The Sprawl: Alpha Version

Thanks, Dionysus! I'd love to hear how it works for you in play, if you get a chance!

question: where's the Reporter playbook which is clearly mentioned both as "one of the basic playbooks" and as one of the archetypes?

Good question! That's an editing slip; I haven't written it yet. I have a few ideas, but I'm sitting next to a copy of the Max Headroom DVDs and waiting to get a copy of Transmetropolitan before I write it.

Another question as I work with my player to generate her a character.
You have a list of cyberware in the chapter 6, with words like "Cybereyes: When you have cybereyes installed, choose two of following tags: ..."
Also you have a list of cyberware(chosen for theme I suppose) in playbooks as an initial choice (with choosing either "cheapshit", "owned" or "hunted" to get the ball rolling)
What bugs me is that there's a difference between number of tags sometimes.
E.g. Fixer, Hunter, Infiltrator, Pusher, Soldier - all have "Choose one: ... cybereyes (3 tags)" in their section. Why 2 in cyberware section and 3 here? is it a bug or intentional?
same with "data storage and interface", but it's 1 tag everywhere in the playbooks and 2 in the cyberware section

also: skillwires have two slots as base. how many chips character has on start, 0, 1 or 2? or more? For now I decided to give 2 if my player takes it, but I'd like to know what you think.

I give my players 2 each as well. Full slots at the start.

Skillwires is something I need to think about generally, as well as come up with a big list of example chips.

This sounds really awesome, but unfortunately the link to the Alpha turns up dead.  Is there another place I could check out the PDF?

Yes, sorry about that! My website is undergoing some alterations at the moment; it will hopefully be resolved in the next week or two. In the meantime, here's a temporary link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wm7ylpa7p3e9lxe/The_Sprawl_Alpha.pdf

The original link should work again now. Still the same version.

I saw in a post from a while back that Synth is on the chopping block? Any news on that? I think it's a great way to deal with cyberware but I'm eager to see how you'd do it differently. I'm actually gearing up to use The Sprawl as a basis for a Shadowrun hack, and I'm trying to figure out how Essence and Magic would be affected by cyberware and the Synth stat.

That post (and thoughts of axing Synth) pre-dated the Alpha. I'm not currently working on anything along those lines.

I've split off the rest as a separate thread here: http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=6056.0

This looks amazing. Will be diving into it over the weekend.

As I say at the end of the document, I'm interested to hear feedback, especially if you play.

Looks like a great start .... Working on a few projects myself, but once they are done I will try and playtest this.

That's great! I look forward to hearing what you have to say after playing.