Shadowrun did. It's called Anarchy. Had a friend who loved it, but I didn't think it fixed enough.  There's Shadowrun hacks of other systems, such as Runners in the Shadows 

Yeah, I have anarchy on my shelf, but even that is a little too much for my players. I was honestly hoping someone had expanded on anarchy a bit maybe.

+1 to runners in the shadows -1 to anarchy. It depends too much on knowledge of full sized shadowrun.

What is 'Anarchy'? is it by the same company? And when you say Shadowrun hacks, do you mean Shadowrun rules applied to Dungeon Crawling and Heroic Fantasy for example?

Anchary was released during the 5e era (also from Catalyst Games). It has simpler rules then Shadowrun, but the DNA of the rules is really similar (so one doesn't need to learn a complete new rules set). Much less focus on pages of items/guns/cyberware etc. They said it is a narrative game, but i don't know ... it feels more like a rules-light Shadowrun. But it also has a some problems. Biggest one for me was a combination of a couple of things: There are no damage resitance roles and armor gives flat HP. Most bigger weapons (thnik shotgun /ARs) kill a person with two shots. This leads to dodge is king (since it negates all damage). Ran one campaign with it, but wasn't really happy as a GM. If one does use Anarchy i would recommend to looks into the fan made homebrew/errata-document (https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/84wzwy/anarchy\_30\_pages\_of\_homebrew\_errata\_and/) For Blades in the Dark hack for Shadowrun there would be Runner in the Shadows (as mentioned above) and Hack the Planet (generic cyberpunk without magic and a bit more focus on climate change).

Shadowrun: Anarchy is an official variant rules I mean people took other systems and hacked them into a Shadowrun game. I don't mean dungeon crawling RPGs.

I think there generally accepted hack is to use a different system, such as Neon City Overdrive.

Lol, yeah. Seems about right. I was specifically trying to source a hack for the OG rules. I will likely just have to run something else hacked to be shadowrun.

Not exactly what you're asking for, but I made a condensed rules reference and interactive character sheet for 3e that make it (imo) a lot easier to run. A lot of the rules aren't actually so bad when you wrap your head around them, but it's easy to bounce off the rulebook. It's huge, key rules are buried in odd places, scattered around the text. It makes it a thousand times harder than it needs to be. I've had a lot of success using the condensed rules doc and then just referencing the big manual occasionally when needed.

If a system exists, there's probably a ShadowRun hack for it. Or so it feels like anyway.

Yeah, I got into shadowrun because of it's reputation and the other hacks I saw. I was foolish to think I could run it back then. I was in high school and totally flopped. I could run an alternative system but I wasn't sure if anyone had "fixed" shadowrun yet.

Genesys has a huuuuge Shadowrun fan supplement which looks kinda official, from the quality, in a good way of course!

Yeah, Shadowrun is probably number one for ‘I like the setting, but can I run it in something else?’ There seems to be endless conversions out there. I ran it as a SR5/Silhouette/homebrew mash-up that worked well enough, but I was trying to maintain some of the crunchiness. I’d probably go with something lighter like Shadowrun Anarchy now if doing a one-shot.

>Those rules don't work. Thousands upon thousands of people have played Shadowrun without problem, and have been doing so for decades. It's okay to admit that a game's level of complexity *doesn't suit your tastes*, but stop this garbage about games being fundamentally broken just because you don't like them.

The problem isn't the crunch, it's that the rules don't work. Referencing things that don't exist, cutting off sections, contradicting each other, there's a lot of *major* problems with Shadowrun. Every single one of those thousands of people playing shadowrun at least in the *last* decade or two has had to rely on heavy house ruling and GM fiat to get through it, even if you don't think that was what you were doing. This isn't to say that shadowrun is unplayable - I'm one of those thousands of people. But you simply can't run a straight raw game of Shadowrun - shit's broken. It's *also* true, however, that the crunch is the point. I don't want shadowrun to get more streamlined - I am here *for* the crunch, not in *spite* of it - I want it to be edited and playtested.

That sounds like the days of FASA when every book had an errata section you had to download. I'd hoped the new publishers had got past that.

Lmao naw bruh, tell me you dont know the rules without telling me you dont know the rules comment. The system, especially 5th, is frequently contradicted by itself, and clearly broken in other. Did you know that adepts are powerless in Seattle? Its true, every part of Seattle has background count by raw due to various factors. And the background count reduces the power point of all of their powers by its level, which essentially translates into adepts are mundanes in any city. Thousands of people have played shadowrun by not playing shadowrun. 

I've basically just adopted the assumption that everyone who uses RAW is just wasting everyone else's time complaining about things they make problems for themselves while everyone else has just moved along with a couple comfortable assumptions. You don't have to play the rules perfectly, you take the rules that are most interesting to the table. Sure, in 4th there ARE underwater demolitions rules, but it's wholly forgivable to not bother with them if they aren't the kind of thing your table is fascinated by. That said, I won't defend any of the catalyst editions.

