In January 2024 we presented the new Sprawl Bundle featuring The Sprawl, the Apocalypse Engine cyberpunk SFRPG from Ardens Ludere. The Sprawl is a game of mission-based action in a gritty neon-and-chrome future right out of William Gibson. You are deniable, disposable assets of vast multinational corporations, performing tasks those multinationals can’t do – or can’t be seen to do.
The tools in The Sprawl rulebook and its supplements let you run fast-playing, fiction-first cyberpunk missions Powered by the Apocalypse. Create your own Sprawl at the nexus of bleeding-edge technology and fragile humanity, or use these full-featured rules as a drop-in replacement in games like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk Red. Play hardbitten professionals balancing ruthless corporate interests. Glide through secure computer networks, crack the ICE, cut power to the alarms, slip past the auto-sentries, secure the prototype, flick chrome blades from your fingers, and slice through that corporate response team between you and the exit. Collect your fee and watch for double crosses. Next week, hit the street and do it again.
The Sprawl corebook recasts basic cyberpunk elements in Apocalypse terms:
- Principles like “Chrome everything, then make it dirty,” “Make everything Corporate/Make everything personal,” and “Treat your NPCs like disposable assets.”
- All the appropriate playbooks: Driver, Fixer, Hacker, Hunter, Infiltrator, Killer, Pusher, Reporter, Soldier, Tech.
- A powerful range of moves like Fast Talk, Hit the Street, Mix It Up, Play Hardball (intimidate), Declare a Contact, Produce Equipment (have the gadget you need at the right time), Go Under the Knife (install cyberware), and “Acquire Agricultural Property” (that is, buy the farm – that is, die, or barely avoid dying).
- Task lists for many mission types like Destruction, Guard, Extraction, Infiltration, Smuggle/Courier, Capture, and Hunt.
- Lots of computer-hacking moves that play much faster than the Matrix rules in (say) Shadowrun.
- Even getting paid is a move: Your success roll determines if you get your money (or mark experience), attract unwanted attention, or get ambushed. You never get away clean.
The Sprawl corebook provides all the elements players need to collaboratively create an atmospheric Sprawl setting and straightforward genre missions. The setting supplement November Metric adds specific mission backdrops like Lagos, Paris, Miami, Los Angeles, the Great Lakes Megalopolis, a South Pacific arcology, Jurczyk Munition Research Laboratories, and North Korea, which, in the year 2070 after a prolonged civil war, is facing a violent corporate cold war.
And for Shadowrun players looking for alternative rules, two Touched supplements introduce magic into the setting. Touched: A Darkening Alley is set in the 1980s as magic starts to manifest in the world. And Touched Prime jumps to 2050, when nonhuman “kin groups” have appeared, and the corporate system has seamlessly absorbed magical practice.
There were five titles in our Sprawl Collection (retail value $83) as complete DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including The Sprawl core rulebook (previously in the November 2017 Indie Cornucopia 5), plus the introductory mission The Downtown Dataheist; the setting sourcebook November Metric; the scenario collection Mission Files; and two rules expansions that introduce magic into this punk setting: Touched: A Darkening Alley and Touched Prime.
