Sinless is a fully independent intellectual property with it's own lore. The basics: magic came back, a lot of data and tech was lost, there's fewer people and corporations are in charge are all the "lore" anyone needs to know.
It is not required to read one sentence of background or lore to play the game. You're already familiar with the idea of mages, ronin, deckers, riggers—they are just different 'classes' of approaching situations.
Not needing to know a single piece of background is a strength. like in the Forgotten Realms or Dark Souls, the lore is there to provide depth to those who seek it, but it isn't in any way required: It's designed to be set up so you can play out your cyber-sorcery games, not mine.
It's explicitly a classic-style game. What do I mean by that? I mean, like in early games, it was about sandboxes, open tables, and an evolving world. All the Sinless games in the discord take place in the same city. It isn't set up for traditional play, like in second edition, or vampire: the masquerade where there's a plot and the players follow it.
But, due to the fact that it follows a B/X (Basic/eXpert, Moldvay/Cook) modular exception-based design it is trivial to use the system without engaging in the corporation/brand building mechanics.
In fact, that was the original design. I always found it difficult to understand how much to pay, what the budgets were for these corporations, how to model the surrounding effects of operational fallout, how would it impact the economy in the area. How do you handle medical procedures, acquiring new weapons, hurting or defeating a corporation.
I don't want the players to do what I want, I want to find out what happens when they play.
So in laying out a system to handle common player actions (finding someone, gathering information, buying things, upgrading their character), it was necessary to create a framework (like a literal guide) to Gamemasters, so they knew how much to pay for operations, and how these entities interacted for players to affect them.
And all that exists! You can use it just like that, and handle character actions during downtime without needing to engage in brand or company management at all!
That said, since there's this wonderful framework for creating and managing power structures in the city, it is pretty easy to add a few actions that allow players to interact with that.
And during playtesting, it turns out it's pretty fun to fight over sectors and resources in an area. It's like, clearing hexes, but instead of killing indigenous species, you're making rich people miserable.
Hack & Slash
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