Anyone played this? Any tips for DMing it?
Any cool character, plot, or world ideas I can steal?
The Sprawl
Asher Lee
Bentley Reed
It's just a ruleset, no world.
Joseph Bennett
I've never even heard of it, but it has a pretty cover and I wouldn't mind learning more about it
that sounds less interesting than I'd hoped
Connor Allen
>no world
>The Sprawl
>implying we don't know exactly what world it is
John Fisher
YOU BETTER FUCKING BELIEVE I HAVE DMING TIPS FOR THE SPRAWL.
WHEN THEY SAY THE GAME IS FOR A MAX OF FOUR PLAYERS, THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT FUCKING AROUND.
THE DESIGN OF THE COUNTDOWN CLOCKS DISSOLVES IF YOU GO OVER THIS, AND YOUR PLAYERS WILL START THE GAME WITH ALL KINDS OF BULLSHIT HELL RAINING DOWN ON THEM.
I TRIED RUNNING THIS WITH SEVEN PLAYERS. IT DID NOT WORK. EVERYONE DIED.
DO NOT RUN THIS WITH MORE THAN FOUR PLAYERS.
Parker Evans
To turn off cruise control for a bit--
It's a genuinely fun game. It's extremely telling that there's no *simple* "fuck up those dudes" move, but rather, every violent action needs an explicit objective. This is key--it always moves the story forward.
I actually dug into this before I ever touched Dungeon World or Apocalypse World. If you want a grounding in the ideas behind The Sprawl, read up on Dungeon World.
My natural inclination when running a cyberpunk game was to pre-plan like a motherfucker, but PBtA-style games benefit most from the players and GM equally making shit up as the game progresses.
>"Okay, it looks like my move to hack the mainframe was successful. What do I find?"
>"Well, it's incredibly valuable and was protected by two separate milspec-augged fireteams. You tell me--what do you find in there?"
For additional material help/coming up with shit on the fly, check out Augmented Reality, a resource that got released very recently. It's full of tables and tables of cyberpunk shit to populate your game with: [tried three times to post the URL, will just upload the pdf in my next post]
Nicholas Howard
http neuralarchive blogspot co uk/2017/01/its-time-to-augment-your-reality html
replace spaces with dots
Juan Green
Here's a plot for you. I didn't write it.
(From the script for SUCKER OF BLOOD, soon to be a major motion picture.)
AGENT AGATHA, a sharp-faced woman in a business suit, enters the office of COMMANDER CAMERON, a greying man in a business suit. CAMERON is sitting behind a bare oaken desk, on which rests a single laptop.
AGATHA: Sir.
CAMERON: Agent Agatha. We are facing... the most unusual, and certainly the largest, issue that this agency has ever encountered.
AGATHA looks attentive.
CAMERON: We've only just now learned this fact, but apparently, four months ago, a group of self-proclaimed... supercriminals... broke into a leading research facility experimenting with genetically modified organisms... of global-scale concern.
AGATHA: My god, are you serious? That's like something out of a thriller novel.
CAMERON: It gets... the word 'worse' hardly seems to fit. Well. The research facility in question was experimenting with genetically modified mosquitos, specifically a CRISPR-based gene drive which ensures that each mosquito has only male offspring, and all of those offspring carry the gene. A single male mosquito of that type can breed with a female mosquito, and she gives birth to another dozen males, who breed with another female mosquito... until no more female mosquitos are left. It can wipe out an entire mosquito population, starting with just one male.
AGATHA (slowly): So... a lot of mosquitos could die.
CAMERON: It could wipe out *all* the mosquitos of a given species on a whole continent.
AGATHA: That doesn't sound nearly as bad as what I envisioned when you talked about supercriminals stealing genetically modified organisms. Unless they're tremendously ecologically important for some reason?
CAMERON: No, they're not. The mosquito species in question is the mosquito species that is responsible for spreading malaria in Africa.
AGATHA: Oh. Oh, holy shit. They're holding the mosquitos hostage.
CAMERON: ...not exactly.
AGATHA: Sir?
Logan Rogers
CAMERON: Well, you see, wiping out a whole mosquito species using a gene drive has never been tried before, and there were a number of concerns, although it's considered pretty clear that this species doesn't play any vital ecological role and they aren't even native species... but, on the other hand, the gene-drive mosquitos could easily cross borders, so there's national sovereignty to think about... people were saying it could probably get regulatory approval in five years, but nobody really stepped up and took responsibility for laying out a clear path and...
CAMERON trails off and takes a deep breath.
CAMERON: Well, the long and short of it is, these supercriminals two hours ago sent a video to the United Nations saying that unless we pay them one million Bitcoins, they will wipe out malaria.
AGATHA: Wait. Did I just hear that correctly--
CAMERON: I think I'd better just show you the video.
CAMERON spins around the laptop, and AGATHA leans forward to stare at the screen.
The man appearing on the video is wearing a solid black mask over his face and wearing a black cape.
MAN ON VIDEO: Greetings, delegates and ambassadors of the United Nations. In case it's not obvious, I'm a supervillain.
The man cackles madly.
MAN ON VIDEO: I no longer have a name, just as I no longer have a face. But you may call me... The Wibbler.
(A sound effect of crashing thunder plays on the video.)
THE WIBBLER: As the attached documentation proves, we've stolen genetically modified mosquitos capable of wiping out malaria all over the African continent. We've bred more of those mosquitos, and secreted incubating eggs in caches all over multiple African countries. Those caches will release their mosquitos in a single week... unless, in that one week, they wake up, check a certain Internet site over the cellphone network, and verify computationally that one million Bitcoins have been deposited to a certain address. In that case, the mosquito eggs will be incinerated.