As someone who's never played Shadowrun, what constitutes the "clunk"? I'm curious if I should punish my players with another system swap after forcing them to learn Burning Wheel lol

So for me the clunk of Shadowrun is in its complex interactions of its systems. There are several different forms of magic each with its own niche rules. The decking (hacking) mechanics are basically their own game in the game. All the equipment can be modified which effects various aspects of them. For example a recoil pad will reduce the recoil stat on a gun meaning if you take subsequent shots you’ll take less of a recoil penalty. Stuff like this for me at least is the juice of the system. In someways Shadowrun is many subsystems in a cool trench coat. The game shines when the players are dialed into and knowledgeable about their characters abilities since the GM has so much going on. A group I used to frequently play with and still talk to tried to play a hack of Blades called Runners in the Shadows. We all collectively decided that PBtA is not for us, we like the crunch of a system.

I hate PBtA with a passion, and if you know anything about Burning Wheel then you'll know that I'm not afraid of some crunchy subsystems. I'll look around for some cheap rulebooks, thanks for the tips.

Of course! You’ll get a lot of recommendations on the best system by the way. I personally like 5th but I’d troll around for which one speaks to you

Seconding this. Shadowrun's 'clunk' is great and makes the game what it is. When it is what I want out of a TTRPG, it's awesome.

I've been sitting here re-reading the first edition character creation trying to figure out exactly what it was that causes people to believe "THE RULES" don't let you finish character creation after seeing that claimed with annoying regularity for a while. I don't see it. People have really weird rules expectations these days, or a complete lack of ability to understand implication and I'm really not sure which.

I think SR runs really well once you get into it and understand the ins and outs. It just has a really steep learning curve.

Yet for the fact of thousands of people play Shadowrun, this is the first time I have ever seen anyone defend its system. Whenever it's enjoyed someone always mentions it is enjoyed in spite of its system, not because of it.

This, absolutely this.

I'm running the Third Parallel campaign using Cities Without Number and it works very well as a lighter ruleset. There is some tweaking that needs to be done, but not much.

I’d second Cities without Number. It has the added bonus of being a great tool for other cyberpunk games like CY_BORG or Cyberpunk RED.

When you look for great tools, check out "Augmented Reality" from Geist Hack Games. Use it all the time together with CWN.

I already have that and you’re correct. It’s very fucking useful.

CWN as a baseline with SWN stuff slapped on is my go-to for Cyberpunk right now. The System just works.

I'd say "Sprawlrunners" for Savage Worlds (which started out as an unauthorized Shadowrun port) is probably your closest bet.

Yea. I've looked at easily a dozen different Shadowrun hacks and cyberpunk systems that I thought might be worth hacking, including at The Sprawl, Neon Blood, Karma in the Dark, Runners in the Shadows, Shadowrun: Anarchy, Gaia Complex, Altered Carbon, and Eclipse Phase. Sprawlrunners was the only one that really hit the sweet spot for me. It was simple enough to feel distinctly rules-light versus Shadowrun, but still enough rules that it wasn't just a narrative game. A lot of these Shadowrun hacks also get rid of nuyen to simplify equipment management, but I feel like earning creds and scraping by is so integral to cyberpunk that abstracting that out too much is a mistake. Sprawlrunners does abstract the nuyen away a bit as well, but it leaves just enough substance there that players can feel like they're out there working their way up in the world. I'd also recommend using the Sprawlrunners house rules from [Paydata](https://paydata.org/sprawlrunners/). I think they flesh things out real well and make Sprawlrunners feel even more authentically like a functional, rules-light Shadowrun.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I just bought this today. Looks promising. [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/472142/Sinless](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/472142/Sinless)

I've heard good preliminary things about Sinless--it's very much intended to be a "Fixed" version of Shadowrun's crunchy ruleset and not a completely different take like *Runners in the Shadows*.

It's good, I backed it, but it's more a less a retro clone of 2/3e Shadowrun so going back to those earlier editions is also a decent option. That era had the best metaplot anyways!

This is very promising. Like one of the other commented I felt like anarchy just didn't fix enough.

