Shadowrun vs Wicked Ones

Compare Shadowrun and Wicked Ones side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Shadowrun	Wicked Ones
Genre	Cyberpunk, Fantasy	Fantasy
Play Style	Crunchy, Tactical, Heist, Character Building, Faction Play, Lore-Heavy, Skill-Based, Mission-Based, Urban Fantasy	Base-Building, Domain Management, Faction Play, Sandbox, Playbook-Driven, Fiction-First, Open Source
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d6s equal to attribute + skill, counting 5s and 6s as hits. Meet or exceed a threshold to succeed. Situational advantages generate Edge points rather than modifying dice pools directly; Edge is spent on tactical effects like rerolling dice, adding successes, or imposing penalties on opponents.	Build a pool of d6s equal to your action rating and keep the single highest die: a 6 succeeds, a 4 or 5 succeeds with a consequence, and a 1 to 3 fails. Before the roll the GM sets position and effect, which fix how bad the consequence can be and how much the action accomplishes. Stress can be spent to push a roll or resist a consequence.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d6 dice pool
Complexity	Very High	High
Accessibility	High	Very Low
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	No open license	CC0 1.0
Cost	$$$	Free
Publisher	Catalyst Game Labs	Bandit Camp
Year	2019	2020
Best For	Groups who want cyberpunk-fantasy heists with deep mechanical subsystems for hacking, magic, and combat.	Groups who like the fiction-first Forged in the Dark engine and want to flip the dungeon crawl: instead of raiding a dungeon they build, grow, and defend one as its monstrous residents across a long campaign. It rewards tables that enjoy a strategic hoard-and-tier economy layered on villain-POV roleplay, and that are willing to set tone and safety expectations up front given the evil-protagonist premise.
Highlights	The setting fuses megacorporate intrigue with magic and metahuman races, so a single team mixes street samurai, mages, and deckers. Distinct subsystems model Matrix hacking, spellcasting, drone rigging, and astral space, each carrying its own rules depth. The Edge economy converts situational advantages into a spendable resource for rerolls, extra hits, or penalties on opponents.	Players design their own dungeon during downtime and later roll its traps and defenses against invaders, which turns base-building into the game's central strategic layer. Giving in to a monster's Dark Impulse earns a Dark Heart to spend for a bonus die, so playing to your character's worst instincts is rewarded rather than left as flavor. The four-phase cycle feeds each raid's fallout back as calamity and blowback that summon heroes to your door, so the campaign escalates its own stakes without the GM inventing threats by hand.
Considerations	Matrix hacking runs on its own timescale and can leave non-decker players idle during a run. Character creation spreads across attributes, skills, magic or resonance, gear, and lifestyle, making the first build long. Dice pools grow large at high skill, so counting hits on a fistful of d6s slows resolution.	The three magic disciplines have no fixed spell lists, so a spell's power is decided by the GM in the moment. During a dungeon invasion the player characters cannot leave the sanctum, so most of the defense is run through minions and traps until the heroes reach the final room. There is no published setting, so each group must build its own region and factions before raiding can begin.