A couple of weeks ago, I indulged in my nostalgia and made a waybackmachine trip to one of my favourite and long abandoned column serials, Blackjacks Corner on the likewise long abandoned and now defunct Shadowrun Archive.
I've read each of the columns a bazillion times already - mostly during my active Shadowrun GMing time (when it helped me a lot to become skilled in handling intelligent high-tech dungeon crawls and running a living world - possibly the phase in my GMing career when I progressed the most), although I get yet back every now and then to compare the wisdoms from back then with my state of knowledge of today. Occassionally, I find out that I reject now stuff that I found clever back then - and occassionally, I find myself suddenly hearting stuff with my new knowledge that I ignored back then. Today is one such a day.

This time I was reading through the article Using the toilet, which deals with getting more mileage out of the downtime phase between runs in Shadowrun campaigns. On my top ten list of "RPG articles that helped me the most to become a good GM", it has a very high rank, and I employed its ideas a lot to turn my SR campaign from a sterile "runner PCs as rental B&E tools on two legs, who probably rest in an unlit box between the calls from their fixer" affair to a campaign where the runner PCs have been rather an active part of a living, breathing world, which just happens to offer chances for runs to them, rather than being a thin and badly painted cardboard backdrop to bridge the gaping holes between runs.
So, I could basically tell what's in it by heart, and it should be old news to most folks here. Downtime can be used to role-play hobbys and interests that would get into the way of the game flow during runs; downtime can be employed to build and maintain connections and other useful relationships; downtime can be used to pursuit private runs of your own like getting back to that meaty data store you stumbled over last run; yaddayadda.
At least I thought that I've been knowing the article by heart, when I stumbled over an paragraph of which I could only very, very dimly remember that I ever read and processed it:

QuoteGetting To Know The Neighborhood: A shadowrunner doesn't know everything, not even when it comes to their own town. I don't care if somebody's lived in Seattle for 180 years, there are some streets they haven't seen, some places they haven't been, and some places they aren't welcome because nobody knows who they are. The last thing a runner needs, after the pop out of the sewer and onto a remote, desolate street, is to have no clue as to where they are and no better idea of where they're going. During downtime runners should do all they can to remedy this problem by visiting these remote places, poking their heads into a few bars, and trading shotguns (not shotgun blasts, just the shotguns) with local gangs until they feel confident that they could wake up from a dead sleep in this area wearing nothing but their pajamas and still have a place to go. Neighborhoods are very suspicious of strangers. Make damn sure you're not a stranger.

Then I remembered why I've always been ignoring this bit - because the way that I've run my game, and the way that other SR GMs have run their games, it was useless to seek out places in the city and get to know people just for the turf they are active at.
I and everyone else always limited ourselves to the abstract, low-detail SR3 Seattle map in the official books, and we fudged travel routes, gang tuirfs and the like. It always just went this way: "OK, let me take a glance at the map. You need to drive about 50 kilometres, and as traffic is light around 10 o'clock, you can drive through at, lessay, 40km/h. You somehow manage to dodge all the nebulously defined gang turfs while you make your way, and one hour and fifteen minutes later, you are in front of the Renraku pyramid. Whaddoyadoinside - oh, and do you yet have that shiny Enfield shotgun with that bulky drum mag under your armored duster when you get through that revolving door?"

Now, I've been reviewing FTA!GN! between my last and my recent read of this article, which has a nifty system for generating and traveling hex maps. Likewise, I gained better knowledge of games that deal heavily with exploration and/or random places (i.e. Traveller).
I'm thinking about employing a similar approach for sprawls maps in the next cyberpunk games I'm going to run.
First, I want to dissect the sprawl map into hexes. Next, I want to fill up each hex with content (for which I would need some random tables similar to them in FTA!GN! or Trav, to come up with such information as crime rate, law level, allegiance(s) to important organizations of the city like Arasaka corp/Gambione family/etc., or special points of interest as secret corp facilities or radiated power station ruins). Thereafter, I could also well need some subsystems for such issues as "some thug recognizes you"-chances on mob turfs, getting lost in ruined and badly documented alley mazes, or random growth and shrinkage of gangs and their turfs (and some guidelines on how the PCs can influence this power game).


Finally, I'd hopefully end up with a concrete map of the sprawl where it suddenly makes sense to get to know the remote streets, to find friends throughout all of the sprawl and to plan your route carefully to avoid unsavoury encounters. And suddenly, the PCs get forced into action if they have a series of jobs at the Renraku pyramid, if the only two checkpoints that are lax enough to get wired reflexes through are bordering hostile gang turfs. So if they want to make any money this month, they'll have to improve their relationship to one of those gangs - or to get on the good side of a beta male and to help him to replace the alpha male of the gang - or to cajole a friendly gang into a taking over one of hexes, and to support them in this endeavour - or to blackmail the head constable at one of the more restrictive checkpoints at the border of a less hostile hex - or at the very least, to pack the fast bikes and big guns for the purpose to blitzkrieg their way through, if they get detected on their way.
Either way, the game wins, as it forces the players to either find a clever solution, or to blast it out (and "blast it out" is always a viable substitute for actually interesting game content, as the inventor of the "suddenly, two guys with SMGs tear down the door" technique can confirm).

