I've had this idea for a while and I wanted to see if anybody else has ever attempted it.

If any of you have ever played D&D you're familiar with the premise; the rules in the book can be used in the "main" setting, one of the alternate settings published by the company, or a homebrew setting the GM creates.

It occurred to me that SR4 as a ruleset has a lot of potential for homebrew settings. There's just so much in it. The metatypes, the sci-fi tech, magic, dragons, crime, etc. You could build your own Star Wars galaxy with this stuff.

Which is not to say that I dislike the setting or find it bland. I just see a lot of potential for all the stuff in this game to take on all different kinds of forms and premises.

So what do you guys think? Have you tried it? If not, do you know anyone who has?

After being a "fan without the books" for years (mainly because of the Genesis game), upon serious study of the canon, I decided to homebrew the universe for the campaign I'm currently running. Honestly, I didn't like what they chose to do with the San Francisco Bay Area, and California in general. As a thoroughly wonkish political scientist, I also felt like they made some very creative but very unlikely decisions with where to take both World and US politics, and their future political breakdowns. There are also a lot of Neil Stephenson fans and Anime fans in my group, so our campaign is a bit more like "Snowcrash" and "Ghost in the Shell: SAC" than the traditional setting. Those were the main things I re-engineered for our campaign.

I do agree that there is a massive amount of potential for this system, and its setting elements. As other examples of that, I have a friend who has been using SR4 to write a Mass Effect campaign, and I also know people that are using SR4 for Call of Cthulhu adventures. Guns in this are just so much better than guns in CoC D20.

I've tinkered with this in making a completely different world but using the SR4 system itself. There are aspects of the mechanics I really like over the d20 system, though the hard part was changing a lot of the qualities and gear for such an alien world to what's established for Shadowrun (with a much lower tech level, so stuff like technomancers, commlinks, and the sort couldn't exist). I haven't even looked at it for a long time now.

A friend had opted to try a simpler history rewrite, taking out the GGD & rise of the NAN, and completely rewriting the appearance of the metatypes, as a few examples. AFAIK he stalled out on it.

I have run a few different games using SR mechanics. The game I'm running now is actually a no magic version of the game. Around the same timeline for the world except no mages/adepts, elves, orks, dragons, or ghouls. I also took out essence as an experiment, which means that the main benefit of bio vs cyber was diminished so bioware costs were all cut. I also put greater emphasis on Genecrafting, putting its advances earlier in time. Expanded space exploration/settlment. And of course had to rework most of the history...

I also did a modern zombie apocalypse using SR mechanics. Unfortunately I didn't get to run that one beyond the first session.

I can't comment for SR4, however the problem with SR1-3 was initiative and combat pool, and balancing out magic.

For the first, the SR system is based on the idea of spreading out your dice pools (using the SR3 term) over multiple actions. However, in most settings you won't have access to the ware to give you multiple actions, so you end up dumping the entire pool into one action. The result got a little crazy.

For the second, magic is balanced by cyber. In most settings, there is no cyber, so it's magic or nothing.

If your using it in a setting where its magic or nothing (such as a traditional fantasy setting), then I would assume everyone has magic or access to magic/magic items.

In which case it still wouldn't be much of an issue.

Make a bunch of converted magic items that give cyber like benefits (bonuses to stats/skills, initiative passes, etc) and replace essence with a "magic threshold" where items would have their old essence values instead apply to a threshold and if you go over that, all the magic items on your person begin to resonate and explode dangerously. Fun!

I actually think i read a bit of fiction in a world that worked like that...

You can create all the alternate settings you want, then just say they are metaplanes.

But I know what you are saying. It was one of the first things I observed when I discovered SR. I thought, "You could play about any setting with this. Cowboys and Indians, vampires and werewolves, cops and robbers."

At the time I was looking for a good Western rpg. I found a couple, but didn't like them too well.

Or UV nodes.

The first game of Shadowrun I ran was set in an alternate history version of Europe and was steam punk, because it was what the players wanted. I adapted the cyberware heavily, cut out the matrix, and made mine own list of weapons (based upon calibers rather than arbitrary DV values). It was a pretty good game. Lots of potential for jobs for/against the big time heavy industries, i.e. railroad, steel, etc. The first job was stealing an agricultural report two days before it was released publicly so a banker would know which way to bet. Not having to deal with the matrix was really nice, especially for my first time running SR.

I also made a more medieval game using SR rules, set in an alternate version of Europe 1200 A.D. and magic had become active around 100 A.D. Magic had to be nerfed, I split summoning and spellcasting into separate abilities, and equipment changes made, but I made almost no changes to the core mechanics. Never got to run it though. The jobs would have been for against guilds, stealing holy relics, etc.

And since our current game is set in Atlanta and there's very little info about CAS in the 2070's, it's almost like a completely different setting.