Review: The Sprawl

I've run two sessions of The Sprawl, not including character creation, so I feel it is time to review the game that brings cyberpunk to the Apocalypse World family.

The Sprawl

Similarities

If you've played Apocalypse World or one of its many variants, most of The Sprawl will seem very familiar. Players pick one of several Archetypes, assign their attributes (which range from -1 to +2), and select their starting moves. The core mechanic remains rolling 2d6 and adding an attribute. 7-9 returns a partial success while 10+ gives a character most of what they want. The game master does not roll the dice, instead pushing the plot forward whenever the PCs fail or leave an opening.

Differences

So what is different?

Functionally the biggest change is structuring gameplay around a mission. This gives The Sprawl a very focused and much more traditional feel (at least in a 80s RPG sense).
A typical session of The Sprawl follows the following path:

1. The characters are hired by a Mr. Johnson (or otherwise duplicitous agent of the megacorps).
2. They research or prepare for the job.
3. They perform the job (of dubious legality and probably high violence).
4. They attempt to get paid without being ambushed or otherwise removed from the picture.

While this structure works, it feels very off to me coming from other Apocalypse World based games like Urban Shadows or Worlds in Peril. These games follow a sandbox approach of following the characters and having the world react to them. The world still responds(often violently) to the player characters of The Sprawl but they have more clearly define (and often MC-defined) goals based on the mission.

The other significant change is the addition of cyberware.

Cyberware is ubiquitous in The Sprawl. All PCs possess some form of cybernetic enhancement: neural implants, robotic limbs, synthetic nerves, or mechanical eyes. These enhancements give them the edge they need to do their jobs (and provide bonuses and new options for the basic moves). Hefty costs are attached to them: the characters are either owned by the corporation that paid for the operation, hunted by people they owe, or burdened with substandard or defective parts.

One thing I would have liked is an explicit option to opt out of having cyberware. It might limit your character but it seems at least some interesting concepts could come out of it.

The other changes to the system are simpler. Experience needed for advancement is inflated to 10 and is gained by completing or complicating mission.

Combat in the Sprawl feels more brutal. Characters are capable of inflicting lots of damage and the opposition is much more organized than some other settings. Luckily damage vanishes between missions. What doesn't kill you in a mission can be easily cured by future medicine.

Overview

A quick note on world creation.

One thing I really like is how The Sprawl handles the megacorporations that run the world. As step zero in character creation, each player (and the MC) defines a corporation, including its areas of influence and what it is like. The technique allows players to easily define the aspects of the game they want to focus on.

Stats

The stats used in Sprawl include Cool (for grace under pressure), Edge (street smarts combined with an air of professionalism), Meat (for your physical toughness and fighting skill), Mind, Style (a combination of charisma and social skill), and Synth (how well you interface with machines like cyberware or the matrix).

My impressions were mixed. Personally it feels likes there is some overlap between Edge, Style and Cool. Each can be argued to convey an impression of competence. In play this wasn't an issue but then we didn't do much social engineering (with an Infiltrator and a Killer, people were mainly obstacles to be murdered or avoided). On the other hand, the Synth stat makes it clear which characters hue closer to machines than humanity.

Playbooks

The book offers ten archetypes to choose from, each of which carves out a distinct niche in the world of The Sprawl:

• Driver: the transporter and getaway driver as well as part-time drone jockey.
• Fixer: the man or woman who knows everybody. Networking is their thing and they always can find a guy who can help.
• Hacker: master programmer and explorer of the Matrix, the future version of the Internet.
• Hunter: bounty hunter, tracker, and detective. Their focus is in getting information before a mission begins.
• Infiltrator: either a social chameleon or stealthy ninja, they get in and get out without anyone being the wiser.
• Killer: some people need killing. Equipped with the latest cyberware, the Killer is almost more machine than man.
• Pusher: somewhere between an activist, gang leader, and a cultist. The Pusher has a message and a mastery of social-fu.
• Reporter: wields the power of the press to reveal the dirty secrets of the megacorps.
• Soldier: the "Hannibal" of the team, the Soldier has a plan. When the team follows it everything goes smoother.
• Tech: the guy or gal who builds stuff for the mission: weapons, vehicles, cyberware, and so on.

Most of these look like they would work well together. In my games, I was even able to keep a Driver and Infiltrator involved at the same time. The two that I'd worry most about are the Pusher and Reporter. Both include elements in their playbooks that might distract them from what the rest of the group is up to (like the mission). I think either would work great as a focus of the group however.

The Basic Moves

You can tell what an Apocalypse World-based game is about from the basic moves it includes. The Sprawl devotes a fair amount of space to dealing with damage, gathering information, and the mission.

Some of the moves are familiar.

Act Under Pressure is your catch-all knock off of Acting Under Fire. When in doubt use this move, though in my game I think I overused it. That probably indicates that I needed to create some dedicated moves for the actions involved, specifically driving.

Something similar could be said for Mix It Up, the main combat move. In retrospect, I should have homebrewed some version of Apocalypse World 2nd Edition's battle moves.

