The Sprawl Mission 1: The Birthday Party

I decided it would be fun to run some one-shots of The Sprawl, possibly extending into future missions if all went well.  I got seven people available to play, and since PBTA games work better with 3-4 players, I decided to run two missions for two different groups.  Perhaps at some point in the future members of the two teams will work together?

If you'd like to see what happened in Mission 2, there's a player's write-up here, but here's how things went down with the first group.

The Birthday Party

It's cough years in the future and the former United Kingdom has collapsed, devolving into a number of independent city states as global warming and the urban sprawl gradually obliterated the once green and pleasant land.

Central City: a megacity covering most of what used to be called the Midlands.  While there's officially a democratically elected government, everyone knows the real power is in the hands of the multinational corporations.

But there are things that the corporations can't do - or can't be seen to be doing.  And that's where the crew comes in.

The crew all received identical messages from a Miss Smith, telling them to meet her at Raphael's to discuss a job.  A rather more upscale restaurant that they were used to, as the pizzas came with real cheese.  If nothing else, the meeting might be worthwhile for the free meal.

Miss Smith explained the job.  Jiro Nihei was turning twenty-one in a few days' time.  His mother, Kimiko Nihei, was the CEO of Nihei Industries and had planned the kind of party that befitted the heir to the corporation.  A polite affair, with cocktails, piano music and a carefully curated guest list of high level NI employees.

What Jiro Nihei wanted, however, was drugs, women and loud music, and there was a substantial payout available in exchange for ensuring that he got the kind of party he wanted without his mother finding out about it.

Once terms had been negotiated, the team got to work.  Looking into Jiro's social media gave them some ideas on what kind of party he enjoyed: illegal raves.  Not the kind of thing advertised in public forums, but a dive into the deep web told them that his favourite DJ Mesmer would be performing in an abandoned warehouse on the canalside on the night of the party.

Keeping Jiro's mother in the dark would be a bigger challenge, and while giving her food poisoning was briefly considered, they finally decided on a body double and a handler.  Trenton hit up his cult for someone prepared to get the necessary facial sculpting to impersonate Jiro for a night, and Donau recruited a skilled operative to stay with him and deflect questioning.

The night of the party arrived.  Marsh Rat jacked into the Orion Hotel's security, deftly avoiding the Black ICE, and added a few extra names to the guest list.  Trenton headed inside, and managed to locate Jiro without arousing suspicion, easily persuading him to leave for a better party.  They headed for Jiro's private suite, where Jiro got changed into some clothes more suited to an illegal rave and Trenton tried to steal his phone.  Tried, since Jiro returned while he was still holding in, and took some convincing that nothing untoward was happening.

Meanwhile, with Marsh Rat in control of the security cameras, the double and handler were brought in to make the switch in Jiro's suite.  The double put on Jiro's clothes.  Donau diverted suspicion by posing as an incompetant waiter, and soon Jiro was out of the building and on Gear's bike.

They hadn't entirely avoided detection, as became obvious when another bike in Nihei Industries colours gave chase, but Gear and his bike were practically a single entity and soon shook off the tail.  The others got in an AI taxi and left via a different route.

At the warehouse, DJ Mesmer's show was in full swing.  Jiro threw himself in with enthusiasm, while Gear kept an eye on things to make sure nothing untoward happened before the others showed up.  Only one threat stood out: a man with the glint of a cybernetic eye implant who seemed to be recording.  One quiet little chat about living in the now and he was persuaded to stop the recording and erase his footage.  Disappointed, he headed off to sample the recreational pharmaceuticals on offer.

Jiro was similarly keen to indulge, but with the team keeping close watch, he was still more or less upright when it was time to get him back to the Orion Hotel.  Word from the handler was that Fake Jiro had played his part well and got an appropriate level of drunk.  However, the hotel were concerned about a potential theft and had tightened up security, locking down all external doors.

External doors were no match for Marsh Rat, however, and the garage opened up just in time for Gear to slide his bike dramatically underneath it.  Jiro was returned to his room, and the double and handler brought out again, and the team made their exit.

They met up with Miss Smith again the next morning, and got paid.  There was still one questioning bothering them though.  Who was behind this job?  While the exact source couldn't be indentified, they were able to find out who Miss Smith was working for.  Nihei Industries.

Cyberpunk Red's lifepath in action: Armala's backstory

I love a life path system.  It was by far my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020 and I'm delighted that Cyberpunk Red has one too.  I randomly rolled my netrunner's backstory, and used it to write the following backstory incorporating everything I rolled.  One of the other PCs rolled the same childhood background living in a megabuilding, so we decided that was how we knew each other and I've incorporated some of the details of his story into mine.  In particular, the megabuilding in question, owned by a corporation with a particular fondness for alternative facts, whose residents are indoctrinated with capitalists beliefs and the values of America's greatest ever president...

