All vampires in SR are pretty young by SR standards, and hence, just lack the KArma to become that powerful.

It's important to keep this in mind when porting stuff from VtM: there is no grand vampire conspiracy running the world. Instead, it is hiding from the forces that do and hopes they don't notice. That's a total game changer for VtM stuff, changing the Masquerade from "keeping the sheep in check" to "hiding from powers that could crush us like insects".

Dark Passions also has few intresting cults like the Dionysus club, that could be imported to SR quite easily.

I dont know, not getting annihilated is pretty much the reason for Masquerade in VtM too, as the inquisition showed the vampires that either they hide their existance or get wiped out.

Or the Mother Earth Cult. SURGED furries. Who worship a demon. Yep, that's useful indeed. I am not being sarcastic, neither about demonic furries (there's even art of them!) nor about that being useful.

The Dionysus cultalso is nice, of course. Especially the gradual corruption angle.


The vampires in VtM run the world pretty successfully for that...

VtM is OLD WOD... You should look a bit at the NWOD...

Never saw anyone play it. Is VtR not canceled yet? I heared it spectacularily crashed because they actually wanted to un-angst and un-derp the vampires there.

As for nWoD, I have the Hunter game lying about soeplace, and bought that social combat supplement because I like the idea. Mostly, though, people play WoD here, for all I know though.

NWOD is going Strong. Requiem, Forsaken, Created, Lost, Awakening, Hunter, Geist. The Limited Lines have stopped production, but there are still books coming out for the Core Lines (Requiem, Forsaken and Awakening).

There was a lot of anger when the New lines came out because they were not OWOD. Fortunately, the quality was very high (and has remained so), and the settings/system worked better, at least in my opinion, than the OWOD Settings/System/Metaplot did. The Metaplot got old for me. Not that I do not Like OWOD, I have most of the Books. It is just that NWOD has so much more potential, in my opinion.

YMMV, as always.

There are arguments for and against using stats to track Humanity, as well as the way humane-ness is defined, true.



The whole idea behind the Masquerade is that "if they ever find out what we're doing, they'll kill us all", and that makes perfect sense in SR too. In VtM vampires need to keep clear of werewolves, inquisitors/witch hunters, mages, and random mortals, including the police. The vampires are at their best when they're using their abilities to manipulate their enemies into fighting each other instead of the vampires. Vampire powers are particularly good for intrigue (invisibility, telepathy, changing memories...), but they have trouble keeping up with a lot of other creatures (werewolves, mages, most of which wouldn't like vampires, people with Faith) in sheer firepower.

I don't have much experience with nWoD.. I bought the core book and Requiem core, but I didn't really like it aesthetically (too glossy), and I was seriously pissed off they recycled names from oWoD - for me that's really annoying, it causes conceptual bleed-over. But there were interesting new concepts in it, and I might give it another chance someday.

VtM is taking things way out of my comfort zone n several areas, that being the worst, but not the ony one. At least as far as I remember, been some time since I read that book.


In SR, invisibility is beaten by everybody's vehicle's sensors (because it neither works against radar nor ultrasound), elves have better Charisma than vampires, and mindfuck is open to all mages, including atheists (and a cybersam will give a vampire a hard time, too, if he has the right kind of ammo, because odds are he'll act first). Vampires are a LOT less powerful in SR. It' important to keep that in mind when converting stuff, though I personally don't think such a Masquerade would be possible at all in SR, even scaled down.

My SR v2 game included Call of Cthulhu, TORG, steampunk, Bubblegum Crisis, Stargate, Hardwired, Chung Kuo and more before it stopped being SR and I moved onto something else.

I really wonder what, despite vague 80s cyberpunk flair, BGC and Shadowrun have in common.

My Shadowrun has always stayed Shadowrun but I've borrowed plenty of plot ideas. And spent a year or more dealing with a longtime Werewolf T/Apocalypse player who really wanted to be a shapeshifter in SR. Ivan (the werewolf hitman) turned out to be an interesting PC with a strong storyline.

Any CONCEPT can work, if you put enough energy into it. Sounds interesting.

Sorry, TJ, going to have to disagree with you on that one...

Really? How come?
Conceptually, a character should work in almost any circumstances. Not necessarrily talking about gaming here, though that is the main focus. In the end, it is execution of the character that makes it viable or not. Poor execution tends to make poor characters.

I mean hell, look at Jim Butcher and his Codex Alera Series. Who would have thought it would work, other than him?

Because we're not all Jim Butcher, no matter how much energy and effort we put into something. That's why.

You need raw talent, trained skill, and that certain "Something" to make things work at times. All putting more energy and effort will do if you're lacking those things is teach you that all you have is a lifetime's worth of failure.

While that is definitely true, It does mean that in the right hands, any concept is viable. Which was really all that I originally said. Unfortunately, there is a LOT of poor execution out there.

Ah, I was pointing out the poor execution, which is the norm.

Hell, look at my work.

Well, your work is generally far from Poor...

Yeah. It reminded me of Findley's Hard Boiled style action stories. Little rough on the edges, and could use some more of these detailed descriptions HB books love so much, but generally comes along very well, has the slightly ironic/tongue-in-cheek tone just right (I loved the descriptions of Nas' problems with his women!). Best SR fanfic I've read in some time. Pity you don't do online gaming, really.

Might have to give it another shot someday. Not soon, however.

And Findley (*Pours a 40 on the curb*) was a bit of where I was aiming for. Cyberpunk and TechNoir is what I'm aiming for.

And, yeah, it's a bit rough. It's the first bit of writing I've done that I've actually put up for people to read, I'll freely admit that. Apparently I've gotten better with my current Fallout work.

Also, I put it up unpolished. No editing except what's done as it flows out. Literally finish the chapter and Copy-Paste it away. If I were to sit down and do it properly, those edges would go away.

It's not bad edges either, just a bit here'n'there. For unedited work? Hell, look at some of the (supposedly) edited in-print, official SR work. That's very good actually.

Fallout work?

Only at first glance.

My players once had to do an entire vr/matrix scenario based on Battletech. You should have heard the laughter as they tried to argue that I had to setup the btech boards for them to "visualize" the fight. I told them that they've played srun for so long without a board, why would they need it now?