So I’ve decided to give Savage Worlds a bash for the next session (at least) of my Ghostbusters campaign, so see how we all like it. I’ve translated all the PCs from the UHM system (hardly an exact process) and started writing up a few critters for practice. I’m also writing up a rules summary doc for my players, with modifications for the setting.

I took some inspiration from Graywolf’s “Savage Ghostbusters”, but actually ended up using the gear stats from the Horror Companion (I love that SW has official stats for proton packs and ghost traps), with my own house rules for the application of psychomagnetheric slime. It’s very much a work in progress, as I get the hang for how SW actually behaves in play. I’ve got as good a grasp as I can get on the rules just from reading, but how a game reads and how it behaves at the table are usually two very different things.

One thing I’m undecided on, is the use of miniatures. Savage Worlds, for all its rules-liteness, is written with the assumption that you’ll be using minis, and while I like using miniatures for my Pathfinder game, I’m not sure I really want to be pulling out the mat and figs for busting spooks. Ghostbusters (when done right, anyway) alternates back and forth between freewheeling and terrifying, neither of which are really well served by counting squares; on the other hand, one of the fun things about Ghostbusters is how busting spooks is “just a job,” like being a plumber (or possibly an exterminator), and I can see how having the miniatures could make it feel more like blue-collarey work. (“Yo, Iggy, ya got yerself a nasty free-floating vapor at about ten yards, hit that sucker up with a capture stream and it’s Miller Time.”)

The fact that there aren’t easily-convertible Ghostbusters miniatures doesn’t help, but isn’t really that big a factor– I could easily make Cardboard Heroes-style figs if I wanted to. There have also been some really nice custom minis made, but that’s a bit of a stretch for my sculpting chops and would take forever.

I’ll poll my players on the topic (HEY PLAYERS: Weigh in on this! …That was easy.) and see what they have to say. I’ve certainly got plenty of monsters I could use as spook figs.

-The Gneech

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