---

Armala Suda was born into a homeless community in Night City.  Several families lived together under a bridge until one day they finally managed to find a way inside one of the city's megabuildings.

They hoped to find work and maybe even a home there, but the residents of Eric Trump Plaza turned out to be oddly suspicious of anyone even slightly brown.  They tried to escape the building, but their original entrance point had been cut off and attempting to leave via the main entrance without documentation resulted in a police shooting.  The only survivors were Armala, her parents, and Armala's friend Kamala Singh, thanks to one of the residents, a janitor, who risked his own life to snatch the two girls out of the line of fire.  The four of them went into hiding, making their new home in the dumpsters, constantly on the lookout for the building's authorities.

Finding she had a knack with machines and computers, Armala began to practice making the security cameras look the other way to make their foraging a little easier.  The residents were a little harder to hide from, but soon realised Armala could be useful to them too, and soon she was trading her skills for food and clothes for her family.  Dean, who worked at the gun range, started sneaking her in after hours so she could learn to shoot.  It wasn't long before they were in love, but their plans for a life together were tragically cut short.  Dean was killed when one of the range's customers accidentally shot him dead.

Armala attempted to channel her grief into something positive, answering an advert for someone to play synthesizer in a new band called Gen Sys.  While she was forced to leave when the rest of the band's infighting started to attract too much attention, it did allow her to catch the eye of a local netrunner collective.

They were working to take down the corporation owning the building from the inside and looking for a new member.  They offered to get her neural link installed in exchange for her working with them, and she accepted.  One of the first things she did with her new abilities was to hack the door code of an apartment in the hab block that she knew had recently been vacated, to give her parents and Kamala their first real home.

Initially her work for the collective was to pay off her cyberware, but soon she became friends with one of her fellow netrunners, Arch.  While she wasn't convinced when Arch insisted on setting her up on a date with her younger brother Bobby, things went better than anticipated and soon they were dating.

Life with the netrunner crew was going well.  Arch and Armala made a good team and their services were in demand.  It all went wrong one day when they started picking up chatter across the megabuilding's networks suggesting that a riot was imminent.  They tried to contact Bobby to get him away from the danger area, but by the time they got through it was too late and Bobby was killed in a fight with the police.

As a known associate of Bobby, now officially declared a terrorist, Armala (now going by the name Widow) knew it was time to get Arch, herself and her family out of Eric Trump Plaza.  Help came from an unlikely source.  Staff Sergeant James Ford had been part of the police squad that had attacked them when they first tried to leave the megabuilding.  He'd seen the corporation for what it truly was that day and finally had the chance to try to make things right, risking everything to get them out of the building.  Unable to ever return safely, he took the fake ID Arch offered him to begin a new life outside the building.

Out of the building, Arch and Widow set up a new team of freelance netrunners catering to local nomads and fixers.  Unfortunately they'd had to abandon all their old clients in the flight from the Plaza, and some of them have taken this as a personal insult.  Widow doesn't intend to let them get the better of her though.  After everything she's been through, anyone attempting to cross her had better watch out.  One day she'll get the janitor who saved her and Kamala out of there and into a better life.  And then that building's going down.

First Time Playing: Out of the Ashes

Between Pathfinder 2, Symbaroum and Forbidden Lands, I'm firmly of the opinion that I have enough fantasy games already, but when Paul Mitchener, the creator of Liminal, shows up with one, I've got to at least take a look.

Out of the Ashes is a fantasy game set in the aftermath of a war against a terrible evil that's left the world close to ruin.  Characters will undertake quests to fight the remnants of said evil and rebuild their community.  The setting reminds me of Forbidden Lands, while the play style made me think rather of Mutant: Year Zero.

The system bears no resemblence to these Year Zero engine games, however, using a 2d10 mechanic that's a modification of Liminal.  Success is slightly harder to achieve than in Liminal, reflecting the very different type of game that's happening here, and the various methods for improving rolls all have some kind of roleplay hook attached.

But the important thing is whether it's fun to play, and I loved it.  You could look at the setting and system individually, but what makes this so good is that just like in Liminal, the two sides work together to complement each other.  Things like the skill list including Song, which backs up the importance of music in the setting.

Then there's the monsters, in the form of the Tainted, who are thoroughly creepy.  The main concern with fantasy games for me is whether it's just going to be a rehash of everything I already know from years of playing D&D and Pathfinder.  No; this game has its own theme and the corrupted remnants of what used to be humans fit right in here.

