Interview with Courtney Campbell from Sinless

What is a city game?

Sinless has been really interesting to me. It fixes a lot of the issues I have with Shadowrun. If you’re interested, Courtney’s got a kickstarter for the new supplement ending pretty soon. Check it out! We do a deep dive on his inspirations and workflow below.

Sean McCoy: So Courtney, first off, I really love Sinless. I think it fulfills the promise that Shadowrun made for me when I was a kid. Which is like a crunchy, fun, gear heavy, mission-centric, cyberpunk game. The city is a bit of a fascination for me in RPGs and I think it is a bit for you as well. What is it people get wrong about designing city games?

Courtney Campbell: What *is* a city game?

Is it a Midkemian crawl, or it's mod taboo incarnation, Vornhiem? A Munchausen narrative? A sector manager like Chaos Overlords, fought over block after procedurally generated block? Lankhmar with it's unknown interior configurations to be designed by the dungeon master? Or something enclyopedic like Ptolus, which turns the entire city into a reason to have 5' square battlemaps delineated? European style worker placement D&D branded extruded fantasy product? Did any of these designers think about the fact that we'd have to google how to spell their names?

Coming from a classic fantasy role playing background, you're really talking about the core conflict of the game. Law versus Chaos. The core conceit is the wild is out there, and we bring order in and retrieve knowledge and resources.

It's not very popular with the locals.

You're forced to limit actions and show the effects of order. E.g. you can't just stab people and take their stuff. Do players want to be told no? Only with the opportunity to subvert the no in a reasonable way.

Does the purpose of a 'city game' become achieved in it's design? Failing that is probably the mortal sin. There are lots of city games, city builders, city painters, city combat, etc. and I think the purpose varies in terms of what you're attempting to accomplish and that there are different design considerations in each, which is truistic, but I mean, Dominion is a city game. It's just too broad for me to pontificate as if I have some secret knowledge. (I am assured by my therapist that my secret knowledge is symptomatic and is untrustworthy. ;-p)

* Just to be super clear here, you might have a city, within are sectors like 'the docks' and some of those sectors might be locked, but mostly it's just sector->location, wide, open, and shallow.

SM: What’s your stance on what makes a good city game? How did you approach the city as a concept in sinless?

CC: There's a question of how much of the mechanical structure itself is enjoyable outside of it's specific implementation and aesthetic.

I'm sorry, I'm not intentionally evasive. I think in creation, there is intent, quality, and desire. Like, the general appreciation of a creation has more to do with exposure, social norms and human development, but genius exists in the margins.

Also my desires are very idiosyncratic. I think there is an underlying approach to city games that is engaging. They are a growth and development of human order, they are literally our constructed hives built by people with great research and insight with strict guild controls. Carl Rogers said that which we feel is most private were the things he found resonated most for people. I'm not sure what makes a good city game for other people, but I know what I want, and mileage may vary! I'm very fond of setting by design rather than exposition, and the way your city mechanics function provide context to the type of world that exists.

I leverage that in Sinless, you can just pay or steal or influence your way into whatever you want. You know, like in life.

An engaging city game treats it as an evolving and changing environment. The game interface for the city has to be structured shallowly in a physical sense, due to its complexity as a space. (i.e. travel barriers are low, nearly everything is accessible either one or two layers deep)* There are several approaches to that, impressionistic like in Elder Scrolls, or abstract and Generate Just In Time results, but it obviously doesn't lend itself to a board at human scale. These aren't absolutes of course, and one could design whole games exploring that space.

In a fantasy game, by definition and design, they are not explicitly designed for core activities (exploration/combat) and so it functions as a lull and accounting period where only certain restricted actions can occur (recruiting henchmen, etc.). Some of the tools in On Downtime create exploration loops within the city that I find quite enjoyable for larger sites, and that leans into the ttrpg work in the past.

But the city as an object obviously take a higher importance in a cyberpunk game. And I'd like to say that, that's now. I know I've got like 'magic bosons' and 'uplifted bear cyber warriors' but we have a cyberpunk present. They literally built the Star Trek computer. You can order a brain online. Robots are being trained to be autonomous. Russian forces in an eastern European nation surrendered to drones a few weeks ago. The fucking news is like the start of a Veterhoven film setting up the dystopia.

So you have to find a way to integrate that natural order that cities have in context of the player actions, and then support an entire consistent mechanical system underneath it.

(I'm not-I'm not saying that I'm some authority, I'm just describing how I view it)

In cyberpunk, this means that you have to create something that handles your tropes. You have to be able to lock down an arcology, have gangs and territory to cross to deliver data, Use a hacker dolphin to take over the grid, and provide a reason why anyone would live in a place where this is happening. It also needs to work on a larger scale in the sense of the campaign, so that there's an interface between in mission decisions and how that affects it in a logical and understandable way. It has to be flexible because, hey ttrpg, but I like things to be pretty explicit and mechanical so I designed interfaces for that (Sector features, heat, High Threat Response Teams).

