This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by my old pal ShinobiCow at the Dump Stat with the theme of crossing genres. My first thought on the topic was something I considered running five years ago for one of our Saturday games – CyberCelt Carnage!

For this game we were combining Mongoose’s OGL Cybernet and either Conan or Slaine. After a quick vote we went with Slaine. In the end we were looking at the Roleplaying Game of Cybernetic Celtic Heroes on the mean streets of post-modern Ireland, Cyberspace, and the Underworld. The upside was also of course that both games are OGL d20 derivatives, and thus are mostly compatible.

The idea caught some traction in my imagination, but never went anywhere – instead we launched into an awesome sixteen-month game of Feng Shui.

So now, five years later, I’m going to go through the various key elements of both games and see how I can mash them together so I’ll be ready if I want to pull this out again in the future. Both are based on the d20 system of 3rd edition D&D, so should be roughly interoperable.

Both games have a few subsystems that are “unique” to that game.

Edge Dice are a kind of “bennie” for Cybernet characters. They aren’t explained well in the actual Cybernet rule book, fortunately Mongoose published a free PDF of how they work – you can download it here. We’ll be keeping edge dice as written.

Slaine brings us Enech – which is a celtic honour and reputation stat. If you keep your Enech at 1 or better, then you are in good standing with your “tribe”, at zero or less then you are either a slave or an outcast. In a normal Cybernet or Cyberpunk campaign you see a lot of dirty low-down play and underhanded dealing, by throwing in Enech, we get a reason to play noble punks. So, like Edge Dice, Enech sticks around.

Another awesome Slaine-ism is the Geas. Every character of note starts with a Geas. Breaking a geas results in loss of Enech, Charisma damage, ill luck, and the potential of suffering a Weird – being a horrible fate or destiny (like long term imprisonment, exile from clan, or more).

For character classes I basically have to choose between Cybernet or Slaine. Since the setting is going to be more CyberPunk than Slaine I’m going to stick with the Cybernet classes (which in turn feel more like d20 Modern classes than D&D classes – which suites me fine).

These classes are – Connection, Corporate, Jacker, Soldier, Webcrawler and Professional. Each class has a special ability that you only get if this is the first class you have taken a level in – so while you can multiclass, your first class gives you a special ability that can’t be duplicated through multi-classing.

However, to bring back the Slaine, I think the best approach would be to create a few new Talent Chains. In addition to the normal Talents that each character gets, no matter what class they are they will get a Celtic Talent at each even character level, and these should be drawn from the various Slaine classes and feats. I was thinking of the following Celtic Talent Trees,

• Druid
• Tribal
• Warped
• Witch

but I just don’t have the time to go through and create them now, with all the work I’m putting into Old School Mercenaries and the other ZERO/Barrier products I want ready to launch for October. But with today being the last day of the Carnival, I’m posting this up now, an incomplete set of ramblings on what I wanted from CyberCelt – another project I’ll probably never finish.