Tell me ’bout your sprawl?

Tell me ’bout your sprawl?

Tell me ’bout your sprawl? Not so much the characters or corps, but the backdrop that you set it all against. I’m a map geek and a scene chewer. I love a good setting. Where is your city, and what are few of the signature locations you’ve devised?

13 thoughts on “Tell me ’bout your sprawl?”

  2. my sprawl campaign is set in a previously established Stars Without Number campaign. Not having an earth to reference to or the ready pop culture does make cyberpunk a bit harder to set up. But then we get to do cool things like a heist set in a zoo for xenobiology.

  3. Once my DTRpg book arrives and I can run a game, I’ll let you know. I have thoughts about making some Shadowrun playbooks and running a Seattle game.

  4. My “default” sprawl is a Boston-Baltimore metroplex in a world otherwise ravaged by war and climate change. I love to populate my cities with less expected cultural congregations (e.g. Amish crime syndicates or a hillbilly ghetto filled with refugees from the Appalachian mountains.)

    I’m itching to do a Great Lakes sprawl though. Mainly because I like the idea of the water playing a significant part in transportation.

  6. We decided to set our game in what we call the Neo New England Metroplex which is a huge chunk of land running from Maine down to Pittsburgh. Boston, NYC, and most of Canada suffered a cataclysmic calamity at some point (nuke maybe?), making those areas hot zones not fit for living in. Most Canadians live underground and no one goes to Boston/NYC unless they absolutely have to. Areas that would’ve been cities get a Zone number (Zone 1, Zone 2, etc), which makes naming them easy and I just make notes when I put something in a Zone. Beyond that, we’ve only briefly talked about other countries, but haven’t fleshed anything out beyond the NNEM.

  7. I have a game set in the shadows of Neo-Dubai, a city covered by a permanent city-size sunshade, since the destruction of the ozone layer has mad it highly dangerous to venture into direct sunlight in a place like the Arabian peninsula. The city is built up in layers, with never fancy buildings just built on top of the older layers of the city.

    Location for the only mission so far has been an (artificial) holiday island a few kilometers off the shore (also sun-covered), a place for corporate execs to enjoy their time off (ha!). Beautiful place, even if few ever get to see it.

  8. When I was playing Cyberpunk 2020 I took a subway map for my home-city and wrote in pencil some additions to the subway lines, new constructions made of stronger space metals that extended the city into the lake, the major local corporations that control so many people’s jobs, areas of gang control and their borders with other gangs, creations from a friend’s short story that he let me use with written permission such as Thor’s Maximum-Security Car-Park. There was a parallel map of the ‘Net with locations of corporate sites in pretty much the same as their physical locations, but also various private citizen’s “boards” and the shadowy Nomad network maintained by wireless means such as an adaptation of CB radios. As you may know, that game did not anticipate wireless WiFi networks or the Dark Web. All Internet areas were “visible” but some could have extreme security preventing you from getting in. Nothing was actually Dark Web-hidden.

    You may have to end up preparing a sketch-map of the same city in vastly different ways if there are too many layers of detail for a single map. Subway maps, for example, are given out free, are in colour and admirably lay out your city as a schematic.

  9. Also, I really want to run a game with a sprawl that is centered around a massive space elevator. It is (basically) the last city on a ravaged Earth and is maintained by the corporations primarily to facilitate hazardous industry and the collection of raw materials.

  12. eh? maybe? Take screen shots of places that fit the style of neighborhood in googlemaps. open in photoshop magnetic lasso out the interface and the edges of the neighborhood. Enhance™ the image then put a cut out filter on top. gather a collection then spin them around till they make sense…

    I did this because the city we’re playing in doesn’t actually exist. That’s paris next to detroit and mall of america, so yeah lots of things going on. If you were playing with real earth I would just snag a shadowrun map.

  13. Aaron Berger Old message, but now that I look at it, the mash-up city is crazy. A major in-city freeway begins and ends abruptly.

    This is not altogether unreal. In Montreal the Boulevard Métropolitain is one giant freaking east-west overpass feeding out to Montreal neighbourhoods. Predictably, with gaps in city funding there may be gaps in the Boulevard! There’s a cartoon showing a gaping chasm with the French sign FIN D’AUTOROUTE, and an American tourist makes the mistake of thinking it means it’s a fine highway…

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