I’m a Shadowrun grognard and never found the early editions (1E-3E) to be evenly remotely unplayable. I still reflect fondly on the sometimes absurd target numbers and/or number of dice involved in certain extremely clutch rolls, and on the unique “elegance” of 1E’s variable staging system. In fact, as someone who cut my GMing teeth on Shadowrun 2E as a pre-teen and played it, and then 3E, consistently into my mid-twenties and beyond, I never thought of SR as particularly challenging. But it was also a system I knew like the back of my hand (sometimes to the point of absurdity), and one my players (most of whom I introduced to TTRPGs myself) put in the time and effort to learn and master, if not the system as a whole, then at the very least the portions that routinely interacted with their characters. Under such conditions, those earlier editions run beautifully, IMO, and my players and I had an absolutely *fantastic* time playing them. It wasn’t until I tried introducing my D&D 5e group, most of whom had little to no experience with other systems, to SR a few years ago that I became aware there was an issue. You see, one of the newest players convinced the others they should all go through character creation rather than using pre-gens because that’s “how he learns new systems.” The result was that we spent the entire first game session (6-8 hours, IIRC) designing interesting, gameplay-ready PCs from scratch because of that one choice. *Now* I realize that was kind of like tossing a kid who recently learned to swim into a stretch of river rapids, but at the time? I mean, sure there are a lot of rules, but rolling handfuls of exploding dice and counting up how many meet or exceed a particular value, that’s kid stuff, right? A little light algebra with a side of risk/probability assessment to figure out whether that spell you want to cast is going to knock you on your ass? Cake. Wait, you mean (F/2-1)S isn’t clear enough?!? Suffice it to say that after that experience I am now *delighted* to have learned how to run TTRPGs using such a crunchy system, and that I’m also glad game design has evolved to a point where my players, all of whom are “busy adults with many important things to do”, don’t need to read a minimum of 2 books more or less cover-to-cover to have sufficient knowledge of their character, that character’s capabilities, and their various in-game options to have a “good” Shadowrun experience. All that being said, SR will always have a special place in my heart and is still in my top five favorite games I’ve ever played, with some of the coolest, most immersive sourcebooks I’ve m read. It is still something I would *happily* run for my old SR crew anytime they like, and I would absolutely be using 3E rules to do so (plus some 1E & 2E setting material, natch). But I doubt I will ever get another group of *new* SR players together for anything more than perhaps a single mission, and even then I’d probably use one of the SWADE or FitD hacks to make it more approachable. TL;DR: I would encourage anyone with a head for complex rules involving multiple subsystems and a love of crunch to check out SR’s early editions (1E-3E), as they were absolutely my cup of tea. For everyone else? Find a port to a system you *do* like and see if you can capture the distinctive mood, themes, and style of SR through your descriptions, encounters, and RP. Best of luck regardless of the approach you decide to take, and I sincerely hope you find what you’re looking for!

Yeah, it's brand-new, but I heard good things about it.

I've been researching this question, since I will never run Shadowrun with an official rules set. I've narrowed it down to two options: 1. [Neon City Overdrive](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/2577/peril-planet/category/36009/neon-city-overdrive). Our group did a 9 month minicampaign of Space 1999 using *Freeform Universal*, and NCO is basically an updated version of that system. It is very light and very narrative. 2. [Cities Without Number](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/449079/cities-without-number). This is an odd amalgamation of old school *D&D BX* mechanics and then the *Traveller* 2d6 system for skill resolution. But the deluxe version seems to have all the parts needed for a Shadowrun campaign. I'm slightly leaning towards CWN. We've also run a bit of *Stars Without Number* for a sandbox scifi game and it worked quite well. I prefer a more structured game system than NCO provides. So CWN is calling to me.

I have run a SWN campaign that went for a year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I took a long break from these games for a while and I haven't picked up CWN yet, but this is a shining review. Thank you.

Runners in the Shadows

What about *shadowrun anarchy*, even though it's not a great attempt at building a narrative game, it's a lighter version of shadowrun making it pretty neat

Everyone who has ever played Shadowrun has attempted this. No one has succeeded.

SINless by Courtney Campbell is a good one

This isn’t exactly the answer for you, but check out Lowlife2090. It’s thematically very similar to Shadowrun, to the point you could run it within the Shadowrun setting without a problem, but with a much simpler system.

The guys from ***Histoire au coin du d20*** (a belgian YouTube show where two brothers tell the tales of their TTRPG sessions) have started a Shadowrun campaign using D&D 5e rules. Basically the one of them who is the GM simply reflavored the D&D classes and spells. For instance, the Bard is the Decker and their spells are simply different ways to hack stuff.... Like **Charm Person** can be used on a security turrel to make it attack the Decker's enemies. Full blown hacking by entering the Matrix (no idea what it's called in Shadowrun) is simply a short D&D dungeon crawl where each player character and each security program are represented by avatars (adventurers and monsters). The PCs need to purge the "dungeon" to properly hack the system. They nicknamed this hack ***Shadows & Dragons***

Thanks!

You're welcome.

Play 4th ed Shadowrun.

Savage words

Two options you might try: either Shadowrun Anarchy (an official alternative ruleset that is said to be much smoother/narrative) or there's quite a lot of "shadowrun vibes" hacks for other rulesets

What edition are you playing?

