Last week, we had probably our highest exposure run.
Last week, we had probably our highest exposure run. The mission was to extract a piece of military hardware that is being demoed at definitely-not-Blizzcon. The PCs had the option to do it quietly (and considered it for all of 2 minutes!), but opted for a dramatic (employer offered a bonus for something suitably flashy).
Lots of stuff going on behind the scenes. The players have caught on to the idea that it might have been the demo organizers who hired them in the first place, but they can’t be sure… and definitely don’t know why. Also only lampshaded here, but the team almost TPK’ed in an ambush by Boeing attack copters right at the end!
I’ve been running my “West Marches style” Sprawl game for 4 sessions now.
I’ve been running my “West Marches style” Sprawl game for 4 sessions now. Here’s an AAR of our latest session, wherein our intrepid antiheros robbed an ambulance. Hope some of you get a kick out of it!
Here some custom sheets we did for our cyber squad.
Here some custom sheets we did for our cyber squad.
Respectively:
Jaguar – Driver
Il Danese (the Dane) – Fixer
Three of Spades – Soldier
We are playing around 2080, in Nueva El Dorado,
in Argentina.
Our corporations are:
Wakanda: producer of Blue Stream , a synth fuel made out of fungi and molds which are covering the plains of Africa, and from plancton/algae harvested in the Atlantic. Both Jaguar and Three of Spades are ex wakanda corporatives, hunted down by them.
Verve : represents cybernetics excellence, research early nanotechnologies, and has developed a mind backup prototype, availabe just for the ultrarich.
Eagles Security: heavily armored privatized police that enforces order around the world biggest cities. Only people covered by their insurance policies benefit from their protection, leaving crime to thrive on the poor.
Buena Vista: one of the information megacorps, direct evolution from Disney acquiring major tv broadcasts around the globe.
An underground movement, called Humanos Ante Todo (HAT) [humans before everything] , organizes public, and sometime illegal, protests against corps, defending the purity of flesh untainted by cyberwear.
More about the protagonists:
Jaguar is a cyber pilot, with neural link to its two drones, a recon light one and a medium armed one, and owner of a VTOL stolen from Wakanda Corp. Has sworn vengeance toward Wakanda and he’s on the hide, while trying to do the most damage(and earnings) as possible.
The Dane is a fixer, trying to bring the best and brightest future to his little niece, trying to keep her out of the harshness of the sprawl. He owns a small activity in the slums, with prostitutes and a little gang for debt reclaiming. He is driven by monetary gains just to protect his little niece.
Three of Spades is an ex Syndicate of Wakanda Corp. Her ex whole syndicate squad, with code names tied to the number of Spades cards, was betrayed by Wakanda and left to die during an operation. Jack of Spades, the captain of the squad, amazingly drove the squad to safety while bringing retaliation to a Wakanda facility. She’s gone underground, mantaining contacts with her ex squad while working now as an independent merc.
Three criminals-for-hire are tasked with breaking into the clean room at a semiconductor fab to steal the…
Three criminals-for-hire are tasked with breaking into the clean room at a semiconductor fab to steal the manufacturing components for a military microprocessor.
Yesterday was our first mission of Sprawl. I was the MC, with two players, one being my wife. I was really surprised at how cool it was too simply make a single roll for a full scene, unless the PCs described other moves. I also enjoyed the collaboration of the story telling, putting much of the narrative in the players’ hands.
The game was fun, fast paced, and did a wonderful job of putting everyone in the fiction.
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.
