Let he who is without SIN roll the first dice

I've been interested in diving into review content for a few weeks now, and I figured there would be no better game to start with than one of my favorite purchases of 2024; *Sinless*.

For those unaware, Sinless is brainchild of Courtney C. Campbell, creator of On Downtime and Demesnes and other OSR products. What appears at first glance as some sort of Shadowrun 3rd Edition inspired retroclone actually sets out to fix many of the longstanding issues Shadowrun has had, streamlining the classic D6 dice pool rules into something far easier to grasp. At the same time, Sinless also sets out to do a huge playstyle shift; taking the cyber-sorcery genre from your standard dystopian trad game into what is described as anti-anti-utopian sandbox play (more on this later I promise).

Disclaimers

Alright before we get into the actual meat of the review, there are some things that ought to be said here.

First and foremost I am not being paid to write this; I am simply a happy Kickstarter backer who enjoys the game and feels like more people ought to be aware of it.

Secondly, some of you may be familiar with some of Courtney's prior work, particularly the excellent On Downtime and Demesnes. Some of you may also know Courtney's name as one of a handful of RPG creators who was "cancelled"(for lack of a better term) back in the day. It would be I think irresponsible to write a review without addressing this for me, as I do not believe in any milquetoast stances like "separating the art from the artist". If you're going to choose to support or not support a creator, you should do so with the full knowledge of both their work and who they are as a person.

That said, with a lead in like that you are probably expecting me to say a whole bunch of terrible stuff about Courtney here. To the contrary, my personal opinion is that he was very wrongfully "cancelled". His treatment had nothing to do with the content of his own character or beliefs, but instead because of his working relationship with one Alexander Macris. Alex deserves (and will get) his own blog post, but he is a somewhat prominent game designer as well as prominent within the US "alt-right" political sphere, being closely associated with controversial figures like Milo Yiannopolous (note: this is a gross oversimplification). Courtney's working relationship involved him writing a module for Alex's Adventurer Conquerer King system, as well as Alex contributing some work to On Downtime and Demesnes.

For some reason this has convinced everyone that Courtney shares Alex's political beliefs. I can assure you as someone who regularly interacts with Courtney via the Sinless discord that this is not the case at all. Courtney is pretty clearly far left of center and actively shuts down people who try to engage in bigoted bullshit in his server.

So anyway, that's my piece, my needed disclaimer. Yes Courtney was canceled, no he isn't the person you think he is. And before I step down from my soap box here (and I will have more words on this at a later date) I have to say that the whole RPG community's stance on shutting down any discussion involving certain individuals is dumb and bad. You have been forewarned. Now on to the review

The Premise

Anyone who has spent any amount of time around RPG Reddit has probably run into some form of post where someone asks "What system should I use to play a Shadowrun game?"

The implicit statement in all of these posts is pretty simple; the core Shadowrun rules are bad, and have gotten progressively worse with every iteration, especially starting with 4th edition. Making matters worse is that the ownership at Catalyst Game Labs seems more interested in pumping out mediocre Shadowrun novels and then dumping the money into Battletech the real cash cow. As anecdotal evidence, at GenCon 2024 CGL put out a reprinted hardcover version of the 1st edition Shadowrun rules, which was sold out entirely by the end of the con. What was very readily available were 6th edition books, of all shapes and sizes. Simply put, the fanbase for this game is begging for a return to form with the franchise, and CGL has showed zero interest in delivering that. The franchise also has a pretty problematic history, and lots of content over the years has been pretty outright racist, particularly towards Asian and Indigenous American populations.

Enter Sinless, which leads with the promise of fixing all of this and more. But how does it actually address these issues?

The Rules

Sinless opens with a handy page detailing why you should even give this game a shot. These include simple premises like "Hey I actually playtested this" all the way to "the mechanics actually work" which, it's horrifying that we still have to question all of this in the year of our lord 2025 but we sure do.

The rulebook comes in at roughly 275 pages so this is by no means something you should consider "rules-lite". Owing to Courtney's OSR background, this is also very much a procedure driven game. While the dice mechanic is pretty classic Shadowrun (players form D6 dice pools and try to hit target numbers, which vary based on the difficulty of the mission) and so is the character creation (players assign priorities to things like attributes, skills, their ancestry, etc. and build a freeform character from there), the structure is much more OSR than it might seem at first glance.

This should come as no surprise when you consider that Courtney's most popular work is a book about running downtime and domain play in OSR games. Instead of the classic Shadowrun structure (endlessly running missions for evil corporations until you die in a ditch), Sinless opens up with a goal; accumulate 1 billion Zuzus (the game's currency and a tongue in cheek reference to Dogecoin) and the international courts will grant your brand sovereignty. This is not a goal that the players can achieve through wet work alone; they will need to acquire and manage assets in their downtime, build out their sectors, and more to accumulate enough wealth to achieve true independence.

