Jul 09

Three Tight Jams

As I noted in a (backer only) Kickstarter update, I was at Origins last month. I ran three games of The Sprawl in Games on Demand for players including external playtesters, backers, and interested people who missed the kickstarter.

I ran the same mission three times, The Bogatyrev Jam, a hostile extraction of a mobile target passing through the team’s sprawl, each time with fun and different results. When I run The Sprawl, I usually have the players write the corporations we create on index cards, but at Gamex back in May, I forgot to pack them, so I picked up a noteboard (as frequently used by Fate GMs for recording aspects in play). Here are the Sprawls we created over the three Origins games:

The Amazonian Landfall Sprawl

This was actually two linked Sprawls: The Amazonian Landfall Sprawl in the once-forested upper Amazon basin connected by a corporate controlled space elevator to the Amazonian Canopy Sprawl, a geosynchronous conglomeration of orbital platforms. This mission ended with a bloody, high-speed extraction from a passenger shuttle in the space elevator itself. Bogatyrev did not survive.

The Paris Sprawl

One of the players introduced experimental man-portable laser systems into the fiction… so of course he was sliced in half by laser fire in the final showdown in a narrow Parisian street. I can’t remember whether I advanced the Action Clock to 0000 or not. Either way, the mission ended… poorly. I think Bogatyrev survived though.

The SeaTacPorCouver Sprawl

This one was a tangled tale in which every corp was implicated. It ended with a passenger jet hijacking, an air to surface missile, a spot of intra-team sniping, and Bogatyrev’s corpse dangling from a parachutist. Good times!

Coming Attractions

My next convention appearance will be Gen Con in a few weeks. I’ll be running The Sprawl in Games on Demand, hopefully with a new two-hour quickstart game. I’m running a backer reward game and I’ll try to find time in my schedule for a backer meet and greet; stay tuned! Twitter will probably be the best way to get in touch over the weekend.

Hamish Cameron

Hamish has been playing, designing and tweaking games since he discovered Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in the mid-80s. Most of that designing and tweaking has involved tabletop roleplaying games and miniatures wargames, but a few free-form larps and multiplayer team strategy games (now also known as "megagames") have snuck into the mix along the way. After a decade in Los Angeles, Maine, and other parts of the US, he is now back in Aotearoa. In addition to Ardens Ludere, he is part of the creative team at Cheeky Mountain Parrot Games.

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