We wrapped up “Season 1” of my Singapore Sprawl game over New Years (the finale ended up in a Mission Abort!), and we’re now unfolding Season 2. I’ve had some time to reflect on the game and am looking for some advice for further developing Singapore as a setting, because it poses some unusual challenges. I’m curious how other folks would handle these:
Singapore is a surveillance state, and the tech is only going to improve. Today, there are cameras everywhere! And China’s developing facial recognition tech that’s already frighteningly accurate. It’s something that we’ve been sweeping under the rug mostly, since the Clocks ensure some degree of safety for the PCs. But what would be a good way of handling this without requiring a Hacker to scrub surveillance data every mission? Or maybe we fold this into the options for Get Paid? I’ve also added an easter egg to one of the epistolary articles that surveillance footage is often circumstantial evidence because they are easy to tamper with.
Singapore is gun-free. The “regular” players have leaned heavily into a low key, low violence style of run, possibly because of cultural expectations. But as written, The Sprawl expects most people to have guns. Half the classes get automatic weapons as a starting option. So when the guns do come out, it’s often a bit jarring (“Hold on, are you sure you want to fire a 5-Harm canon at the hospital?” “Wait, I don’t think you would have gotten the Assault Rifle past the security at the supermarket, so what else do you have instead?”) My current thought on this is to have the city be divided roughly into zones, where certain firearms are permitted / won’t draw too much attention… possibly with firearms categorized by the Harm they inflict. So city center is 2-Harm or less, patrolled urban areas are 3-Harm, and most of the island is 4-Harm.
As a result of both of these, players are very hesitant to go on high risk / high profile runs. Runs that cause violent and damage in a public way suddenly stand out significantly, and feel very risky. And the game doesn’t provide any structure to make up for that risk. The payout for missions is usually about the same (3-5 XP, and 2x or 3x Stake in Cred). What are some tools people have used to sweeten the deal?
If you’re curious about the setting, we’ve been curating it here:
I think the question on both of this is which way you lean into this in the future. Do you lean heavily, or pull back.
My thoughts:
Surveillance State – I would lean way more heavily into this, more as a precautionary thing, how do they avoid cameras, how do they make their public behavior look unobtrusive. Perhaps have the security systems be run by one of the megacorps, so they more they do publically the eventually get tags on their record, that can lead to them getting picked up. A lot of cyberpunk settings generally assume a high Surveillance, but assume also that their is so much data..moving so fast that no one can scrub it all so subtle crimes, slip by. But if a megacorp is the one managing the data, maybe they occasionally do runs for that corp to reduce their clock with them and stay out of legal trouble.
Gun Free – This is a hard one and I am not sure which way I would go. If you lean away from it, you could just say in the future the culture cracks and they go gun crazy instead and instead of no one having guns everyone has guns.
Alternately if you lean into it I might actually go through all the templates and respec their starting gear alotments, so that they have different choices of items to start with that are more appropriate for the setting they are in.
Alan, this isn’t relevant to your post so sorry about that. I just have to ask you this before G+ goes and i lose this opportunity forever.
I went to school in Birmingham UK in the 90s with a kid with your name. Now i feel stupid asking this but you wouldn’t be that guy would you?
Richard Smithson Sorry, not from the UK! My name is not too uncommon though. There was another me at my old university, even.
Alan Tsang fair do’s. I had to ask!
My take on this can be found in the Technoir Transmission called the Singapore Sling (in the book), but here’s what I tried.
As the city is now, money is the true power, even above that of the party or cultural mores. If an external force with sufficient funding took advantage of this, they could seriously distort the city’s culture. But why would they bother?
My answer was the city’s proximity to the equator: if you’re going to build a space elevator, or an orbital railgun (I called mine the Singapore Sling), Singapore’s ideal: a modern technologically advanced port, and a nation state still small enough to be corruptible.
The only issue is the labor force: the disruptions of the modern world already create massive pools of migratory workers, and I assumed the future would be even more so. So this big ol labor force just offshore can put a major strain on the city’s mechanisms of control. In combination with the corrupting influence of outside investors and local greed, there’s all kinds of cracks in the facade of control, and clients willing to carve out exceptions for those willing to do their bidding.
Oh, and crank up what’s already there! Tight controls on illegal drugs means whatever does make it through is worth even more. Climate change pushes the wealthy into arcologies connected by sealed public transit so they can spend months indoors pleasurably. Tensions over immigrant labor. A single party in power, willing to do anything to preserve their position. Opportunities abound!
Oh, and for guns? Add tags like +collapsible or +disguised, for weapons that look like something innocuous until their purse unfolds into a handgun, or their smart-material chunky bracelets into tonfas 🙂
Being successful runners means they’ve already figured out ways to be effective under the city’s constraints, so I’d give them those tags for free for starting equipment.