Hi everyone, I’ve ran The Sprawl a few times as one-shots and am thinking about running a West Marches / Open Table campaign with it. Has anyone tried to do something similar? I would love to hear about other people’s experience.
My situation is that I don’t have a fixed roster of players, and the scheduling is semi-regular. But I want to run a persistent setting with a rotating cast of players. I think thematically The Sprawl is well suited for the job, but I will need to hack some of the systems… Links (due to high # of players) and Heat Clocks (probably individual ones rather than a group clock) come to mind. I will probably borrow heavily from DW Fronts that evolve as PCs affect the setting too. Jobs will be put together by me, rather than player initiated, by default.
Anyways, any thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated!
I made a bunch of notes about this myself. Too long to post here. But i have a couple of other ideas.
Links: what if each PC had a link score to the whole group. At the end of the session the players vote on who should get the link increase based on who they think they know better.
Heat: yeah heat for the whole outfit.
Missions: give them a map/list of targets/jobs. Perhaps each job has its own clock for how long it’s available. But to be honest the real fun of West Marches is making your own missions. My own idea was that as the last step of session zero each PC makes up a project; one thing about the status quo of the world they want to change. Then each project has a clock. Doing paid missions gets you money, but doing a project mission advances the project clock. This gives PCs a way to affect the setting beyond the confines of a specific mission.
Links: Replace. Let the PC roll the appropriate stat for the Help action. Either the same one the main PC used or a different one if the fiction demands it.
Thanks! Great thoughts.
> My own idea was that as the last step of session zero each PC makes up a project
I like the Project Jobs idea. I think I’ll provide some downtown mechanism to do groundwork and look for certain kinds of jobs (i.e. how they want to affect the world). Much as it pains me, I’m going to minimize Session Zero stuff because there’s no guarantee anyone from Session Zero stays on. The timing also doesn’t work unless I want to do Session Zero on its own day, but given the high turnover rate here, I don’t think that’ll work for us.
(Listening)
Hamish Cameron notoriously ran a living dungeon world game. Maybe he will share the information about this sometime
We ran Living Dungeon World three times at Los Angeles conventions, but perhaps more relevantly, we ran a Living Sprawl as well: Operation Angel Basin. I described it in three blog posts: ardens.org – Operation Angel Basin
http://www.ardens.org/2016/06/aar-operation-angel-basin-setup/
http://www.ardens.org/2016/07/aar-operation-angel-basin-missions/
The main thing you have to balance is how many clocks there are and you you spread out click advances. If you can get every potential player together at once, you can make a bunch of corps and links together (this is what we did). If you have truest “drop in” players, you could have each new incoming character introduce a new Corp or Threat, and establish one link with an “existing” character, or just have each character at the table make or increase one link with another character at the table (and forgo the end of session link creation).
Wow, that sounds like an awesome event! We’re doing a multi-table game in a few weeks and I’ll have to forward to the cohosts (not using the Sprawl for this though).
It’s very likely that most players for the Sprawl game will be the most “drop in” sort. We’ve had players who have never played RPGs before (we’re kind of pioneering the indie RPG scene here). So a proper session 0 is impossible, and I’m thinking I should just create the corporations myself based on big names that are instantly recognizable (everyone will know what Disney-Amazon Mediacorp is up to).
I’m considering having each character maintain their own corporate clocks, rather than have one for the campaign. Clock ticks affect everyone at the table, but don’t affect absentees. This will hopefully avoid drop-ins or subsequent groups walking into a mess. Interventions in a mission will be based on the highest clocks in the current group, and will be focused on them. Do you think that’s a decent idea?
Maintaining clocks individually sounds like a lot of extra bookkeeping, so I wouldn’t do it, but if it works for you, give it a go. Let us know what worked and what didn’t!
It’s very in-genre for cyberpunk/neo-noir protagonists to be in hot mess of trouble that isn’t their fault at all, so I don’t have a problem with group clocks potentially landing a bunch of “innocent” characters in hot water.