It provides a wonderful method of advancement, it's like there's your character development, but there's this background engine that can be built or expanded through player action, allowing them new options as they expand and gain in power. A thing they build and develop together as a group.

SM: Let me be more specific, in Sinless, how do you teach referees how to build cities, or engage with that landscape in a meaningful way as opposed to something like a dungeon or wilderness in D&D? How do you "stock" a city and make in a meaningful location for players to explore?

CC: As a game designer, you and I both know, that the difference between a 'wilderness' a 'dungeon' a 'city' or 'space' is largely in mechanics that approach our understandings of how the spaces should be. But in a material sense, we are just in the world. The cultural zeitgeist, the, uh, avant-garde has always recognized that, the 'concrete jungle'. Predator 2 probably counts as a cyberpunk film.

The first question, how do I teach, is both with pictures to fire the imagination, and a structure for construction and representation. Like a lego box. I show a drawing of the sectors with all sorts of little cool cyberpunk details, and then I give them the blocks. This is a resource, depending on it's type, it allows you to do X (X,Y,Z are things like "Purchase items of this type" or "Gain this bonus" - "Gain access to sub-orbital and near space platforms" non character focused advantages opening up options and playspace) You give it a little statblock, some core structural info about how tough it is (a statblock-simple because it's just tracking the state of the resource).

When you see the picture, and then look at the blocks, you figure your reader is going to know how to put them together themselves. And to start out, they can just use the ones I put in bounty to get their sea legs.

But, I mean, the people who like this type of game have been making things work on their own terms for a long time. So I have a lot of confidence that people will figure it out on their own- it's just like D&D. Start small, just one sector. It's like a starting hex. let them explore and 'pacify' the local sector, either through alliance, or conquest. By then you're eight or nine sessions in and you *know* what you'll need in surrounding areas. Also, I'm almost certain a sector generator is on the board after we finish the character creator. We have hopes of being able to do a lot of this online from the sinlessrpg web page, but I'm not the programmer. Not that you'd need to do it online.

I mean, I don't have to teach you, anyone looking at it and the blocks can see how it works.

How do you "stock" a city and make in a meaningful location for players to explore?

Well. What a good question. I think the core question is how do you make things meaningful. I've found, in games, realistically, it's most triggered by things that stymie or tweak the players. Since they, by virtue of the brand creation and sector ownership, have explicit resources on the board this provides trival and obvious interfaces for the gamemaster (agonarch) to do so.

I wish there were a better answer. Monkey does not like things that do not bend to their will.

Technically? Well, it's not a board game, it's a TTRPG. There are five tags for buildings (service, housing, business, science and vice) and twenty-four types of assets representing things like 'stores' 'factories' 'military base' 'condos' 'casinos'.

They all have specific interfaces with the tags, allowing players to maximize their resources (much in the same way as you might do in a 4x game, building support structures for better output). You can just ignore the fact that you can alter the terrain and just conquer the existing terrain for those that aren't interested in that.

The map is hidden, and the sector actions are limited, and it seems to drive play in a simliar way to ticket to ride, where you always have more to do then time to do it. So they use their limited actions for their highest priority actions, do a new operation and see what things look like after their operations and other things that are happening.

SM: This all sounds great. Now I think the big thing cyberpunk as a genre has to wrestle with is that we are living in a cyberpunk dystopia right now. The role Gibson describes exists. The future is here distributed unevenly. So it’s no longer about an imagined future but perhaps an exacerbated present. What does sinless add to the conversation around cyberpunk as a genre now that it’s an amplification of reality rather than an aesthetic?

CC: Oh, that's easy.

Sinless puts you in the role of being in charge. Being in charge is hard. You want to upgrade a housing complex with condos, you've just gentrified an area and created housing out of reach of the people. What are you going to do about that? Sinless doesn't force you to do anything. Every action the players take affects the city, which means it affects real people. Are you going to use a psuedertron to get followers and exploit them for cash? you need the cash and the resources they provide.

The goal itself is absurd. It's a billion dollars. If you ran 500 prime operations, each paying out 2 million at no expense you'd reach your goal. Will you ever play 500 missions? Will they ever go off without any costs? You just *can not* earn a billion dollars.

You can acquire it though, through economics of scale. Are you going to be a capitalist and take over capital? So now you're part of the problem. Can you do this and be moral in any way?

There is a better solution out there. Can you find it? Can you live it? Can you survive corporate law and property owners associations, and people without rights, racism, speciesism and create a utopia?

You'll have to create your own answers during play.

