The wind was blowing cold and hard off of Lake Eerie; locking the city down in a static of ice and smog. Through the haze, the glow of ancient neon splashed gaudy color across the backdrop of rust and decay that was Old Detroit.

I’ve been playing and running RPGs for a long time, and while I’m almost always excited about a new game, few games have piqued my interest lately as much as the Sprawl; a cyberpunk RPG created by Hamish Cameron. Being a huge fan of both cyberpunk and the Apocalypse Engine, I knew I was going to run a game of the Sprawl as soon as I could. Thankfully my lovely fiancee decided to grab me a copy for Christmas last year. So, I brought the rules to my local gaming group, and we were off to the (cyber) races.

As is often the case with PBtA (Powered By the Apocalypse) games, I couldn’t have been less prepared for, or more happy with, the outcome of our first session. Over the course of a couple of hours, we created a deeply flawed and interesting future Detroit, filled it with broken characters and power-hungry corporations, and set the stage for some seriously fun sci-fi roleplaying.

Being someone who works with technology every day, cyberpunk has always held a certain appeal for me. Themes of trans and post-humanism; class struggle; the limits of privacy versus appeal of convenience; and the rise of corporate entities as first-class citizens are all things which we are bearing witness to in the real world, and the opportunity to extrapolate and explore potential consequences of these things is what keeps me coming back to things like Neuromancer, the Matrix, and their ilk.

And let’s be honest, as of late, some of these themes have been sliding across the line from “fiction” to “fact” pretty quickly.

The Thing Itself

Red-brown carcasses of ancient train cars spiraled out from the central terminal of the Railyard, a once bustling center of corporate freight and commerce, now a gestalt bazaar serving a different type of clientele, with a different type of trade. Market sounds and smells made war with each other as hawkers and hucksters blasted as much AR advertising as they had the cred for, each angling for the next sucker to draw in.

If I’m being totally honest, I was a little worried at the outset that the Sprawl was going to be too rigid in it’s execution. You see, where most PBtA games are somewhat free-flowing in their setups, the Sprawl works off the concept of the characters being professional operatives who take missions on behalf of one group, working against another, for profit. This restricts some of the more sandbox-esque aspects of Apocalypse Engine games, which is a little weird if you’ve played games like Dungeon World or Apocalypse World.

Of course, the Sprawl isn’t the first PBtA game to do this, and after reading through the rules, and watching the first Roll20 episode, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem at all.

Here’s what a mission (session) in the Sprawl looks like:

Get the Job — a move that both sets up the mission and creates potential consequences.

Legwork — a phase where the characters describe how they are prepping for the mission, and by doing so accumulate resources to spend during the Action.

Action — the phase where the characters actually do the mission at hand.

Get Paid — another move where the characters try and get paid by their contact, who most likely tries to screw them over, especially if they did poorly when they got the job.

Retaliation — the last phase, where the corporation the characters acted against (maybe) comes looking for payback.

Each phase feeds into the other, often through the concept of “clocks;” a way to measure a countdown towards a particular outcome. For example, during Legwork, the characters try to accumulate gear and intel for the upcoming mission. Doing so risks moving the “Legwork Clock,” forward, which is bad; the closer the Legwork Clock is to “midnight,” the more prepared the target of the mission will be for the characters, and the less they will get paid at the end of the mission.

As a side note, I think “clocks” are a brilliant concept in terms of tracking outcomes, and I’ve started using them in all of my games. If you don’t believe me, go watch some of the Roll20 GM prep sessions Adam Koebel did for Apocalypse World. That shit will change the way you prep for games.

Building a Better World

The Raft looked a lot cleaner than it actually was. Nothing the corps did could totally shake off the grime of greed and corruption that clung to the mega-arcology standing sentinel in Lake Eerie. It loomed like some towering beast over the skyline of Neo Detroit, but the menace was only skin deep; inside it was all cancer, rotting from within.

