Chromatic Shadows Basic Rules

Chromatic Shadows is a feature length, d6 based, darkwave cyberpunk TTRPG. It feels like a throwback to the explosion of AAA-style indie core books from the 2000s, and I mean this in a good way.

The PDF is 94 pages, clean and well organized, with a conventional but really lovely layout. There's a lot of stock art, but it's all high quality and thematically appropriate. The handful of small Mork Borg-y flourishes look distinctive and nice without risking bothering anyone who had an outright allergic reaction to Borg's visual design.

In terms of content, Chromatic Shadows operates in the same sort of liminal design space as Shadowrun, CY_BORG, and Cthulhutech, but there's a little bit of SCP and Control in there too. It's a shared world of guttertech and horrors from beyond the stars, and the way in which individual players operate through it can be very asymmetric. 

Rules-wise, Chromatic Shadows uses a d6 pool. Checks have a Threshold, which is the number of dice hits needed to pass, and your effectiveness scales up the more hits you get. Dice don't explode---except in a limited fashion if you have an appropriate skill specialty--- and Effort, the system's bonus dice currency, is pretty limited, so having a low enough pool can lock you out of success in some situations.

Character creation is just as crunchy and nuanced as you'd expect from something like Shadowrun, but it's a *lot* easier to follow. It's mostly a la carte, selecting packages that assemble into a complete character, but you can also spend build points on some social stuff, and there's a long menu of items and cyberware you can buy. You have stats and derived stats and cyberware and magic, your body has a limit to the cyberware it can take, and you can sell XP for money. There's also a mental damage system called Shock which can be called by taking too much cyberware. Notably, cyberware and magic don't conflict, so you can go full Blood Net rather than having to pick a side.

Combat is largely Shadowrun rules, but without the granular initiative system. If you have bonus actions, they all spam out during your turn. Hacking happens at the same pace as regular combat, and everything feels broadly faster and more cohesive.

The setting has some weird beats. It's a decaying urban sprawl with eldritch societies skulking in the shadows, but there's also stuff like everyone being poor because the megacorps collapsed and couldn't provide jobs anymore. It's definitely in-genre in cyberpunk for there to be casually introduced setting facts that just bodily launch me out of my immersion, but I had to claw my way back from thinking about this approach to economics to thinking about the book.

Probably the most unique element of Chromatic Shadows is how it handles the occult. Every character has a brush with the occult in their backstory that changed them, and further brushes allow characters to buy up their Resonance and become spookier. A character's specific brush with the occult determines which weird powers they have, and these vary from "a normal accident at the cyberpunk factory" type experiences to being half necromorph.

For GMs, there's a bestiary and some artifacts that you can write hooks around, and there's a dang good character sheet, but for scenarios you'll have to write them yourself.

Overall, this is a *wildly* impressive work for a solo project. It's big and mechanically polished and should appeal to anyone who likes traditional rpgs and cyberpunk. The occult flavor adds a lot to the game, as does the stellar layout, and honestly I think the weakest part of the game's visuals is its cover.

So if you like your cyberpunk a little bit gloomy and ominous, or if you like your lovecraftian horror with monofilament blades, check Chromatic Shadows out. It's beefy, balanced, and there's more material for it on the way.

Minor Issues:

-Page 24, "One or more Daemon" should be Daemons

Very well done. Can't wait to see what's next

Hell yeah. Very solid ruleset with an interesting setting.

Sooooo excellent! Big thumbs up all around!