Secret Corporations

Secret Corporations

Secret Corporations

I’m prepping a session of The Sprawl but hacking the setting significantly — using Night’s Black Agents for a Jason Bourne meets Dracula story. Instead of megacorps as the Corporations, I’m anticipating various intelligence agencies and terrorist groups to be named for the Clocks. However, behind the scenes in NBA are these organizations:

* EDOM: the shadow agency that tried to recruit Dracula as a spy

* the Conspiracy: vampires, simply.

EDOM and the Conspiracy are not well known by the PCs or the players but may still make movements against them. Hence, my question: how do you handle secret or unknown corporations?

10 thoughts on “Secret Corporations”

  1. The way I would handle it is that I would tell the players about the corp but then explain that their characters don’t know about it. This is fun because when you tick off a clock on the “secret” Corp the players will get excited because they know something freaky and different is about to happen but won’t know exactly what form it will take.

    But that’s just me. I’m not a fan of the OOOO the GM has a secret style of play unless there really is meant to be a puzzle element of play. Otherwise I rush to get secrets into play as fast as possible and will take that as far as letting the players know something exists before their characters know.

  2. Why not just treat EDOM/Conspiracy as a group threat?

    Group threats have their own clock and can make moves just like loners, places, headlines, and corps.

    You can add a move to the ones already suggested in the book obviously, one of them might be to: Attempt to cover their tracks.

    But maybe they get sloppy when a player nails some investigation roll and now they pick up a mysterious trail…

  3. Omari Brooks: interesting… can you say more about the difference between Corporations and Threats? That’s not so clear to me.

    Honestly, I haven’t finished reading the rules yet. My understanding comes from a background in PbtA games in general, few AP podcasts, and my reading up to pg. 147 of the MIDNIGHT edition, so far.

  5. Introduce them slowly and hint at their existence in subtle, but disturbing ways. Say an EDOM team beat the PCs to the mission and left behind a surgical strike…or a very bloody scene (If your EDOM uses a vampire, anyway). You make moves on behalf of the opposition all the time to show the players they’re not in control all of the time and are part of a very big picture. 

    EDIT: This is how I would approach it as a NBA game, anyway. That’s why the Conspyramid and Vampyramid are awesome, because they suggest great ways on how to escalate the situation for the agents. If you haven’t bought the Director’s Handbook or have the NBA rulebook, I would recommend them, they’re incredible resources that have given me great advice on how to run a thriller game.

  6. Matthew G. Threats are covered in Chapter 9: Running The Sprawl

    On pg 184 is a generic description of what a “group” threat can be and what kind of goals/moves it might have.

    The difference between Corps and Groups is that corps always have at least one area of commercial expertise. So to me that means there are no secret Corps because they are so big they don’t need to hide. That doesn’t preclude them from doing shady stuff in secret on the side but there is at least some facet of them that is legit and public facing.

  7. Trung Bui great comments. I’ve got pretty much all of the NBA materials and am working through the Dracula Dossier bit by bit. My goal, actually, is to adapt The Harker Intrusion scenario (from Free RPG Day a year or two ago) for use with The Sprawl

  8. I assume that NBA gives lots of advice for running the conspyramid that might be useful here too. I haven’t read that book though, so I can’t direct you to anything specific.

  9. Hamish Cameron Definitely. The name of the game is escalation. The corporations will react to the players in ways they feel match what they’re doing. Maybe they’ll try to hire them, bribe them, hurt friends and family, etc. It’s up to the MC to make the decision. I would really recommend reading the rest of the book, though, it is phenomenal Kenneth Hite​

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