Hey Blastin,
Sounds cool! Spycraft can certainly be tooled to fit whatever style of horror campaign you want to play, whether its Van Helsing-style monster slaying or creeping horror much larger than the PCs. I'll suggest some ways to you can tool the game with Campaign Qualities and rulesets based on the OP:
Basic Horror:
As Morgenstern mentioned earlier, Chapter 7 of the book lays out the basic campaign qualities we suggest for setting up the core of a horror game. Campaign qualities such as
Tense and
Paranoid will ensure that the PCs (and maybe the players!) are affected by the horrors you set forth. If you want some things to be extra-scary, NPC qualities like Disturbing could be...
terrifyingly effective
Blastin said:
I plan on having the players be normal people, with maybe some special training (ex-cops, military) but very little to no magic...to start.
I assume that by "normal people" you mean "not action heroes." As such, you might use the campaign qualities
Small Screen (lowers default number of attribute points) and/or
Fragile (reduces vitality progression substantially) which will ensure your characters are not running around with really high natural abilities or callously wading into combat (especially as the game progresses).
Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, the
Back to Basics PDF dials down class abilities and sets up a Modern SRD class structure, giving players greater flexibility to build a concept outside of more standard class archetypes. The added bonus as a GC is that the most powerful
B2B abilities do not reach the "game breaker" level that standard Spycraft classes hit at Level 14.
Origins are super-flexible and let your players build past histories such as "ex military" in a snap
I would like to have the possibility of low level magic/psionics become available to the characters latter on, and definatly use it from the start for the bad guys. I see that there is a magic supp out for SC@ as well, but it seems like it might be a bit too much like D&D magic.
As everyone has suggested, the
Shadowforce Archer Worldbook (and possibly the Hand of Glory threat book) provides just these things. The upcoming PDF of the SFA Worldbook will include a conversion document which will help you quickly swap the rules you need over to 2.0 play.
The magic supplement you mention is called
Spellbound, and is part of a series. Volume 1 has your basic D&D blaster mage, the Channeler, but some later archetypes such as the Reaper (necromancer type), the Sage, or the Enchanter are all much more subtle and sound like excellent villains in a campaign like yours. Currently, the second and subsequent volumes are being worked on but we have no hard release date.
How hard would it be to convert a d20 modern module to Spycraft 2.0?
The basic adventure elements could work just fine straight across. The biggest piece of conversion possibly would be NPC conversion, which is surprisingly easy once you're familiar with the NPC creation system. I've reverse engineered standard d20 stat blocks by finding the CR, then using the closest approximation for the critters abilities at an equal Threat Level to spit out the scaling stat (I-X). From there it was finding approximate NPC qualities to the critter's own (since the NPC system was informed by the Monster Manual, this isn't too hard). The nice thing, in the end, is that you have an NPC that can be thrown at the PCs at any time in your campaign without fearing they'll just roll over him...excellent if you want PC's to be a bit more normal.
I hope this helps!
