On 1 March, I ran a game of Hyper Alley for a couple of friends at a local gaming store. Hyper Alley is a version of the Cyber Alley rules created by Malebogia from the Lead Adventures forum. For the demo I ran the City of Serpents Scenario published in the September 2017 issue of Wargames Illustrated. It is a pretty good scenario.
The Scenario: In the last adventure, a massive, unscheduled data broadcast was beamed to a data store house in the Humbolt District of K1N6 from the Citadel Station in Saturn's orbit. After a pitch battle in the streets against a team of edgerunners, criminal, and federal law enforcement, TriOptum Corporation was able to lock down the area, but did not have an specifics on what happened at the data store house. However, word quickly got out that a Hacker named Rache was able to copy a portion of the data transmission and he is willing to trade it to escape from the Humboldt region. The surviving edgerunner, a group of criminal syndicate enforcers, and a corporate strike team all had to escape from the TriOptum Lock down area, and find information on Rache's location before TriOptum found him.
Here was the League's mission briefings.
Edgerunner Mission Briefing: The Humbolt Incident was not a milk run like it was promised. A new employer has contacted you and they want you to hunt down a hacker names Rache, get the info from him and then silence him. Wetworks, it is what we do best.
Corporate Mission Briefing: TriOptum locked down the Humbolt District like a vault, and your leadership wants to know why. Intel wants to find a hacker names Rache, get the data he has at a minimum, extract him if you can. This could bring down TriOptum’s control of K1N6.
Criminals Mission Briefing: You are enforcers sent by your gang leadship after the Humboldt incident. Word on the street is that the a hacker named Rache was in the system when everything went down,, and he might have critical date to help find you lost money.
Each league, however had the same stats, listed below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BylV9FwdB7NAYy1UWmNaaERZbkRCbGk3c1N3dDFiVmlRTUww/view?usp=drivesdkHyper-Alley uses a few special rules.
1) Leaderless - No league has a leader. Each league receives 1 free sidekick.
2) Gritty - No Character may start with higher than a d8 in any skill, without augmentation.
3) Augmentations - Each character may take up to 4 total levels of augmentations. Cyberware, bioware, etc, will allow character to gain skills higher that d8. Everyone in Hyper-Alley has some level of augmentation, however leagues have access to illegal combat enhancements can have negative effects on the users. Augmentations require the use of the Horror Deck, which represents the negative effects of these modifications. If a character takes damage, instead of making the health roll to avoid damage, the player can choose to suffer a negative effect of the augmentation. For this, an opposing player chooses a number of cards equal to the Augmentation levels of the character, chooses one and applies it to the character, discarding the rest. The player can still make a recovery roll at the end of the round to discard the Horror Card.
Horror cards can also be used in the same way as represented in the rules, so anything that could have negative effects on augmentation, like a computer terminal with Black ICE, or as in the scenario - Cyberware jammers, can force the characters to test to avoid having a negative effect of their cyberware triggered. If it is triggered, another player chooses a number of cards equal to the total augmentation level, chooses a card, applies it to the character and discards the rest.
4) Hyper-Reality - In Hyper-Alley,like Pokeman Go, hyper reality constructs exist in the world for characters to interact with. They can be bystanders, or plot points. Only a hacker can interact with a Hyper-Reality Object. If a HR Bystander joins your league through the efforts of your hacker, they are considered to have the Unearthly ability.
Set up: The Law Enforcement lock down area in the center of the board was extremely perilous if you were wanted, but it was also considered a Augmentation Jamming zone. All character in the zone must test to avoid negative augmentation effects. This area is marked by the ring of military style miniatures.
There was also a number of Bystanders on the board. Most of the bystanders were locals of the Humboldt district going about their daily lives. 9 of the bystanders were Hyper-Object programs, with 4 of those (the clear red figures) were search programs being used by TriOptum, so they also cause a test for negative effects on augmentations.
With the start of the game, the three leagues pushed out in different directions looking for information on the hacker Rach. The corporate and edgerunners found an information that provided them with possible information on the whereabouts of Rache, while the criminal enforces hacked a local HR terminal.
Of course, the edgerunners wanted to start the fire works and the heavy gunner opens fire across the security zone, making the edgerunners wanted.
The corporate team and the enforcers quickly got leads on the location of the hacker.
With the corporate strike team finding the elusive hacker first, and the race is one to defend him, or steal him.
During the brawl, a number of bystanders were convinced to work with different sides. A interesting turn of events was a bystander that joined the corps attack a ICE program that was cooped by the criminals. It just so happened that the corp bystander has a high finesse, and was able to take down the ICE program.
In the end the corporate strike team was able to defend Rache the hacker until their extraction arrived, leaving the criminal syndicate reporting to their boss why they could not recover his money, and the edgerunners on the run from their johnson for failing to accomplish yet another mission.
Overall it was a fun game, lasting a little over an hour with 3 people playing. Everyone agreed that the new rules really captured the feel of worlds like Deus Ex.
Hopefully in a few days I will post the league creation rules with the reworked lists of abilities and augmentations
Welcome, Guest. Please 
April 25, 2024, 03:19:02 PM