The game then alternates between the operation phase (where players investigate, accept jobs, and then carry them out) and the sector phase (where players manage their "brand", improve their sector resources, and seek to acquire NPC assets to help them out in the future). This creates a pretty virtuous cycle in terms of gameplay loops, where the fallout from operations (both successful and failed ones) in turn affects the sector management assets and vice versa. Now instead of just taking mercenary work, maybe your party is instead scheming to take out rivals or manipulate the board in their favor.

This takes the game firmly into the emergent sandbox territory, which is pretty unique for the genre (I think only Kevin Crawford's Cities Without Number goes into this territory as well) and brings it beyond "Shadowrun retroclone" territory.

Beyond that we see all the usual trappings of the cyber sorcery genre. Players can cast spells, augment their physical abilities with magic or cyberware (renamed to cybertechtronics here presumably to avoid legal disputes). Players can hack, rig drones, shoot a wide variety of weapons from simple handguns all the way to railguns. Probably my favorite bit of character creation are the ancestry choices; players can choose between humans, synthetic androids, replicant clones (who are constantly being hunted down by their makers), the green and the blight (stand ins for your typical Elves and Orcs you might see), and my personal favorite; the uplifted animals. Players are given a ton of creative expression here and levers to pull to make their character feel totally unique. A one shot I ran for Sinless included a decommissioned delivery robot and an uplifted octopus mage who dual wielded guns. It's wacky and zany in a way that still feels totally grounded within the setting and tone of the game.

Sinless also addresses one of the longest standing complaints of Shadowrun; hacking rules. No longer will hacking require you and your GM to learn a complex minigame that leaves the rest of the party bored with nothing to do for hours on end. Hacking takes place within the standard initiative order, uses the same general dice pool rules, and involves hackers using software as a sort of list of spells to inflict effects on both the digital and physical world. The game features a somewhat clever "if you can see it you can hit it" system, meaning that hackers are not relegated to dealing with threats solely in cyber space, and that your more physically minded characters can also interact with cyber space if they have the gear to be able to see what's happening.

All in all, the rules presented here keep the game relatively fast and fluid, and once your players are familiar with the game you should expect them to be able to make it through an entire session of play (operation and sector turns) in about 2 hours, making the game especially ideal for busy groups or for people running open tables or west marches style games.

The Art and Layout

The entire book features hand drawn black and white art, mostly courtesy of Courtney himself (with a few other contributors for things like mechanical design). While the layout itself is nothing particularly groundbreaking, it's relatively clean and information is placed where you would expect it to be. The art in my view is incredibly evocative, and really puts you into that sort of 80s cyberpunk vibe rather than trying to modernize or re-imagine it.

Particularly in the age of AI art, it is refreshing to see something so clearly lovingly handcrafted. One of my favorite little details are these little vignettes or in universe advertisements sprinkled throughout. They really pull you in while offering some fun humor as well.

The Physical Products

Unfortunately, Sinless remains relatively niche and is currently only available as a Print on Demand product via DriveThruRPG. I'll be 100% honest, this is not my favorite way to have a book on my shelf, but it is pretty cost effective and ensures that you can always get a physical product if you want it. There are also physical cards for the NPC assets; in my view DriveThru's card printing on demand is much better than their book printing and these came out pretty well. You're definitely not going to find some crazy over the top physical artifact here, but everything is serviceable and usable at the table which is the most important.

Future support and licensing

Courtney seems pretty committed to supporting the game as long as he possibly can; he recently wrapped up a Kickstarter for a quickstart and sandbox called Billionaire Bounty, and he is also working on the first piece of fiction set in the universe. Bounty in particular looks exciting, set in an alternate Chicago called Mannon when things get magically fucked, the art he's revealed on Discord looks gorgeous for it.

Additionally, he recently released the license for Sinless which is essentially similar to how Mothership licenses their game, with one key difference. While Mothership's license only covers TTRPG products, the Sinless license covers any and all media. The same review process applies (email Courtney what you're working on and if he approves it you're good to go) which means there's a future ecosystem here ripe for developing some great content. The first project using this license, an online character builder, recently finished funding successfully and is planned to release this year.

Conclusion

Wow this post ended up being really long! If you made it to the end I hope you enjoyed it! Reviews are a new format for me so any feedback is greatly appreciated.

You can pick up Sinless over at DriveThruRPG, although Courtney also keeps the PDF pinned for free within his Discord here. You can also check out Courtney's blog, Hack and Slash and his Patreon as well!