I ran my first game of The Sprawl (or any PbtA game for that matter) at a small local con last weekend.

I ran my first game of The Sprawl (or any PbtA game for that matter) at a small local con last weekend. I was fortunate to get excellent players – they had varied PbtA experience, but they all got on board quick. Excellent game, Hamish!

With a session time of 3.5 hours, it was a tight run. That said, the 45 minutes of character generation were worth it for the buy-in it created. We ran over by half an hour and another hour again wouldn’t have gone astray, but as it was we wrapped up a satisfying mission with a Hacker, an Infiltrator and a Driver.

The clocks ratcheted the tension nicely, especially in the legwork phase. It was gratifying watching the player-created Corps get woven into the rough story I’d mapped out and in turn create new plot twists and conflicts.

Below is a blow-by-blow. I can throw up the mission docs and clocks if anyone’s interested.

>>>THE KOWLOON CONVERGENCE

>>MISSION BRIEFING 20610713

Hong Kong. July, 2061. A vast inexplicable presence seethes in cyberspace at the edge of the South China Sea. The reignited Umbrella Movement clashes with security patrols as the mainland tightens its grip on the former colony. Vindictive corporations jostle for ground with vicious Triads. Amidst the throng, Aunty Jun feeds you a lucrative contract: a by-the-book extraction of a rogue accountant at Vatic Systems. Sounds basic enough. What’s the catch, Aunty? Oh, no catch. No catch at all.

>>AFTER ACTION REPORT 20161119

>GET THE JOB

Aunty Jun summons the team to her favourite table deep in the chaos of Kowloon’s Temple Street night markets. The operatives are MT, a battle-scarred nihilist hacker; Eye, an HK-born infiltrator with a mercenary streak and unnerving artificial eyes; and Juchi, a brash young driver with a wind-worn face and weighty obligations to her family back in Mongolia. After noodles and dumplings, Eye negotiates the job and it pays well: the extraction of Louis Ho, Chief Financial Officer for heuristics firm Vatic Systems; delivery to a location to be confirmed.

>LEGWORK

Juchi calls on Guo, her fourth cousin’s son-in-law and a mid-level manager at Forever Pure, the cleaning firm that services many of Hong Kong Central’s corporate towers, including Vatic. Security has tightened at Vatic over the past few weeks and even the cleaners are subject to full body scans on every shift.

Unable to turn up useful intel on his analysis of traffic patterns, MT trawls financial commentary forums to find rumours that a range of Vatic’s shell companies have been amassing significant off-the-books balances since shortly after the company transferred Louis Ho from Singapore. MT is perturbed by a looming dark presence in cyberspace, something he can’t quite ID.

Back in Kowloon, Eye looks up Li, an investigator with a thick corporate black book, and gets background on Ho – separated from his family in Singapore, he’s now known to spend his nights on the ‘non-destination’ cruises that leave from Victoria Harbour for international waters, where gambling and other vices flourish free from state interference.

Eye finds a perfect vantage point to stake out Vatic’s tower, with Juchi’s small octoped drone Little Sister by his side. The team waits. Juchi is perched on the hood of Mother, her vectored thrust spinner, and MT is jacked in through the vehicle’s uplink. One of the increasingly frequent anti-mainland protests swells in the blocks of Central HK around Vatic’s HQ. Realising it could hamper their efforts to trail the target, MT hacks the Umbrella Movement’s social media and they redirect the protestors to the waterfront to create clear runs toward both Ho’s Lantau Island arcology and the ports where the casino cruises make their nightly departures for more debauched waters. Again, that creeping black presence in the matrix worries at MT – swelling almost in time with the typhoons that roil in the South China Sea.

Expecting Ho to leave with his private driver via the executive garage, the team scrambles when he makes an unaccompanied break from the general staff entrance, an unwieldy rucksack on his back, and melts into the huge crowds.

As Eye tracks the target with the thermal and magnification on his optics, Juchi punches the spinner out of the alley and tracks the protest as it funnels through a narrow gate toward the harbour. Hacking the local camera feeds, the team spots Ho mounting a stashed Ducati and making his getaway in fits and starts through the alleys.

>ACTION

Juchi and MT feed Ho’s location to Eye, who barrels down out of the overhead walkways in pursuit – but not before he clocks Vatic security making their own moves in ominous black SUVs. Eye tails Ho and with luck, corners him in a blind alley – the target’s frantic attempt to phone for assistance is foiled by Little Sister’s jammer.