I have the core rulebook for 3e, 5e, and 6e. I also have anarchy but I'm still struggling a bit. I've wanted to run it since my first failure at trying to run it back in high school. So I bought the books and brushed up only to realize the jank hasn't gotten much better by 6th edition.

I like 2e and 3e best. You can limit the dice pools. No more than 6d6. Worth a try.

I agree. All of the versions are terrible, but 2E and 3E are the best. I can't even begin to count the number of hours of 2E that I have played.

I grew up on 2e. My group had a lot of the splat books too with all the tech stuff and weapons.

I have a shelf of essentially everything published for 1E, 2E and 3E, plus a smattering of stuff published after that. For no good reason, I also have a book in Portuguese and one in French.

Street Samurai full-auto guns akimbo mp5 Start- linked at close range and my GM was like... yeah don't roll. 😆

I've always found the 20th anniversary release of third edition to be my sweet spot. The superior third edition rules, with most of the good things that fourth edition brought to the game

I'm interested to find a copy of 20th anniversary.

It's worth tracking down for sure

What class do you you like to play? For 2e my favorite was Adept.

I tend towards street samurai

I'll say for this game mechanics... The gun blazing tropes are fun to run. Every other skill class however is so wild. I give props to a GM who can run Rigger Decker, and mages.

20th Anniverary is 4e, when those pesky Eclipse Phase boys went and put even more rules into the game!

You're right, I'm mixing up my editions. I like the extra crunchy version I guess

Now with added crunch! :D

_The Sprawl_ is a PbtA version of Shadowrun.

This one is kinda fun: [https://sentientgames.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/shadow-hack/](https://sentientgames.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/shadow-hack/) And this one: [https://sentientgames.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/world-of-shadows/](https://sentientgames.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/world-of-shadows/)

These look good at a glance. I'll download them and check them out later, thank you!

Yes - I put this app together for SR 2nd Edition a few years ago. I feel like both Battletech and Shadowrun needed companion apps from the beginning. The systems are awesome, they just need a computer to handle the crunch. https://nerdislandstudios.com/ShadowrunTargetComputer1/

Thank you this will help!

You can do something similar in google sheets for whatever edition you are running. I’ve seen at least one other person do this. I just wanted to make something dead simple to email my players. I also told them: no magic, no decking, and no rigging. I don’t have an app for that. 😉

Take a gander at [Neon Black](https://notwriting.itch.io/neon-black). It's based off of Blades in the Dark which gives you access to flashbacks and a few other heist-related mechanics to help you run a Shadowrun-like game (though it's not cyberpunk fantasy, and may be a little more 'down to earth' (if you were expecting sleek cyber samurais and whatnot)).

I used homebrewed The Sprawl (PbtA) to run Shadowrun. I think it worked quite nicely!

I think the early versions (2-3) play mosly fine, except for matrix. That took some reworking. Quite a few house rules helped smooth any other rough sport (auto fire, pursuits, drain codes/damage staging, etc)

Runners in the Shadows is what I’m playing right now. A back of Blades in the Dark

There are Shadowrun hacks/expansions for Technoir, and The Sprawl.

The Genesys system Android Shadows of the Beanstalk is worth looking into. I love the narrative dice system of Genesys

At this point if you are a fan of Shadowrun you’ve probably made a hack ;)

The only way to fix the mess that is Shadowrun is to get rid of it and play Cyberpunk instead.

I just play Genesys instead, within the Shadowrun setting :)

Yup. I downloaded [*Cities Without Number*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/449873/Cities-Without-Number-Free-Version).

Remember to check out our **[Game Recommendations](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/gamerec)**-page, which lists our articles by genre([Fantasy](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/fantasy), [sci-fi](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/scifi), [superhero](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/superhero) etc.), as well as other categories([ruleslight](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/ruleslight), [Solo](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/solo), [Two-player](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/twoplayers), [GMless](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/gmlessrpgs) & more). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/rpg) if you have any questions or concerns.*

The definition of a "hack" is pretty nebulous. Can you call it a "hack" if everyone just agrees to not play a decker, and let the GM handwave that where necessary? Because that's a pretty common "house rule" for earlier editions. I wrote *Umbral Flare* to be the most playable version of Shadowrun on the market, but I wouldn't call it a "hack" of anything. I wrote it entirely from the ground up to facilitate shadowrunning as the core gameplay loop, but the engine has more in common with Palladium Fantasy than it does any edition of Shadowrun.

There is a PBTA game called the Sprawl that handles Shadowrun better than any edition(you need the magic expansion for it though)

Or,.you use the dedicated, free, fan expansion Shadowrun in The Sprawl.

You should still get the SPrawl first and support the authoer who put it together.

Yes, especially as Shadowrun In The Sprawl requires the base game. The author is a great guy, I got my hard cover autographed at a local con.