Collateral Profits

A grounded sci-fi campaign in the Inner Sphere, where the corporations own nearly everything, the government rarely moves, and the people who make a living in the gaps do it one job at a time.

System: Cypher System 2nd Edition · Tone: cyberpunk sci-fi · Theme: every job has consequences — profits come at a cost.

What kind of game this is

There is no fixed party. There is a roster of players and a pool of characters. Whoever is free that week plays, and what you play is worked out between you and the GM rather than handed down. Some weeks the GM calls it — there is a thing happening in the world and it wants a certain kind of crew. Other weeks you ask: we want a heist, or I want to run Ardash again and see what he does about the Cooperative. Either way the GM sets the scene; you are never just told what your night is.

One session you are a fixer working a party on a Concord station, the next a cybercriminal three planets away.

Most sessions stand alone, because the same people will not be at the table next week. But a job can run long. When a scenario does not finish in a night, the characters in it are locked to it until it does — they are still in that corridor, mid-negotiation, halfway through the vault, and they are not available to anyone else in the meantime. Whoever comes back to that scenario picks them up exactly where they were left, which may or may not be the same player.

So a cliffhanger is not off the table. It just means those characters are spoken for until the thing is done.

Characters are shared, not owned. Pick one from the pool, play it, hand it back. Someone else may run it next month and inherit whatever you left behind — the wounds, the debts, the burned bridges. You can build your own and add it to the pool too.

The world is the point. The GM does not write a plot for you to follow. The world has factions with agendas, conflicts in motion, and consequences that land whether or not anyone is watching. You decide where to point. What you do stays done, for everybody.

The rules that are different

Five things change how you should play, and none of them are how Cypher runs by default: nothing resets, pools are the real damage, death is real, cyphers and XP are cards, and you can change the world.

→ What Is Different — read this before your first session.

What the setting is like

No magic. Everything resolves as technology: implants, gear, biotech, training. People in the world may believe otherwise — plenty do — but there is nothing supernatural behind it.

No heroes, no villains. It is money and leverage. Your client is shady. The opposition is not evil. The interesting choices are grey.

Human scale. Planets, moons, stations, ships, and the spaces between them. There are fleets in this setting and they do occasionally fight — but you are not commanding them. You are the people aboard, or docking, or cutting your way in, with a job a fleet cannot do for you.

Every session is a different kind of night. One week is a cargo run gone wrong; the next is a bank heist, a trade negotiation where the dangerous part is a clause nobody read, a gala where reputations are made and ruined, a boarding action on a hull that does not want you, a session of parliament, or a Gathering — the whole extended clan in one place, eating and arguing and competing, while the things that actually get decided get decided.

Some nights you will be asked to actually do the thing: write the toast, argue the debate, take the challenge in front of everyone. Do it well enough and there is no roll — you simply convinced the room. Do it well and you get assets and an easier task. Try at all and you get something. Sitting one out costs you nothing.

Pick your character to suit the night, or pick the night to suit your character. A vote can be as lethal as a firefight — differently.