The Sprawl – Page 16 – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

I feel like I read the answer to this once but I cannot for the life of me find it in the book.

I feel like I read the answer to this once but I cannot for the life of me find it in the book. Am I corect that when a corporate clock hits midnight some serious shit goes down and then afterwards it drops back to empty?

Is it just me, or do most of the play books stay very light on the amount of cyberware characters have?

Hey Shadowrun fans, take a look at this TECHNOMANCER (WOOHOO!!) I just did.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EotBzWwqusg3dNIt-cj8AUX_dzm6uGUG

I made it distinct to the decker by making it kinda hyper-focused and a glass cannon. Special mention to the What if this ICE wants to be free? move that allows her to speak to ICE as if it were people, and even infuse some self-awereness in it!. (dont tell anyone I took inspiration from Kit of the netrunner cardgame xD )

I think it has too many moves though, and would like to cut out 2 or 3 to make it cleaner. Suggestions appreciated!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19sq1woVAFBv_Uyn4IDpGXniHy-TKwu4e

Intel: How powerful or flexible is it in your games?

Intel: How powerful or flexible is it in your games? Do you use it in wildly crazy and extravagant ways? Or do you keep it more grounded in causality? Please say how you’ve been using it in your games. We played the game for the first time recently and I felt that perhaps we stretched things a bit too much. We are experienced in Blades in the Dark, where all manner of crazy use of “Flashbacks” are fair game, but I don’t know if this is really appropriated for the kind of gritty & dirty cyberpunk games we are looking for in The Sprawl. For example, how would you deal with these two situations:

1) The group was on a hurry to escape from a research lab in the 30th floor of a building. We already established that the only access was through the main elevator. Question: Would you be Ok if a player wants to use Intel to establish there is a new emergency elevator somewhere in the floor, even if contradicts what was established before? Would the character specialty and the way he acquired this Intel have a say in your decision? Say, if he was a hacker that got the Intel on a (matrix) Research move and justified that he looked into some old public blueprints, would it be fair game? How about he was a Hunter who got his Intel from some street kids with little knowledge of the instalation?

2) The group faces a squad of guards in the way out of the building, and a player wants to use Intel to dictate that he already met the guards beforehand and bribed them into letting them slip by the gates (and paid, say, 2 creds for this). Would it be fair in your game? How about the character is a Fixer full of style who deals in info brokering, would you allow it? And if the character was a killer with no style nor related background?

Thanks in advance!

The crowdfunding for the Korean translation of The Sprawl has just begun!

https://tumblbug.com/sprawl_kor

Shouldn’t the Hacker have a move for reducing the action clock similarly to that Infiltrator one where he pulls it…

Shouldn’t the Hacker have a move for reducing the action clock similarly to that Infiltrator one where he pulls it off with 12+ rolls?

This was the argument our hacker presented in last session, and it makes sense to me. See, the hacker seems the playbook apt to exert greater control on the mission site security through distractions, alerts supression, cams surveillance, fake service calls, etc. much more than the Infiltrator move descriptions suggest (fast-talking guards into relaxing and similar). Thoughts?

PS: how would you do a custom move for it? I thought about simply replicating the Infiltrator move for the hacker but rolling with Mind or Synth. Thoughts?

Legwork clock in your games: does it stay really low?

We’ve played a single session this weekend and ours stayed clean, which made the Get Paid move pretty trivial. Perhaps we just had luck in the dice, or maybe we passed too fast by this phase (each of the 4 players did 1 legwork action). So, is this clock in your experience? Thanks!

Sprawl story from last Sunday.

So we started off sometime last year, I think? It’s been a while. Played a bunch of missions, it was rad, but some interpersonal breakdowns meant that the group had to be rerolled and someone replaced. But we decided to continue playing in the same universe, with unfinished threads from the original campaign still dangling loose and old characters having cameos every now and again.

