On the Sector Turn

It's very simple.

There are many important things cybertechtronically enhanced secret agents need to do:  Buy illegal tanks with railguns. "Convince" the guy down at the bowling alley that he works for you. Bust up your opponents' resources.

Sector turns are a very straightforward presentation of that. They are a limited time between operations (adventures) where characters have a number of actions to accomplish goals. 

A sector is a hex, an adventureable space.  And it has sites! Like a cliff view. But this is cyberpunk, so the sites are like "The main dark rainy street" and "The seedy bar." These sites are just the sights. They don't mechanically affect play—They are the sets a television show would build for a season. 

A place where interactions take place. Just places.

However.

Sectors also have resources. What is a resource? 

It's something that makes you cash on the barrelhead.

If you own a car factory, not only is any vehicle you buy discounted, but gets you thousands or even tens of thousands of monies every sector turn.

How do you do this? Every resource has boxes. You can take action to damage or control those boxes, using brute force, espionage, magic, or even the law, you can take over resources during the sector turn.

You color in all the boxes to get control of the resource. I like coloring in boxes. It's super compelling. Even more so when it matters.

But. Oh my goodness, this is so fucking intense. 

The actions the characters take during sector turns are diegetic, right? If you use your brand's muscle to go over there and beat the shit out of people till you own the place, it happens in the game.

Maybe that doesn't sound amazing to you. 

But think about it. The actions taken during the sector turn, inform the fictional reality.
Which responds by creating operations to address the changes. 

If you go to a resource during an operation and blow it to rubble using missiles, the resource in the sector is damaged.

 

If you're taking something over, the people who owned it before are probably going to notice.

From the playtest,

One of the players realized they could significantly increase their profits from the salvage yard if they took over the commons, evicted the people who live in the low-income housing and bulldozed it to the ground and built condos.

Do you see it yet? 

It is amazing in play. People are really really excited about the game. They can't wait to do the next operation, because that leads to their next sector turn, which will lead to their next operation. . .. They are advancing the narrative without any "remember a trashcan*". 

This is very concrete, and there is non-trivial discussion about how to leverage the resources in play. I have heard wild suggestions. It's a good time.

Before anyone loses their shit, they are not doing those evil things. This is not "Landlord" the game. It's "Destabilize the system and build it correctly" the game.

But it's just so tempting to use your sector turn to go around using a persuedertron to brainwash people to support your brand.

Buy Me!

Every asset in the game comes with an ability that can change the rules of the sector turn, in extremely novel and interesting ways. Since they are random pulls from a pool of about 100, each playtest group is developing organically throughout the adventure!

It is a great time. 

YMMV. Check it out. You can look at the whole thing in preview, and it's in print.

 * From the Bill and Ted movie, when they realize they can just come back after they win and do anything they need to do. Every time they get into trouble, they say, "Remember a trash can," and their future selves drop a trash can on the guy's head. In heist games like Blades in the Dark and Leverage, it's a technique to obviate having to create a working system of  planning a heist ahead of time. Sinless, on the other hand, is about the players making a plan, and giving the Agonarch (Game master) the tools needed to allow the players to do that. When running a game, listening to the players plan was always my favorite part, and here I made a way to do that while respecting agency.

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Hack & Slash 

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