Naturally one of the first things we did (much like when Paul's GMed Liminal games for us) was to head straight for the pub.  Besides that we had two problems to deal with, one requiring planning and subterfuge and the other heading out into the wilderness to fight monsters.  This game has the flexibility to do both well.

I'm a difficult sell on a fantasy game.  I can't see me embracing this quite as wholeheartedly as I have Liminal as there are so many good options in this genre.  But to create a fantasy game that I find exciting and refreshing and want to play more of is quite an achievement.

Out of the Ashes is fully funded on Kickstarter at the moment, with just a few days to go.  Our Actual Play is available on YouTube now if you want to see what it looks like on the (virtual) table.

First Time Playing: Cyberpunk Red

I have a love/hate relationship with Cyberpunk 2020.  I love the incredible setting, which ties multiple classics of the genre together into one glorious whole.  I hate the godawful system where combat has so many variables you're doing algebra to work out what's happened, is so subject to min-maxing that parties can easily end up wildly imbalanced, and where you can't play one of the genre's most important character types, the netrunner, because the system is so badly designed that most GMs won't let anyone play them.

But 30 years have passed and here's a new edition.

We started off with character creation and picked our roles.  I went for a netrunner, since I'd obviously never been able to play one before, and dived into the life path generator.

The life path generator is probably my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020, and I'm glad to say that Cyberpunk Red is just as much fun.  Some details have been changed, and notably the bits that made things less fun have been removed.  With the possibility of getting unexpectedly shafted by your life path no longer on the table, it's a lot more reasonable to allow players to choose things off the lists if they don't like what they originally rolled.

So I rolled Eastern European as my ethnic origin, but since 2/3 of the CP2020 characters I've played were Eastern European I decided to make her Middle Eastern instead.  She's also a flashy dresser, with wild hair and a fondness for wearing spiky gloves.

On to personality and background.  Here things got a bit strange, as we rolled a group of antisocial and violent types who nevertheless think people are wonderful.  This would be a good point to allow some choosing off lists, but my group are who we are, so we're running with it.  I'm also a little confused where my character developed her netrunning skills, since she grew up homeless, but I'll find a way to work with it.

The family and relationships section has been trimmed down to a sensible level, with three rolls of 1d10-7 to determine friends, enemies and tragic love affairs.  I rolled three friends, no enemies, and two tragic love affairs, both of which ended in the untimely death of my partner.  The other players immediately gave my character her street name: Widow.

One completely new thing is a custom life path section based on your role.  For my netrunner it filled out a few details like who she works with and for, and what her workspace looks like.  This is a great addition and helps the roles to feel unique.

Onto stats and skills.  There are various degrees of customisation available here, but despite the GM giving us options, we all agreed to ignore all that and take the 'street rat' route: roll 1d10 to select your stat block from a grid, then take a standard set of skills and equipment.  While I wasn't entirely impressed with the stat blocks (I feel if you have a set of standard arrays like this that they should all add up to the same points cost) this was a quick way of getting things done, avoiding both min-maxing and choice paralysis, and made sure we were all at similar levels of competence in our respective roles.

It was a pretty prolonged character creation process, even using the pre-built lists, so I would definitely recommend a Session 0 to anyone running this without pre-gens.  Amongst other things, the life path generator throws up a lot of backstory without fleshing out the details, and some time spent between sessions figuring out things like who my three friends are and why some of my former clients hate me would be useful.

We dived straight into an adventure, however.  I picked up the jumpstart kit from DTRPG during a sale but never got as far as reading the adventure, so I sent that over to the GM so he could run The Apartment.

Things immediately became more complicated, as the GM hasn't actually GMed in quite a while now but has been running LARPs.  When you've got 50-100 players involved, you need multiple storylines running simultaneously to keep everyone engaged.  Not so much with a normal TTRPG party of 4-6 players.  I'm not sure how far into The Apartment we've actually got, as we seem to have spent most of the session somewhere else.

What this did throw up is that it's important to talk about the setting, particularly if you're playing with veteran CP2020 players.  CP2020 was a spectacularly 1980s image of the future.  CPRed has been updated significantly, and things like pocket sized smart phones now exist, so there was a bit of adjustment at the start as we all got used to the fact that we were living in a more up-to-date future.  This won't be an issue for people new to the setting, but for my group it was definitely an important thing to bring up.

We haven't had the chance to dive too deep into the system so far, but we did have a few skill rolls, and so far my impression is that the difficulty chart seems well put together.  My netrunner does extremely well at her particular areas of competence, and is just about capable of success at something very easy in her weakest areas.