‘Did Tengfei send you?’ Ho demands. Guessing what the target wants to hear, Eye nods yes. Wrong answer. Ho revs his motorcycle and tears at him. The infiltrator brings his taser to bear and lands the electrodes square in the accountant’s chest – the bike topples and slides toward Eye, collecting him like a lone ten-pin and wrenching his ankle painfully. Ho is down, convulsing. A Vatic security van screeches to a halt at the alley mouth and spits out two agents armed with large bore arguments against Ho’s involuntary defection. Eye wrenches himself out from under the Ducati as Juchi descends from above, deploying Mother’s twin machine guns and thoroughly hosing the Vatic gunmen and their ride.

Juchi and MT pick up Eye and Ho and head for the hills above Central to regroup and grab dumplings at a quiet tourist spot. Eye stabilises Ho, and the target’s rucksack spills two-dozen ornamental knives – or Dao – the currency of China’s Zhou Dynasty. Questioned about the collectibles, Ho reveals he’s been compelled to gather them recently, but can’t say why. The team realise he’s haemorrhaging from what looks like a recently installed black market high capacity neural interface. Ho begs them for some drive space to download data – something in his head is replicating too fast and he needs to get it out. MT safely partitions storage on his cyberdeck and takes the data.

Ho admits he’s spent the last two years adapting one of Vatic’s proprietary heuristics algorithms to his own specification, and he’s got a rapidly replicating and cleanly authenticated cryptocurrency routine, literally in his head. He implores the team to take him out to one of Feng Geotherm’s drilling platforms on the South China Sea. He doesn’t know why – it’s what Man Dao (‘Slow Knife’), the voice in his head, wants. In return, he promises them wealth far exceeding whatever they’re being paid to deliver him to the State Council, or the Triads, or whoever it is that’s behind this job. After all, he has an effective ATM in his skull, right? As the team ponders the proposal, Aunty Jun makes contact. She’s heard Ho is on the run. When they admit they’ve got him, she gives them the coordinates for the handover.

The team confers. The riches that Ho is babbling about are tempting, especially to Eye, but ultimately they see Aunty as the safe payday. Not to mention it was Feng Geotherm that put that scar tissue where MT’s first neural interface used to be.

Kowloon’s sprawling Chungking Mansions complex is home to the downtrodden, the refugees, Hong Kong’s quasi-legal and questionably moral. It doesn’t easily accept outsiders through its main entries, but Eye is a life-long quasi-legal Hong Konger and doesn’t do front doors. He also produces a potent sedative that mutes Ho’s objections. Joined by Big Brother, Juchi’s quadruped drone that passes for canine on cursory inspection, the team covertly enters through a service entrance and make their way toward the convoluted coordinates Aunty has supplied.

Tailing a crew of scavengers – the savvy upcyclers that act as Chungking’s cleaning service – they dodge a trio of Wo Shing Wo heavies and use the venerable ventilation access approach (MT disables the fans) to sneak into the disused lounge club that Aunty Jun has set as the meeting point. Thermographics reveal two figures in the walk-in fridge, and three more approaching from outside. The team drops down, leaving Big Brother to oversee from the vent above.

Tengfei and two heavies kick down the door and move on Ho. MT wields his fletcher at the docile target’s skull as insurance, but Tengfei is unperturbed. He detaches a forefinger and helicopters a monofilament whip toward them both. In the ensuing chaos, shots ring out from Big Brother’s integral shooter and Eye’s silenced pistol. The two Wo Shing Wo lieutenants are down, and the door of the walk-in fridge is spewing Freon. Tengfei’s monofil whip slices through MT’s arm just above the elbow. A neatly cauterised wound, at least. The fridge door slides open to reveal Aunty Jun drawing a silenced pistol from her long leather jacket. Two shots dispatch Tengfei cleanly, and a surgeon steps out behind Aunty, wheeling a piece of medtech rigged for a serious download. The sedative is just now wearing off Ho, who realises he hasn’t been taken out to the South China Sea to reunite Man Dao with the seething presence that was coming alive in the matrix.

>GET PAID

Regrettably, Aunty Jun says, the target is not fully intact and payment cannot be guaranteed immediately. There’ll need to be diagnostics run on Ho’s faculties, and on the algorithms he’s carrying. The team grit their teeth. They know Aunty will pay up if she can, but that doesn’t make a delayed payday any less galling. At least, they’ve got a couple of hundred terabytes of whatever Ho dumped into MT’s deck – that’s gotta be leverage for something.