The Sprawl
v1.0Best For
Groups who want structured heist-style missions with a hacking minigame and a growing web of corporate rivals across a campaign. It suits players who enjoy risky planning and personal ties that complicate the crew's loyalties.
Core Mechanic
When an action matches a move's fictional trigger, roll 2d6 plus Cool, Edge, Meat, Mind, Style, or Synth. A 10+ is a strong hit, 7-9 is a weak hit, and a 6 or less lets the MC make a move.
Character creation and the core two-dice roll are quick to teach, since each playbook lists only a handful of starting moves. The depth sits in the systems layered around that simple core: cyberware tags, weapon and vehicle construction, a full Matrix hacking subsystem with its own moves and tiers of ICE, and five separate kinds of Countdown Clock spanning harm, missions, corporations, and threats. Running a mission means juggling the Legwork and Action clocks alongside whichever corporate and threat clocks are already active from past sessions. A new group can finish a single mission quickly, but an MC needs practice to hold the full set of interlocking systems together smoothly.
- Free to tryNothing freeNo free rules or starter
- Get it nowSold newIn print or as a legal PDF
- –IndexNo back-of-book index or page-keyed reference tables
- ✓GM guidanceA chapter on how to run the game
- ✓Examples of playRules shown in action at the table
- ✓Quick referenceCheat sheet or summary tables
- ✓Cross-referencesRules point to each other by page
4 of 5 book tools found in the core book
Highlights
Countdown Clocks track legwork noise, mission alertness, and corporate attention on separate tracks, giving missions a visible pressure gauge instead of a single doom clock. Cyberdeck ratings and tiered ICE turn hacking into its own tactical minigame layered on the standard moves. The Legwork and Action phase structure lets intel and gear earned through investigation convert directly into narrated advantages during the mission itself.
Considerations
Combat and infiltration rely on fictional positioning and MC judgment as much as dice modifiers, so groups who want tightly defined tactical rules may find some outcomes settled by table discussion. Running an ongoing campaign means the MC tracks separate Countdown Clocks for every corporation, threat, and mission in play at once. Choosing how a character paid for their starting cyberware can permanently tie that character to being owned or hunted by a specific corporation.
No verified third-party publishing route found · Reviewed 2026-09-22 · Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. Rules license Proprietary Bounded review of the rulebook credits, the DriveThruRPG listing, and the publisher's site (live and archived via Wayback Machine) found no published third-party or compatibility license. A substantial ecosystem of commercial supplements and an authorized French translation are sold via itch.io and DriveThruRPG and cross-linked from the designer's own itch.io page, but no explicit terms document was located.
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