Others have given alternatives, but no one has offered Savage Worlds. It’d probably work great in a cyberpunk setting with magic, and it plays super easy.
You could just run it straight out of the box with the SWADE rulebook, but there’re published books (and free homebrews) that go for that feeling as well (like Sprawlrunners).
I don’t hate 5e, in fact I’d join in as a player very happily, but I wouldn’t run it. 5e is geared towards a very specific kind of campaign that I’m not very interested in running.
I’m more of a social campaign with big action sequences kind of DM and Savage Worlds does that perfectly. It is:
I tried to turn 5e into something that fit a cyberpunk setting for about 3 months, before just buying SWADE and being able to run every genre I could imagine from the go.
Haven’t played em, but Eat the Reich looked interesting. Vampires killing nazis. I remember reading something a while back called World of Future Darkness, which mixed Cyberpunk and Vampire the masquerade, however I’m not sure if that was ever expanded upon or which system it used.
I was working on a module for Savage Worlds that was basically World of Future Darkness with simplified lore and adapted to SWADE, but I never ended up running it to test it since I’m pretty sure the supernatural ancestries and cybernetics will need some work. If you’re interested DM me and I’ll give you the pdf.
Just going to chime in with some help, in case you need it. If you end up deciding for Foundry and find you need a public ip or something, look up zgrok (tailscale and tunnelmole are also options, but they’re not as good). It is probably the friendliest tunneling service I’ve found, and easy to set up as well. Doesn’t really have a GUI but it worked.
Just going to chime in with some help, in case you need it. If you end up deciding for Foundry and find you need a public ip or something, look up zgrok (tailscale and tunnelmole are also options, but they’re not as good). It is probably the friendliest tunneling service I’ve found, and easy to set up as well. Doesn’t really have a GUI but it worked.
The way it’s made makes it accessible to both combat and non-combat interactions, with lots of GM fiat to affect the story in the best way possible. It is very friendly to homebrew and picking whatever rules you want, and adding skills whenever/wherever you want.
The one thing that makes replicating cyberpunk hard is gear. Since SWADE is a step die you don’t have a ton of space to pump weapon numbers up, and the way that Powers work (with trappings), damage types are more of a flavour-turned-into-mechanics kind of thing. Plus, gear does not degrade in SWADE (though that for me is a plus, just more bookkeeping).
For reference, the thing I like most about SWADE in general, is that I can run almost anything with the same system and that it isn’t crunchy. Doesn’t matter if its a space opera, horror, sci-fi, dark fantasy or high fantasy medieval. Easier to run the campaigns I want if I don’t have to talk my table into learning 5 different systems. The weaknesses of SWADE don’t outweigh that for me.