Session 0 — Worldbuilding

A session zero: no play, just collaborative worldbuilding, corp pitches, character-concept discussion, a recap of the crew’s previous (pre-campaign) job, and rules Q&A ahead of the first real mission.

Summary

The table built out Knight City together — its verticality (spires above, a mined-out Under Sector below), its threadbare government, and its retro-’80s, neon-and-chrome, Neo-Asian-inflected tone. Each player invented one of the setting’s corporations: NSMC, Rest Easy Interstate Services, Urban Access Development, Kessauer Dynamics, and VYRAL. Creator credits are recorded on the corporation pages.

From there, the group collaboratively recapped the crew’s previous job — an esports “cheating” investigation that turned into uncovering a covert VYRAL/NSMC wetware mind-control test — establishing most of the crew’s starting relationships, debts, and enemies. The session closed with rules questions (cyberware combos, harm/armor math, weapon tags) and scheduling: wrap-up chat/links to be finished offline by the 14th, first real mission session set for the 22nd at 10 AM.

Key Events

Building Knight City

The table agreed to keep the setting recognizably “Night City” but respelled Knight City (K-N-I-G-H-T) as a running joke that became the actual name. Key decisions: a vertical city (spires up, a hollowed-out Under Sector down) connected by tolled, privatized multi-level roads; Blade Runner-over-Fifth-Element restraint on flying vehicles; a strong Neo-Asian cyberpunk aesthetic; and a mostly-decorative central government, with two competing (unresolved) ideas floated for what’s really in charge — a corporate advisory council, or a disengaged singularity-level AI doing the bare minimum to keep its mandate. See Knight City for full details.

Corp Pitches

Each player introduced a corporation, which the table then wove together (NSMC’s black salt monopoly feeding wetware/cybernetics; Rest Easy and Urban Access Development’s infrastructure partnership; Kessauer Dynamics’ K-Net/Daedalus underpinning the whole city). See each organization’s page for details: NSMC, Rest Easy Interstate Services, Urban Access Development, Kessauer Dynamics, VYRAL.

The Previous Job

Recapped collaboratively rather than played out — this is the crew’s pre-campaign history, not the upcoming first mission:

• A major citywide extraction-shooter esports competition ended with runner-up Pinnacle Squad accusing the winning team (“the Donald” as leader) of cheating.
• The crew (already including Bullfrog and Neon Drift as an established pair, with Muktar and Speckz Arioso brought on as new talent for the job) was hired to infiltrate the winning team’s data center and find proof of cheating.
• Bullfrog hacked the winning team’s systems and found no cheating in the conventional sense. During the out-of-character recap, Feklars (Speckz’s player) suggested that the real scheme involved a dark AI presence covertly puppeting people via wetware—“controlling real robots” in the underground fighting circuit—and the table adopted that as what the crew uncovered. Speckz himself did not perform the hack or uniquely discover the scheme.
• The crew went public with what they found. VYRAL (revealed as a co-conspirator with NSMC) responded with a disinformation blitz — six contradictory cover stories — rather than a denial.
• Ambiguity was left deliberate: it’s unclear whether the crew’s actual employer was really the runner-up team, or a rival corp’s deniable agents posing as them to get the scandal exposed.
• Payment was murky at best — the crew likely wasn’t paid what they were promised, if at all — but they came away with a new ally: a pusher faction opposed to VYRAL’s information monopoly, who arranged to bring Muktar onto the crew as new muscle (partly as a genuine need, partly as a test of the crew’s ethics).
• Muktar’s own history surfaced here: a former NSMC arena fighter (“Ora”) who escaped the Under Sector with a dying agent’s (Kestrel) help, motivated to stop this exact kind of forced control from spreading further.
• Neon Drift separately hired Speckz Arioso to trace scattered former Van Life members, leading to a tense first contact with Van Morrison, who Neon refused to fall back in line for.

Links

The table worked out (loosely — full mechanical resolution deferred) each PC’s relationship links: Bullfrog↔Neon Drift (pre-existing, plus Neon dating Bullfrog’s mother), Bullfrog↔Muktar (Bullfrog’s a fan of “Ora”; also an unrelated, unrevealed joke about Muktar having once eaten a different man who’d slept with Bullfrog’s mother), and Speckz Arioso holding prior working relationships with both Neon Drift and Muktar.

Rules Q&A

Clarified as a group, mostly by Muktar’s and Speckz Arioso’s players working through the book together — see Errata below.

Standout Quotes

“I want to be a lizard man from underground. A lizard man. That’s my character.” — Killjoy Keegan (Muktar), pitching the character concept that became Muktar

“It’s like this: a layer cake where every layer has its own roads.” — Duskit (Bullfrog), on Knight City’s verticality

“Soilent green is people.” / “It is people.” — SiliKen and Killjoy Keegan, on Knight City’s food supply

“You’re not Van Life. I’ll find the rest of them… and escape, because I’m a much better driver than he is.” — regular human faits (Neon Drift), refusing Van Morrison

“What makes it a sniper rifle is the person who holds it.” — SiliKen, mid-rules-argument over weapon damage

Open Threads

• VYRAL/NSMC wetware program — exposed but not stopped; both corps are now aware of and hostile toward the crew.
• Muktar’s debt to Kestrel — unresolved; still needs to identify who/what she owed.
• Neon Drift’s search for his mother — ongoing, tied to the scattered Van Life diaspora.
• Van Morrison — refused, not neutralized; a plausible recurring threat to Neon Drift.
• The pusher faction ally — new relationship gained from the previous job; not yet named or detailed.
• Who really hired the crew for the previous job — deliberately left ambiguous (runner-up team vs. a rival corp’s deniable agents).

Meta / Errata

Table-level rulings on The Sprawl’s rules, for future reference:

• Harm vs. armor: Weapon harm rating sets how many segments fill on a character’s harm clock; it has no separate narrative weight beyond that. Armor of 1+ subtracts directly from the harm clock impact (before rolling); if the result would go below zero, no harm move is rolled at all. Zero-armor gear (e.g. “armored clothing/synth leather”) instead subtracts 1 from the harm move roll itself (not the clock) — a much smaller effect, since the roll result (not the harm number) determines narrative consequences.
• Weapon harm feels flat by design: a sniper rifle and a revolver both do 3 harm — the MC’s ruling is that a bullet is a bullet; what makes a sniper rifle distinct is range/narrative permission (can engage from far/extreme range) and tags (loud), not raw damage. Player pushback on this noted but not changed.
• Reload tag: appears to apply specifically to revolver-type weapons, not magazine-fed guns — swapping a magazine isn’t treated as narratively significant enough to warrant the tag.
• Cyberware combos: confirmed that a second slot unlocked via a move like “Chromed” can be filled from anywhere on the cyberware list, not restricted to the same sub-list as the first pick.
• Inaccessible partition (cyberware tag): means the implant’s data can’t be accessed by the implantee themselves — someone else with proper access needs to retrieve it. Confirmed it must be paired with a “recording” tag to actually store anything, meaning it effectively costs two cyberware picks to use as a data-courier setup.

Player Notes

• Character sheets live in a shared Google Drive folder, organized (currently) by playbook name rather than character name; the MC noted plans to rename these to character names.
• One player also cross-checked the raw transcript against ChatGPT (given a player/character map) as a second tool alongside this Claude Code pipeline — noted as working well.
• Wrap-up on links/relationships to be finished offline via Discord by the 14th.
• First real mission session scheduled for the 22nd at 10 AM.