Some tips for game controls1:

The site generated.photos has great material to use for NPCs. If you use some editing tool you could even make them look like a drawing and add horns or tusks for example.

If you need maps for offices, houses etc, just search in your favorite image search machine for something like “office floor plan”, “manor floor plan”, “apartment floor plan” et al. This will give you realistic maps and you do not need to create them on your own.

For handing out reconnaissance material I usually go to Google Maps, search an area in Seattle where the run will be happening and if the target is a house for example, I will search for a house that will roughly fit the floor plan I searched before. Make some screen shots without labels in different zoom levels. Thus you will get great material to hand out to your players and even can think about how Lone Star or gangs might be included. Imho this works best if the run plays somewhere where the players don’t live. I am located in Germany and my runs are happening in Seattle.

Last but not least, build characters just for the sake of building them. At least when I build characters a character with a background story forms in my head. Since I try to build real characters, I need to understand the rules coming with them. Therefore I learn the rules and I get characters with a background story and full stats. This translates into great NPCs. In the past I had a complete folder with NPCs that turned up in my runs, and they were memorable for the players. The most interesting ones were recurring regularly which made my version of Seattle more alive.


  1. A term for game master I found in the game Spycraft which I like better because game master sounds too fantasy imho and the term master has its problem, too. ↩︎