The other similar moves are solid. Assess is your basic Read a Sitch move, examine a place or person and ask questions about it. This version might have too many choices available. Play Hardball is the Go Aggro, the intimidation move to getting your way with NPCs. Fast Talk let's you manipulate others with words not the threat of violence.

Characters to Help or Interfere with each other, adjusting the odds of success. The interesting thing about this is that Links, the stat used here and which reflects how well a character knows and works well with another, is initially tied into how much trouble the players want to be in with the megacorps. Each player defines a mission their character conducted against one of the corporations and the other players can chime in with how their characters helped. If they did help, they gain +1 Links and advance the corporate clock for that organization. If the clock gets high enough, the megacorp will be coming after them.

This does limit Links to +1 at the start and means small groups are less likely to make a megacorp turn hostile.

Then we get some new moves.

In addition to the standard harm move, we get two new moves dealing with damage. The first, Apply First Aid, handles patching up characters during a mission. In many ways it extends the Angel's (from Apocalypse World) abilities to most characters, thus removing the need for a dedicated medic. Despite getting shot up a lot, my players never had need to use this move. The second, Acquire Agricultural Property (or buy the farm) shows the game's Dungeon World influences. This move comes up when you would otherwise die, allowing a character to cling to life at a cost.

For the information gathering side of things, Assess is joined by Research, a move to use when trawling through a database or other repository of knowledge. For the low tech, there's Declare Contact and Hit the Streets. The first lets you declare a character who owes you one. The second comes up when you go to that contact or one previously established for help. If you are lucky they don't have problems of their own complicating things.

One complaint I have about these moves is that Declare Contact can only be used once per session so it can take time to build up a stable of potential allies (especially if your players neglect to use it each session). At the very least, I think you should be able to Hit the Streets for contacts that don’t owe you one.

Then we have the mission moves.

There is a move to Get the Job which depends on your Edge and determines how forthcoming your employer is and how much trouble you find yourselves already in. On the other end of the session, Get Paid depends more on how much noise your team made before the mission and resolves if this job ends well or with an empty briefcase and many guns pointed at you.

One nice pair of moves works off the new forms of hold in the game. Produce Equipment uses up [*gear] hold to have the right tools when you need them, much like Preparedness in Night's Black Agents. Reveal Knowledge does the same with [*info] to show how your character's behind the scenes intelligence gathering helps you out during the mission.

The final move is a bit of an oddball. Given the costs of cyberware (8+ Cred, the game's currency/status stat) Go Under The Knife seems unlikely to be used frequently enough to justify being a "basic" move. But there it is.

Matrix Moves

Why is it that every science fiction game seems to have a subsystem just for hacking? Perhaps it is simply unavoidable. Some aspects of a game concern only a small subset of characters but are very important to them and the setting (hacking, workshops, driving, combat for combat focused characters, and so on).

Anyway, the moves here are simple but cover a nice range of options. From the necessary Login to Compromising Security and Manipulating Systems to Melting ICE (the brain damaging computer security of the future). I like that the rules include a range of stats between the various moves: Cool, Edge, and Mind and Synth.

Login and its twin Jack Out both read as refined versions of Act Under Pressure. A soft hit still succeeds at your intent but introduces complications. Login is a little different on a miss though. You still succeed but at a greater cost. This makes sense for what is really just the opening move of any Matrix run. Failure at that point isn't very interesting.

Compromise Security and Manipulating Systems both work on a hold system. Each hold spent allows you use that system or security measure.

Finally Melt ICE lets you damage, destroy and evade the computer security of the future. The cost here is whether you hurt it before it hurts you.

This chapter also includes a lot of advice on handling the Matrix, building ICE (Blue, Red and the dreaded Black), and otherwise handling Matrix runs along side other (not net savvy) characters.

Other Material

The one chapter of the book that I didn't see when running the game was the final one: hacking the system (I had the pre-layout version). It is okay as such chapters go and the advice would probably have helped me in the game I ran. As I've mentioned above, I could have used more elaborate out rules for battles and driving, something I should have hacked together myself.

Looks

Final version is laid out well and looks slick. I look forward to a print copy.

Overall Impression

At first glance, this game seemed far too complicated to me with a preponderance of moves and options. On further analysis however, I see that was a flawed impression. The number of basic moves is similar to that of Apocalypse World and games based on it (at least if one ignores the Matrix moves). The archetypes do get a much larger number of initial choices than typical however which might have contributed to my view.

In play the game ran simply and smoothly. You can find the write ups of the sessions here:

1. Character Creation
2. The Black Science Woman Job
3. Crisis of Greed
4. The Unused Mission

Once complication I encountered when running the game was that there was not a basic move sheet. So I had to make my own. You can find a copy here.

The one other item that bothered me was how the mission structure took the focus off the lives of the characters. I would have liked to dived deeper into the PCs' world more; where they lived, who they cared about, how they distracted themselves. Some of that was discovered in play but I wanted more. Of course part of the cause was how the character creation session was cut short due to my son breaking out in hives.

All in all though the game is pretty fun and runs fairly easily.