This is *not only* hypothetical. Do grown machine intelligences have rights? We're less than a decade out from both immortality [Editor’s Note: Mmmm, I don’t think so.] and fusion power. People are creating drones and machines out of brain organoids. Someone is going to uplift a dog. 100% I started this project a decade ago, and the futurists were blurry past 2045 when I started, and it isn't taking longer, they are now uncertain about post 2035, and *that* is unusual among futurists. We are nearing a singularity, we are soon to leave the era of 'unknown knowledge' and reach the eschaton. The time is upon us. Ofc the world isn't going to end, but it will change irrevocably.

There are no easy answers. China spent a thousand years trying to figure out how to get reliable magistrates. We have a good idea what makes it worse, but does preventing that create a better world? Technology is advanced enough now that modern humans are behaving in cargo cult like ways. We know what's fair, it's one of our best abilities as primates. Will we enforce that? At what cost?

I'm doing this because I have things to say, and a fictional intellectual property allows me to say them in a way that people can decide how to address them. This is both through play materials and forthcoming fiction, All the Drugs are Strawberry Flavored is a Sinless Novella and is written and already in editing, and we've got more on the horizon.

It is simply the most I can do.

SM: Sinless fills a really unique space mechanically in that it sort of relishes its crunchiness but it doesn’t feel cumbersome or clunky. In particular I love the difficulty levels for different missions. Sinless is a dice pool game so on easier missions a success is a 4/6 and on hard ones it’s only a 6/6. This is super elegant and cuts through a lot of issues. But at the core you still have lots of actions you can take and you can have helpers. There’s sector turns, etc.

So when you’re designing a game with this many mechanics how do you decide what stays in and what goes. What do you makes a “good rule”?

CC: There's a cognitive load. You need to make sure that players can understand what they are deciding.

Specifically, in Sinless, we were dealing with legacy issues from the D6 pools. Anyone agrees a floating target number is unwieldy (SR3E), Setting things to static target numbers make it easy to succeed (SR4E), and the current design branch has moved into grindy, high health combats, with fleeing opponents, and hero points (edge).

I get it, but it's not for me. Personally, I'm not a fan of 'hero points' or mechanics that rely on them. I prefer activatables and mechanizing things that exist materially in the world.

There's a bit of a push/pull in the mechanics themselves, the target number *does* change (becoming easier) when maximum heat is reached, along with granting extra actions. Starting the countdown timer empowers you.

What *is* critical is players being able to understand what they are doing and why. Sinless isn't about figuring out the mechanics, they are obvious. On a 4+ you succeed 50% of the time. The choice-the gameplay, comes down to bidding those pools to your actions to get the degree of success you feel you need, while still being able to react. Since the math is straightforward, you're able to choose your own approach. Are you going to be cautious, expend everything physical on a dash to cover? Are you going to be reactive or proactive? There's terrain relevant to gameplay in the spaces (Network Access Nodes, Mana lines, physical cover), you're usually accomplishing an objective that involves movement, there's a timer. There's locked treasure boxes (files) to distract deckers/technomancers. It creates a lot of fun decisions for players. Each approach (magic, ranged, melee, decking, etc.) has their own approach based on their abilities. Mages duck under cover and cast full round spells. Rigger's hide and put their drones in stupid positions and cry when their drones die. Deckers hide behind walls and screw with stuff. Amps run around punching things. Gun people can destroy cover. Speakers can summon all kinds of weird shit. You can bionic commando around. Lots of options. It's fun.

It does, in fact, address many of the legacy issues with d6 pool games, but I have the benefit of over thirty years of playtesting.

We are playing the game *right now* and have no idea what we need. What do we need? Everything is based around what we need. If it doesn't come up, if it gets forgotten, it isn't used, it doesn't exist. So nothing in the core game exists that doesn't *need* to exist. I'm making a game to play, and I've noticed a lot of games are just better if you ignore some of the rules? obviously no thought is given to how you're actually supposed to integrate some rules into the course of play, like, *when* they are applied, and *what* about them makes them ignorable.

In Sinless, you are not generally asked to do something unless, you *need* it to do something else. There aren't/isn't really anything that doesn't belong.

Some of it is just math? I notice a lot of people don't do the math for games, and sometimes I notice a math guy being cute for math in a game, but I think both those approaches are wrong. You need a curve, it needs to cap somewhere, you need consistency between results and that has to map onto expectations (in Sinless's case, action/spy/thriller/car chase movies), Some numbers need to go up quickly, others' need to go up slowly, and there has to be a transition from localized to global (to often supernatural) and gameplay development changes to match.

