Note: This is part 2 in a series of retrospectives on running The Sprawl for my local gaming group. I’d recommend you check out part 1 to get some background.

Last week my gaming group and I spent some time establishing a gritty future Detroit, where crime syndicates and mega-corporations loomed large over the downtrodden and destitute. This week, we got to start playing in that rusty, crime filled sandbox.

If I’m being honest, things got off to a bit of a slow start; two of our players weren’t able to make it, and while we had a new player to help backfill, he had to spend some time creating his character. I did my best to keep the group engaged while the new player built up a Tech named Nikki, but I was also spending that time boning up on some of the rules after watching Episode 3 of the Roll20 actual play. Once the new character was up and running, however, things got rolling pretty quickly. While we weren’t able to complete the first mission in the time we had, we all had a blast getting to the cliffhanger I left us on.

The Crew

Three figures slipped out from the sleet and acid rain of the street and into the clamor of the Railyard. They picked their way through the stalls selling cheap imports, the ramshackle restaurants, and the bars carved out of the hulks of long dead train cars; the practiced moves of professional operators marking them as “not to be fucked with” to anyone with the guts to give them a second glance.

For this mission, we had three operators:

Riyoh, the Pusher — a true believer, working her way up through one of the corporations in an effort to bring them all burning down.

Henry, the Killer — “nature’s happy blunt instrument,” to quote the player. Henry is a violence tour-de-force, just looking for a direction.

Nikki, the Tech — a once beautiful woman who lost much of her organic body when the corp her father worked for had him killed. Now she’s out for payback.

While Nikki’s player didn’t get to establish a corporation of his own, he was able to make the world interesting for the entire group by setting up “links” with the other characters.

I didn’t think to highlight the “links” last week when I discussed character creation, but now I feel like they deserve a few words. In standard Powered By the Apocalypse (PBtA) games, characters establish existing relationships with each other by declaring them. In other words, my character Brutus the Barbarian distrusts your character, Melisande the Purple, because she once bewitched me. I declare the existing bond/string/hex, and you fill in some of the details of what your character did with/to/for mine.

This paradigm is reversed in the Sprawl. Instead of telling other characters what they did, you tell the group about a job your character undertook against a corporation, and then you ask the other players if their characters helped. If they did, they describe how, and then they take a “link” with your character. This, like many of the systems in the Sprawl, is very elegant, as it gets around one of the issues my groups often run into when playing games like Dungeon World; namely that you get to declare something about my character, and that takes away a bit of player agency.

As I stated above, “links” also tie into the existential threat of the corporations by letting the players dial in the amount danger they want at the start of a game. It works like this: for each player who declares a job against a corporation, that corporation’s clock advances by one. If every player uses one or two corporations to establish their links, then those corporations will be actively seeking the players out, which opens up plenty of hard moves for the GM. If the players instead spread their links around, then more corps are interested in the characters, but to a much less urgent degree.

The Job

The teahouse was hazy and poorly lit; red and orange light creeping out from underneath cracked glass lamp shades. Sparing barely a look for the hostess, the trio marked their contact in a booth at the back of the rail car; a slender man in a suit 150 years out of fashion, sitting next to a woman who was clearly wired for military action. The man smiled as the group approached. “As-salāmu ʿalaykum. You can call me Mr. Draper. Would you like some tea?”

Hamish Cameron, the author of the Sprawl, recommends that you start your players with a fairly straight-forward mission, and that’s precisely what I set out to do. I decided that one of our syndicates — a local crime outfit turned “legitimate” corporation — wanted to steal some technology from an out-of-town rival. In this case, the Madmen were after some sweet augmented reality blasting hardware from Bud Light Optics, which they would hire the characters to steal. To add a bit of flavor to the standard smash-and-grab setup, I decided that Bud Light would test their new hardware at a free concert, so they could see the effects on a large scale.

