Note: This is part 3 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.

We’re back! After two weeks away from our cyberpunk future, my group — the full group even — and I were able to jump back into Neo-Detroit and wrap up our the team’s first mission. Things… did not go as planned.

When we last left the team, they were deep into their mission to recover a piece of hot new augmented-reality tech on behalf of the Madmen; a shadowy advertising co-op making a name for themselves in Detroit. The target of the mission was a free concert sponsored by Bud Light Optics (BLO), who were going to use the venue to test the new device. The three operators; Henry the Killer, Nikki the Tech, and Riyoh the Pusher; had managed to cut the power and get the crowd moving out of the abandoned factory-turned-theater. A gun fight had broken out, and Henry and Riyoh had fallen prey to the sensory-warping effects of BLO’s device. Nikki, meanwhile, was busy being shot at by drones responding to her sabotage of the power grid. With Henry and Nikki pinned down, and herself being swept away from the target by the panicking crowd, Riyoh decided to make a call.

The Way of the Gun

Far away from the raucous crowds of the concert, people were going about their usual nighttime business. The neon signs and soft AR glow from day-time advertisements had been replaced by garish signs and ads describing less respectable services as the curtain of night had fallen across the Old City. A few vehicles drove along the ancient arteries of the city, passing clubs and bars where the thumping sounds of synth rolled out of windows and patios. And he was watching it all…

The nano-gears inside his cyber eyes whirred and hummed as they adjusted the focus of his optics. He was scanning for someone — a mark he’d been hired to track — and he knew his mark was somewhere nearby. His AR overlay scanned the faces of each passerby, try to match them against the face he was seeking and, if they weren’t a match, cataloguing them in case he was ever hired to chase that person down. A beep startled him out of his task, and the optics snapped back into normal focus. He picked up his comm — the source of the noise — and looked at the screen. Riyoh was calling, and he knew that could only mean trouble.

As I mentioned in my last report, this mission started two members down; neither our Hunter nor our Fixer could make it. Luckily, they were able to make it for this session, but that presented a challenge; how should I get them involved in the current mission? The answer was simple enough; things had gone south, and Riyoh decided she needed backup. We didn’t have to contrive this; the action clock for the mission was at 22:00, which meant they were only two ticks away from total mission failure. So, she called up Python, the Hunter, and asked for help with the extraction. Python, in turn, dialed in Abel, the Fixer. Abel, who had a fancy set of wheels, picked up Python in stylish fashion and they arrived at the concert just as things were coming to a head.

While all this was happening, Nikki had successfully dodged her drone attackers by ducking into the surging crowd, and had run into Riyoh in the process. They agreed to try and get back inside to assist Henry, who was, at that moment, busting down the door to the room where the tech was being kept. In our previous session, Henry had dispatched the guards with explosive results, but he knew that something was waiting for him inside the room. That something turned out to be a cyborg heavy; military-grade and wired to kill. Henry, not wanting to waste an opportunity to be visceral, opted to attack the thing with his machete, rather than his big gun. He might also have wanted to avoid damaging their target, but I prefer to think of him just being bloodthirsty.

Into all of this stepped Abel and Python, screeching their ride to a halt just in front of a pack of security goons who were, at the time, trying to keep the panicked (and hallucinating) crowd from over-running them. Abel slipped out and tried to Fast-Talk the first goon he saw; this was a security job, and they were here to extract an exec’s kid from this mess. It was a great setup, and I was ready to roll with it–until Abel’s dice came up snake eyes. Instead, the goon decided he didn’t have time for this shit, and cracked Abel in the jaw with the butt of his gun. Python responded in true action movie fashion; by leveling his own gun at the goon, and trying to intimidate him. That didn’t go well either, and before you could say “oops” we had a standoff; eight very angry people pointing guns at each other as a crowd prepared to trample them all to death.

I ticked the action clock up to 23:00.

Mine’s Bigger Than Yours

A loud and unintelligible garble screamed across the comms, and he winced at the sound, momentarily forgetting about his bleeding lip. Then came a noise which sounded like a dozen heavy feet marching rapidly from beyond the warehouse the crowd was pouring out of; which meant whatever it was, it loud and VERY heavy. He looked over the barrel of the submachine gun pointed at his face, and saw a large form moving rapidly along the edge of the crowd. It was insectoid in shape, and about the size of a sedan. The back section was segmented, and tapered up to what could only be described as a head, which itself was studded in various sensors and what he assumed were guns. As it skidded to a halt nearby, an artificial voice boomed over a loudspeaker.

“CITIZENS! THIS AREA IS UNDER SECURITY LOCKDOWN BY BLO PACIFICATION. PURSUANT TO MUNICIPAL CODE 659, SECTION 2, BLO ASSERTS FULL AUTHORITY WITHIN A 2 MILE RADIUS OF THIS LOCATION. DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED. PROCEED IN AN ORDERLY FASHION TO THE NEAREST SECURITY CHECKPOINT, OR YOU WILL BE PACIFIED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.”

I hadn’t planned on dropping a tank on them during this mission, but I needed something suitably big to convey just how close the group was to failing the mission, and I’d just been reading my copy of Ghost in the Shell again. I had intended the tank to be something that the players would avoid; perhaps a way to start off a cool cat-and-mouse sequence as the characters outside the venue worked to keep it occupied while those inside worked to grab the BLO tech. In doing so, however, I forgot one of the cardinal rules of GMing: no plan survives first contact with the players.