Sinless is built off a modular B/X style core. You could replace or change subsystems, because the interface with the subsystem is abstract. (like, maybe you like Sum to 10 creation, or D&D muscle wizards, or Shadowrun physads, or whatever). This was intentional because, well, everyone who's running cyber-sorcery is already doing most of their own work to make the game go. They know what they want, so I just wanted to give them tools they could use and rely on without getting angry someone made it up without ever playtesting it. I'm not really making this for other people you know. I'm making it so I can play it. It's the game I want to play.

Not much 'goes'. We cut some things, more complicated software-combat (it was too much, and not being used, so. . .) software writing (simply a matter of time and complexity) and we've left space for things, like new magic in the magic book, there's some talk about mechs in a rigger book. After every session if there was a rule that wasn't used or forgotten, it's marked and if it can be cut, it is.

What makes a good rule? One that provides interesting choices.

Is it crunchy? I mean, abstractly, I think something like Ticket to Ride is pure crunch, right? I'm making a game. Games have rules. I know how to play magical tea party, I don't need a book for that. What I need is to have answers for players, and a game that allows emergent narratives that spring from the basic play loop, with a change in focus during play of a long campaign. When you compare it to procedurally generating henchman or treasure in 1e, it's like a baby game. It's on par with 5e, I think. More dice but only counting to 7 or so usually. (sometimes as high as 15 or 20!). There's nothing besides adding one or two dice, and comparison operations. Is it crunchy because I provide rules for everything you're supposed to do in the game? If you've ever played warhammer 40k, combat is about there, roll to hit, defender rolls dodge, reduce damage by armor, defender rolls soak. Very fast and straightforward.

it is entirely possible that my expectations are not consumer expectations. I think probably cyberpunk fans are probably-I mean, the entire genera is ironic depiction of a dystopia. So I expect people interested to be savvy. I provide the tools people need to use the game. Like, we've all played with someone who never read the rulebook in D&D? That's possible with Sinless. Each skill is super explicit, not a lot of overloading, they do what they say on the tin, so if you know how to do your stuff, you'll be golden.

SM: Okay so tell me about Manon Quarterly. What does that bring to the table and how does that change the Sinless world?

CC: It's a slice of history for the future. It expands on the lore and science of magic. It has law and terraforming frameworks for sectors, allowing smooth development between the mid game and end game.

Mostly, it's something you'll be happy to get, you'll find useful, and you'll enjoy. What else could be better?

You don't really have a lot of space to waste in a core rule book. It's a reference. So you can drop tidbits, but can't really expand on anything more than the basics involving magic.

So we can talk about it. If it were real, what would we think, or do? If it's real, reproducible, what does that mean? You can see it through the text, the 'content' that we would produce in 2090.

It's got all the normal things, new things, new rules, we're testing them now. We have a lot of, you'd call them powergamers I guess? In the community. It gives good feedback on what's out of balance. Sinless isn't an excessively tactical game-it's not the type of game where you have a 5 hour battle. But you want there to be a reason for every choice. You don't want one option that is just flatly superior. You want more approaches and options.

I'm realizing that perhaps it isn't obvious what all the normal things are: We're adding technomancers, people with the natural ability to interface with machines, new options for rank B mage specalists, new mage gear, artificing and magic item creation. Alternate option for accoutrement to increase your magic potential. It will also have the introduction of legal actions (to go along with all the illegal sector actions), and sector terraforming with ley line characteristics.

The rules are concise and simple, so instead of just writing a bunch of words, I'm presenting it visually in universe, with the traditional hacker/community commentary. It'll be a good time.

SM: Is there a sort of appendix n for sinless. Or some media that you particularly love when it comes to cyberpunk?

CC: My appendix N is living in a country during a fascist takeover and dismantling of democracy in favor of a corporate hegemony.

The boardgame Stop Thief!, Clue, 221 B Baker Street; the colecovision version of Venture, X-com series, CyberKnights, and the Shadowrun games on NES and by Hairbrained are inspirations for the infiltration/operation phase.

The downtime phase is heavily inspired by Chaos Overlords, 4x style games (Civilisation, Age of Wonders 4, Stellaris) and the downtime out of combat phases of games like The Adventurers Guild on steam, X-Com, Battle Brothers, Cyberknights, and Mechwarrior, and the Shadowrun Returns mod Shadowrun Unlimited.

Finally, a workable fun car chase/road escape mechanic is inspired by Thunder Road, Car Wars, and many many love letters to car chase films of the past and of our time, from Bullet, The French Connection, to Ronin and The Italian Job, to Fast & Furious and Baby Driver. Best part of the game, hands down. :-)

As far as settings from film and books as inspiration, Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers, British TTRPGS of the late 80's, Mission impossible (the one from the 60's), The A-Team, Knight Rider, Procedural detective shows with unrequited love, Peter Gunn, (and for that matter Spy Hunter).

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Thanks for reading, you can check out Manon Quarterly here.