So the short answer is yes it’s best at a fantasy setting and hard to hack.

BW has a massive collection of skills, traits, and lifepaths that are all tailored for a fantasy medieval setting. These aren’t just lists but each has its own stats, nuance, and connections to other things. You need all of this just to create characters and skills are pretty much how you play the game.

To hack this you would need to make entire new sets of lifepaths and new relevant skills at a minimum. It’s not hard to make a new skill or two to fit a custom setting but if you were trying to do cyberpunk or something the amount of overhaul would be staggering.

I haven’t looked into it but there something called Burning Empires that has done the heavy lifting for you and modified BW for a sci-fi setting. Mouseguard and Torchbearer also re-theme the BW system in specific ways (Mouseguard more so) but also simplify the rule system considerably.

That all said, BW itself has a pretty crazy range of stories you can tell just from the different settings (loosely tied to races) available. Classic fantasy? Stick with humans, maybe with a sprinkle of elf/dwarf if you’re feeling spicy (recommend sticking with humans for your first go though). Want a pastoral setting plagued by cult-crazed terrorists? Roden got you covered. Want to play as giant magic wolves dealing with pack dynamics and protecting the woods? Great Wolves are all set up for you. Want to be giant spiders and…uh…anyway yeah you can do that too.

It’s a wild system that does so much differently but there’s a lot of great stuff packed in there. It’s changed how I play basically everything else.

@INeedMana
From what I can tell, adapting it requires writing entirely new species, and therefore entirely new sets of lifepaths, from scratch… and while some specific adaptations exist, like Burning Empires and Mouse Guard, there doesn’t seem to be the kind of culture of homebrew surrounding the game to help with arbitrary adaptations. (Or at least there wasn’t a decade ago, when you could actually *see* communities on the open web instead of them being locked away in Discord…)

There’s a sci fi setting for it called Burning Empires. So it seems at least someone hacked it for something other than Tolkienesque fantasy