Missions

"Three Ops. Nine hours. One extraction vehicle. Good luck."

A Mission is the backbone of Cybercore; three Ops strung together across three game sessions, held together by attrition, paranoia, and whatever your players cobbled together during Lockdown. If you've run other RPGs, forget the twelve-session epic. Missions are designed to be fast, brutal, and self-contained. Players walk in with a briefing. They walk out with scars, debt, or a body bag.

For a breakdown of the four pillars of play, SitRep, Mission, Op, Encounter, see the Tactical Overview. For tactical maps, visual conventions, and space design see Mission Design. For pre-built encounter tables, see Encounters. For Mission Tiers, TL tables, and Threat Bands (player-facing rules), see Missions and Deep Ops.

Mission Design

This section is your blueprint for building a mission from scratch. A good mission doesn't need a novel's worth of lore; it needs clear stakes, a ticking clock, and enough moving parts to keep your players making hard decisions.

Start With the Job

Every mission begins with a contract. Someone wants something done, and the players are expendable enough to do it. Before you write a single encounter, answer three questions:

1. Who's paying? A Corp, a Syndicate, a desperate station administrator? The employer shapes the mission tone. Corp jobs come with clean briefings and hidden agendas. Syndicate work comes with vague instructions and generous hazard pay. A station admin just needs the problem gone before the next supply ship docks.
2. What's the objective? Keep it concrete. Retrieve the data core. Eliminate the infestation. Secure the facility before the competitor's team arrives. If you can't explain the objective in one sentence, simplify it.
3. What goes wrong? The briefing is never the full picture. The data core is inside a quarantined biolab. The infestation has a queen. The competitor's team is already there. The complication is what turns a job into a story.
4. Who else has skin in the game? No mission exists in a vacuum. At least one other faction should have an interest in the outcome, and their goals shouldn't align neatly with the squad's. The employer wants the prototype recovered. CORSEC wants the facility locked down as a crime scene. FOFT has a buyer lined up for whatever the squad retrieves. ICE already has an operative inside. Layer two or three factions into every mission and you get diversity, tension, and conflict without writing a single extra combat encounter. Factions don't need to be hostile: an uneasy SAROS rescue team working the same site creates more interesting decisions than another squad of corporate security. The question isn't who's the enemy, it's who wants what, who gets spaced when those wants collide.

The Three-Op Arc

A standard mission spans three Ops across three sessions. Each Op should escalate; not just in difficulty, but in what the players know and what's at stake.

Op 1, Insertion. The short Op. Players arrive, establish a foothold, and discover the first sign that the briefing was incomplete. This Op follows the SitRep and a possible Encounter, so keep it tight, 2 to 2.5 hours of play. End on a revelation or a new problem that reframes the mission.

Op 2, Escalation. The meat of the mission. The squad pushes deeper, encounters the real threat, and burns through resources. This is where the mission gets personal, NPCs die, plans fail, hard choices get made. 3 to 4 hours. By the end of this Op the players should understand the full scope of what they're dealing with.

Op 3; Objective and Extraction. Everything comes to a head. The final objective, the hardest encounters, and the clock running out. Extraction is not guaranteed. If the squad is limping on fumes and 90% of their DR is gone, you've paced the mission correctly.

Pacing the Clock

The RTC is your best tool for pacing. Nine RTCs across three Ops means three events per session, roughly one per hour of real time. Design your RTCs on a curve:

• RTCs 1–3 (Op 1): Environmental pressure. Atmosphere venting, power failures, comms interference. These establish urgency without direct lethality. One of them should hint at the real threat.
• RTCs 4–6 (Op 2): Direct threats. Reinforcements arrive, security escalates, something breaks containment. At least one of these should force a tactical decision; fight, reroute, or abandon a secondary objective.
• RTCs 7–9 (Op 3): Existential stakes. The station is going critical. The extraction window is closing. The enemy has called in something the squad can't fight head-on. These should make the players move, not deliberate.

Not every RTC needs to be combat. Some of the best RTCs are logistical; the med bay loses power, the airlock they came through is now compromised, a rival team broadcasts that they've already secured the package.

Resource Attrition

Cybercore's recovery structure, Stim Breaks between encounters, Lockdowns between Ops, is designed to create a downward slope. By Op 3 the squad should be rationing consumables and making do with cracked armour. Your job is to calibrate how steep that slope is.

Lean missions restrict supply opportunities. No vendor access after the SitRep. Whatever the squad brought is all they've got. Good for siege scenarios, hostile-environment ops, and anything behind enemy lines.

Generous missions include a resupply point mid-mission; a friendly NPC, a cache, a captured enemy stockpile. Use this when you want the final Op to feel like a proper climax rather than an exhaustion test. If they have a commander, leave it out.

The sweet spot is somewhere between. One Lockdown with limited resupply. Enough to keep the squad functional, not enough to make them comfortable.

Setting the Threat Level

Use the Mission TL Table to set difficulty appropriate to the squad's Tier. A few guidelines:

• New groups should start at the low end of their Tier's TL range. Let them learn the system before it tries to kill them.
• Experienced squads can handle the top of the range, but be honest about whether you're challenging them or punishing them. There's a line.
• Mixed-Tier squads are tricky. Set the TL to the average Tier and lean on encounter design to scale difficulty, more enemies, tighter timers, environmental hazards, rather than inflating the raw numbers.

Individual Ops within a mission can have their own TL if the local situation warrants it. A Tier 1 mission might have a Tier 2 server room. A Tier 2 mission might have a quiet Op 1 at reduced difficulty to lull the squad before Op 2 hits.

Building Encounters

Each Op should contain 2 to 3 encounters. Vary the type:

• Combat encounters are the obvious ones. Vary enemy composition, terrain, and objectives. A fight in a cramped corridor plays differently than a fight across a cargo bay with cover. Give enemies goals beyond "kill the players"; they might be defending something, retreating to regroup, or trying to trigger an alarm.
• Skill encounters test the squad's non-combat capabilities. Hacking a security grid, navigating a damaged hull section, negotiating with a hostile NPC who has something the squad needs. These burn different resources, CPU, consumables, time, and give non-combat cores a chance to shine.
• Environmental encounters pit the squad against the location itself. Decompression, radiation, zero-g, collapsing structures. These work best as complications layered onto other encounters rather than standing alone.

The best encounters combine two or three of these. A firefight in a decompressing cargo bay while the Sec-Ops is trying to hack the airlock controls; that's a session the players will remember.

Stakes and Consequences

Every mission should have consequences for failure beyond "you die." Death is a consequence, sure, but it's the least interesting one.

• Financial consequences; failed missions don't pay. Worse, the squad might owe for equipment they lost or damaged. The O-Bill doesn't stop just because the job went sideways.
• Reputation consequences; Cores talk. A squad that fails too often stops getting the good contracts. A squad that abandons objectives gets a reputation.
• Narrative consequences; the thing they were sent to stop, happens. The facility falls. The data gets sold to the competition. The infestation spreads to the next station. The galaxy doesn't pause because the players had a bad session.

Success should feel earned, not guaranteed. If your squad completes every mission without a scratch, you're either pulling punches or they've outgrown their Tier.