Do you have any recommendations for a tabletop RPG implementation of Warframe? I was thinking of using Eclipse Phase to more easily represent the characters switching which Frame they’re using, but didn’t know if you had other ideas for a sci-fi ‘magic space ninjas’ sort of game.
Eclipse Phase isn’t necessarily a bad hoice, though it really depends on whether you’re looking for a general-purpose game that can handle the milieu of Warframe, or whether you actually want to emulate something of the gameplay. Eclipse Phase isn’t so great for the second one - too low-powered, for the most part, and the combat system is kinda clunky.
If you don’t mind doing some heavy homebrew, I might be inclined to knock together an AGON hack. You’d have to rename a lot of traits and come up with your own way of handling frame-swapping; on the plus side, the semi-competitive play and focus on spectacle over practicality is a good fit for emulating online PvE at the tabletop, and it has a pleasingly tactile approach to gear what I think would work well with the source material.
As for something that would work out of the box with minimal adjustments… hm. Most of what springs to mind is very rules light, and I’m presuming that if you were considering Eclipse Phase you’d prefer a system with a bit of heft to it. Wushu could definitely do body-swapping magic space ninjas straight up, for example, but compared to EP the system is barely there.
Actually, if you don’t mind going rules light after all, another possibility occurred to me while I was writing this: Exemplar. It’s a little self-published game from back in 2004 that’s so obscure it doesn’t even show up in a Google search, and I’m not aware that it has any significant player community, but as I review it now to refresh my memory, big chunks of it feel very Warframe-y, both flavour-wise and gameplay-wise. You might at least be able to mine it for ideas.
Correct me if I’m making any bad assumptions here!