Last week I alluded to the structured nature of a play session in the Sprawl, and that extends to the setup, as well. With the job created, I created a simple set of directives — milestones which indicate when the players get to mark experience — and wrote them down with the rest of the prep:

When you take the job, mark XP.

When you decided where and when to make the hit, mark XP.

When you make the drop at the safe house, mark XP.

When you finish the job and get paid, mark two XP.

Writing this stuff down helps me to remember what, exactly, is important in terms of tracking the progress of the mission. It also gives me a very clear reference to look back to, and helps communicate to the players that they are making forward progress; something which is very important when you’ve got this kind of mission-based gameplay.

The last bit of prep I did for the mission was to write a custom move; a little something special that I could hit the players with which would make this mission stand out from any others. In this case, my move had to do with the hardware being tested at the concert:

When you get hit with BUD SPLICE, roll +Synth (Synth being a character stat).

On a 10, you’re fine; your hardware shuts down the ads.

On a 7–9, you’re handling it, but not well; you’re Acting Under Pressure until you can get some time to purge your systems

On a 6-, Bud Light is everywhere; literally everywhere.

That last option ended up tripping me up, as we’ll see in a bit, but overall I was happy with the mission, and we were ready to play.

The devil’s in the details

The trace was coming hard and fast, but she still hadn’t found the file she needed. All of her counter-programs were running at full tilt; the processors in her rig were screaming hot and threatening to turn into melted slag if she pressed any further. A sudden sizzle and pop from meatspace let her know that one of her cores was dead — either burned to a cinder, or destroyed by some corporate ICE. But they were too late; she had found the file. Now all she had to do was disconnect before the trace could lock her down…

When players in the Sprawl decide to accept a job, two things happen:

They roll the “Get the Job” move, which can set up advantages in terms of how much they get paid, how much intel they have about the target, how much they know about their employer, etc. The initiate and engage in the “Legwork” phase of the mission; that is they role play a series of vignettes where the characters hit up their contacts or do some digging to prepare for the job itself.

Both of these systems are directly tied to the tension of the mission at hand. If the players roll poorly when they Get the Job (and mine did), then they lose out on key advantages — they have no idea what they’re getting in to, they get paid poorly, or worse, someone notices what’s happening.

Similarly, as the players play out the legwork phase, they run the risk of alerting their quarry that something is up. If the legwork clock for the job gets too high, then not only do the characters get paid less; they also start running up the action clock (the clock associated with the “doing shit” part of the mission). If the legwork clock creeps even higher, the corporate clock of the corporation they are acting against ticks up, as well. All of this plays into the over-arching meta-game built into the Sprawl; deciding which risks you are willing to take in the hopes of gaining an advantage later down the line.

This system, which gives players agency over the amount of tension and danger they are willing to deal with, is brilliant. It lets the players decide, in a tangible way, what the priorities are for their characters, and how much they are willing to wager on those priorities. It’s something I’d love to see in other games in some form or fashion.

Our group didn’t spend too much time on legwork. Nikki hit up her uncle, a man who works for Bud Light Optics, in the hopes of getting some intel about the security at the concert, and then followed it up by staking out the concert venue. Henry went sniffing for a street dealer to get some tech for the job, and Riyoh decided to try and do some research about the Bud Light hardware itself. Nikki succeeded at her first roll, and then all three of them failed the subsequent rolls. This let me push the Legwork clock up considerably, which meant that the concert would have heightened security and the action phase would start with one of the clock segments filled.

Now, I will say that I stumbled a bit with this phase; the gist of the system is that characters spend the legwork collecting intel and gear; abstract currencies they can spend during the action phase of a mission to gain bonuses to their rolls. In a nutshell, it allows the characters to have exactly what they need, when they need it, and then retcon why they know that particular detail, or brought along that piece of kit.

While intel and gear are further examples of the elegant systems at play in the Sprawl, their implementation tripped me up a bit. The rules intentionally want these currencies to be vague; if a character needs a smoke bomb, they can spend 1 gear to have brought one along. My players, on the other hand, wanted to seek out very specific things; Henry, for example, wanted a Mission Impossible-style rubber mask. The solution, I think, is to push the players to keep their actions a bit more vague during legwork. It’s something I’m going to have to fine-tune during the next session.