Gabriel Lee
THE WIBBLER holds up a sheet of paper showing the Bitcoin address, then puts it away.
THE WIBBLER: Not even I can stop the release now, unless those one million Bitcoins are deposited.
THE WIBBLER leans forward to stare at the video.
THE WIBBLER: You know, of course, that there are numerous concerns about the safety of this technology. These concerns must be EXTREMELY SERIOUS, since it was considered wiser to wait another five years, or possibly longer, to resolve those concerns, before actually wiping out malaria. Now personally, I happen to think those concerns are FUCKING BULLSHIT. But I am ready to consider the possibility that the people taking responsibility for this issue, IF THEY EVEN FUCKING EXIST, have understood the dangers better than I have. That their decision to wait was made in a wise and well-considered way. I'm sure that in that case they will be happy to make a trivial additional payment of one million Bitcoins to head off a premature release of these mosquitos, considering that over the next five years they were willing to spend the lives of FIVE MILLION AFRICAN CHILDREN DYING OF MALARIA, each of whom would be, in my personal calculus, worth CONSIDERABLY MORE THAN ONE-FIFTH OF A FUCKING BITCOIN.
THE WIBBLER leans back again.
THE WIBBLER: So you have one week to deposit one million Bitcoins to my account, or I will WIPE OUT MALARIA! Ha! Ha ha ha! Bahahahaha!
As organ music begins to play in the background, THE WIBBLER still laughing maniacally, the video cuts out.
Owen Brooks
AGENT AGATHA looks up from the laptop screen. Her face is contorted into a rather odd expression.
AGATHA: May I speak frankly, Commander?
CAMERON: You may.
AGATHA: I really hope you're not about to tell me to track down this guy and find the location of the caches so we can stop the mosquitos from being released without paying the million Bitcoins.
CAMERON: While the public is not to know about it for obvious reasons, that is, in fact, the request that has been handed down to this officially nonexistent desk--
AGATHA: Are you familiar with the meme that goes, "Fuck this shit I'm out"? If not, I can try to find a 10-hour looping video of it on Youtube.
CAMERON: Agatha.
AGATHA: I've been part of some raw things in my time. I stuck it out with the Agency, stuck it out with *you*, because I believe that the Agency is, on net, a force for order. That our counterterrorism unit, as much as it might sometimes be abused, remains the primary force standing between Washington D.C. and a suitcase nuke--
CAMERON (holding his head in his hands): Agatha.
AGATHA: And I did sometimes daydream about being the agent who got the order to stop that suitcase nuke, racing against time, which does seem very much like the present situation. Except for the part where I'd be trying to UN-SAVE FIVE MILLION AFRICAN CHILDREN which would make it EXTREMELY CLEAR that I was in fact the villain--
CAMERON: Agatha!
AGATHA: Sir?
CAMERON: I'm giving you this mission because I know you, I've worked with you for years, and I trust you, above all my other agents, to fuck this up.
AGATHA: Thank you, sir. I'll do my worst.
Jacob Allen
Better yet, replace uk with nz:
neuralarchive.blogspot.co.nz
Hobbit magic.
Brody Taylor
I think that anyone who picks up a cyberpunk game, already knows what the setting is.
Luke James
>My natural inclination when running a cyberpunk game was to pre-plan like a motherfucker, but PBtA-style games benefit most from the players and GM equally making shit up as the game progresses.
I think there is room for GM prep, but it also understands that no prep is good enough for player's plans, and also that no matter how long players plan something, they forget to think about something obvious.
Jace Lewis
Bump for interest.
Brandon Campbell
Just play Cyberpunk 2020 instead.
Camden Sullivan
There's a really good Actual Play series called Friends at the Table that used The Sprawl during their second season (Counter/Weight). They started off with TechNoir, but that actually doesn't make for good podcasting (too much discussion of adjectives) so they switched to the Sprawl around Episode 7.
Gavin Foster
what he said
does anybody have a pdf?
Alexander Myers
How do you do money in your games? Bitcoin, bundles of (future-y polymer) cash, krugerrands, bricks of .22LR?
Matthew Bell
All electronic microcurrencies; some supported by traditional governments, some corpscrip tied to stock prices, some using the bitcoin model, some back on the gold standard (or tied to another precious commodity like rare earth elements).
Pretty much everyone do all their transactions electronically, and subscribe to advanced currency-trading services that constantly exchange one for another to make fractions of cents of profit. It's replaced getting interest from a bank account. it also means that the 1% are free to manipulate the currencies under their control, as well as the algorithms that do the trading, to make themselves essentially unlimited wealth at any point
Gabriel Torres
>explicitly set in the world of Gibson's writing
stay retarded, bud
Eli Evans
Jaxson Reyes
Oh wow you sure told him
I bet he's now regretting asking for it
Wow
So brave
So pure
You did it
Alexander Clark
It's a PbtA game; all you need are the basic moves and playbooks, and maybe the GM sheet if you want the official hard moves. It's not hard to put together whether or not it's worth $15, and I didn't feel like helping someone steal from one guy working out of his bedroom who has already publicly put out every beta version and a free sample of the finished game.
Luis Watson
I ask this question frequently, but: What goes on the the back-country areas in a/your cyberpunk setting?
Oliver Barnes
Natives riding horses, Awakened horses eating natives.
Bentley Myers
Guy who asked here. I'm fine with just a preview, really, but a lot of the time when people talk about systems on here it's a choice between advertising blurbs or actually getting to read the system and I prefer the substance of the latter. Cheers.
William White
Since the other guy's a dickhead, here:
Brayden Butler
Anyone have a character sheet for this?
Jace James
It seems to be on the downloads pages linked in , but they're all one document I think
Ian Powell
Thanks.