Another way in which the Sprawl distinguishes itself from other PBtA games is the heavy emphasis it puts on world building. Step 0 of character creation isn’t “pick a concept,” or “assign stats;” it’s “create corporations.” Cyberpunk is all about the consequences of letting corporate greed and power run amok, and by putting that front-and-center, the Sprawl lets the players set the tone of the game they want to play.

So, after deciding to set the game in a balkanized and tribal future Detroit (yeah, I know; Motor City just can’t catch a break), our group went about creating the faceless mega-corps that were going to be pulling the strings.

Well, kind of.

You see, one of the first decisions we made as a group was that the corporations had actually left Detroit in the past; after they sucked it dry of any potential profit. In their wake, several crime syndicates had taken hold, and after a while, started trying to legitimize themselves by taking on the trappings of corporations. Once they started making money, the old corporations took notice again, and returned to try and muscle their way back in. I was really pleased with this setup, because it added an extra layer of antagonism between our corps; the old “real” corporations, and the nouveau riche upstarts trying to keep the old guard out.

The group also decided that they wanted an African influence, which added a new thematic spin on things. I know there’s a large Somali-American population in Minnesota, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch for us to imagine that those groups might have moved into Detroit at some point.

Rounding out the setting was the idea that unlike most urban cyberpunk settings, Neo Detroit wouldn’t be a megaplex, or grossly-large city, per se. It would still be huge (10+ million people), but nothing on the order of the BAMA from Neuromancer, or California in Snow Crash. Instead, Neo Detroit would be a large urban area between larger megaplexes; the equivalent of a future “flyover” state. This would help keep our stories more local, which worked well with the themes of tribalism and community the group had established.

With the setting built, we got down to making corporations and characters, which was as smooth as pretty much any PBtA game I’ve played.

Characters Big and Small

Four figures sat huddled around a table in the back of the dining-car turned cheap bar, alternating between taking sips of cheap booze and chatting in low whispers with each other. The music in the place was too loud and too wrong for the decor, but that didn’t stop someone from listening in…

There were four players at the table when we created characters, and we ended up adding two more for the next session. Those last two didn’t get the chance to create corporations, but I’m ok with that; five is good number to get the setting moving, and if we decide we need more in the future, the new players can take first crack at creating them.

Our cast of corporations includes Bud Light Optics, Fisher Price & Wesson, FailSafe Corporation, Kellog’s Artificial Nourishment, and The Madmen.

To conduct operations in their shadow wars with each other, these faceless entities would be calling on the services of our Fixer, Killer, Pusher, Hunter, Tech, and Hacker. The Tech and the Hacker are our late additions, and will be completing their character setup at our next session.

As I said above, character creation was fairly straightforward, even when dealing with the Sprawl’s addition to the standard PBtA flow: cyberware.

In keeping with the genre, every character is required to take at least one form of cybernetic enhancement; be it cybernetic eyes, a neuro-jack, synthetic nerves, or something else. Aside from making each character cool, it also builds the fiction; cyberware isn’t cheap, and to get it the characters have to take any number of complications along with their chrome. Maybe they’re owned by the corporation which paid for it; or perhaps they paid for it themselves, and it’s dangerous or substandard. There’s plenty of good hooks in the process for an enterprising MC to take advantage of these tags, and I constantly found myself saying to the group “I promise that won’t come back to haunt you…”

The Aftermath

If you want to know how well this game handles world building and setup, all I can say is that each one of my players and I had a huge grin on our faces when we left the table that night. All of us are excited to see what happens in this unique world we’ve created, and that, more than anything, is a testament to how good the Sprawl is at what it does. I’ll try to keep these play reports coming, so I can collect my thoughts and critiques on the game.

If you’re looking for more examples of what the Sprawl looks like in play, I would highly suggest you check out the Roll20 actual play. It’s seriously good stuff.

Coming next week; The Sprawl — Session 1 play report. Stay jacked-in, cowboy.