Death Metal

Bud Light knew their business, that was for sure. The promise of free booze and free music had brought out a throng of people; so many that they spilled out of the venue and into the parking lot. Huge virtual screens hovered in the air, making sure that those outside could enjoy same effects people inside were getting. The operators didn’t care; they had a job to do. Things going just as they’d planned, and then two of them dropped off comms as their AR gear barked and spat at them. Without warning, their ware was overloaded with a flood of ads for the latest Bud Light Optics tech and swag; their entire field of view choked off; the noise of the concert completely drowned out by an oppressive corporate jingle that just wouldn’t stop.

Once the characters were through preparing for the mission, it was time to move from the legwork phase to the action phase. Since the players had rolled so poorly during the former, they entered into the latter phase with one or two segments of the clock already filled. This meant that security at the concert, and around the Bud Light hardware, would be stronger than they otherwise would have been. In mechanical terms, this let me bring out some heavy threats for the group to push up against.

Things started simply enough; the characters formulated a three-pronged approach, where-in Riyoh would cause a distraction (and try to push her anti-corporate agenda), Nikki would attempt to cut the power, and Henry would grab the hardware and run. It was one of those plans that could only work in a RPG or cartoon, which meant it was perfect.

Once inside the concert grounds, things didn’t go as smoothly as they could have. While Riyoh got off to a strong start with a couple of great dice rolls, she failed when it came time to lean on her personal goals to sway the crowd. At that point, Nikki was successfully cutting the power, but also drawing lots of attention to herself in the process, and Henry was prepping his trigger finger.

It was at this point that I decided to have Bud Light test their new gear on the crowd, which highlighted some poor planning on my part. Nikki was outside of the venue, and wasn’t affected. Henry rolled a 7–9, so mechanically he just had to deal with some extra rolling to accomplish his tasks. Riyoh had a hard failure to withstand the effects of the BUD SPLICE, and the vagueness with which I wrote the move kept me from putting any meaningful mechanical consequences behind it. I didn’t want her Acting Under Pressure, since that was the consequence of rolling a 7–9. In hindsight, I should have more explicitly spelled out the result of a failure. Instead, I decided to give her a -1 ongoing to some of her rolls. This is another lesson learned; be explicit!

In the end, Riyoh ended up getting carried away by a panicked crowd while Henry was blowing holes in security personnel with his shotgun, and Nikki tried to evade some angry drones who were shooting at her for blowing the power. I felt like that was a good place to end, as we were out of time, and it seems like the players are all anxious to get back to the action and see what happens.

Curtain Call

Machine gun fire raked across the pavilion, biting into her body as she dove behind a nearby transformer. Luckily, they got the metal parts of her, rather than the flesh; she couldn’t afford to lose much more of that.

While the session was a success, I’ve got a few things to tweak, and a few challenges to prepare for before the next game. Namely, I need to handle legwork better, and I’ve got to get some better conditions attached to my moves. I also need to work out a satisfactory way to both bring the current mission to a close, and potentially begin a new one. The Sprawl tells you to try and give your missions (and characters) time to breathe, from a fictional perspective, and I don’t want to bleed this beginning mission into another. This will be particularly challenging if our other two players return, as I don’t want them spinning their wheels while the rest of the group wraps things up. I might have the current characters call on any newcomers as a way to help them with extraction, if that becomes necessary.

In the end, we all had a great time, and I will continue to recommend the Sprawl to anyone who will listen to me. It’s mechanics are really a delight, and a I think anyone looking for something different from the standard PBtA fare would have a great time playing it. Sadly, you’ll have to wait two weeks before I can give you my next play report; I’m out of town for business, so there isn’t a session this week.

Until next time, stay jacked-in, cowboy.