After all, cyberpunk sprawls shouldn't be shiny happy fantasy towns where you get around easily and encounter at worst a pickpocket who's after your copper coins, or a gruntling bailiff who thinks that you looked too funnily at him. They should rather serve the same gameplay purposes as fantasy wilderness, as savage, indomitable and widely stretched places which are bustling with life, well-defined areas of interest (and danger) and random encounters with possibly much bigger fish than you.
Certainly, as long as your records are clean, no guns are under your jacket and no wired reflexes alert any sensors, you get nicely around downtown and corp suburbs, just as in fantasy games there might be this nice safe imperial road through the Loveable Plains where you at worst meet an one-legged goblin with a pointy stick. But then there are also gang-infested slums where it could be a matter of life and death if your shirt is green or red, and abandonded ruin districts where drug-crazed cultists blow out your tires with AK47s for crossing their road. And likewise, the typical PCs tend to have guns in their waistbands, illegal smart links under their skin[1] and a long history of breaking, entering and homicide, so even in corptown they should watch which checkpoints they can safely cross and which are too plastered with well-maintained sensors, face-recognition cams and trigger-happy security guards with such name tags as "Ian K. O'Ruptible", "I. B. Tuppunx" or "Feroggio Kärcherowski". And there, in corptown, might also be the turf of nice little Don Tagliatella, whose nice little thugs are yet looking for you to have a nice little chat with nice little espresso mugs on the table and a nice little hammer blow on your fingers about their not-so-nice feelings of not-so-little discontentment regarding the nice little abduction of Consigliere McMoneywash three months ago...


What I'm wondering about is: Has anyone tried to employ such (h)exploration techniques for their cyberpunk sprawls, or for similar settings (independent pirate ports in space opera games, fantasy rogue cities à Port Blacksand etc.)?
How did it go? What went well? Where were issues? What would you change next time?
If you have devised subsystems as I think about (such as random sprawl hexes), what did they look like, and would you share them?
Did you ever have similar problems with nebulously defined sprawl maps?
Any other thoughts on this matter?


[1] Or illegally memorized fireball spells in their head, or illegally obtained ha-do-ken chi power training. (Just in case before some smartass points out that in Shadowrun not every viable PC is cybered.)

In a 2nd edition Gamma World campaign many years ago I turned the Pitz Burke ruins into sort of an outdoor megadungeon with a much more active regular society operating in parts. I didn't use a hexmap, it was based on a square grid that scaled down nicely into city blocks and then lots.

On a different note, the Blackjack site ROCKS! I've never played Shadowrun, but the books of NPCs and so on are amongst the very best free netbooks ever.

So, did you just keep track of the standard GW information like ruins, technological artifacts or general population? Or any other of the information I mentioned as possibly useful for a sprawl campaign, like area covered by various factions and their rise and descend?
How did it help or hinder your campaign, and did it have any of the effects I aim for?


BTW, Hexes aren't the actual point. I might as well use a grid map, and it could have some advantages, especially if you go for an American city with its chessboard block structure.
Then again, hexes might be more convenient for kitbashed shantytowns and other wildly grown parts of the city, and might be advantageous to cover nearby wilderness areas of interest, like remote corp facilities, nomad camps (in CP2020) or amerindian talismongery claims (in SR).
I'd need to think about that one again when I get to actual campaign prep.

And Blackjack rocks indeed. He's been a hero of my early GMing days with his material and advice, and it's a damn shamn that he's left the online world of the hobby (if he's at all in the hobby yet).

Alright, I probably got way more into this topic than I should, but I just put up my Christmas tree and I'm happy. Here's a quick .pdf I whipped up to do random generic urban blocks and detail the buildings and contents.

Scifi Urban Blocks.pdf 31.6 Kb

and here's an old Gamma World pdf about urban street gangs and societies which you can integrate with the above to populate the sprawl

Wild in the Streets

These are some dang useful tables!

The city block tables might need some tweaked entries and some modifiers for area to fit for cyberpunk purposes, but nothing that couldn't be accomplished with a red pen and a boring afternoon. I'm going to share that when I get around to do so.

The gang tables reminds me of Ocelots Gang Creation Chart for CP2020, although it seems to be expanded from a cursory glance.

Whoa Thanks!

These So Rock!

Cool, glad you like it. I'm working over that pdf right now, giving it some art and better layout (almost thought I'd lost the Word .doc which was mistakenly named Scifi Urban BLACKS). Anyways, look for an announcement here shortly.