Just finished watching Dark Matter, a show about amnesiac shadowrunners waking up on a space ship and doing missions…

Just finished watching Dark Matter, a show about amnesiac shadowrunners waking up on a space ship and doing missions while they try and figure out who they were. Had a few thoughts on how to adapt The Sprawl to run it, and thought I’d share.

Originally shared by Jamie Frost

Just finished binging the first season of Dark Matter. Took an episode or two to push past the “I’ve seen every one of these character archetypes done better elsewhere” phase, but once they got past that and everyone started to get some depth it was actually a pretty good show. Also seems like a pretty great setup for a game, though I’m not sure what system to use for it.

I almost want to say The Sprawl, just set in space instead of in a city. You’ve got megacorps, a team of badass professional scoundrels working shady jobs for whoever pays the most, socialization outside the crew is pretty much restricted to contacts and contracts, and everyone has someone after them. Augmentation isn’t really a thing (for the most part), but it’s a close fit otherwise. Only thing is that there are a couple of important facets of Dark Matter that I think would need to be addressed in the mechanics somewhere.

First, everyone has a secret, something about their past that gets revealed at some point during the game. When that secret is revealed, it creates complications for the entire crew and occasionally comes with some kind of boon. The Sprawl’s Directives could work here; you get XP when you explore someone’s past, super simple.  But I think there needs to be more to it than that, since uncovering a secret always says something about the world at large; I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but in Sprawl terms a couple of characters named new corporation-level factions and a couple of others got the equivalent of free augmentations.

One idea for how to handle it: each character has a countdown clock for their secret, which advances when you learn a new fact about it. When the clock is filled up, things come to a head, and you get a free advance. Simple and dirty, but I think it works?

Regardless, when a secret is fully revealed, it sets the theme for an entire session, because it inevitably gets the secret’s keeper entangled in something they can’t handle as well as they think and the team needs to come and help them out. This seems like the sort of thing that the table just has to buy into as a group, I think.

The other thing that needs representation is mistrust. Between missions, especially when missions go badly, scenes play out where at least a couple of crew members have found reasons not to trust one another and they need to work through that. I think the easiest thing to do would be to invert or reframe Links; in the Dark Matter hack, your Link score with someone goes up when you find something that reinforces why you shouldn’t trust them. When you hit 4 and roll over, your downtime scene is about that distrust boiling over into a confrontation, and what you do to get past it.

Directorial note: downtime scenes should be longer for this hack, I think. The character conflicts are actually more important than the jobs in the show, so they should be given appropriate weight.

I think that about covers it. Thoughts?