Savage Ideas

So a while back, I bought an RPG game called Savage Worlds. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically a generic system that you can use to play quite a lot of things, like GURPS but rules lite instead of rules heavy, and usually a reasonable price too. The impression I get from reading peoples experiences online and from my own is that it's mostly used for shorter games and not for long campaigns, mainly because character advancement is quite short and would lead to generalisation after a while. I imagine it could work well in a long campaign but the GM would have to add to it themselves.

Still, having a game that you can pick up, throw a setting over it and be ready to go in under an hour is a very good thing. These days, most games are rules heavy and are frequently built around their own system instead of a more generic system (farewell d20 supplements...) which means character creation and learning the actual rules takes the group at least a session. For Savage Worlds (SW for short), the rules are fairly straight forward, character creation even more so, so all that's left to do is explain your setting. How long that takes is really up to you.

But there is one thing I've been thinking about lately; just what settings could you adapt with this system? After running a game of White Wolf's Hunter: the Vigil with this system, I think I've come up with a three questions to ask when wondering whether it will work.

1) Are the characters human or equivalent to human (ie Elves or Dwarves)? This is an important one, especially when you're adapting things like White Wolf games. In the World of Darkness games, characters are frequently not human, they're vampires or werewolves or changelings etc, and these are all better than your average human in some ways and worse in others. What this means is that either you give each player a list of new rules for their characters on top of the rules for the game, to represent them having to drink blood, burning in sunlight etc, which also means making up those rules, or you have to scale back standard humans so the PC race is still better than them. That's a real pain, and probably not worth the effort, so in these cases, I'd recommend trying something else.
2) Do you need a load of different 'powerz'? SW has rules for magic, but like the rest of it, they are rules lite. The spells are barebones and mostly linked to combat, which threw me at first, but after reading into it a bit more, this is deliberate. They've listed basic powers (shooting someone with a bolt of magic, turning invisible, telekinesis and such) and let the GMs work out the rest from those. Generally, all you need to do is say a spell counts as one of those in rules terms then describe how it looks. Need a fireball spell? That's the Blast power, which creates an area to damage enemies. Need a spell to cause ice spikes to shoot up from the floor? That's also the Blast power, just with a different name and description, so the powers are customisable.

...well, it's still Blast of course

But in some settings, such as White Wolf games or D&D, there's already a huge list of powers players can take. Generally, you'll end up spending a lot of time building each power in SW or have your players choose them from a list and build them as you need them, which is also going to slow you down.

3) Is the game really focused on selling loot? The one definite criticism I have of SW is that the equipment list is not very good. Okay, it's got a lot of entries and you can build anything you need based on that, but the prices are really all over the place. For example, a .50 cal sniper rifle costs more than a laptop. How does that make sense? A sniper rifle costs the military over £1000 to make, you can get a laptop for £400 if you're not too picky, and anyway, does this really balance the game? So yeah, this is only a minor problem but if your setting is based around raiding or trading for goods (Firefly for example), be prepared to spend time on price lists.

I'm going to be trying out this system in future, no doubt about that, so if I think up more questions, I will post them. With those in mind, I've thought up a few settings that could be easily converted to SW. I haven't seen any conversions of these so far, but I haven't looked too hard so if you know of one, or have made one yourself, feel free to link me to that :)

Fallout - okay, the weapons list would take some tweaking but I definitely think this could work. The SW core book has rules for radiation, stats for monsters similar to super mutants or robot drones, everythings pretty much done for you.
Halflife - again, a few additions to the equipment list and you're pretty much done.
Farscape - well alright, Hynerians will be a bit tricky should anyone really want to play one but apart from that, everythings basically a variant of human.
Pandemonium and/or Spite - these are already roleplaying games, made by Neoplastic Press. In Pandemonium, demons return to Earth suddenly, and begin causing mayhem in secret. As the world starts falling into chaos, you are recruited by someone working for the other side (probably) to hold back the end times. Spite is much the same but the other way around, Angels (which are no less monstrous than the demons) are here to 'cleanse' humanity of sin and your group is all that stands in their way. The players section of Spite and the Pandemonium rulebook are free on that link if you're interested, they're pretty good. Trouble is, I'm not a fan of the system at all. Easy answer, adapt to SW rules.
Lord of the Rings - I know there's games of this out there somewhere but I think a SW version would be a good match. Anything d20 can do, we can do better!
Final Fantasy 7 - This one might be a bit trickier, mainly because of all the magic types involved, but it wouldn't be that hard in the end. You could even adapt later games too, like 8 or 9, or maybe set a game in Ivalice based on Tactics Advance and 12. Of course, the later games have fewer fans so you might get fewer players but at least they stopped at 12 and definitely didn't ruin the series after that with tripe.

Correct me at your peril!

So there's a few ideas. If I get time and interest from my groups, I might set them up myself (and post them here) but for that's it for now.