We also did a bit of practice combat at the end, just to see how it worked, and unlike CP2020, I actually understand it.  Again it looks pretty well scaled.  A weak, unarmoured opponent can be dropped in one good shot from a heavy gun, but a PC in armour is a bit more durable.  Crits happen when you roll multiple 6s on the damage dice, and there's some nice tables to roll critical injuries on.  While people aren't going to be shedding limbs all over the place like in CP2020 it's nice to see that it's still an option.

My only real qualm is that the game still uses the mechanic where cyberware implants decrease your humanity and take your empathy stat with it.  My netrunner started out with only 5 empathy, and once the neural interface that she needs to do her job was installed, that was down to 3.  The good news is that fashionware no longer has any humanity cost, so rockerboys can have their tech hair and light tattoos without suddenly becoming incompetant.  All the same, it means that empathy retains its status as the 'how much cyberware can I fit in my body?' stat, which is the source of quite a lot of CP2020 min-maxing and the reason I would not allow people to use the point buy system for making their character statblocks.

There's still a lot about this game I've yet to experience, particularly the netrunning, but so far it looks like a solid improvement on CP2020 and I'm looking forward to getting to play more of one of my favourite settings without some of my least favourite rules.

First Time Playing: Brindlewood Bay

Brindlewood Bay is a game where you play elderly women investigating mysteries while a Lovecraftian cult lurks under the surface.  I've been wanting to give this a go since I first heard about it, so was very happy to see it offered in the MK RPG club short block.

By chance, all three players were women - or was it that this game particularly appeals to women?  Either way we were soon busy creating our Mavens, discussing our careers pre-retirement, our dead spouses and our cosy hobbie.  It took quite a large chunk of the first session as there's a lot of things to think about and not all of it can be done by the usual PBTA box ticking.

What can be done by box ticking is selecting your special ability.  Each of these are named after well known characters - I went for MacGyver, and later used it to pick a lock using only some hairgrips, elastic bands and a bit of metal trim.  Rather disappointingly for a game about women, the abilities all seem to be named after male characters.  I would have liked to have seen some iconic female characters on the list - although I appreciate that making them all women would have likely have resulted in a rather short list.

But eventually, Rosemary, Gladys and Hyacinth were created and ready to solve mysteries, and off we went to investigate the death of a man who'd fallen off a yacht.  The way this game works differently to most mystery solving RPGs is that there was no correct solution.  Instead we had to assemble a number of clues, and then towards the end of the adventure we had a discussion where we put together a theory of what happened that made use of said clues.

This all gave it the feel of a TV show where not everything is revealed at once.  At one point my character found a diary with a dramatic phrase on the last page.  What wasn't specified is who the diary belonged to - which meant that we were able to decide between us whose it was when we discussed our theory.  I could just picture the scene where the character pulls out the diary, opens it, and the camera switches to her shocked face without showing the audience what she's just read.

There was one mechanic we didn't use, and that was crowns.  In Brindlewood Bay your character can 'put on a crown' which allows them to change something about the narrative in exchange for narrating something quite specific about their character.  Trouble is, part of the charm of PBTA is that failure is often as interesting as success, and the point where my character unexpectedly got tasered and shoved in a cupboard was such a cool dramatic moment and made for such a good cliffhanger (given that it happened at the end of the first session) that I didn't want to change it.

Something else we didn't use was the dark occult conspiracy aspect of the game.  Partly that was because we only played one mystery and our rolls weren't generally high enough to start digging into that.  But I also don't feel the game needs it.  Cozy Mystery is a perfectly good genre on its own without shoving tentacles into it.  As someone with a great fondness for things like Miss Marple and Rosemary and Thyme, I was far more interested in the 'mature ladies solves mysteries' part of the game.  Part of what's so great about this genre is the contrast between the twee setting and the deep dive into the darkness of the human soul, and I feel like adding the Cthulhu Mythos into that detracts from it rather than adding anything.

Overall I really enjoyed the game.  Mechanically it's solid, with the tweaks to the PBTA engine really suiting the mood.  All three characters got a chance to shine, and the attempt to assemble the clues into some kind of coherent narrative was great fun.  We all enjoyed it enough that we're going to try another mystery in the next short block.

What I'm not quite so sold on is playing it as a longer term campaign rather than these brief one-offs.  Presumably that's what the dark conspiracy stuff is supposed to be for, but given that that aspect just doesn't interest me, that's not going to work for me.  Perhaps it would be possible to reframe it into something a bit more genre-appropriate (Hot Fuzz springs to mind) but cozy mysteries to me are inherently episodic.

But treated as an occasional episodic game, focussed on the cozy mystery and not the occult, I think I'll continue to have a lot of fun with this game.