We brought in a new guy, who did not have much RPG experience, but is a cool guy with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the characters we made for the new session tended to suffer from meme overload, partly because the new guy was not housebroken yet and this had a ripple effect on the rest of the bunch. I tried rolling with it, couldn’t, failed miserably. So after a few months of not playing I threw a bit of a tantrum and talked everyone into de-memeing their characters, and everyone decided that’d be for the best and actually the easiest way is to just kill them off. So we played a session where we did just that.

Except for ech0 the Hacker.

Ech0 was the most normal of the entire party, and his shtick was solely that he was a huge no-life and had a sweet bike. So when at the end of the mission where everything went wrong, the bike was taken in by Lucky Land Communications’ hit squad and he spent all of his Cred on getting out of Japan and shipping himself to Berlin, where he spent whatever he had left on a new bike. He is now at 0 Cred.

And as we all know, that’s a perfect excuse to mess with a player.

So right now he’s living in an old capsule hotel for gastarbeiters with a bunch of angry Turks who can’t get citizenship for five generations now. He keeps the lights on by troubleshooting at a tech bazaar on Prinzstrasse. Nobody respects him, nobody knows him, and for all his posturing the only “hacking” jobs he could get were through Mr. Wizard the Tech, back when he worked for the police (he’s since been severed after getting shot at fried his comms implant and the force has been privatised anyway).

So Bill Lowrey the Infiltrator goes to get the job. And, as it turns out, his contact Klaus has a corporate extraction all lined up! You need to pull a woman out of the Bayer-GSK arcology on the west side of the Berlin Wall. Then clone a transponder chip she has implanted in her and stick it in a genetically-identical corpse to feign her death. Luckily, she has a twin sister, except nobody knows where she is. But I already lined up a crew for you, Bill!

Meet Blazej the Hunter, a cool, solid professional. He’s a Pollack, but what can you do. He’s on the team to find the missing girl.

Then there’s Mr. Wizard the Tech. Ex-cop. He’s gonna help you build an interface for the chip! (Klaus neglects to mention Mr. Wizard is not a cybernetics specialist.)

Obviously, you’re also gonna need a Hacker, right? To write the software. I got you a Hacker! A great Hacker! Her name’s Terzi Basha. The girl is amazing. Although a Turk. But you can rely on her!

Oh, and there’s also this expendable errand boy. Goes by ech0. I pay him just enough to pay the rent, but it’s okay, he’s so transparently illegal if you think he’s acting up just call immigration services and he’s at Lampedusa before the weekend.

And this little setup worked perfectly. Ech0 has a huge chip on his shoulder and it’s so damn transparent everyone else is actually scared he’s gonna pull off something stupid. The first thing he does is go dig for dirt on Terzi. He keeps trying to pull everyone into his little harebrained schemes to undermine her, and everyone sees it. He also volunteers for jobs he has no business doing just to get anyone to respect him. Bill, who’s supposed to be the chief of the crew, does not trust him at all.

Thus when, after three real-time hours of crying wolf, he actually finds a tracking bug in his motorcycle gas tank, everyone roundly tells him to go fuck right off.

There’s also the story of how Bill went to a luxury German brothel to see if the missing sister is there and moved the Legwork clock three segments in the process, but that’s for another time.

I ran The Sprawl at Acadecon last weekend.

The table had one seasoned PBTA vet and three first timers.

Playbook selection and character creation took a bit longer than I had anticipated, and we went ended up going about 10 minutes long. (I’d budgeted an hour for game creation, and we took an hour and a half).

The group consisted of a Soldier, a Killer, a Pusher, and a Driver.

The Soldier got to make a plan, The Killer got to kill, The Pusher got to recruit, and the Driver got to steal a garbage truck. There was sneaking around in the dark. There was betrayal. There was violence. There was dancing.

If I had it to do again I’d push them a little harder during creation phase, I’d chrome it up a bit more, and I’d work harder to get the Driver and his chariot more involved.

All in all, I think it went pretty well, but because we went long I didn’t get a chance to source the table for feedback.

That said, here’s the The Interview