This was the point where the campaign started to open up, and we had a whole session of “in between missions” stuff to do. It establishes and follows up on some NPCs, side-plots, and character plots. Every secondary character in this episode comes up again and again, evolving and falling into danger in different ways. Three of them die later*. Can you guess which?
New chapter in “The Sprawl: Chinatown” the cyberpunk short fiction on Run a Game, based on our actual play of…
New chapter in “The Sprawl: Chinatown” the cyberpunk short fiction on Run a Game, based on our actual play of @TheSprawl_RPG — “The Kurosawa Extraction”
The first mission summary is up for The Sprawl: Chinatown.
The first mission summary is up for The Sprawl: Chinatown. Guan Fu is the team Fixer’s First Mission. It involves three of the four PCs, three of our main locations, and three of our five megacorps, but only one corp they’re aware of at the time.
Not every episode will be a full mission. Some might summarize part or half of a mission at a time, depending on how much happened. The goal is to keep a brisk ~1,000 words.
The landing page for session summaries of my campaign is up.
The landing page for session summaries of my campaign is up. We’re already something like 6 months in, so summaries will be coming out more regularly than we actually play, at least for a while.
The landing page has the setting, character bios, and corps. Stay tuned. Next post should be one of their First Mission summaries.
So I ran two campaigns of Night’s Black Agents. There’s ALSO a retaliation phase in NBA. And the core book has a really cool way to handle it, called the Vampyramid (the conspiracy response pyramid).
This is the printer friendly “Vampyramid” from the free downloads from Pelgrane’s site, so I’m not violating any copyright here.
Spy thrillers aren’t TOO different from cyberpunk thrillers. So this is a useful tool for corporate response tracking. It’s even got six layers, and our Corporation Clocks are 6-tick clocks. How convenient!
A little explanation of the Vampyramid…
This is the algorithm the GM uses in NBA to decide how the vampire conspiracy responds to the superspies hunting them down. You start at the bottom. Assuming the PCs weren’t deterred by the tier 1 response (Narrator: “It only strengthened their commitment to the hunt.”), the conspiracy advances to the tier 2 response following one of the lines from their original tactic (because more than any other creature, vampires — and intelligence agencies — are victims of the sunk cost fallacy).
BTW The strange words in parentheses are the different monsters the conspiracy might use to achieve these goals.
So if the vampires open by framing one of the PCs (Frame Agent), their next move will be to isolate a PC (Isolate Agent) using one of their human servants to make their friends and contacts think they need to be left alone, either by planting false communications or rumors, or by counseling them to keep safe and not get involved. After that, on tier 3, they’ll flip one of those contacts and get that contact to spy on and sabotage the PCs (Double Agent). Next, they might get the contact to try to kill their PC “friend” (Double Cross) or use the contact to spill what the PC really cares about so they can use that to try to recruit the PC with a genuine offer (Offer Drive) that satisfies their Drive (similar to Personal Directives in The Sprawl). After that, things get violent, with manhunts (Hunt Agent) and traps (Lure Agent) and eventually straight up assassination attempts against PCs, one by one, using the toughest monsters around (Kill Agent).
The Vampyramid works AS IS for The Sprawl (except Haunt Agent has to involve the matrix, not weird Bram Stoker style nightmares).
But maybe we can make it even better!
I put a blank Vampyramid on here for folks to use, also from the Night’s Black Agents downloadable stuff (though it might be easier to use SmartArt or text boxes to make them in Word, or the draw.io extension to make them in Google Docs; see below).
Anyone want to join me and try to create a more “megacorp” pyramid? A “corporate ladder” as it were?
Currently is just has the more corporate versions of the Vampyramid. Feel free to jump in and edit; I made a copy of the original for myself. So this one is for all of you, my fellow Sprawl GMs (and Hamish Cameron of course).
Benefits of using the pyramid: Each corporation can start at a different spot on the bottom rung, giving them each a unique style and flavor. But as they move toward the top, they always become more inhuman, cruel, and authoritarian, regardless of their initial tactics, until in the end, they’re just killing that which resists their control. You can track which corp is at which point on the pyramid, too, using just one pyramid instead of six different clocks. Or use the clocks as player-facing warnings, and use the pyramid to choose what the next Retaliation action will be.
Please feel free to suggest other Retaliation ideas in comments, even if you don’t feel like installing and typing them into the draw.io diagram.
Considering doing two missions simultaneously. Give me your thoughts.
Considering doing two missions simultaneously. Give me your thoughts.
A lot of noir stories have a detective who encounters two mysteries that turn out to be linked or somehow solving one allows them to solve the other. I’d like to try that in The Sprawl some time.
A few things that seem obvious, but I thought I’d ask the group:
– Normally I set 5xp worth of Directives for a mission. These missions should have 3 each. 6 total. That way I can force myself to focus on the interaction between the missions being the complication, rather than two missions with normal levels of complexity.
– Normally you get heat if you wager 3 Cred on a mission. I wouldn’t modify it. So they can wager 2 cred on each mission safely and potentially make 12 back (total) if they get both Paid Well and Paid in Full. That’s more potential profit, but it’s also twice the potential consequences.
– I would make it clear to them OOC that they CAN take two missions if they want (system wise) and that these two opportunities were intentional.
Question for all the MCs on here: How much do you prep and how much do you improvise?
Question for all the MCs on here: How much do you prep and how much do you improvise?
I’ve been running Cyberpunk RPGs (CP2020 and Shadowrun, mostly) since the early 90s, so I default to preparing a good deal. But it seems like you could run The Sprawl entirely improvised, once you got through the Preparing the Play phase. You could just write Mission Directives and leave it at that.
I’ve prepared 2 missions so far, and I’ve done a lot more than just write Mission Directives. I filled in all the details around them. I customized the Kurosawa Extraction to my PCs, for instance, and created lots of NPCs and locations. I didn’t OVER-prep. I wound up using almost all of it without any railroading. The second mission, about the same.
Here’s what I prepped:
> How they were contacted to get the job (two simultaneous offers)
> The mission was to track down a black market dealer and get a copy of a milspec chip from them, so I prepped the chip and the dealer, where the dealer was hiding, what dangers were in the area, what rival groups were after the chip, and how the Action Clock determined how the race to get the chip was going for the PCs — this was almost like prepping a small dungeon crawl for D&D, except I didn’t make a map and label 5′ squares and encounter locations. Still, I prepped some “encounters” — my PCs being a reporter, pusher, tech, and fixer, they’re not “goblins attack” encounters, more like “there are squatters the gang here probably pays to pass word to them, what do you do?” encounters. Of these, two exist to complicate the mission directives and two exist to let me throw pointed Personal Directive moments at them. Well, they all exist for PDs, because IMHO that’s what makes The Sprawl so good; but two ONLY exist for that 🙂
> Made a custom move for the contamination in the failed arcology the dealer and chip were hiding out in
> Made a custom move for intentionally tripping out on the contamination like the squatters and gang does, similar to Open Your Brain from Apocalypse World (inspired by my own AW Hocus who huffs mold).
> Wrote a few Trello cards to connect this situation to my PCs’ personal directives, so I would have material ready to push those. (The whole mission is based on their personal agendas – the black market dealer is a contact of one PC who disappeared, one corp rival is an NPC nemesis for the Reporter; the gang in the failed arcology is a rival of the Pusher’s gang’s, though they’re currently not at war, etc., etc.). Also a card about how the reporter’s Story could connect on this mission.
Overall, about 2-4hrs of work, probably 3,500-4,500 words if I had to guess.
