What is CyberSprawl?
A primer on the universe behind the games.
01 — Position
Projection, not fiction.
Other cyberpunk is speculative fantasy set 200 years away. We're talking about consequences of decisions being made this year.
The meta-pattern: take a real 2026 trend — convenience, AI dependence, surveillance, consolidation — and ask where does this go when you 100x it over 100 years? Sometimes absurdly funny. Sometimes terrifyingly plausible. Always recognizable.
Our science fiction is becoming non-fiction faster than anyone predicted. The timeline between fiction and reality is collapsing.
02 — Premise
The system isn't broken. It's working as designed. That's the horror.
People opt into systems for first-order benefits — convenience, speed, cheap prices — and are blind to the second-order costs: dependency, job loss, surveillance, consolidation. The system delivers exactly what it was designed to deliver.
Nobody was deceived. Nobody was forced. Everyone chose this.
We don't say this is bad. We don't propose solutions. We make the implicit explicit. We show consequences and let the reader decide.
Every entity we create answers one question: what's the first-order benefit people opted into, and what's the second-order cost they didn't see?
03 — Emotion
Helplessness, not hopelessness.
The feeling of being trapped in systems you can't control — but systems you built yourself. We can't blame anyone but ourselves. It's the natural result of what we set out to do. We just didn't see the second- and third-order consequences. Now gravity is pulling us in.
But individuals have agency. Characters hustle, strive, build, connect. The macro is broken and can't change. The micro is alive with ambition.
Hopelessly unfixable world. Hopeful individuals. Everyone trying to get ahead in a world that's extremely difficult to change.
Where to start
The Narrative
Five minutes. The Cascade, the Aftershocks, and the corps that own what's left.
Enter the Sprawl →The Encyclopedia
1,141 pages. Every faction, every character, every event. Built to be read.
Explore the world →The Games
Different windows into the same universe. Pick where you enter.
See the games →