Abel attempted to use the tank to his advantage. He succeeded in fast-talking the crowd into attacking the security goons, with Python helping by pointing the tank as a way of saying “hey, these assholes want to kill you!”. They both rolled very well, so I gave it to them. I decided that the people closest to them were hardcore punks who were spoiling for a fight after having their AR hacked. They jumped in and things got physical.

Meanwhile, Riyoh and Nikki had gotten split up in their attempt to get back inside the warehouse. Riyoh had found a way around the crowd, but had gotten shot by a drone (she rolled a 6 on her Assess) in doing so. Nikki had succeeded, but only just, and so had lost track of Riyoh. Henry had taken a few hits from the man-tank guarding the target, but was holding his own. It started to look like the team might just pull this off.

And then Python, in an effort to distract the tank, shot at it.

The roll came up as a 9, and Abel, who’s character was out to make things interesting, volunteered to take damage alongside Python (this is one of the options for a 7–9 result on a roll to Mix It Up in the game). So the tank took a tiny bit of harm, and then unloaded its auto-cannon into the knot of people standing where the bullet had come from, causing Python and Abel to each take 4 harm. Python, who was wearing armor, managed to survive. Abel, who was not wearing armor, was less lucky. Having already suffered some harm from being hit in the face with a rifle butt, Abel didn’t have the segments left on his harm clock, and those 4 new harm filled it to the brim.

So, Abel rolled his Acquire Agricultural Property move (the move a character makes when dying), and got a 6. Oops. Abel had been in the game less than an hour, and was already a red smear on the pavement. I was a little stunned, honestly, but Abel’s player took it in stride.

“I volunteered to take the harm,” was his response. The rest of the group nodded and shrugged a bit, and then proceeded onward.

Game Over

His machete came down more like a hammer than a blade, and sparks and lubricant flew as it bit into the shoulder joint of the man-thing. The cyborg wasn’t totally out, however, and it fought back against him with all the hydraulic strength it could muster. His synthetic nerves had given him an edge when we was at a distance; but now, locked in a death grip with the half-man, it counted for nothing. A blow thundered into the side of his head, and his vision swam. He responded by reaching into the cyborg’s open wound, and started pulling at anything he found. Wires, tubes, and plastic parts that might have been pseudo-organs came out in his hands, which were covered in a mixture of synthetic goop, and very real blood. He didn’t notice the cyborg had stopped moving until after the taser hit; someone had come up behind him and hit him with an electric shock that felt like being run over by a dump truck. As his vision faded out, he smiled–he could see the light in the cyborg’s eye go dim.

I hadn’t bumped the clock from 23:00 to 00:00 when Abel had died, mostly because I wanted to see if, in true TV-thriller fashion, the team could escape, making the Fixer’s death a noble sacrifice.

Unfortunately for them, things didn’t go that way. While Henry managed to kill the cyborg guarding the BLO tech, he didn’t roll well enough, and Riyoh, who at this point was coming up the stairs to help him, volunteered to take some damage along with him. That damage came in the form of a shot to the gut as she ran up and onto the landing and was met by a security goon. That amount of harm filled her clock, and Riyoh was forced to make the second death move of the night. Luckily, she rolled extremely well, and was able to survive.

With two players either dead or down, and the goons closing in, I advanced the clock to 00:00 and called the mission. Python grabbed a civilian and jumped into Abel’s now badly shot up car and drove off, while Nikki melted into the crowd to get away. Henry and Riyoh, on the other hand, were both captured by BLO, which provides an excellent hook into the next mission.

Lessons Learned

I must admit; I wasn’t expecting things to spiral like they did during the first mission. The players advanced the action clock quite a bit before they even got to that portion of the mission, which set them up for a harder time once things got rolling. Looking back, I also see some things that I could have done better.

The crowd became a kind of one-note obstacle. It was essentially a physical barrier the characters had to move against, rather than being a living, breathing thing. I probably should have used it more like a gang than an obstacle, as gangs have distinct rules in the Sprawl.

The cyborg “big bad” didn’t really turn out to be all that bad, mostly because I played that encounter fairly straight. Given that the fight was happening very near to a sensitive piece of technology, which was the team’s primary focus, I missed the chance to raise the stakes in a more compelling way than just “you get hurt.”

Dat tank, tho. In retrospect, I think I overplayed this. There were a lot of other options on the spectrum between “security goons” and “tank,” and given that this was the first mission, I should have opted for something less ridiculous. While I had hoped the players would engage with the tank differently, I should have expected them to shoot at it. Most of the team’s skills are about violence, after all, so that was always going to be the way they got its attention.

The final takeaway, for now, has to do with the action and legwork clocks. I am a huge fan of clocks as a way to track the various moving pieces of an adventure or campaign, and I might write an entire post on that alone. However, I came away from this session feeling like their might be a flaw in the way the Sprawl implements them; namely that there’s no mechanical method of advancing the action clock during play.

Here’s what I mean: during the legwork phase, if the players fail a roll, the game says to advance the legwork clock. Sometimes doing so will cause the action clock to advance, as well. But there’s no corresponding directive for when players fail a roll during the action phase.

When a character misses and the MC has the chance to make a mission move which represents the increasing awareness and alertness of the target, she will advance the clock.

That’s a bit hand-wavy when you consider that the mission fails if the clock hits midnight. While I appreciate the wiggle room, I feel like there might be a need for a harder, if-this-then-that kind of approach. But who knows; maybe I’ll feel differently after I play a few more sessions.

In the end, and despite the character death, everyone had a good time, and since the session ended a little early, we were able to let Abel’s player roll a new character, and even got started on the legwork for the next mission. I’ll cover that next week, so I can keep things thematically linked.

Until next time, stay jacked-in, cowboy.