Game System Conversions

In general, being a full-time sorcerer should be a real pain in the ass. True Mages should be bitten by Paradox and their own paradigmatic requirements enough to make the hedge mages following Unknown Armies-style magic glad of their tribulations. Hucksters and Lotus-style sorcerers should take heavy Paradox penalties outside their home junctures (meaning that only the most subtle Lotus sorcerers go into the modern juncture, and it’s usually just demons and troopers), and postmodern mages should be astounded by the power available in the Deadlands and 69 AD junctures.

World of Darkness

World of Darkness stats are 1–5 spots and skills usually 1–5 spots, so the rough conversion is that each spot is worth +2 if you want a 10-spot person at AV 20. Lower the coefficient on skills if you want a 10-spot person at less than AV 20— skill spots being worth +1 will give you AV 15 for human-maximum experts from the World of Darkness.

Vampiric Humanity needs to correspond to the sanity meters...

Gnosis is a substat of Magic, Rage is its own substat...

Arete...

For Mage-style magic, one schtick in an Sphere gives access to levels 1–3 and two gives access to 4–5, always subject to GM tweaking.

Cyberpunk 2020

CP2020 stats are 2–10, so they convert directly. Skills are 1–10, so divide by 2 if you want 10+10 people to be at AV 15. In particular, associate CP2020 Empathy with FS Charisma and CP2020 Cool with FS Willpower. Chrome affecting Body Type affects the Body stat. Kerenzikov boosterware is +2 or +4 to initiative; Sandevistan is +6, but takes a sequence to warm up and only lasts for 5 sequences before shutting down again. SP10 armor is +1 Toughness, –0 encumbrance; SP15 is +2, –1; SP20 is +3, –2, and SP25 is +4, –3. Light autopistols (1D6) do 8 points of damage, Medium autopistols (2D6) 10 points, Heavy autopistols (3D6) 12 points, and Very Heavy autopistols (4D6) 13. Light and medium SMGs do 10 points of damage, HSMGs 12–13, and assault rifles 13.

Most cyberware and bioware bonuses convert directly, but every 10 points of Humanity lost subtracts 1 from Charisma and ensures that you have an appropriate number of Hardened notches on your Self counter; every 20 points is an automatic Failed notch on your Self counter.

Cyberware can be very handy, and can be obtained for mere money. (Need to come up with some rules for generating CP2020 characters.) Disadvantages to it include:

The advantage of cyberware (and nanoware like that created by the Carbon Plague, below) is that it doesn’t take juncture modifiers unless you’re in a really freaky reality where physics has been severely tweaked.

Take a look at Patrick O’Duffy’s conversion for comparison.

Cybergeneration

Bringing a whole new take on the Scrappy Kid... treat it as a different sort of Creature Powers. In the game, it’s just one power with an appropriate skill for using it and some complementary skills for the complicated ones like the Alchemist. The Tinman is most susceptible to being Creature Powers-ized, with Armor, Abysmal Spines, and so on. An Alchemist could be given Blast-like powers by building internal reservoirs creating a personal flamethrower, acid spray, web spinner, poison, butyric acid stench or other such fun stuff. Bolters could use the tendrils for shocking people for entangling them as well, or could power a laser. Scanners and Wizards are the hardest to tweak that way. Wizards could get schticks in multitasking, sensory enhancements through algorithmic analysis, television broadcast interface, adapting plugs out of their flesh to hook into arbitrary sockets, field induction to interface with electronics at a short distance without a direct plug connection...

Shadowrun

Multiply stats by 1.5 and add 1 to get stats. Multiply skills by 2 to get the AV, and extract the skill bonus from the AV. Need to come up with a few rules for metahumanity. (Orks should be Big Bruisers, and Trolls should be Big Bruisers with the Really Big power...)

Unknown Armies

For percentile stats, divide by ten and round off, with .5’s going up. For percentile skills, divide by 5 and round off to get the AV, and subtract out the stat to get the skill bonus.

Magic is not as powerful as straightforward Feng Shui Sorcery, so it should not be as expensive. Real mages are rare and have to worry about Paradox in many junctures. These more subtle and bizarre forms of magic don’t bring down the wrath of a finicky reality.

To avoid the lists-of-spells notion, we may simply define special schticks appropriate to the UA-style wizards and give them the same flexibility as everyone else.

Deadlands

Hucksters will use Fortune the way some people use magic— a new Gambler-style archetype. We may want to add a Faith stat to Chi.