I feel like I read the answer to this once but I cannot for the life of me find it in the book. Am I corect that when a corporate clock hits midnight some serious shit goes down and then afterwards it drops back to empty?
I feel like I read the answer to this once but I cannot for the life of me find it in the book.
I feel like I read the answer to this once but I cannot for the life of me find it in the book.
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I assume it drops to empty if all PCs die.
I’m pretty sure serious shit goes down, but I don’t think the clock completely empties.
Pretty sure you have to fight back or Lie Low
The only mention I can find of it is at the end of the Hacking the Sprawl section of the book. It mentions an entire mission run a s a long chase scene because a corporate clock hit zero.
Yeah so you might get away, for now. But that corp has you at the top of their list.
If memory serves me well, I read a passage about something like “corporations never bother so much with single characters, ’cause they are so big that they have different scopes.” So probably they punish the characters, but with no overkill,’ cause an enemy today can become an ally tomorrow.
I’m just about to start my first Sprawl campaign, and I was wondering about that, too. I just assumed Corporate Clocks were pacing devices, serving as campaign arc time limits. And the Lie Low move exists to let the players say “we want more time in the rising action phase” / “we want a longer campaign.”
What I mean by that is that when the XCorp (for eXample Corporate) Clock hits 2100 and consequences start happening, we’re at the end of the second act, at least for the XCorp arc.
If the clock fills, that’s a lose condition. They’re constantly hounded by XCorp and its corp and government allies. It’s a race against the clock to destroy XCorp before XCorp destroys them.
Hopefully they’re at 2100 on the XCorp clock because they’ve been working to find XCorp’s weaknesses and pressure points, so they can start using them.
If their characters are NOT ready for all out war on XCorp, they’d better scramble. And the players have to trust the MC to make their victory at least possible.
If the PLAYERS are not ready to jump into act 3, they have the Lie Low option.
To that end, I don’t plan to advance corporate clocks past 1800 except when the PCs take actions that declare themselves to be at war with those corporations. Advancing the XCorp clock on a failed/7-9 Get Paid move is fine up to 1800, but for me to advance it to 2100 or later on a Get Paid, they’d better be getting paid for something egregious akin to declaring war on XCorp.
Jon Lemich Just remember that there are certain moves that can advance/decrease a corporate clock (the reporter has at least one, the soldier has one, the pusher_may_ have one).
If you’re using them to set the pace of the campaign and you don’t take these into account they may catch you by surprise.